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Pretty good if you liked the base game .

Definitely a lot harder for the boss fights, and some of the open world areas are a little too open, if that makes sense

It’s BIG, and that’s both good and bad.

Good because there’s a ton to explore. They said the dlc landmass was about the size of Limgrave, and that’s true from the map perspective, but holy shit there’s a lot of layers to it. When you first start you see a lot of places that you seemingly can’t get to, but as you explore it, you find caves and canyons and cliffside trails that you can follow into areas that are inaccessible by most paths.

Which leads to the bad part, some of these areas are almost too well hidden, and some are very sparsely populated, with maybe one or two interesting drops tucked away in the corners and an almost obligatory field boss to deal with or avoid.

All in all, I’m having fun with it, but theres been some frustration as well, partly because it feels like you are meant to explore and find the upgrade fragments rather than just go through the story, as a lot of the bosses will one or two shot you without enough upgrades.

It’s fantastic for exploration. The whole map is a giant puzzle box.

Just go into it with a sense of adventure. Difficulty is fine, but it’s asking you to engage with all the mechanics.

Bosses are also a puzzle, there’s basically always a mechanic or questline to make it way easier if you think about all the tools at your disposal.

Don’t go into it trying to beeline towards anything, let your curiosity take you, be willing to experiment (not even talking about respeccing) and it’s a great time.

If you try to boss rush and get frustrated your preferred style of combat isn’t working then you’ll get salty

The closest thing to a spoiler I’ll give is that they troll you with the map, hard, and you’ll constantly end up wayyyyyyy the fuck deep in the shit from the tiny little off the beaten path ruin or cave or hidden wall that you thought would be a 10 minute detour. They subvert the fuck out of that, because you get so used to it from the base game

I’ve “finished” it (beat all the main bosses, anyway), and I’d say it’s mostly solid with hiccups here and there. 7 or 8 out of 10. I’m not a fan of the new scadutree blessing mechanic (an increase to damage and resistances that you level by collecting rare items in the world), because unlike golden seeds, where you could end up with 6-8 extra, there are only exactly enough to get you to the max blessing level, and because your build is probably already complete, manyside activities won’t help you make any progress towards the harder fights. Some of the items you need for the blessing are also in weird places; typically you get one (or maybe two at a time), but then there are just five in the room after one of the harder bosses that could really have gone somewhere else.

In terms of exploration: I think it’s a little too big, and while the verticality is a fun idea, it wore thin after a while. Legacy dungeons are great. There are two new dungeon types with a few of each, which are both fun. Some of the dungeon types from the base game make appearances, but they’re usually a lot longer (there are catacombs with 3 elevators, for instance). Fuck the Abyss. New weapon types seem neat but I’m not using them because they’re not ultra greatswords.

In terms of bosses: I genuinely don’t know how a dedicated caster could do most of the fights solo. They range from extremely aggro and difficult to 500% aggro and nightmarish, but also are generally an interesting spectacle and fun… with the exception of the final boss who is the ultimate difficulty spike and by far the hardest boss in the game (and probably any fromsoft game). It doesn’t help that it also attacks your framerate directly. For comparison: every other boss took me 5 tries at most (many first try!), while the final boss took around 50.

Edit: forgot to mention, performance is dogshit. Also, playtime was a little under 30 hours, itself a little under half of my first base game playthrough which was around 70 hours.

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I played and finished the game while ill (it might have been coronavirus, idk) so my opinions and impressions might be different than if I wasn’t feeling like shit all the time, but:

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE FINAL BOSS AND VARIOUS OTHER BOSSES

It’s very difficult. It’s actually surprisingly difficult to talk about this online I’ve found, because the Scadutree blessing system, the variety of builds, and the fact that some used summons and spirit ashes and others didn’t means it’s hard to find a baseline difficulty for most of them. For the record, I went in with a fairly uninventive build with medium rolling, used the Greathammer you find near the start and later on a new heavy thrusting sword, and didn’t summon nor use ashes nor use statuses until the end. This meant I had a much more difficult time than others, who I’ve seen have gone “Oh, THIS boss isn’t really that bad, I got them in a few attempts” and it turns out they were using frenzy incantations while two summoned dudes tanked. So, yeah, when talking about DLC difficulty, it’s hard to nail down because it’s so variable. To be 100% clear, I’m not somebody who agrees with the opinions of some commentators (cough Joseph Anderson cough) that amounts to “endless combos and long charge attacks are bad and make Elden Ring bad, if you can’t do it with an R1 big greatsword like with Dark Souls 1 then the game sucks” - Margit and Malenia are a couple of my favourite bosses from the basegame, in fact, though Malenia does have genuine issues. I think boss aggression is really fun when you learn how to counter that aggression and it turns the whole thing into this elegant dance.

Personally, I greatly struggled through the new bosses, similarly to how I did through Malenia on my first playthrough. However, I didn’t get the “elegant dance” thing from these ones quite as much. Messmer fucked me up for hours before I beat him (I’ve seen people battling him with summons and it looks MUCH easier), though by the end, I thought his moveset was pretty fair and balanced overall, Scadutree Avatar took me longer than I liked and disliked his moveset, Rellana was pretty tough but fair, and so on. The final boss is just… very, very, very difficult. And unfair. And also underwhelming, in my opinion (and several others’) because we’ve seen him before. We could have gotten Godwyn, if the developers decided that they wanted to just write the lore that would allow his soul’s return to be possible. Every mention of the Godwyn possibility is invariably met with the counter of “but his soul is dead, that’s not how the lore works” as if the lore was divinely bestowed into Miyazaki’s mind by some deity and he is unable to change it. Miyazaki could have said “oh actually, reviving souls is now possible if you sacrifice two demigods which is what Miquella is doing up at the Gate” and nobody would have been like “BUT BUT THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!” because it is how it works now, y’know?

To be clear, I don’t think Miyazaki “bought into player demands to fight prime Radahn” or anything, that’s just silly imo, I think Miyazaki knew exactly what was going to happen with Miquella before the first trailers for vanilla Elden Ring released and we knew who Radahn was. I just think his lore sucks sometimes. Oh well.

The map is a real innovation from base Elden Ring. It feels like a return of the Dark Souls 1 connectivity but in an open world, where caves and catacombs take you to entirely new areas - in fact, with enough knowledge, you can fight almost any of the ~10 remembrance bosses first if you want to. The problem is that in this excellent new map, there’s… not really much there, y’know? The devs couldn’t figure out what to give players who are already at endgame, which you almost certainly are if you’ve beaten Mohg. So instead, you get offered smithing stones from anywhere to +1 to +8, and a healthy scattering of the top-tier smithing stones. The scadutree blessings are generally found by exploring, not by killing bosses. This is both bad and good, as it at least offers some justification for exploration, but means that fighting the non-remembrance bosses feels kinda… underwhelming? Like, it’s new content and that’s great, etc etc, but it’s weird that fighting bosses isn’t how you get stronger in this DLC.

Also, there are some areas - large areas - that are overwhelmingly empty. I’m talking, less dense than Mountaintops, without contest, for at least 30-40% of the map’s total surface area. This really sucks and indicates to me that even 2 years of development was insufficient. Also, there are repeat bosses still. There are even repeat vanilla bosses - oh yes, there are Tree Sentinels and Fallingstar Beasts, Ulcerated Tree Spirits, and even regular-ass fire dragons. And they repeat some of the DLC-added bosses too.

My rating of the game was initially like 10/10 on the first couple days, but as I approached the end and then finished, the flaws suddenly came to the foreground for me, so it dipped precipitously to a 7/10. I think Dark Souls 3’s and Bloodborne’s DLCs were better both in terms of fair boss difficulty, quantity and quality of loot, and overall value of money. 40 entire dollars - 2/3 the price of an entire-ass game - for a 30 hour experience in which nearly half the map was just kinda empty? My first playthrough of Elden Ring took me 120 hours, and while some areas were certainly a little barren, there’s so much there in aggregate that complaining about a “lack of content” in vanilla just feels bonkers. But having the same complaint for the DLC feels much easier for me to make.

I have to admit, my patience with the “difficulty as a medium of storytelling” or whatever Miyazaki thinks he’s doing is getting thinner and thinner nowadays. When I killed each of the hardest bosses in the DLC, I didn’t feel elation or pride like I did in Dark Souls 1/2/3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, or even base Elden Ring. I felt a vague sense of relief that it was finally fucking over. I didn’t have to meticulously dodge and punish a boss’s 221-move combo with a single R1 before he started up again, knowing that a couple mistakes would mean my death. I wanted to prove to myself that I could still beat it solo and without spells or cheese, and I did (up until the final boss, where I simply needed mimic tear), but the reward of that hardship just feels like ashes in my mouth. I do take a sort of perverse delight in the DLC getting Mixed ratings. I know it won’t last long and it’ll eventually reach Mostly Positive and then Very Positive, but I hope for at least a few days, there was a little panic in the studio about - fuck, maybe we really have gone a little too far now, and maybe for our next game, we have to make it a little less challenging.

Should you, reading this, buy it? I don’t know. If you want, I guess. Like, it is good, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think it’s worth that much money unless you also plan on doing further playthroughs of it and base Elden Ring with the new weapons and spells and stuff you find in there.

It’s illegal to spill beans at Hexbear

All beans must be consumed

I’m really having a good time but I have two criticisms.

Game performance is subpar, the base game gave my machine no issues but the DLC stutters and drops frames.

Also, I wish the DLC wasn’t locked behind Mohg. By the time you are fighting Mohg you pretty much have finished or are finishing your build. Once you hit 150 your stats are soft capped and get hit with heavy diminishing returns anyway. Progression really just becomes finding Scadutree fragments. In the base game if you hit a wall you could just go somewhere else, and look for some sacred tears, golden seeds, talismans, weapons, smithing fragments, runes, anything. You can do that to some extent in the DLC, but the thing that really matters is tree fragments and it feels kinda disappointing.

It’s the best videogame thing of the year, but there’s also like genuinely no competition (well except maybe if the new Zelda is really good (which it probably will be) (ok also stalker 2 might be good)).

It genuinely makes me feel like the base game wasn’t half of what they wanted to ship: The map design and openness of the DLC make the base game map feel ancient and like a giant compromise. It’s definitely the closest they’ve gotten to Dark Souls 1 in terms of level design, while also being an open-world game. Dark Souls 1 was a bunch of winding paths that cut through a world, Dark Souls 2 was just nonsense, Dark Souls 3 were like plates of level put next to each other, base game Elden Ring was one really big really wide corridor. The DLC is like a bunch of winding paths all stacked on top of another. There’s so much verticality to it and so many twists and branches to every path you can take. That alone makes it 100% worthwhile.

I find the “oh there’s nothing to find in the world boo-hoo it’s so empty” complaints to be ridiculous. I guess that’s what happens when every other game that comes out nowadays is skinner-box first and game second. The game is fun to play, the world is fun to explore, I don’t need a dopamine treat every five minutes. The game is better for not giving you one. I don’t need to see number go up. Stop playing shit like vampire survivors or balatro, your brain will thank you.