I'm really conflicted with how I should rate Shadow of the Erdtree. On the one hand I can admire the fact that Hidetaka Miyazaki is so committed to his artistic vision for Elden Ring and especially in this case the DLC for it. But on the other hand I also have to listen to my own enjoyment, especially while playing games. So, if I'm being completely honest, I didn't enjoy most of the boss fights in this DLC as much as I would have liked. This is mainly due to the amount of damage they deal, but not only the bosses hit hard, no, the standard enemies also deal a lot of damage. So much that almost every enemy that you will encounter in the beginning while one or two hit kill you. My problem with this is that I think it is just a really lazy and the easiest way to make a game harder by just increasing damage numbers.
But what Fromsoftware is excellent at is creating beautiful landescapes and my jaw was on the floor a lot of the time while I explored the map. I also liked the verticality in this DLC, there are many areas that I hidden underneath other areas and this makes the Land of Shadow a lot bigger that it initially looks.
The performance on my PS5 sadly wasn't the best, I experienced weird pop-ins from the foliage and FPS drops during my playtrough, it was the worst when I used the raytracing mode. I also didn't like the design from many bosses, example are the Dancing Lion, Commander Gaius or the endboss(I wont say the name for spoiler reasons). Fighting them was really annonying because they never stop attacking and have extremly long attack combos. The main game had a similar problem but had many ways to avoid that problem. You had a lot of freedom in the main game you simply could fight a different boss, upgrade your weapon or level up your character. You can't really do that in the DLC, leveling up your character makes no difference and you also can't upgrade any further because you maxed out everything. Making runes almost worthless also killed the tension for me, yes you can play riskier but a lot of the time I didn't really care when I lost all of my runes but I think this is a problem that the endgame of these games in general have. The only mechanic that they give you to improve your character are the scadutree fragments but some of them are locked behind bosses so farming them is not an option when you are stuck at a particular boss like it was with the runes. The scadutree fragments also lower the replay value of the DLC because you always have to grind these fragments especially on NG+ runs. The fragments are always located at the same places so there is no variety when you farm them. At least the scadutree fragments carry over to NG+ but I still think there should have been a better way to improve your character and balance the boss fights. While I do think exploring is rewarding simply because how amazing the environment looks, the items aren't. 90% of what you’ll find are either smithing stones and damn cookbooks. The boss/enemy variety is also not great, many of enemies that you will encounter are either Dragons that look slightly different than the other, bunch of Hippos or other enemies that you already know from the main game. The second phase from the finale boss was also terrible, he just spams aoe attacks all over the area and is fast as fuck. But it was doable after switching my weapon to bloodfiend's arm with a bleed + stagger combo. The ending from the DLC was pretty anti climatic, you only one or two sentences from a certain character and that's it's. Which mirrored my overall experience with Shadow of the Erdtree.
One question remains, should you buy the DLC ? Well if you are a person that didn't like Elden Ring during Mountaintops of the Giants (which is the endgame of the main game), which I know was for many players (including myself) the weakest part of the game, then you probably won't really like the DLC either because many of the bosses for this DLC are pretty similar in terms of craziness to the endgame bosses of Elden Ring. But for my they overturned them quite a bit. But world the environment is still incredible and I can respect the artistic vision from Miyazaki and it's still a decent DLC but weaker than the main game.
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But what Fromsoftware is excellent at is creating beautiful landescapes and my jaw was on the floor a lot of the time while I explored the map. I also liked the verticality in this DLC, there are many areas that I hidden underneath other areas and this makes the Land of Shadow a lot bigger that it initially looks.
The performance on my PS5 sadly wasn't the best, I experienced weird pop-ins from the foliage and FPS drops during my playtrough, it was the worst when I used the raytracing mode. I also didn't like the design from many bosses, example are the Dancing Lion, Commander Gaius or the endboss(I wont say the name for spoiler reasons). Fighting them was really annonying because they never stop attacking and have extremly long attack combos. The main game had a similar problem but had many ways to avoid that problem. You had a lot of freedom in the main game you simply could fight a different boss, upgrade your weapon or level up your character. You can't really do that in the DLC, leveling up your character makes no difference and you also can't upgrade any further because you maxed out everything. Making runes almost worthless also killed the tension for me, yes you can play riskier but a lot of the time I didn't really care when I lost all of my runes but I think this is a problem that the endgame of these games in general have. The only mechanic that they give you to improve your character are the scadutree fragments but some of them are locked behind bosses so farming them is not an option when you are stuck at a particular boss like it was with the runes. The scadutree fragments also lower the replay value of the DLC because you always have to grind these fragments especially on NG+ runs. The fragments are always located at the same places so there is no variety when you farm them. At least the scadutree fragments carry over to NG+ but I still think there should have been a better way to improve your character and balance the boss fights. While I do think exploring is rewarding simply because how amazing the environment looks, the items aren't. 90% of what you’ll find are either smithing stones and damn cookbooks. The boss/enemy variety is also not great, many of enemies that you will encounter are either Dragons that look slightly different than the other, bunch of Hippos or other enemies that you already know from the main game. The second phase from the finale boss was also terrible, he just spams aoe attacks all over the area and is fast as fuck. But it was doable after switching my weapon to bloodfiend's arm with a bleed + stagger combo. The ending from the DLC was pretty anti climatic, you only one or two sentences from a certain character and that's it's. Which mirrored my overall experience with Shadow of the Erdtree.
One question remains, should you buy the DLC ? Well if you are a person that didn't like Elden Ring during Mountaintops of the Giants (which is the endgame of the main game), which I know was for many players (including myself) the weakest part of the game, then you probably won't really like the DLC either because many of the bosses for this DLC are pretty similar in terms of craziness to the endgame bosses of Elden Ring. But for my they overturned them quite a bit. But world the environment is still incredible and I can respect the artistic vision from Miyazaki and it's still a decent DLC but weaker than the main game.
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Games I finished in 2024 ranked
2 Comments
@stovetop oh well that's great, thanks for the info!
stovetop
2 days ago