an improvement over the base game in a lot of ways I think, the open world is far more interesting here with its actually interesting dungeons that take longer than 2 minutes to complete and weird obscure paths that actually lead to entire areas that you previously had no idea how to access.

as a fan of bosses with stupidly long combos I was pleased with most of what was present here (although I understand the fatigue with said boss archetype), the only real missteps for me were the stupid guy on the boar (that charge is just not real bro wtf is that shit) and the final boss (phase 2 is a bit too absurd for my liking, I'm scared that if they continue with this formula that bosses this overtuned are gonna become the norm).

the white whale dragon and accompanying captain ahab npc were probably a highlight for me, that whole part was just ridiculously cool and silly and igon is probably gonna live on as a favourite npc of mine

overall this might be as good as or at least close to as good as old hunters? it might just be recency bias so im gonna have to think about it for some time but this dlc does elevate elden ring as a whole quite a bit for me, the only real problem is that if I ever plan on replaying this dlc i gotta get through a long ass game first and thats just a lot of work...

an improvement over the base game in a lot of ways I think, the open world is far more interesting here with its actually interesting dungeons that take longer than 2 minutes to complete and weird obscure paths that actually lead to entire areas that you previously had no idea how to access.

as a fan of bosses with stupidly long combos I was pleased with most of what was present here (although I understand the fatigue with said boss archetype), the only real missteps for me were the stupid guy on the boar (that charge is just not real bro wtf is that shit) and the final boss (phase 2 is a bit too absurd for my liking, I'm scared that if they continue with this formula that bosses this overtuned are gonna become the norm).

the white whale dragon and accompanying captain ahab npc were probably a highlight for me, that whole part was just ridiculously cool and silly and igon is probably gonna live on as a favourite npc of mine

overall this might be as good as or at least close to as good as old hunters? it might just be recency bias so im gonna have to think about it for some time but this dlc does elevate elden ring as a whole quite a bit for me, the only real problem is that if I ever plan on replaying this dlc i gotta get through a long ass game first and thats just a lot of work...