My Elden Ring review was a strange affair where I was bullied into admitting that all of my complaints about the game weren’t genuine problems, so I played devils advocate against myself to the amusement of all. But no more, I say! Elden Ring‘s recent DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, has actual problems and I’m going to talk about those actual problems and I won’t feel bad about it. Probably.
Shadow of the Erdtree is relatively unique among From Software’s “Souls” content in that it actually has a pretty straightforward story that’s not only relatively concise from beginning to end but also fills in a lot of lore that was missing from the original game. Miquella, everyone’s favorite missing hostage and noted long-arm-in-an-egg from Mohg’s boss arena, has traveled to the “Land of Shadow” to accomplish something vague (at first) that involves sacrificing parts of himself along the way. Following his path to the Land of Shadow are a number of loyalists and devotees who invite the player character along for the ride, and thus begins your new adventure into a land of death, disease, and war crimes, which was sealed away by Marika long ago. Said land looks very much like the Lands Between from the base game only with ghostly tomb stones, wailing spirits everywhere, and very sudden changes in biomes as everything that Marika didn’t want in her perfect Order were cast aside to this world between worlds.
But I was talking about the lore. Ever wanted to know what was up with St. Trina? What was really going on with Miquella and Mohg? Why Marika and Radagon had their (choosing my words carefully to avoid spoilers for people who don’t know) unique relationship? What’s up with the Fingers? Shadow of the Erdtree has all those answers and more in clear/not as vague as it could be lore delivered in the usual Souls methods: item descriptions and half crazy NPCs talking to you in their brief bursts of lucidity. So far so Elden Ring, which already had relatively clear lore compared to previous Souls games but the sheer amount of “answers to burning questions” that the DLC layers on is actually rather impressive, though after I learned about the pot people the first time I didn’t really feel learning more the next three or four times it came up.
Yes, Elden Ring‘s DLC continues the repetitive nature of the base game but with enough variety in the environments this time that it’s not nearly as bad as it was the first time around. Gone are the dozens of samey tombs full of imps with just one small gimmick separating one from the next, ending in a poor excuse for a boss fight (after the charm of the first dozen has worn off) that drops loot you’ll never look at again. Instead SotE has several different tilesets for its dungeons such as fiery forges, frozen pits, and tombs again. This still provides a somewhat repetitive experience after you’ve seen each once, but they have enough variety and secrets shoved into them that they don’t get boring outside of the initial knowledge of what you’ll encounter inside. Each forge will have stone golems you have to attack from behind, each frozen pit will be full of horrid monstrosities, etc, but maybe this forge will have a lever puzzle and maybe this frozen pit will have platforming challenges. This sort of variety did happen, rarely, in the original tombs, but it’s amazing how much a visual appearance and enemy type shuffle can reduce the monotony.
The rewards from the optional areas are great too, and something I took for granted so much that I only remembered how bad the rewards were in the base game when I re-read my notes from my first Elden Ring review. You’ll still find things that you may not consider worth it off the beaten path (there are a ton of crafting materials in the DLC) but most every enemy worth fighting will drop something unique or interesting, be it one of the many, many new dual wieldable special weapons or stranger things like weapons that are throwable as part of their main attacks or the perfume bottles from the Perfumer enemies. The spells you’ll pick up are also much like the weapons where they are either upgrades of existing spells (double moon attacks, half a dozen lightning bolts thrown at once, etc) or spells that you saw used in the base game but never had access to yourself until now, such as Melina’s healing tree. What I’m saying here is that complete exploration actually feels worth it this time with noteworthy rewards at the end, even if you’ll run into the same zombie dragon more times than you think you should or any other spoiler that I could throw in here.
To get these fancy new items you will have to fight your way to them, and that’s when people start complaining about Shadow of the Erdtree. If you started the DLC around when you’re supposed to you should be 80-100% through the base game and feel pretty powerful about yourself, only for SotE to smack you in the face with your own mortality as nearly everything in the DLC can kill you in four hits. And this was with me having 60 points in health and two items that extended my health total even further, so I can hardly imagine how jarring it was for people who dumped points into other stats instead the first time one of the enraged knights kicked them. This is in service of making you feel like a first level character all over again, and is overcome with new items known as Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes. This consumables are used as bonus leveling materials, used to empower your abilities exclusively within the DLC area to get you back up to a level where you die in 6-10 hits, as Placidusax intended. DLC exclusive leveling is a great idea to make you able to withstand a post-game area without completely shattering the difficulty of the main game, but I found this percentage based leveling less engaging than regular leveling just because your gains were less visually impactful. Sure statistically they’re great with a 5-10% increase to damage dealt and durability per set of Fragments used initially, but it just didn’t feel as fulfilling when you weren’t spending hard-earned runes and instead were building up items in the background until the next time you sat down at a Site of Grace and suddenly you could “level up” again.
No matter how many Scadutree Fragments you pick up they won’t help you see the ghostly fodder enemies in half the game’s areas. Outside of some returning enemies like dragons, mice, and giant crabs the rest of the regular enemies you’ll encounter are either weak losers in mobs or single targets that hit like a truck, with very little in between until you get about halfway through the Fragments and then things start to balance out a little. I found dodging to be the primary way to handle said truck-tier enemies as most of them have combo chains that can go on for four to eight hits, so if you prefer shield blocking over dodging you might be in for a rough time, though I’ve seen lots of people parry most enemies in the game so there’s a window for that too.
As for the bosses, From Software had said they were going to make the DLC bosses equivalent to Malenia in terms of difficulty. I’d say they managed it due to all the influencers doing thought pieces about how hard the DLC is, but I feel like something in their design shows a negative trend when it comes to difficulty. Fortunately none of the bosses come from the same school as Malenia with her ridiculous health regeneration, but instead nearly every boss has MASSIVE AOE attacks to ratchet up the difficulty. These come in many flavors, with the most bearable being sweep attacks that you can dodge through or jump over and the worst being arena-filling death blasts that you either need to run like hell to avoid or find the perfect dodge roll that (boss depending) will then mean you just get hit by a secondary blast wave instead. When I was dying to these attacks I thought back to earlier Souls games and how most of the bosses, from the best to the hardest, didn’t need massive AOE attacks to be fun and challenging. Artorias was just a lunatic jumping around the arena, Isshin’s AOE attacks were his weakest form, and even Orphan of Kos only had one major AOE move that you could avoid if you saw where it was coming from, but that level of boss design seems to be missing from Shadow the Erdtree. Or at least it’s been tainted by adding extra explosions to attacks that didn’t need them.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t good bosses even with these faults. Almost everyone agrees that Rellana is one of the best bosses in the franchise and cover boy Messmer is pretty fun too (despite them both having irritating AOEs as well), but you’ll probably more frustrated than not when fighting the SotE bosses, which is a problem when they’re supposed to be the highlight of the experience. Outside of cynical declarations like “From Software has run out of ideas for how to make things challenging” I’ll instead blame it on something else: the NPCs. If you played Dark Souls 2 you may remember that one of the key features in that game was that every NPC’s quest could only be completed if they did a co-op boss fight with you three times AND SURVIVED THE WHOLE FIGHT, otherwise they’d get the bad end or simply fizzle out. Shadow of the Erdtree chose to go a similar route for some reason and has Miquella’s roadies be heavily invested in the fates of the bosses you fight, to the point where a non-zero amount of their quest lines will break if you don’t fight bosses with them.
Breaking quest lines isn’t as horrible as it used to be though. Rather than most characters ending up in a pool of sadness and insanity when you don’t give them enough attention the DLC actually treats NPC quests as you gaining or losing influence with these characters and opening (or closing) their eyes to the world around them. This all pays off rather nicely in the end in a way that I won’t spoil, but I enjoyed it a lot and I’m worried they probably won’t do something like this again for fear of them repeating themselves. But yeah, if you’re being a completionist you’ll want to do at least some jolly co-operation with your NPC friends which arguably makes the bosses harder (due to larger health pools) and also justifies all of the bosses having huge AOE phases just so they have a chance against the Tarnished that are coming for them. With that factor at play I don’t begrudge From Software for giving bosses a way to defend themselves, however I still think it’s less fun for those of us playing the game solo.
Map design is also something I don’t begrudge them, but I do wish they had spread out the secrets a little more. Everything is three layers deep and six wide in many of the DLC’s areas, to the point that I was actually getting sick of keeping track of it all. This is one of the points that I disagree with when it comes to the more negative reviews of the DLC, as those have complained about the lack of freedom and exploration in the DLC compared to the base game. They say that a smaller map, Fragments scattered seemingly at random, and everything being difficult there’s no way to take advantage of Elden Ring‘s “main strength” (it’s open world) to find something easier to fight while the main path is kicking your ass. For my money if you’ve managed to get anywhere in the DLC then everywhere on the overworld is manageable, since everything is essentially the same level of difficulty and very few of the early Fragments are trapped behind bosses. Find a boss you’re stuck on? Just go a different direction and you’ll find it still hard but not as hard as the boss, and if EVERYTHING is too hard for you then you probably still have stuff left to do in the base game, so just go back to there. There’s no shame in it when this is clearly meant to be post-game content, and if your character isn’t at the level to handle the beginning parts of it then you most likely have stuff left to do on the main continent.
Two areas where From Software did more seriously drop the ball were in the design of the Furnace Golems and the Abyssal Woods. The Furnace Golems act as overworld mini bosses alongside various dragons and a few invader NPCs, but unlike the dragons and invaders there’s really only one way to reliably fight these wicker man references: on your horse. Due to the Golems’ ridiculous AOE attacks Torrent’s jumping is really the best way to avoid them, and he’s also a great way to get close when the Golems use their homing fireball attacks. These two in combination means the first time you fight a Golem might make you a little irritated by their massive health pool, but appreciative that they added an enemy that really feels like Torrent was meant to handle… but then you run into the rest of them scattered throughout the land and they just get tedious. I was the biggest defender of their existence in the world after the first two but when I ran into one that was invincible unless you do a gimmick I just lost interest and mostly only fought them out of habit than enthusiasm. A slightly smaller health pool might have helped them be less of a chore, but we don’t live in that reality.
As for the Abyssal Woods, my complaint about the overlaid secrets doesn’t apply here because there’s fucking nothing in the Abyssal Woods. It’s a big empty space with fog, trees, insane rats, and an optional boss that plays host to a very frustrating “invincible” (they can be parried) type of enemy that’s just a less interesting version of the Winter Lanterns from Bloodborne. The encounter with these enemies is just part of three stealth sequences where you crawl through long grass until they walk past you, and frankly when I said I wanted more Sekiro in Elden Ring this wasn’t what I meant. I don’t know why this area exists with these mechanics, especially when they’re repeatedly foreshadowed in this area but you’ll explore a good half of the environment before you encounter your first one. Either way it’s a rare miss in From Software design, in my opinion, worse than any swamp or half-finished area in previous titles.
If you’ve heard that Shadow of the Erdtree is hard, you heard correctly. If you’ve heard that it’s beautiful, you heard correctly. If you heard it fills in a lot of lore questions, you heard that correctly too. You also may have heard that it’s the best DLC of all time, and that isn’t something I’m willing to say definitively. Everything that it arguably improves on (better selection of faith weapons, unique tears, improved rewards at the end of dungeons, etc) are primarily due to the benefit of them having a smaller canvas to design around than they did in the main game, and it doesn’t really add anything to the overall design or mechanics like other DLCs do to their base games. With as solid of a foundation as Elden Ring I’m sure you could argue it didn’t need to change anything, and in the end if you’re up for a challenge and liked Elden Ring then this DLC is certainly for you. I just don’t think the missteps in a few areas and the boss design philosophy are worthy of calling something “the best DLC ever,” but I’m probably just still mad about the Dancing Lion.
