There's something fundamentally wrong with the summon system. They were always an afterthought in the previous games and it doesn’t feel like they’ve improved here. They take aggro away from you, you get to ignore the fight for a while. All the changes and expansion of the idea haven’t changed this one fact (well, we got more diversity now and some summons don’t take aggro but they’re a minority).

The problem is that the Souls combat system is designed for one versus one encounters. Pushing the limits is possible: we have wonderful duo fights in the previous games. Going too far, be it multiple enemies or players, just breaks the game. When the summon takes the aggro from you, you just get a free window of damage because the enemy will not attack you any more. This doesn’t create an interesting dynamic at all. The enemies are not made to handle two opponents at once. There are a few countermeasures such as the boss changing its target mid-combo but did you really feel like they are enough?

Designing the game around this was a bad idea because the game becomes frustrating without summons and uninteresting with them. I don’t care that the summons exist as some sort of assist tool if you want to reduce the difficulty of the battles (this is how I see their purpose, especially in the previous games). However, I believe SOTE just pushes the player to use them.

The base game already does this to some extent. When previous games had delightful duo bosses, Elden Ring has a few duo bosses which are literally two bosses in an arena with no AI adjustment. They WILL attack at the same time, some of them will even use moves that will absolutely devastate you: remember the two gargoyles fight, during which one of them is constantly spamming a poison AoE move that flinches you? Who designed that, honestly?

SOTE went another direction: now enemies will attack almost forever and if you want a break, then you have to make it target someone else. Yes the bosses are doable solo but personally, I wasn’t enjoying them unlike the previous games.

I can already barely read some of them. There are fights where distance doesn’t matter because the boss can constantly jump on you, barely visible wind-up animations… and telling when they stop is more difficult than ever because of the variable combo feature. A same combo can have a different amount of moves, creating a lot of variabilities to take into account which make it very difficult to tell when you can actually hit and even if you do, you barely get a few seconds.

So I’ve been playing the game with summons. It’s alright, but I don’t really like using summons. I like when the boss focuses on me but I also don’t like how they’re too aggressive. Perhaps I didn’t need to write a whole review about this after all? It’s too late now.

One day maybe I’ll complain about other problems I got with Elden Ring, which are shared by both SOTE and the base game. But I still liked my experience a lot. I’ll praise the DLC for not having copypasted caves any more, every “minor” dungeon was pretty fun and had distinct environments (though their bosses are still miserable for the most part).