Shadow of the Erdtree is another fantastic FromSoft DLC you can throw on the pile along with The Old Hunters and The Ringed City. It's by far the most expansive-- to the point where many have argued its content could comprise a separate game entirely. I spent around 40-50 hours exploring everything I could find, so I'm inclined to agree, but while it still earns its place among the other greats, it feels like a step down from previous Soulsborne DLC outings for a few reasons.

It's been said repeatedly by many people, but I can't understate the sheer scope of this DLC. There's so much new ground to explore and I did my best to thoroughly search every nook and cranny to find everything I could without looking anything up, but I still ended up needing to use online guides for a couple of the remaining collectables (Some Scadutree Fragments and Crafting Books). Most of the time I spent exploring was great! The new areas feel pretty well fleshed out and nearly all of them are total eye candy. FromSoft is ever a master when it comes to crafting gorgeous landscapes with haunting backstories that itch to be scoured for loot.

That said, I was a bit taken aback at how empty a few of the areas felt. Much of the southern area of the map is entirely devoid of interesting loot, battles, or anything else that might make one want to explore it. It's very odd because these areas-- the Cerulean Coast and Charo's Hidden Grave in particular-- feel like they're meant to be chock full of secrets. You get a sense of a hidden land, unspoiled by "civilized people", when you first step onto their soil. When in reality they hold... I don't know, maybe... two or three interesting things between them? It'd be one thing if, like some other somewhat emptier areas, these two were created in service of a particular legacy dungeon or NPC questline, but unfortunately this isn't the case. The aforementioned areas are great if you find yourself in need of Ghost Glovewarts I guess, but as someone who didn't spend much time with the various summon ashes in my playthrough, there's very little here for me. If I ever replay the DLC I can't see myself spending much time in these areas.

This aside, FromSoft clearly took some player feedback from the base game into account. The mini dungeons each feel much more unique and actually were one of my favorite aspects of the DLC. They're a bit more sparse throughout the game world to compensate, but I never saw someone argue there weren't enough of them in the base game so I'm sure that's not a major downside for most people.

Legacy dungeons continue to be some of the best content here just as they were in the base game, though they're on average a tad less remarkable. Some of them feel a little bit short, if anything, though still enjoyable to explore. However, I strongly feel that the main legacy dungeon of the DLC is easily among the best FromSoft has created. There's so much to dig into here-- hidden passages, alternate entrances, and cool new weapons to collect, to name a few. I was impressed to find how the area just, kept, GOING on a number of occasions when I got the sense it was winding down.

A major point of contention with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC among fans has been the high difficulty of some of the content, particularly among some of the major bosses. This is not unusual territory for Soulsborne games, which often have housed their most challenging trials in their DLC content, but I don't think I've quite seen an outcry like this among players for one of these games before as someone who's been following them for a while now. To a certain extent I agree with the backlash here. Many of the harder enemies and bosses in this DLC are just way overtuned to the point where I didn't really enjoy spending the time to learn how to fight them.

Don't get me wrong, there are some gems in here for sure that I would glady fight again in a heartbeat. FromSoft clearly sought to outdo themselves when it came to providing a tough challenge that also delivers in spades in pure visual spectacle. But when every other major boss fight requires perfect dodging 4-5 hit combos over and over in the hopes of getting 1 or 2 hits in in return and the bosses have massive health bars like this... well, it gets exhausting very fast. I often found myself rolling my eyes when I'd dodge almost an entire combo from a boss except the very last blow, which without fail would send me catapulting backwards far enough that I wouldn't have time to get a hit in before the next combo started and the whole thing repeated over again.

Many of the new bosses also suffer from visual/gameplay clarity issues. It can be excruciatingly difficult to figure out what exactly you're expected to do in the face of certain attacks because the way you're meant to dodge them is often counterintuitive to how the attack might present itself or because the particle effects resulting from said attack outright block player vision of the follow-up attack. As an example, there's a particular mounted boss (who has been on the receiving end of much vitriol from the community) who has an opening attack where he just outright charges you. This being his opening attack means I had plenty of opportunity to practice it over and over but without fail no matter what I tried; rolling left, right, forward, backward, jumping, running away, running away using Torrent, jumping with Torrent, etc.... nothing worked to avoid the attack that chunked half of my health right at the start. Eventually I caved and looked up a strategy to avoid it which involved getting the boss stuck on a wall until he decides to stop charging.

I sincerely hope that this kind of absurd constant "balls to the wall" aggressive boss design either gets patched a bit to mitigate its issues or at least doesn't become the norm for FromSoft's bosses going forward. Dark Souls III and Sekiro really hit a sweet spot when it came to enemy aggression and overall speed of combat that I wish we could go back to.

The DLC also managed to introduce some additional performance issues to the game. Of course it'll vary from system to system, but I have a pretty decent PC that can average 60 fps in Elden Ring most of the time. But ever since the DLC patch, the game has had moments where it'll just freeze for like a second or two. Music and SFX continue, indicating the game itself is still going, but it's like the frame rate drops to 0 out of nowhere. These moments were seemingly random-- entirely unrelated to what was happening onscreen, whether it be combat, area traversal on horseback, or merely navigating the map menu. There's something funky going on, because the freezes definitely often happened in patterned short bursts, so when I got one, I could usually expect one or two more in the next few seconds before all returned to normal. Thankfully my issues weren't prominent enough to stop me from enjoying the DLC, but they are concerning and it'd be great to see them fixed.

Shadow of the Erdtree is absolutely worth your time if you enjoyed Elden Ring's base game content, but don't expect it to change your mind if you weren't a fan. It's more of the same exploration and hyper-aggressive bosses. I had a really great time playing through it but it definitely left me a little concerned for whatever FromSoft's next project is if they continue on this trajectory.

Elden Ring’s expansion is a fun challenge that successfully recaptures some of the feel and flow of the base game in a smaller package. I don’t think I’ll remember or want to revisit most of its bosses as much as I do those of the main game, but there are big highlights, and the new map is a lot of fun to explore. It’s definitely one of the best things I’ve played so far this year and a worthy addition to the original experience.

The new content does particularly shine in the exploration, where the vertically-layered map offers loads of little teases of places you can see but not easily reach. It was pretty satisfying finally reaching these places and running into other stuff that’s tucked away while I searched around. The centerpiece of this new region is a large legacy dungeon with openings to and from several different zones. It’s an impressive area that embodies the nonlinear, looping-back feel of Dark Souls and that houses one of the expansion’s coolest bosses. Some of the optional areas look very nice and quite unlike what we’ve seen in the base game, which felt like a good reward for the effort. Like in the main game, you may spend time exploring without getting anything directly applicable to your build, but it’s still inherently fun to do.

Stronger talismans and a new region-specific upgrade system for characters and spirit summons allow the new content to have its own self-contained progression curve like that of the main content, even if you bring in a fully-built character. Rushing straight for major bosses (and even many minor ones) is likely to result in a painful beatdown, as you lack crucial percentage-based scaling offered by the new upgrades and other new ways to mitigate their damage or augment your own. I like how they balanced this stuff, even if it does cause a bit of a rude awakening at first that may scare people off who got comfortable with the main game.

Boss designs are similar to the main game’s later content with a range of complexity and number scaling. The most aggressive of these foes leave little room to heal, are good at breaking out of combos, and can easily devastate your healthbar in seconds if you’re not careful. Bulky spirit summons like the Mimic Tear and builds that deal lots of poise damage like the character I brought in still feel immensely valuable for getting some breathing room. Like in the main game, there are such powerful options available that it may end up a little too hard for many people who prefer not to use summons, and even those who do may still struggle with the camera and somewhat excessive AOE splashes in some fights. I had a nice time with the spectacle and chaos of the major bosses and the tension of the more PVP-like minor ones—could maybe do without the dragons and some other overworld foes, but I don’t dislike them.

I couldn’t really ask for too much more from this expansion content, as it delivers more of what I liked about the main game at a time when I’ve been pretty high on the game as a whole. It doesn’t outdo the base game but rather just adds a new big meaty chunk to it. I brought in a “completed” endgame build and came out with a whole different weapon type and greater engagement with the RPG systems and exploration in a way that felt pretty significant. It may not convert anyone who wasn’t already into what the main game did to the Souls formula, but for those who enjoyed that, I think this is a must-play.

Unsurprisingly, the Elden Ring DLC turned out to be quite good. There's a sense in which this fact was inevitable. There are ways it could've been botched but despite the vast amount of content in the base game, simply adding more to an already beloved title is sure to please many fans. However, Shadow of the Erdtree continues the trend of many other Fromsoft DLCs in delivering an expansion that not only adds to the base game with new areas, bosses, and weapons, but provides a twist on the premise of the core game to bring us something new. There is a sense in which I was somewhat hoping to enjoy this DLC a bit more than I did, and—as I'll try to explain below—I did have a few gripes with it. However, my bar from this studio is quite high and meeting those standards at all is a pretty much guaranteed 5-star game for me.

Note: as I'll get into in...well the very next paragraph, exploration and discovery are big parts of this game, so I'll go ahead and spoiler tag all my screenshots so they're at least blurred out, though mine don't contain any significant spoilers in the more general sense.

My favorite thing about this DLC by far is the exploration. While the Soulslike genre is often known for its punishing-but-fair difficulty that thrives on trial and error and forcing the player to learn the enemies, areas, and combat well, I've always found the much-discussed and thoroughly-hyped difficulty to be one of the less interesting aspects of these games, especially when the difficulty is pushed especially high. Instead, what was so satisfying about Elden Ring to me was inhabiting a rich fantastical world like those in the studio's other games with satisfying and deep combat mechanics, but on a far larger scale than has been implemented otherwise to this point. The map in the base game is huge, with its seemingly endless expansion being one of the cleverer details to appreciate as you progress through. I think everyone who's played it through remembers the baffling discovery after discovery as you explore new regions and the map that once seemed rather wide and expansive, now makes up just a tiny piece of the explorable lands, even without accounting for the thorough underground and dungeon areas. There's a sense of wonder in seeing a wide mostly-blank map in a lot of games which implies how much remains unexplored. But Elden Ring goes the opposite direction in constantly stressing just how much further you have gone.

Shadow of the Erdtree takes this core appeal and places it dead center by tweaking the gameplay progression in significant ways. For one, the DLC is far less restrictive with its boss and dungeon placement. There are 11 main bosses in the DLC, not counting dozens of lesser field and mini-dungeon bosses. However, you only need to beat 4 to finish the DLC's story, allowing you much more liberty to leave a boss for later and scour the map either as a break from attempting said boss, or to find items to aid you in that fight as almost none of these bosses prevent you from accessing new areas. This leads me to another somewhat controversial mechanical addition: scadutree fragments. These are rare items scattered across the DLC map that significantly improve your damage and survivability in the DLC (and only in the DLC, your stats remain unchanged if you travel back to the Lands Between). Though some require defeating tough encounters, all you need to do to get the bulk of these is just find them on the map and pick them up. I personally really like this mechanic as it reinforces heavily what the DLC is all about: encouraging exploration. If you're stuck and just getting totally stomped, why don't you stop being a try-hard and go explore this beautiful map the game is offering you? It's a fairly simple concept, but one that very elegantly encourages and rewards exploration and puts the focus on the part of this game that I enjoy most.

But the real literal beauty of this core concept is that the areas in Shadow of the Erdtree are pretty awesome. Though the map is unsurprisingly much smaller than the base game's map, it still features considerable variety with a clever (though at times confusing) use of verticality. There are many moments of awe and wonder to be found as you explore the shadow realm and just taking in and tromping around these gorgeous vistas was a big part of the appeal for me. In fact, I've purposely not included as many of these landscape shots in my review because I'd rather players who haven't gotten to this yet be able to experience them anew first hand.

All my praise aside, I'm not without my complaints about the DLC. It does feel like in an effort to live up to the game's reputation, some of the difficulty and attack patterns of the bosses leans into the ridiculous to the point I don't find it as fun. I don't want to overstate this complaint; there are some really fantastic boss and combat designs in the DLC as well. But there are also moments that it's hard to ignore how much it feels spectacle was prioritized over fun, especially with the final boss of the DLC. Some of this has been patched, though I finished the DLC a couple days before the first major nerf patch landed, so I can't really speak to it. Still, I generally found that in line with my above praise, even some of the more frustrating fights were far more winnable when I just went exploring and came back with more scadutree fragments in hand. While I'm mentioning caveats, I will also admit that my first foray into the shadow realm I didn't enjoy nearly as much as the rest. Though I had high expectations and did think the new area was immediately intriguing, I did feel that the DLC didn't pick up for me until a few hours in. I'm not entirely sure why this was but still thought it worth mentioning in case others are finding it to not be an immediate hit.

All in all, Shadow of the Erdtree is a fantastic addition to the base game that successfully adds on to what's good about the base game, while still managing to deliver something totally fresh and new. While I feel at times difficulty was prioritized over fun, the DLC still manages to be a blast from start to finish. If you don't like Elden Ring, I really don't see this DLC turning you around on it (especially as you need to play a ton of the base game to even access it). But for fans of the base game, Shadow of the Erdtree is a treat well-worth its hefty price point.

Since its release, Elden Ring has become one of my absolute favourite games of all times. So naturally, hype was pretty damn big for Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. To my delight, the absolute majority of Shadow of the Erdtree is top-notch stuff. To my disappointment, it also falters in a few surprising ways.

Let's start with the good stuff. First off, the DLC is gargantuan in size. There's a shitton of new areas to cover, weapons to collect, enemies and bosses to slay and so on. The maps and dungeons are also often more complex than the ones in the base game. The main terrain of the Shadow Realm is a lot more vertical than the Lands Between, and there's surprising connectivity from one area to another. Catacombs are far less frequent but lot longer and intricate. There's also a few of new forge dungeons that are missing bosses but are otherwise pretty fun places with good rewards.

Secondly, the DLC looks amazing. As was the case with the base game, the art direction is realised so well within the game that there are painterly landscapes and scenes in multiple parts of the game. The areas of the DLC also look different than the areas in the main game which gives nice variety. The bosses of the DLC also offer quite the spectacle at times and some of the intro cutscenes are tremendous.

Thirdly, the DLC is just more of the good stuff. It's so nice to get new weapons (and weapon types), spectacular super-challenging bosses and crazy disturbing lore to dive into. The new weapon types are nicely different from the older ones and I really liked testing them out. Throwable weapons were also an addition that just felt natural to play with. The lore and story go in some surprising places and I was pleasantly surprised in how much it revealed some new stuff about the base game's story. One rewarding thing in the base Elden Ring was getting stronger little by little, and I was worried how that will be done in the DLC. Luckily, there's a new DLC-dependent progression system (blessings) for getting stronger that I felt was quite nicely implemented. It's simple but it works.

Difficulty seems to have been the most contentious point of Shadow of the Erdtree. I have played 600h of the base game so I am not without my bias but I thought the difficulty was mostly fine. It was tough, of course, but this takes place after beating Mohg in the main game so I didn't really expect a cakewalk. And the blessings make a ton of difference (at least after the patch). I suspect I had a lot easier time than many since I scoured the lands pretty extensively and found lots of scadutree fragments even before attempting any bigger bosses. I'll say, though, that the bosses play quite differently than in the main game. Be ready to learn insane combo chains that the bosses throw at you constantly. If that doesn't sound like fun for you, it probably won't be unless you find a great shield build or try the help of spirits and summons.

What's bad in the DLC then? I think this boils down to two main points for me: uneven areas and the final boss.

Even though the DLC has lots of good new areas, there are some that are just boring and empty. In general, I felt there's slightly less stuff to discover but the worst areas in this respect are the finger ruins and the Abyssal Woods. Especially the Abyssal Woods section feels like big missed opportunity. It's a big area where you can't use torrent, won't find much items at all and has only a few enemies here and there. It's atmospheric, yes, but it gets boring really quick.

As for the final boss... Well... Even though it was good to get a Miquella bossfight, I was disappointed that it was basically just Radahn again. This was such a good spot to finally bring Godwyn into the game or, hell, even make Messmer more of a star of the DLC but no. The twist also kida came out of nowhere, I had no idea Miquella had any relationship with Radahn. Moreover, I didn't even realise it when I played it but this is supposedly Radahn's soul resurrected with Mohg's body. They did very little even with that idea. And the ending cutscene that you get after the fight is minimal to say the least. It doesn't really say or show anything the intro cutscene didn't already tell. Oh well, at least it's a cool boss fight albeit with some really annoying moves.

When weighing it all down, my current thoughts on the DLC are heavily on the positive side and I'm content with it acting as a new part of Elden Ring. I can't shake the feeling that they missed the mark with a few things but such is life and it's basically a new game's worth of good content in a DLC (that costs a new game's worth). And who knows if replaying this with some silly or overpowered builds will kick up the enjoyment even higher. That's kinda what glued me to the base game for so damn many hours.

I do think it's interesting how much this game is getting review bombed. The critiques are centered around difficulty and performance issues. I think there are merits to the performance issues (albeit it's being profoundly overblown) and the challenge I think requires a bit of nuance. For performance, I get the consumer having the expectation that the game should run perfectly on day 1 especially after 2.5 years of development in a game that was built on a pre-exisiting engine. There certainly are moments of stuttering and frame rate drops. This wasn't a big issue for me personally. These issues were rare and never resulted in anything game breaking. I did have the game crash once. And I had another weird issue where I was told my activity was "inappropriate" and I had to close and relaunch the game to re-connect to the server. Other then that, frame rate drops were brief and infrequent.

Game difficulty I think is something that is a bit more complex. It's a very subjective thing and will vary from player to player and by build. I tackled the DLC on NG+ and started at level 200 using spells in a melee focused build. Most bosses wouldn't allow for me to use spells because of how insanely aggressive and efficient at gap closing they all were. I was getting slapped by all bosses but they were beatable. I did end up needing to resort to my mimic tear more than I would have liked. Given, the bosses felt doable I just didn't want to spend the extra 40 attempts to master the moveset. The new feature of fragments and ash to buff yourself and your spirit make a significant impact on both your DPS and survivability. This new feature did result in the devs pumping up the damage and health of all bosses. I think this decision makes sense in order to make these new bosses challenging even for people who have beaten the base game plenty of times. This DLC is certainly not designed for new comers. That's how all DLC is. It's additional content that is meant to be enjoyed either during or after the base game. The new feature of fragments+ash facilitate this design choice. Wherein you gain substantially more power in comparison to the base game if you decide you want to tackle this early. I wouldn't advise it. IMO you should beat Malenia before even daring to tackle this because most bosses will be harder than Malenia.

Where this DLC excels for me is in the exploration and lore. I'm anxiously awaiting Vaatvidya's many lore videos based on this new content. There will be a lot of interesting speculation around the ending of the game in particular. Roughly 40% of this game is essential content to beat the DLC. The remaining 60-70% are optional and half of that is well hidden. For me, the combat is never what's drawn me to these types of games. It's always the atmosphere and exploration. Which is why I personally don't like how much more combat focused the series has become over time. I often like the less conventional boss fights that feel more like puzzles. These boss fights are often met with the harshest critique by the average consumer because they are "easy" once you know the solution. Yet these types of unconventional encounters feels the most RPG and unique. Sadly, none of the bosses in the DLC fall under this category. Instead, they are all combat focused. While I do find Souls games combat to be engaging, it is objectively simplistic compared to most action games. The only exception to this rule was Sekiro, which limited the build variety in favor of a complex combat system. Here the combat focus made complete sense and paid off with the deeper combat and more interesting boss encounters. In the DLC, the combat isn't changed substantially, though plenty of new weapons are fun to use. I found most new bosses to be fun and engaging challenges. With great spectacle. I've enjoyed the boss fights so much that I've been helping random people with Messmer and Radahn with a decent kill rate to help push them over the finish line.

The art direction is among my favorite in the series and certainly goes toe to toe with the base game. There were plenty of zones that I just stopped and gawked at once I saw it for the first time. Whether that be Cerulean Coast or the Jagged Peak. Both are visually striking. The legacy dungeons are also among the best the series has done so far. With the Shadow Keep being one of the best legacy dungeons to date. Featuring multiple secret exits to different optional areas. And of course culminating in a challenging yet fun boss fight against Messmer.

There's a ton to explore and discover. I spent roughly 40 hours to beat/discover everything then another 20 hours helping people beat the tough bottle neck bosses and co-oping in the world. If you didn't like Elden Ring, this DLC will not sell you on it. It's certainly evolutionary. It is absolutely not meant for new consumers. It is firmly meant for those who are itching for more Elden Ring content. And it certainly scratched that itch for me. Even if I think this is among the best content Elden Ring has to offer, it is still more of the same old in terms of high level design. In addition, it's certainly the most challenging and will not be a cake walk even if you've beaten Elden Ring multiple times and don't think Malenia (with a Mimic Tear) is that bad. I don't view this as a flaw. All Souls DLC has been historically the most challenging content the game had to offer. They met that expectation in my eyes.

UPDATE: There actually is one section that feels like a bigger departure for the series in a good way. There's the whole section in the Abyssal Woods. It's kind of like Lost Woods from Zelda on too much acid. It feels more like a horror game and while the Souls games always has horror elements, this was a horror segment because it forced you to play the game completely differently. You need to navigate, on foot, through a large forest while stealthing past Winter Lanterns. You cannot hit them, they are incorporeal. The only exception is you can actually parry their grab which then makes them vulnerable to kill. You are told this in the manor when you finally reach it on a note. It's not easy to parry the grab but it is doable. As an alternative, you can stealth past them in the tall grass and use the bell plants to draw them to new locations. It's actually a pretty decent stealth section that was extremely tense. Both from not knowing where to go and the imminent doom I felt. I wish the game had more of these one off set pieces. The game is still great in my book but it didn't do much, except for the above example, to drastic depart from the formula. Not a bad thing nor something I would expect from a DLC so the Abyssal Woods was a nice surprise. Another fun detail about this section was how the community made a large message trail to guide you through the woods. It was pretty awesome and full of Metal Gear references: "Snake, Snake!"

(Here is my rambling review of ER Base Game)

Thanks to @Mikomak I realized, way too late, that this DLC had me in a sunken cost transaction for the last twenty hours before completion, and that completion comes with an asterisk because I am sure that I did not get most weapons or items, missed like four Scadutree Blessings and like half Revered Ashes but I killed all the mainline bosses. That is the best I can do.

You know what? Elden Ring is just not for me. I can't say that I did not enjoyed this game at all because there were several instances when the adrenaline was pumping and the battles were awesome. Hell, even that huge Twitter vaguepost of a story is enjoyable to some extent, but after traversing the DLC I can confirm that I am not an Elden Ring person, at all. When I finished the base game I thought for a second "likely I am just burned out, this first playthrough was really long and grueling, maybe I just need to give it some months and then it will click with me", but no. I disliked this DLC almost as much as the base game.

Even when the story of SoTE is way more engaging and some of the weapons and add-ons were really interesting, the biomes are still vast and beautiful and full of nothing (Jagged Peak and Enir Ilim being a notable exception) and the boss fights are even MORE bullshit that before. I can't remember being as frustrated with Vicar Amelia or Pontiff as I was with the most innocuous boss of this game. After three playthroughs I almost came to enjoy Pontiff, call it Stockholm syndrome or whatever, but after I beat Rennala or the stupid Boar Knight I was not overjoyed or ecstatic, I almost did not feel like I had improved as a player or something like that, I was just numb, and a bit tired, every time. Every win I got in SoTE felt like when I beat Malenia: A struck of luck, the one attempt where the RNG played on my favor and something unlikely to happen again.

Elden Ring boss fights have a weird disconnection that I cannot quite pinpoint. When I played a Dark Souls game I feel that my character is in the same "reality" as the literal gods that I am fighting against. Even when these gods are way past their prime or downright rotting away, my character feels like is made of the same essence as these monsters and I can fight them and beat them and actually "git gud", even when it takes countless attempts. In Elden Ring, almost every boss feels like a fucking Dynasty Warriors character mauling you into oblivion while you move like a Silent Hill protagonist afflicted with the paralysis status from Pokemon Emerald. The carefully curated power level inbalance of Dark Souls/Bloodborne is thrown out of the window so Malenia can carved assholes behind your knees and the fucking Boar Knight in Scaduview can run you over unceremoniously like a disconsiderate SUV driver. SoTE cranks this feeling to eleven almost in every boss encounter. The only notable exceptions that I can think of are maybe Midra and Messmer, which are quite a nice spectacle, but most of the boss battles here are just straight bullshit, Rellana and Radahn being exceptionally bullshit walls to climb.

But I am free now, I completed a full playthrough of probably the most acclaimed game of this generation. I did it for me, and I will stick to that to hide from the fact that, in terms of enjoyment, I have very little to show for it. Now I can finally start another Dual Boom Hammer run in DS3.

This is, without a doubt, the new standard.

This game singlehandly validates a 4K OLED TV. Paintings come to life, beauty through human effort and care. You feel entering each area how that moment was carefully crafted.

New weapons, both creative and thematic. "Oh... my ashe has three phases?"

Masterclass level design: "wait, I do what now, who are you lol, ouch, huh... this dungeon goes where!?"

This is base elden ring with the fat cut. No more repeating dungeons and limited enemy re-use. Handsculpted with love from you evil step mother; who loves pots.

Engaging, well thought out lore that defines gameplay and interaction. So many games just staple this in haphazardly. Less is more.

Amazing set pieces; "wow, I have to fight this -------?"

The later sections have been criticised as being "empty" I don't think that is the point. The big later areas are hidden on the map, and if you look at the wiki for items, etc. you will see that the entire map is filled (Select "All"). Also, I understand treating this as a full new game but it isn't. This complaint feels like going to a buffet that has 10/10 mains, but complaining there isn't the same amount of desert.

For people considering this game, asking "will it be too hard?":

This DLC was designed to punish players that don't engage in the games various mechanics. You can basically chose to beat the bosses with strategy and preparation (right approach for the right boss), exploration and powergrowth(gaining personal or summon power), or build optimisation (making your one approach really powerful). Combining these makes the game easy.

Strongly recommend doing the DLC on a new game plus run as an experimenter. It will make sure the DLC is challenging, but also that you have all the tools and levels to adapt to challenges posed. Also, rune farming is easier and you can stack resources. If you want to stick with a specific build maybe stay in your first game or you might find that the boss damage increases just results in one-shots.

I am a huge fan of Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne and Sekiro, and to me, unfortunately, this DLC was a major let down. Especially for it's price of a seperate game.

Locations, enemies and boss fights are indeed very scenic and beautiful, but after playing they turned out to be not as exciting as i expected. Locations are extremely empty (even compared to the Lands Between from the main game) and filled with useless cookbooks and low level smithing stones/runes. There is no insentive to explore whatsoever, outside of pure curiosity and finding scadutree upgrades so you get one shot by bosses not as often as you would without them, and to find bossfights of course.

Other problem is that bossfights in this DLC are dissapointing as well. There is way too many reskin copy paste dragons, bears, crucible knights and npc boss fights, there is also surprising amount of dungeons that don't have a boss fight at all. I wanted to experience everything Shadow of the Erdtree has to offer, but at some point i realized that this DLC is filled with time wasting obstacles instead of bosses even more so, than the base game.

There is a small amount of the original unique bossfights, which are also extremely well designed visually, but are quite the opposite in the gameplay department. Most of them will spam you down with areal attacks non-stop without any openings 90% of the time, and vast majority of their attacks can't be armored through and almost guaranteed to knock you up/send you flying. I am a firm believer that there is almost infinite amount of ways to make bossfights challenging without making them feel boring and obnoxious, and Elden Ring (especially it's DLC) is doing much worse job than DS3, Bloodborne or Sekiro.

Overall what we get is an overpriced expansion of an open-world game, with the least rewarding exploring i've ever seen in that genre, no interesting quest lines (since it's a From Soft game, obviously this isn't their primary focus), lots and lots of reused enemies and other assets, and underwhelming boss fights, which make me feel that in pursuit of making bosses look cool, cinematic and challenging, Miyazaki totally forgot how to balance them like to be fun as well, like he did before.

I am a bit dissapointed and i can't give it more than 6/10, there aren't any signs of playerbase backlash, so it doesn't look like FromSoft is ever going to change gameplay direction of their future projects. Kudos to everyone who really enjoys this game as it already is, i guess.

GameSpot, IGN or something said

an unmissable tour de force that is every bit as brilliant as the original game

What they were trying to say (I think) is that it makes the same mistakes as the base game.

It is too big and extremly uneven and unbalanced experience. Huge areas that at first glance promise a big adventure, end up being mostly empty except for 1 dungeon, or some mini bosses pasted from the base game.

What is new is mostly OK or good, with splashes of bad. Visibility of multiple bosses is worse than it has ever been, don't really understand how the hell AC6 with way more strobing lights and particle effects, remains more visually clear and transparent.

Fromsoft boss design in Elden Ring has become 90% the same template. Spin around in AoE combos. Why? Because now except for summons, players also have access to spirit ashes so FS has to counter that. More and more bosses limit builds that are fun or good against them. They have long forgone the Demon Souls and Dark Souls gimmicks of bosses, where they try to make the bosses rememberable thanks to fun design, interesting and fresh gimmick. Now they can only make you remember a boss cause it either had great spectacle, or a stupidly hard fight. But spectacle runs of, and does not provide replayability.

Fromsoft has always had great level and world design (with very few missteps) but applying that to a huge open world only works if you know how to limit the scale. Leaving such huge empty areas makes the exploration extremly padded out and only creates an illusion of interesting exploration that often becomes tediouis, annoying and unrewarding. Huge areas often gave me 5-10 minutes or running around on a horse, "fighting" either those black villager NPCs for useless crafting materials or just nothing. Biggest areas have 1 dungeon, and still often repeated minibosses from base game.

At least the new dungeons are more unique than the base game, there is less of them too, which is good. But still, the game remains too big. I think that crafting is largely the fault. There is a lot of stuff to find in this game, in all their games in souls like genre. But in Elden Ring, most of this stuff is either crafting which you will rarely use (i haven't used it for anything else other than horse food and big pots required to kill flaming visage guys) or more and more equipment, where most of it is now unusable, because per 1 run, playthrough, you want to find 1 build that you find fun/good and complete the game with it.

Finding stuff no longer feels significant and thus is not rewarding and fun.

As much as there are a few cool new weapons, most of the new equipment seems useless or too situational.

There is a few of nice new NPCs, but the story, just as the base games, lacks focus of their other titles. Base story of elden ring was boring for me, and this is more coherent but goes into a very weird direction and is no more interesting.

In terms of difficulty, people seem to have split into two camps (as they often do those days):

1. Git Gud hehehehehehehhehe
2. Enemies do too much damage, have too much health and bosses only do AoE

To me it seems that the difficulty debacle has a lot more to id.

You can be extremly patient and not run around looking for scadutree fragments everywhere. If you are a god gamer, streamer or spend 8 hours a day gaming or in general do gaming it per living (or don't do much else except game), you won't find this DLC too difficult. This is a very vocal part of the community because those people are usually terminally online. Those are people who post videos beating Radahn lvl 1, comment GIT GUT everywhere seriously (the phrase started out as a meme in Dark Souls 1 times but now is treated as an actual insult) and in general think very highly of themselves, have a perma honeymoon phase with Fromsoft and just think that hard to beat == good. They see that boss design evolved but player mechanics didn't, and they want it to stay like that, cause it gives them an option to boast about beating Godslayer Zanzibar with a club while naked.

There are also people who do not spend that much time on gaming and like this game. I also know a few of them, and in general they are rather patient, don't play much else other than FS games cause they played them a lot when they had more time. This DLC is just more Elden Ring to them, and they are ok with it, they have fun with it. They gather scadutree fragments, use spirit ashes, play the game as FromSoft intendent and don't want to tread new grounds. They see that boss design evolved but player mechanics didn't, but they don't care.

And then there are people like me, who are rather unhappy with this DLC repeating mistakes of base game or even going deeper into them. I hate most new bosses and half the areas. I hate how so many fights favor certain builds or straight up cheese. I hate how greatshield + spear is a viable build for many bosses, how many cheese options there are. I hate that rolling has been nerfed cause bosses need to have AoE to counter summons. I hate that the mechanics of their games in this genre haven't evolved in many years, and that they are forgetting how to design their legacy dungeons. Too many sites of graces, too little shortcuts and interestingly connected areas that still makes sense. So many connections in those new areas are so moronic.

There were still fights and areas I really liked, but so much of the game was tedious. The big torch walking guys. What were they thinking? They one shot you with most attack, and it takes 10 minutes to kill one of them? You still fight the camera on most big bosses in closed areas too. After so many years I am still looking only at dragons feet, cause they won't give you the option to zoom out just a bit? So many times its impossible to see your character and so on and on with the same stupid stuff.

And the scadutree fragments? This system makes your rune levels almost obsolete, you can now boost all stats to unlock any weapon. It makes the DLC collide with the base game cause the DLC still has bunch of runes (went from lvl 120 to 190), so if you start it without completing the base game, you will come back to it extremly overpowered and creating a build does not matter anymore.

A lot of the fights and enemies do not feel fair with their attacks and patterns and AoE and one feels much like the other, with maybe 3 exceptions.

I've never so far been dissapointented by FS, but I had a lot of gripes with the base game, or at least the last 30 hours of it, being too hollow, repetitive and uninventive.

It often feels like they start to value spectacle more than the gameplay. You are amazed at the cinematic or the cool boss looks, so you push away how stupid the fight is.

Of course mindless fanboys will remain strong in their belief that FS does nothing wrong and will stay firmly at their belief that it's a flawless game. Because they can just say "get good" "its supposed to be difficult" and never let a thought enter their mind, that maybe there is something more to those games that made them so special that so many others try to copy it and fail. This is the first time FS has failed at their own game for me, and I really hope they evolve in some other direction, or focus on stuff like AC more, or something entirely new. Souls like formula for me peaked with DS trilogy and Bloodborne and transfering it to open world was an interesting experiment, but in the end deeply flawed.

As any creators, artists etc. they deserve and need criticism to evolve, be better or at least stay at the top of their game, denying it because "git gud" is as moronic as it sounds.