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[nenjin]

I formulated a complaint last night while working my way down the Ellac River.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

These environments are super cool, vertical and "epic" in the sense they're ridiculously big.

But they can be kind of empty.

I've been staring at the Ellac river for a while and realizing, as with most places in the DLC, it's its own distinct area. So I was looking forward to traversing it because, in usual From Soft style, where things ultimately drain to tends to be where shit gets the freakiest.

Except that wasn't the case here. It's long, and breaks over multiple tiers creating all these waterfalls. But it's pretty much empty except for 1 side dungeon, several packs of fly men, and a Mega Shrimp. In terms of detail, it's pretty plain too. Almost no light reaches it so it's very dark and you get the sense that someone didn't feel the need to do much with it because of that. While it's cool to traverse logistically speaking, as an adventure it wasn't. I'd liken it to the enjoyment you might get out of going somewhere in Death Stranding. Interesting, but not exactly what I'm here for.

I took a good 30 mins to check the entire thing before it drains out to the Cerulean Coast and it's just.....bare. It's caused me to look back at the rest of the DLC I've played through and re-evaluate. There is a lot of just terrain to cross in the DLC with not much going on with it. The ground cover and trees and yadda yadda do a good job of making it SEEM filled out, but it's not.

This isn't to say it's somehow worse than the base game. But with how tightly constrained your movement is between areas in the DLC, there's a great opportunity to easily predict where people are going to go and look and put cool stuff in their way. That doesn't really seem like how the DLC is built though. There's "nodes" of content but they're separated by a lot of travel time that's dictated by the geography. To the point you can ride for a few minutes without really encountering anything of note, only to discover that what you're heading to is another route back to content you've already been through. It's kind of From Soft's shortcut level philosophy extended to an open world. But it doesn't quite hit the same as doing it in a dungeon, especially when the themeing and the pay off isn't there.

[nenjin]

Sitting here trying to fix Elden Ring after the patch early this morning. I had problems with the update for SotE never completing and constantly resetting and had to reinstall the game.

I'm into the mid to late game now. I've done some of the harder fights I've heard about. Most of them I've finished with my mimic after ~8 tries and almost beating them solo.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bayle is intimidating and does have some one shot potential. But honestly, the Ancient Dragon right before him gave me way more problems with the never ending lighting AoEs. Bayle I think is a pretty fun fight actually. He doesn't move around nearly as much as most dragons and other enemies (ha), and once you get over the frankly overwhelming visuals, it feels kind of like a balanced fight.

Scadu Tree Avatar gave me some conniptions, even with standard fire on my weapon. Basically had to learn the hard way that he has three phases, and then learn the hard way again that he'll light your ass up in Phase 3 with that Holy attack he can just repeat over and over again.

Commander Gaius was also a ball breaker. He's basically Gyobu from Sekiro, but on steroids and who can turn that mount on a dime. This fight gives you literally no time to do anything. Ironically when I finally beat him, I was fumbling over my controls and accidentally summoned my mimic. I was fully ready to finish him solo because he'd irritated me, but oh well.

In general, the later game bosses are all about constant AoEs of one form or another. And they seem to do more damage in each phase of their fight or life bar. It's kind of more obvious that bosses enrage as they're close to dying.

I'll say that Shadow Keep has turned out to be a pretty incredible legacy dungeon.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's huge, combining like 3 zones together into one, with the "From Soft" library labrynith at the center. Shadow Keep serves as the nexus of like 4 parts of the map, so there's lots of ways in and out, and it really feels well put together. I've easily spent 2 hours clearing it out and I think I'm almost done. It's the closest thing in scale to something like Stormveil or the Capitol I've seen so far.

Going back to my earlier complaint, it's kind of reaffirmed with exploring the Cerulean Coast and the "Red Flower" area. There's "stuff" there, but not a lot to really call memorable other than the aesthetic. So much of my time in SotE has been spent trying to figure out how to get somewhere, or riding to get somewhere or try something out, that it contributes to my sense that the DLC is a little barren at times.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It doesn't help either when massive sections of the map are given over to "one thing." Like the Finger Ruins, a sizable chunk of the map, is basically a huge statue cemetary, some worms, some garbo loot and 1 precious trinket. The entire area design feeds to that one point in the center for one piece of loot, and the rest is basically an open (but decorated) area with some enemies kind of sprinkled around, and D-Tier consumables or materials scattered around. You spend 30 minutes really, really checking that place and out and it's not paid off satisfactorily. I know when my instincts are telling me it's not worth the time to explore, there's a problem with the game.

On the other hand, exploring a thread does lead to something cool sometimes.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Finding the crater to the underground coffin repository and fighting through that to eventually find St. Trina and do the questline with her and that one guy....that really felt paid off by the end. That wasn't just "hey ride around this area for an hour looking at stuff you can't get to and fighting the same repeated field boss for some questionable loot."

I think the hand-crafted parts of the game are really great, and the map design is top-notch. But the detailing of the open world and the amount of thought put into what's there feels lacking. Sort of like whoever was tasked with making sure interesting things were evenly distributed really didn't try. Or that they're imparting a message with what they put there, like "the loot wasn't the point of coming all the way over here, rrrriiiiiggggghhhhttttt? *have some total garbage*".

And then there's the weirdly polar opposite of that, with the freakin hanging jars.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's jars hanging on strings you need to hit with something to drop the item out of. Classic From Soft stuff, except this time there's no visual indicator of an object inside. I've found these things, seemingly at random out in the middle of nowhere before. I've easily missed several by now, I'm sure. They seem to usually contain Cookbooks. It's like someone put them there, without an easy way to notice them, as an act of spite almost. Like "haha, you want secrets? Good luck tracking all these down in the vastness of the map."

[nenjin]

Well it took longer than expected but I've cleared the DLC, finally.

Before I talk about my experience overall, I do want to note something.

There is something seriously fucked up when playing online. You don't notice it while playing through the entire DLC, but as soon as you hit the final boss fight it becomes radically apparent that there is something going on that's affecting FPS and maybe other systems based on it.

The fight requires A LOT of dodging. Most attack chains are 3, some as high as 6, plus all this other nonsense going on. You need some frame perfect dodges on some of them.

My friend and I fought the boss over 40 times and wiped each time. We both experienced, as the host, that the attacks seemed HARDER to dodge. I was dodging combos that my friend seemed unable to dodge. I thought he was crazy, but then he went and fought the boss offline and beat him in just a handful of tries. So I switched to being host and the inability to dodge things I was able to as a phantom was real, and infuriating.

Today, I did the same method. Not only did I beat him in 4 tries, where the best we could manage as a team was ~10%, my frames were better, across the board. When:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

he does the epic light beam attack

In coop my frames tanked to 20 FPS. Playing solo? Maybe 50? That's a pretty huge gap for just having 1 other person playing with you.

So yeah. It was probably one of the hardest fights in a From Soft game since Dark Eater Midir. At least I felt so, until I went offline :\

----

So, Shadow of the Erd Tree.

It's pretty good. Visually stunning. All the new toys are cool.

But afterward I'm left cold by some of my experiences.

The world is gorgeous and there's tons of variety in settings. Yet some of them feel very empty. Like more was planned. But even then, some of the basic geography is just....kind of simplistic. It's the most vertical game From Soft has made, and yet each layer of that verticality leaves something to be desired.

That isn't to say there aren't cool areas. Some of my favorite small and major dungeons in the game are now from the DLC. But many of them aren't great either. Which is true of the base game I suppose. Again, one is left with the feeling, much like with the base game, that it could have been smaller and more tightly designed.

And for the bosses, excluding the final boss, I didn't feel were that hard on a first playthrough. I beat almost every boss in the game solo within 5 tries, many without my mimic, which was basically overkill in most boss fights. Sometimes regular enemies felt way more lethal than some of the bosses they threw at you. Partly because so many of the bosses have player forms and mechanics. I think stun locked at least 5 bosses with the halberd to the point it was a flawless victory.

This isn't to say they're ALL weak. The first boss is definitely an order of magnitude harder than MOST base game bosses. But in general I was surprised how easily I felt like I steam rolled them with essentially the same build I played the base game with. Maybe that's the Scadu tree fragments. Maybe that's first playthrough difficulty.

Honorable mentions too for recycling several base game bosses in the DLC as well. It mostly makes sense, thematically. And they did mix up one or two with a new element or something.

And then there's the gear. This shit is just crazy from a PvP perspective. If Elden Ring was L2, The Game before, now it's L2, The Movie. Everyone can carry multiple tactical nukes in their pocket now, not to mention the batshit crazy damage you achieve with just regular attacks done the right way with the right weapons. The Dark Souls 3 DLC did not feel like this dramatic of power escalation compared to Shadow of the Erd Tree.

Lastly, the story.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I enjoyed the subversion. It was alluded to Miquella maybe being a little sinister in the base game with their power to charm anyone. Of all the contenders for Elden Lord, Miquella has the best reasons for what they're doing. But ultimately are the bad guy, and was willing to kill Radahn to puppet their way to a kinder world. Between that and St. Trina (I'll never forget seeing HUNDREDS of player blood stains stacked on top of each other in one spot in the St. Trina room, as people kept drinking) it's all beatific and yet kind of horrifying at the same time. Ironically, Mesmer feels like the most over-hyped and least relevant character in the DLC. He's just sitting in his castle, sulking, like he has nothing to do now.

Overall I enjoyed the story and how they put a bow on some of the base game's storylines and ideas.

All in all, if you wanted fresh Elden Ring, it does deliver. It's a smorgasbord of content, and I spent many hours riding around trying to find ways to access areas that made for scenic views but also really inflated my playtime. There's a lot of cool verticality, things are just massive in scale and scope no matter where you look, it's pretty, tons of flashy new cool stuff to look forward to, and it is quite difficult coming from base Elden Ring. Everything hits hard, including trash enemies, and many non-trash enemies have long attack chains sometimes, well above what you'd face in the base game. I just wish, like Elden Ring, that it had been a little tighter in design because it definitely overstayed its welcome at one point.

[dikbutdagrate]

And then there's the gear. This shit is just crazy from a PvP perspective. If Elden Ring was L2, The Game before, now it's L2, The Movie. Everyone can carry multiple tactical nukes in their pocket now, not to mention the batshit crazy damage you achieve with just regular attacks done the right way with the right weapons. The Dark Souls 3 DLC did not feel like this dramatic of power escalation compared to Shadow of the Erd Tree.

I hate Radahn, but you absolutely do not have to dodge. You don't even have to think. Its sort of the worst part about the fight, is that there is just an auto-win setup, that the developers seem to endorse. You use a tower shield, towershield talisman, double turtle talisman, and an ant-spur rapier, infused with blood to go faster, and you just shield poke with it, and that will simply win you the fight. All you have to do is hold forward and block, and hit r1, that's it.

About pvp, idk what you're talking about. You may want to revaluate that stance. Everything minus backhand blade, and blade of damnation, which has a grab which gets better the worse your connection is (think ds1 backstabs) was completely awful at release. Spells included, minus thorns. FS completely dropped the ball, and like, just forgot to add hyper armor to a wide number of unique weapon skills and spells, which made them hot garbage, and almost categorically worse than base game weapons, in large part, due to ability to be knocked out of your weapon skill while wearing full bull-goat armor, because your opponent hits you with a dagger's r1. There is just no universe where that can be a good thing in souls pvp.

Lol, do you remember what Elden Ring was like on release? It was like DBZ meets Dark Souls, between chain-casting combos - blood hound's step,  OG RoB and MV, Ezk Decay. What in the DLC comes close to that level of power without involving some kind of weird damage bug? (Minus of course backhand blades. Which if memory serves, are still on a fundamentally different level from most weapons, in terms of their motion values. Like, why use curved twin blades at all when you can deal so much more damage with these things? Even after the two separate recent nerfs?) It was the exact inverse of power creep.

Hyper relevant storyline spoilers:
Heh, probably the best DLC meme I've seen to date.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSR-kQKQn5c