Shadow Of The Erdtree Review: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- Some thoughts on the recent Elden Ring DLC and the future of souls games. Thanks for watching.
Chapters:
Story-02:31
World Design-07:53
Performance-12:16
Bosses & Combat-14:54
Conclusion-22:32
On the boss design and difficulty, I'll say Radahn was the first time all DLC where I just stopped having fun. He's genuinely too much, and I mean that literally... too much of the effects, causing significant frame drops as well as completely obscuring my screen so that I couldn't see what Radahn was doing. I eventually just pushed through with the Blood Arm and the Mimic Tear, first time I had to pull out the Mimic Tear it wasn't even upgraded for that character.
Radahn is, in my judgement, genuinely bad. The lightning storms he brings in need to be toned way down, all his attacks effectively roll catch and frequently blind you as well as the frame drops from his big nuke. Cool as it may be, it just is too much.
He has a literally undodgeable attack. Phase 1 is mostly ok but phase 2 is just: random bullshit, go!
He's literally Gael again just on crack, his first phase is easy yet his second has a bit to much
It can't be as bad as Malenia's Waterfowl Combo 1 being pretty much undodgeable at close range. Not even jumping or dodges could save you from it (except for an extremely obscure tactic that is too awkward to be conceivable by any practical player), you eat that damage if you ain't got a shield, unless ofc you're far enough to run away, but that SEVERELY affected how players could interact with her, given she could pull that shit out and ruin your day at a moment's notice. It meant you genuinely couldn't get too aggressive unless you wanted to risk getting point-blank waterfowled.
I'm not at the final yet, but I'm sure you can jump more of his shit just from seeing some of it. I've heard some say he's not too bad, and others say he's satanic, but I've heard enough say he's fairly learnable that I trust it'll be managable compared to Malenia.
@@angrymoths As someone who just beat Radahn, his first phase isn’t that problematic and kinda fun in my opinion. He does have an attack where it is barely dodgeable because of how fast it comes, but it doesn’t one shot you like waterfowl dance.
But his second phase is the real problem. His teleportation attacks are all nearly undodgeable, he has light attacks after nearly every attacks that are straight-up blinding and even though they don’t one-shot, the combos will. He has way too much health and deal way too much damage(I had 18+ blessings).
Overall, his first phase is simple when you learn it, but his second phase make Malenia look like a walk in the park with all the light attacks and teleportation bullshit.
@@angrymothsNot true. If you sprint perpendicular from Malenia during her WFD animation and jump during the first attack you will dodge it 100% of the time, even if you're right under her.
The more I play this game the more I wish it was more like Sekiro.
Fromsoft has already accomplished this level of difficulty before while also keeping it engaging and fun to play and it feels like they were too aprehensive about building on Sekiro.
I really despise how much the souls style movement the player has in Elden Ring holds back these boss encounters.
Playing with the deflection tear has completley solidified my stance on this, I found that, when using it, many bosses I didn't quite enjoy ended up feeling amazing. If Fromsoft wants to keep making bosses this quick, they need to buff the player, the dodge roll needs to be put to rest.
They should also make the deflection tear inflict posture damage on a deflect or otherwise increase the next guard counter proportionally to how many succesive perfect deflections you've made, to incentivize enduring a combo.
I hope their next game is more similar to Lies of P, that game really proved you could balance deflection based combat across many different weapons.
totally agree. sekiro is the pinnacle of Fromsoft imo. the way the mechanics blend with the environments and boss design is actually immaculate. lies of P blew me away personally. i legit had more fun in 40 hours of that than i did in 200+ hours of elden ring and it's expansion.
i prefer when you can beat bosses and challenging areas through clever use of mechanics and mastery of your moveset and item use. keyword being "mastery". i feel like i can physically get better at a boss in sekiro and lies of P the more i fight it, whereas my entire time spent fighting in shadow of the erdtree was waiting for the stars to align so i could safely press L2 like i did the entire main game. i get no feeling of getting better or accomplishment in elden ring because it's just plain tedious for the hell of it. instead of making a few tools that have many applications, they bloated the game with tons of strong one-button-press payoff weapons so you feel strong without actually getting better.
@@tyhjyys I totally agree and also loved Lies of P. The thing is, I feel like if I fought some of the Elden Ring bosses again after I beat them, it wouldn't really be nearly as sure-fire a victory as other games provide. Like In Sekiro, if I can beat a boss once, I can beat them 10x in a row fairly easily. In Elden Ring, if I can beat a boss once, it doesn't really ensure that I can do it again. Part of this is how much it comes down to luck. It depends entirely on which attacks the boss decides to string together and when. It really deprives you of the sense of mastery that other games provide making victories feel hollow.
Yeah, the roll & poke is getting old already. The more complex bosses are, the more dated it feels
I dont get why many would want this game to be another sekiro, theyre different franchises for a reason. Though to some degree i can agree, fromsoft's follow up game can be a more rpg esque sekiro game with a better implemented dodge like Bloodborne (but i havent played that yet as i dont have a ps) and a semi focus on deflect as a playstyle, instead of being another sekiro.
@@derpoi Because ds3's combat system is dated and CAN'T grow from here. No one's asking for Elden Ring to be sekiro, we simply want better combat.
This is a wonderful way to describe my feelings about the dlc. I like it more than the base game, but it definitely has some flaws.
So brave
@@CasualBerry it is brave considering the metric fuckton of blind praise the dlc is getting. just the performance issues alone makes it not a 10/10
The sheer amount of narrative dissonance some of the Dlc lore conclusions, and the visual presentation of some of it as well, makes me not enjoy it as much as the base game. But yes, it objectively has more good quality content than the base game.
To clarify, by visual presentation I don't mean artistic quality, but some stuff is very superficial compared to the usually profound, subtle, and Grim dark stuff we get in FS souls titles. For example, the last battle, very epic, very flashy, but very high fantasy tones, and the fight itself and the lore surrounding it is just a cheaply made fan fiction level narrative, to end by far the best (overall) work they've ever done, which leaves a very bittersweet taste in my mouth considering how overwhelmingly good the rest of the content is.
Base game has highs and lows, but never feels out of place, and doesn't butcher a single character's narrative
@@sweetbabyrayso5262 i had 0 performance issues besides like 1 or 2 mininal frame drops
@@AaryonTeragonThe set up for The last boss literally started in the first trailer for the base game, 3 years ago. You don’t know what you’re talking about
Regarding Elden Ring's boss design, in particular when someone brings up the aggressiveness, damage, health, and AOE attacks of Elden Ring's bosses, I find it funny how in defense of Elden Ring's boss design people often bring up "you have to consider positioning more," as if positioning your character hasn't always been a component of Soulsborne games
There are plenty of instances in previous games of positioning without directly rolling every attack being just as effective (sometimes more) than spamming the roll button
In Elden Ring I find the bosses to be frustrating in that they often do not feel like they match the player character's speed; Your character is slower than they were in DS3, meanwhile many bosses fight at speeds akin to Bloodborne or even Sekiro
Yes, you "can" fight each boss solo and beat them given time and patience, but the amount of dodging and positioning required of you during a fight seems excessive when your windows for punishing are often so few and far between
Also, positioning only does so much when if you position yourself away from a boss to use anything ranged that they often either run you down, or use ranged attacks/AOEs of their own
Also, if bosses weren't designed with using summoning as the default, then using a summon would come along with a negative effect like co-op did in previous games
I found the boss design to be more digestible in the DLC for the most part, but I was still disappointed that the majority of bosses didn't solve the issues that plague many of the game's bosses
The general feeling I get is that the bosses get to play a much flashier game than I do
Whenever someome says you 'can' fight the bosses solo. I always want to say "Shit is 'edible,' but it aint tasty."
Not saying anything about the difficulty of the bosses. Just saying it's a poor argument when one side sees a cake and the other sees shit.
The argument should be finding out whether it is shit or cake in the first place.
@@juliusc1381 its shit
Artorius was doing front flips and jump attacks back in ds1, when people say position in elden ring it’s not cause you need safety. YOURE POSITIONING AND ACTIONS DETERMINES THE ACTIONS OF THE BOSS. There’s a reason people can beat all the bosses hitless lvl 1, also if you play it like souls and just roll them poke obv it’s not gonna work, play it like elden ring bruh
Definitely felt the speed difference with Romina in her second phase. Scuttling away constantly and using her airtime moves a whole lot more felt almost like a game of cat and mouse to where it felt pretty tedious.
Speaking of positioning, you’re suppose to stay close to Radahn right? Well guess what, if you’re close sometimes you’ll roll a combo and ends up behind him resulting in miquella majestic mane blocking your entire screen, 10/10, be blinded by the lights ir be blocked by the hair.
Also you need to position yourself on the his right knee to dodge the 3 hit criss-cross combo, with near frame perfect timing. I’m not even gonna get into how stupid that is.
I'm glad you mentioned the performance issues, theres too many "10/10" reviews not giving it enough weight. For me, the issues were so severe that they nearly made me quit playing and wait for a patch. Playing on PC I used to have only very sporadic frame drops in the base game, and now I experience severe drops (often from 60 to 30-40) constantly and seemingly randomly. When I say randomly I mean that for some reason certain boss fights with extreme amounts of particle effects would run smoothly but other, much less epileptic moments, would be a choppy mess. The worst thing is that this isn't a hardware issue because my CPU and GPU utilisation never goes above ~75% and lowering the graphics settings doesn't help.
Other than that, the DLC unfortunately has more than enough of that fromsoft magic which makes me play despite all the issues 😅
Have you tried turning the graphics to low?
@@darkmatter9643 I tried doing that and it does not do that much of a difference.
Man that’s tough I’m glad I personally never had any issues but at the same time my ps5 is relatively new
He is probably the only one with balls to bring up this game’s terrible performances
I mean the game still has shader compilation stutter from the launch of the base game lol. It was never patched. People who think it was "fixed" had simply played the game enough to have a "warm" shader cache. This is also hardware agnostic, will literally still happen if you have a 4090 and a 14th gen i9 lol (or the AMD equivalent if you prefer)
Bosses are messed up. The start of it all is that Elden Ring opened Pandora's box of ultra cheese builds. So they desperately needed to make bosses ultra hard, resulting in torment for people playing non-cheese builds. This imbalance pressures players who prefer non-cheese builds to swap out for broken ones just to keep up. Now, it's becoming like an MMORPG where bosses can be easily beaten with cheese builds, while people who aren't using cheese builds need to try 100x harder.
The "Souls basement community"-those who play Souls games excessively and primarily as their main focus while living in their mom's basement-should realize that many players have demanding jobs and responsibilities. As grownups, we don't have endless hours to perfect the game to that extent. On invade, I rarely see anyone without broken builds. That's pretty much tell the balancing is fcked
Bosses are not hard at all, most of them are pushovers and easier than many in base game. Morgott is harder than Messmer i'd say. Also, games with difficulty settings exist and the game has many ways to trivialize it. I dont see why they need to design the whole game for lowest common denominator, even though it already kind of is. If your time is so precious and have responsibilities, i suggest not spending that much time on video games in the first place.
@@Frozenkex Ah, the classic 'Git Gud' response-because obviously, the only valid way to spend our limited free time is by masochistically grinding through unbalanced game mechanics. Maybe one day I'll achieve the zen-like enlightenment of dismissing other people's valid frustrations and responsibilities. Until then, I'll just be over here juggling my actual grown-up life and trying to enjoy a game that's supposed to be fun. Cheers! And finally, maybe take a break from those status effects and cheese ashes-you know, for the real challenge.
@@4sxS307cAW You can spend your free time not playing the game at all. You dont have to waste your time on Elden Ring. Yeah make sure to never play Sekiro as you'll shit your pants and it will be just waste of your time and money.
Why do you need to juggle your "grown up life" with elden ring in the first place? Elden Ring is a pretty long game. I understand its a popular game, but not everyone need to play it.
Maybe start acting responsible instead of like spoiled child and expecting games to be designed around you. Clearly souls games are not for you and youre not interested in overcoming challenges. Play games that have a difficulty selection and save game. You know, like skyrim.
Also youre just not good at this game, the game is easy and no "cheese" is required, youre probably failing with the cheese too. But since you're "responsible adult" you dont want to spend any time learning and improving. Just play a game with an easy mode.
@@Frozenkex you sure need Miyazaki to design your room as well because if he sees it, he’ll get inspiration on the next dung eater iteration.
@@4sxS307cAW The dude you were responding to definitely talks like someone too young to have major life priorities lol. "Why do you need to juggle your "grown up life" with elden ring in the first place?". Its because we are grown up now. I have Platinum Trophies in games like SOCOM 4, Catherine, and Vanquish. I did those when i was in high school. Who the hell do these From-sexuals think they are telling us we dont like hard games/challenges. We were able to complete those challenges in the older games like it was our part time job, because we didnt have real jobs back then. 4-5 hours a day on games? no problem. at 16 years old, that many hours on a game was a luxury. at 30, 4-5 hours a day on a game is a detriment.
My issue is the bosses have bloodborne/sekiro energy, but we're stuck with DS3 healing. And thats a bad matchup.
They’re not though, you have spacing, crouch pokes, jumping, positioning is paramount, we already have faster bosses than Bloodborne, it’s just they will punish panic-rolling & especially backing away. I say Elden Ring’s main bosses are mostly perfect mechanically.
@@HeyTarnished it's pretty much proven that a lot of ER bosses have inputreading, hyperfast tracking, and sometimes patterns that will cazch you before you can revover from a roll in a combo. It has noting to do with panicrolling or staying in their face
@@himenomagnum248 Input reading has been a thing since Dark Souls 1, they’re much more prevalent in Sekiro than Elden Ring, also instead of finding a punish window, use that to heal and bosses will never input read, also bosses being fast & aggressive is actually a brilliant thing in Elden Ring, in forces you to be aggressive & you having to find punished in the middle of attack strings, also they have roll catch attacks because panic rolling won’t work in Elden Ring like it used to in Dark Souls 3, you have positioning now to take into account, all of that combined make ER bosses way better and more dynamic than DS 1/2/3 bosses.
@@HeyTarnished not really. Sekiro may have input reading but on a much smaller scale than ER. It's combat-system also works very different from ER and other souls-titles. Using open windows for healing is also not the best system for multiple reasons. With a damage output that massive, one hit often means that you are forced to heal to not get wrecked by a second hit. Compared with the fact that boss combos are now so long, have lot's of alternate combo finishers and follow ups, have hyper tracking and have (if any) very small open windows in between, means that one mistake can often pretty much end the entire fight. Some will say that's consequences, I think it prevents players from actively engaguing in a fluid fight and prevents them from making active progress in learning the fight. The problem is also not, that panic rolling get's punished (even if the overreliance on delayed attacks is supet annoying at this point) but that some combos CAN NOT be dodged by rolling and will hit you most of the time not matter what. ER combat system is a sign to me, that fromsoft bought to much into the whole " it has to be hard"-mantra. They thought that they had hit a well with their old mechanics and didn't see a way to top them difficulty wise, so they started relying on overly long combos, imputreads, hypertracking and visual effect-chaos, ending with a system that often hits far away from "the hard but fair"-mantra that made them so big. In terms of positioning: i don't really know what you mean with that part tbh
@@himenomagnum248 I completely disagree, ER bosses are harder & require more nuance than previous Souls games, you getting wrecked is because you haven’t upgraded vigor nor even have a good armor, Bloodborne bosses deal more damage than in ER, combat system in ER works perfectly, it needs more time to master and that’s OK, again, combos aren’t any longer than previous Souls, they depend on positioning & its almost like you dictate what the bosses do, input reads aren’t even that prevalent at all, they’re so few & far between, and they’re not even something new, and no lol, bosses do not have hyper tracking, since you out-position most of their attacks, they make perfect sense, if you’re talking about Rellana from the DLC, then yeah, she has cancerous tracking, but other than that, they work well, alternate combo finishers can also be dictated by your positioning relative to them.
Delayed attacks can be used to punish, replenish stamina & even reposition, stop panic rolling and they won’t become a problem.
What I mean by positioning, is that bosses will judge your play mostly by your positioning relative to them, they’ll engage & change their combos through their combo-flowcharts based on your position relative to them, this isn’t anything new, but in ER, they’re very important.
Please watch these videos so you’ll get what I mean: ruclips.net/video/fo4dXJmd1cQ/видео.htmlfeature=shared
ruclips.net/video/9ZLQCRs3WVQ/видео.htmlfeature=shared
ruclips.net/video/WvNOZeHFz68/видео.htmlfeature=shared
ruclips.net/video/EZ_9F73R1tE/видео.htmlfeature=shared
Regardless of their difficulty, I just don’t feel satisfaction from so many Elden ring bosses. Gaius becomes easier once you understand him, but that doesn’t mean he’s interesting or engaging. I don’t feel great about beating the dancing lion, cos i spent the entire time fighting the camera instead of the boss. There are exceptions, like Messmer and Midra who I think are stellar, but more often I find myself thankful the boss is over rather than joyful that I achieved something
I completely agree. It seems FromSofts new philosophy for challenge is make them insta kill you with quick combos, immediately jump out of range, and remove punish windows via input reading. It’s not satisfying to win anymore. I think the traditional souls combat system is dated. They need to add some parry/deflections because bosses are outpacing the player without OP builds or spirit summons.
Yep. Not a case of difficulty, fully q case of engaging fights that you love to learn and progress on. DLC is tedious beyond being fun
“Jack of all trades, master of none”. They try and make the bosses do everything, oh strength builds can hit trade so make them do ten hit combos, oh magic builds can stand at range make them jump through the air, AOE attacks and lightning from the air, you can circle around? GIVE EM A TAIL
In other games you could hit trade with Abyss Watchers while a dex build is gonna have trouble with the agility, you can parry tf out of Sulyvahn or not engage him at all with magic, I think the fun comes in when you’re fighting a specialised boss and your build makes it easy or hard.
I found Gaius to be fun after a full hour of playing him for like a full hour, but I still think some of his attacks hit too hard and his charge has horrific hitboxes (he also shouldnt be considered a remembrance, that pissed me off). Beast was really cool, but not interesting gameplay wise imo (weird hitboxes, delayed attacks, etc.). Messmer and Midra were great.
Light greatsword, blue hood, white dress, leather boots, dude stole my build even though I never streamed this once.
Perhaps it’s basic
It was in the trailer as far as I remember
Yeah I think that build (or something similar) was in the trailers, early gameplay footage, and promo pictures
It was in the gameplay footage
They should add the sekiro crystal as a base game mechanic, with some balance.
Your part about spirit ashes had me clapping. You absolutely get it. The balance is so messed up by this. Hopefully they can figure something out that facilitates both camps.
Phase 2 Radahn is so corny 😂 I cheesed him with a greatshield and never looked back
lol I can't beat him even with the greatshield and mimic tear
the clone attacks genuinely look like some fanmade shit bro 😭😭 it’s corny asl
@ennayanne Get 50 endurance and a blood infused Antspur Rapier, and then never put your shield down. The only thing you have to manually dodge is the phase 2 grab attack
@@ennayanne use scholar shield as well
@@voidy6836if they removed the clone attacks it would actually be a good fight
Something that lets the DLC down is how they did scadutree fragments. As a baseline, it's a good system, but they should've added more than whats required to max them out. This would've done wonders for those who felt they weren't rewarded by exploring some areas as it means they could spread the scadutree fragments across more of the map.
That and a few bosses should've had cutscenes.
Fr man, I agree completely. I’m not 100% on if you need all 50 to reach level 20 blessing, as I haven’t done the math, but it seems like you need all the power you can muster for the final boss and I’d argue it’s asking too much from a player to find them all without a guide
@@vicentedevidts7647 Yeah, you need to find all for level 20
The opinions and reviews on this game shocked me to be honest. Everyone was completely hung up on the "difficulty" of the game, while I was here, isolated from social media and discord shut down for a whole week exploring this absolutely magnificent piece of art. The visuals and execution of the art direction is the best I have ever seen. This is the most magical and awe inspiring fantasy world you can set your foot in. My jaw dropped left and right, up and down, literally.
And while I personally feel there were just some slight hiccups with the difficulty (mainly in the design of some hitboxes, which felt "unclean" compared to the base game and the usual souls standard), all of it was simply washed away by the definite artistic and exploration (especially lore) experience in this masterpiece as a whole.
i dont use xitter and i hate the boss fights lol. The world is pretty but too barren to be interesting.
Visually, yes, it looks like a moving painting. But from a gameplay perspective, I don't necessarily agree with you.
I have to agree on that, areas like the Gravesite plain unlike Limgrave has very few interactions and areas to explore which is sad considering it's bigger than Limgrave
its hard to ignore the difficulty when beating the bosses is an essential and core part of the game and progression
but the camera still sucks despite how wonderful the aesthetics of the game.
I played every fromsoft since DeS, but I still havent been able to capture a feeling remotely close to that of finding Ash Lake for the first time
I'm at a strong 7 for me just didn't do enough.
Great review. I mean, it is supposed to be more Elden Ring, which means more Elden Ring flaws as well. I see people complaining that the DLC missed the chance to fix some of Elden Ring''s issues, but that was not the purpose of the DLC. It's an expansion, not a patch. I'm pretty happy with it, and I think now we just have to see what FromSoftware's next big game gonna be, to see how they are treating Elden Ring's + SOTE criticism and flaws.
I think the problem of the boss and combat design could be simplified in a line of statement: the protagonist is incapable to handle or counter the bosses’ agility. The bosses in Elden Ring are getting more and more rapid and aggressive, while the protagonist has a hard time to counter the boss to obtain a sufficient window time to deal damage. We can refer back to the old Souls title, bloodborne and even Sekiro by comparing the old bosses and the protagonists of the old titles
I have to say I agree with your point about flashy attacks. I found Bosses like dancer, pontiff, manus, and the gargoyles, and all the Sekiro bosses difficult without having flashy attacks. Yet some bosses in this dlc feel like I’m fighting against their attack animations to figure out what they’re actually doing, rather than purely strategizing and learning timings/positions.
The problem isn't whether the bosses are beatable in general, it's whether they are reasonably beatable for the average souls player. When discussing difficulty people must differentiate between average players and hardcore players. The hardcore players don't represent the majority of players and will get extremely good at a game regardless of issues and difficulty. Don't use hardcore players as the metric to judge the baseline difficulty. Most players just want a fair challenge and aren't interested in impossible difficulty just for the sake of it, especially if it's difficulty at the expense of game balance and mechanics.
The issues with the open world stem from the game being too big for the content it can offer.
As my introduction to your channel I found this to be an excellent, well articulated video! I very much would like more long form content like this.
Long form? You call 24 minutes long?
@@chase6579 Relatively.
Fromsoft is truly peerless in their world design, to the point that I've begun to wonder how they even do it. Given six years of constant development, Tears of The Kingdom wasn't even able to scratch what From cooked up here in terms of world design. My jaw kept hitting the floor over and over and over again, until I decided to leave it there so i wouldn't have to return with a crowbar every five minutes. One vista this mind bogglingly impressive or detailed would be impressive enough, but hundreds in a single game? It feels like a dream.
Visually the world looks great but with so much reused content, it all starts to blur together in my mind still
Nothing like roaming around a giant empty wasteland land for cookbooks such peak open world game design
@@_CrimsonBladeah yes, let’s forget the plethora of new weapons, armor sets, spells, incantations, remembrance fights, minibosses, npcs, and an entirely new way of progressing spread throughout the world and call it barren and empty. I’m genuinely convinced that you’re trying to make this dlc disappointing for yourself, because I cannot possibly believe that you believe your own words when the vast majority of modern open world games don’t even brush the surface of the amount of context present in this singular expansion. Yes, there are absolutely areas that are clearly less developed and needed more attention before release, but dropping a blanket statement like “the only thing present in the dlc’s world is cookbooks and reused bosses” is just outright wrong
@@voidy6836 ah yes plethora of useless weapons that all suck and how could i forget about the useless underwhelming spells
@voidy6836
Two words. Finger Ruins.
Try to defend them. I dare you, I double dare you. Tell me, what content is in them? In this massive zones? What amazing new armor and weapon is hidden in them? What a interesting new enemies is in them?
I swear to God, you people... I am a hardcore FromSoft fan, but holy shit, you people is absolutely blinded by your love. Yes, the areas in DLC is very cool, they are looking amazing, every single one of them. But they are EMPTY. Only the starter area and Scadu Altus is somewhat filled with new stuff.
Abyssal Woods is EMPTY. It's a cool area, but there is NOTHING but reused winter lanterns and rats, one invader and one cool, but very short dungeon. Cerulean Coast is EMPTY. Birds, birds, ANOTHER fucking dragon, ANOTHER fucking Tibia mariner, ANOTHER fucking deathrite bird, NPC fight, demihumans, and entrance to a small new zone. Dragon Peak (or whatever the hell it is called) is EMPTY. FOUR REUSED DRAGONS! FOUR! BACK TO BACK! At least Bayle is cool, tho. Finger Ruins is EMPTY BEYOND ANY MEASURE - one talisman, one of the most annoying new enemies, remembrance copy thing, and TWO TREE SENTINELS BACK TO FUCKING BACK, FOLLOWED BY THE FALLINGSTAR BEAST. I am sorry, but what was they thinking? It's two most reused bossed besides dragons, why in the name of god they decided to put them there?
I just don't get it. How you can praise exploration aspect of DLC with a straight face? Yes, the highs are high, but holy shit the lows a low.
I dont think sprit ashes are the problem at all. All the dark souls games had NPCs you could summon to help you in most of the boss fights. The real issue is that long term players are too skilled now. Going back and playing Demon Souls or DS 1 as a vet who knows what to do for every boss fight and the game's difficulty is a joke. The bosses are just too simplistic to put up any challenge. With DS 3 and Bloodborne fromsoft made effort to make Boss fights much more complex to continue to give challenge to long term vets. With Elden Ring they upped the challenge in some ways and added spirit ashes for new players that struggled. But Elden Ring and its DLC still has ways to trivialize its difficulty even as a solo player. All you need is a Greatshield and you can guard counter your way through the entire DLC. The DLC is only truly too hard when you insist on playing only with a melee weapon with no other options for offense and defense beyond jump attacking or pressing R1.
Nah I played the entire dlc without greatshield melee only and I beat every single boss except for the final boss so far. As for the final boss, yeah hes defo overtuned but hes doable if you sink in enoigh time. The final bosses main issue is that his 2nd phase is a visual sperg. You cant see jack shit due to the aoe effects, after shocks and the massive hair that covers the bosses back so you cant see his moves coming. All this means that its likely youl die 5 seconds into phase 2 meaning you only have a very small window for learning the moveset and improvement everytime you get him to 2nd phase which is just a BRUTAL way to design a boss fight.
Even people who solo r1 rhe boss at rl1 hitless say that the final boss is incredibly overtuned and poorly made in terms of hit boxes. Now I dont hate him so far, but he does have a few moves that feel like they are impossible to dodge reliably.
@@gavinferguson2938The double swipe into a cross swipe frame trap he does seems like it was designed to be countered with the deflect tear. I can't find a single way to reliably avoid it without just blocking the first swipe and dodging the second two.
Otherwise I think his moveset is mostly fine, the holy damage in phase 2 is mostly chip damage you can mitigate with holy protection and the ridiculous amount of flasks the game gives you.
NPC summons in previous games buffed up the bosses health bar. Spirit Ashes do not.
Their usefulness as NPCs also greatly varied to the point you might be actively handicapping yourself summoning them, because they simply did not deliver enough damage and/or died too quickly to justify the boss's health buff. Npcs in previous games weren't all mighty giant slappers like Black Iron Tarkus.
That all being said, I had a terrible time fighting the bosses in this dlc solo. I'm a faith caster, so no greatshield for me, so my clan's way to trivialise things was the lightning perfume which nuked bosses before they could even perform one phase two move.
I never used it, but it seemed wholly unintentional and frankly I doubt fromsoft added that and greatshield pokes as an "option" for solo players to take it easy. Even if they did, it would encourage one singular build and style of play, which is still bad, in the same ways the bosses seem to be built around using spirit ashes.
the fact that you can ‘just use the greatshield’ isnt really the point though. yes you can make a build that will trivialise any boss but that isnt fun. i think it would be more fun if you were instead forced to properly engage with the games mechanics. From already executed this perfectly with Sekiro so it’s disappointing to see them stray from that philosophy with Elden Ring
@@stevieasdfghjklable Guard counter is a big new feature in Elden Ring that too many people ignore because their playstyle is not using shields. Using a shield IS a major game mechanic.
I personally play without spirit summons, and I never felt like there was a point where the encounter was designed for spirit summons, so I’m a bit confused about the constant stream of people saying it does.
I suppose it is subjective, but the boss designs in the dlc were some of my favourites out of every soulslike game.
They refuse to learn bosses.
the bosses are 100% designed around summons with like messmer being the only one that isnt. Its not in their moveset but in their health. A lot of the bosses have so much health that you can only feel like they bloated health bar is made to account for 2 people attacking a boss aka a spirit ash. Unless you use some op build like colossal jump attacks or something.
@@sweetbabyrayso5262maybe it’s so you can’t melt the boss in 6 seconds like in the main game?
@@trevormccarron4451 well yeah thats the point. to give bosses the health to take a plethora of attacks youre hitting the boss with. The made summoning, bleed builds, stagger builds so damn strong that they made these bosses have tons of hp to compensate.
@@sweetbabyrayso5262so why don’t you just use a strong build and then it should be a normal difficulty instead of way too easy like in the main game
Elden Ring i general sacrifices cohesive and tight gameplay for size and flash. It has just enough depth to keep the average person happy and the visuals really do their job well. When you start to pick it apart, however, you start to notice where the sacrifices were made and how it affects the gameplay loop.
There is no freedom in the DLC. It's either cheese builds so you can actually make progress, or study a boss for hours on hours and eventually pass it with a build you want to use in the game while running around an arena and nicking the boss with a weapon swing every 5 minutes. It's absolutely crap. Much less being required to do a collectathon to even have good enough defenses/damage, and even with 50 fragments I still feel like I'm hitting like a wet noodle. I would not have been able to do the last boss without fingerprint shield + rapier cheese build. Respect to the people who do that fight with a build they want but I and many other "casuals" don't want to spend 5 or 6 hours dying over and over, studying a boss's movesets.
I beat the entire DLC just using my regular build but radahn definitely made me want to cheese. It took me hundreds of attempts spread out over 5 days to finally beat radahn (I'm pretty sure he took longer to beat for me than the entirety of the main path in the DLC) and I never want to fight him again
Also the fragments are so annoying to collect considering they have so little effect. They should have either made the fragments be in less obscure places (e.g. sacred tears always being in churches) or made it so there was a surplus amount of fragments (e.g. golden seeds)
The bosses are the main content I play these games for. Slowly improving and eventually beating a challenging boss over the course of a few hours is fun to me and many other players. Why are you in such a rush to skip past core content?
All due respect, if you're only hitting the boss once every 5 minutes and still doing garbage damage at max Scadutree fragments, then you simply just suck at the game and have a terrible build
Funny thing is out of all consoles the Xbox Series S was the most stable version at launch.
There was only minimal frame drops in some boss fights but no stuttering.😂
Completely agree with you regarding summons. I love that they’re in the game for people who want to use them, but I elect not to because I feel a greater sense of fulfillment knowing the victory is all my own.
However, because so many of the fights feel like they are centered around this mechanic, I am now pigeonholed into playing in a way I dislike or slamming into a brick wall in the form of an overtuned boss fight.
It feels like these encounters were designed primarily for these spirit ashes with solo combat as an afterthought, which is a complete 180 from how it should be.
To clarify, the huge performance issues have always been a thing, specially for pc. Pc recommended specs? A literal scam. You can over optimize your 4 times stronger setup with 5 different layers of hardware and software and OS min maxing, and the game WILL drop frames, often enough to be annoying even to the most hardcore FS lover.
To be fair, it's EAC to some degree, it can downgrade the overall performance by as high as 30%, and give you "fake" latency of about 100ms or higher in multi-player, on top of your real latency. Tested by pirates and modders alike, 100% a fact.
Why do I call "recommend specs" a scam? Because those specs wouldn't even run at a steady 40 in lowest settings. I had just a slightly inferior setup before upgrading to a high end, and it was unplayable.
I dont know when "recommended" meant absolutely bare minimum to play it like crap lmao.
Omw to 3k hs, love FS, but I'm also no white knight.
Hate to say it, but works on my machine.
A few very random stutters maybe at most every once in a blue moon
@@angrymoths Don't know what your setup is, but I'll assure you, recommended specs wouldn't run it properly at a steady 60 even at lowest settings.
Something twice as strong as ''needed'', struggles way more often than it should, really.
That's what no/poor optimization does.
We are not entitled to run it on a toaster. We are however, as customers, entitled to run it flawlessly on something equal or better than what's advertised for it to run.
It's just something game devs in general have forgotten over the years. And FromSoft may be the exception to many things, but poor optimization is not one of them. Remember Ds1 10 fps blightown on (by then) high end Pc? or 10 to 20 fps Dreg Heap in Ds3? yeah...That took a remaster, and 1+ years, to fix.
This is an extremely well written and insightful review that I didn't think I'd end up agreeing with in almost its entirety. You should do more of these.
Holy crap, an Elden Ring enjoyer who knows/has read Moorcock?!?!?!
So I was saying in 2011 how much Dark Souls reminded me of the Eternal Champion. (not the Daker EC, but the concept in general)
Imma sub just for that mention.
I think you do yourself a disservice by summoning most of the time. it makes it easier and harder in both of the worst ways: easier in that you split aggro and a lot of your combat is just hitting the back of a boss thats ignoring you, which homogenizes fights to be indistinct, and harder in that when they do switch aggro it becomes very unpredictable and snappy in a way that often cant be reacted to, especially when they do it erratically mid-combo. it makes it so that a lot of the fight isnt engaging and when it is, its much more random and unreactable than theyre designed to be. most of the dlc fights i found very engaging on a variety of builds. their aggression keeps you always alert and their quicker pace means you really have to explore the ideal options in your moveset for different windows. in a lot of fights i found myself using half or more of my available attacks actively, which i cant say youre incentivized to do for most of the base game or their previous titles (even more impressive that you have so many more moves at any given time in comparison). theres a lot of variety in how you can dodge attacks too from running out and spacing, dodging in specific directions to avoid follow ups, and of course jumping over (or ducking under after a jump attack). especially fun when you realize you can jump over a final hit of a combo for a free jumping attack before you take the actual window for something bigger. i really reccomend trying it out solo and approaching bosses in a more flexible way before you discount them as infinite combo infinite damage schizo walls that you just brute force with a summon (though there are definitely still a few of these in the dlc..haha....)
This was an amazing review man, easily the best I’ve seen so far
The only disagreement I have is with your step back point.
I'm actually so happy they increased the boss difficulty. It's very possible to achieve solo, in various ways aside from summoning that you mentioned. As a player who generally plays solo, especially on their initial run. It's nice to have that classic challenge constantly getting pushed.
The tools are there for players to make the game easier in various ways. If you aren't satisfied with your victory because you summoned spirits... Perhaps don't summon them? I think the mentality that the dance and deliberate combat is gone is the only thing I feel like is blatantly wrong. If anything, there were bosses in this DLC where the dance felt better than ever.
Not every fight is perfect and the same strats won't be similarly as optimal on every boss. But the freedom and sandbox nature of these games adds so much replayability to me.
Thanks for giving the game the time for such a deep critique.
I really dont understand the "is it too difficult" debate. The question doesn't make sense. Because that depends entirely on the person. There are absolutely people who the DLC will be too hard for. For another player it might be barely an inconvenience. The harder their games become the more players they will bleed who either cant beat it or find it unfun. Both of which are valid. Conversely if they make their games too easy they'll bleed players who beat them to easily and find them unfun. Its that simple imo. I got stumped at the last boss. I realized I was no longer having fun. So I quit. Fromsoftware doesnt have to cater to me. If their games are getting harder, I might just not be in their intended demographic anymore. Which they have every right. As an artistic expression and not as a product to be consumed. It sucks a little to be left behind bit such is life. Some of the bosses I found too hard to be fun. And before anyone brings up summons 😂 I wont bash anyone for using them but I wont. Not when they mean the difference between a boss being brutal/frustrating and trivial.
Let them have their game! And we should move along.
Consider surrendering to the final boss an ending in itself- if you can't conquer Miquella's Lord, stand aside.
How about the dlc is shit debate
@@_CrimsonBlademad
Well told sir 👌
Also I had no performance issues at all on my PS5. The game performed perfectly
Same on my series x
This was probably the most fair, level headed & best articulated commentary I've seen on the DLC to date.
This is the best articulation of my thoughts and feelings about SotE I've found yet. Very well done video, excellent critique.
This notion of dancing with boss is the ideal form of the fromsoft combat system, and I agree with you in that Elden Ring doesn't do the best job in realizing it for the average player. I felt this flow state in Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, and even Bloodborne's dlc bosses. I did not feel this with Elden Ring for a long while, and even through a rl1 no status no ash of war no consumable run, I still felt like the dance wasn't clicking. At this point however, after just putting in the time, I found that the dance does exist and I performed it with the majority of these DLCs final bosses with Midra, the final boss, and Rellana being stand outs. Its just a far tougher thing than any game before. You have to earn that dance in Elden Ring, and the game's lack of visual indicators like Sekiro's posture bar and jump attack red symbols prevent players from reaching that ideal without putting it a ton of time with these bosses. I think your point about spectacle sacrificing the intelligibility of moves is a totally fair one. Some good examples would be the afterimages in the final fight and the fire in putrescent knight.
The other points you brought up miss the mark because you ignore how the game accommodates the player for these encounters, and its for sure a stretch to call these narrow criticisms emblematic of the state of the bosses. My main gripe comes from how you think the game just requires you to summon because its all too hard. I think you can totally do these bosses solo without being a god gamer by just using all the tools given to you. Your criticisms just really remind me of own hollow complaints when bosses piss me off and I just externalize the locus of control. I think the game gives you all the tools to engage with it after messing around with multiple run throughs.
On the note of disallowing certain playstyles. The way you mentioned just you and a big sword reminds me of how I played through dark souls 3. I just think in this game, doing only r1 with a zweihander is not gonna cut it anymore, the game demands you use the full aspects of a weapon, like the charged r2s, jump attacks, status build ups, and ashes of war that make the weapon so so much stronger. I felt similar to you, but changed my mind after just engaging with the games solo mechanics in more varied and creative ways. Getting gud in this game just works differently compared the previous games, the combat just demands more of you, so you have a ton of tools to alleviate that. There is a continuous spectrum of difficulty of builds from fists only to solo claymore to mimic tear with bleed to things like the greatshield build or new thorns build, and everything in between. You have the player choice to make the game as hard as you want it, and experimentation is highly encouraged. You can totally just use a weaker summon too.
Calling bosses unfair for punishing you at a distance while being able to create that distance also has some problems. When bosses jump away, they will do two things, they will do some projectiles or do some gap closer slam move, and both of these options are doable. The pace of the bosses should not always be just locked in next to enemy, these are your breathers. You can punish heavily/heal after most of them. You can gap close during these projectile moves with good strafing to get punishes, a perfect example being Midra's opening attack. The gap closing moves also are all pretty punishable, think about messmers big ball, the 4 spear thrust, or the final bosses gravity spin or single afterimage then side swip. You can work around all of these, and its not a very good general description of bosses, I would love to hear more specific examples that you have. I'll point out a freebie which is the final bosses's big gravity sword slam into fly up and multiple meteors. I couldn't find a way to consistently punish it and it just depletes all the stance damage you have built up. I found it fun to dodge, but just him resetting for free feels sucky. These moves honestly just feel mismatched in difficulty and reward but luckily are very few and far between.
The acrobatics and getting only one hit in seems to point to the common criticism of endless feeling dynamic combo strings that give very few windows to attack, leading it to be practically impossible as the average casual solo. The thing is every boss will have at least some clear, obvious openings. You're right the windows are harder but it's not like its not designed for co op, things are still trivialized as you yourself mentioned saying its just mimic tear tank jump attack crit repeat. Just watch ongbal do these bosses no hit and you will see all the windows are there. It's just not the dark souls 3 roll and r1 every single sword swipe. There a still a ton of shorter 2-3 hits combos that you can get crazy jump r2s with slow weapons, or a ton of status buildup or just general dps with fast weapons. The delays are just weirder, the combos can and will extend based on position, and many attacks just have too little end lag to punish. Getting gud is just again a much harder and complex endeavor. Luckily though you have the agency to trivialize many combos with shields, ashes of war, or consumables like the frost or sleep pots. The average solo player doesn't even have to fully solve the puzzle of these bosses, you can hit trade and do dps racing with the tools I mentioned.
TLDR: The idea that bosses are too hard to solo and splitting aggro is required is not quite right. You have continuous difficulty sliders in the game, use them. Just use lions claw, or bleed, or hit trade jump attacks, or a bunch of consumable buffs, or just don't just summon the most OP possible summon mimic tear. The world is your oyster with this game.
Blah blah blah
this commenter gets it, the video is just a bunch of whining from someone who can’t be bothered to learn the game
Elden ring is still a dance but the bosses can choose the moves instead being predetermined
@@trevormccarron4451 Didn't take long...
@@JLeviNow I thought that too, but the boss actually chooses the predetermined move based on your position. The high variance causes it to feel like the bosses is just choosing moves, but I eventually found myself building an intuition for those random feeling moves.
holy shit, a review that perfectly sums up my thoughts on the dlc
I’m not sure I agree with the boss criticism. Yes, the bosses can be unrelenting, but in my experience the bosses actually seem designed around SOLO play, rather than co-op/spirit ashes.
Take commander gaius, a boss you showed during your criticism: when you used a spirit ash in the footage, it seemed like he was frantically moving around all over the place, completely unreadable. However, in my experience without a spirit summon, I found his moves to be very predictable (after some practice), to the point where I could predict what he would do depending on where I was standing relative to the boss, like the kick attach when you were right behind him. Not every boss has this level of predictability, but in my experience almost every boss attack and combo can be learned and mastered.
Instead, I think the boss difficulty comes from them feeling like they need to one up themselves with every new iteration, or else a certain section of the player population that loves the game for its difficulty will come away disappointed that their itch wasn’t scratched (a population I’m admittedly part of). It’s a never ending cycle that I’m not sure they can escape from. The spirit ashes are a method they included to make it so that everyone that isn’t as experienced with the genre or doesn’t play the series explicitly for the difficulty can bring co-op into a boss if they don’t want to struggle.
Either way, great video
Personally didn't experience any serious performance issues aside from some slight frame drops fighting Dancing Lion sometimes playing on my PS5. Didn't know it could get that bad as your gameplay lol
Yeah me either. Im like actually shocked at how many people are having that issue because i dont have that issue on my PC.
My biggest issue with the souls community is you can't properly criticize the game for the first year it's out. I wonder how many subjective "I like it tho" and unproductive "skull issue" comments you'll get loll
What is your criticism?
Actualy were still in the honeymoon and they write multiparagraph essas in the comments
A very fair and balanced opinion about the game that I agree a lot.
I came by to say I want more long-form content like this.
Also, that it made for very good listening while communicating pretty clearly.
I think section with boss design is so wrong, bosses is definitely is not balanced around summons and thare are no issues to beat them in solo and with just a sword. I think that problem is to trying ro beat them in the way as it works in ds. Don't run away from them when you need to heal, use punish window for that, don't wait until boss is finished his combo, you can panish him when his attacking, use his combo in your advantage, they are dependent on your position and you can control fight understanding that, use other attacks than r1, posture is incredible important to master and utilitise jumps, running and positioning instead of trying to roll from everything and you will have the best boss combat in any fromsoftware games
Man I love your comment, thank you for posting this comment, it will enlighten some people on here.
@@HeyTarnished about the bad game design of bosses like commander gaius and promised consort radahn ?
@@SrBlue-qp2ux this guy has been commenting a lot under this post...a braindead fanboy who likely has only played elden ring and is on that "i beat a souls game" high. nothing you say will convince him that there is a problem with the design of bosses in the game.
I played on ps5 and did not have the performance issues. I would recommend rebuilding the database, which can make things run smoother. I hope this helps give you the opportunity to enjoy this art more.
Great Video. On the lore side. I like it but I was really hoping to get more details about other characters. Melina, being the primary one. Instead I got to meet Midra, and find out there were others who wanted to be lords of the frenzied flame, did not need to be told that to know that. Rellana? I do not care. I am more confused now about how the lands between and the DLC interconnected. Radahn knew Gaius, Renala gave her sister a gift before she left for the shadow realm? Bayle fought placidusax but we have no idea what happened after that. It's like, a touch here, a touch there, and I cannot get anywhere. If we saw a TV series with so many plot questions at the end, what would you say? Think of Lost. I am not asking for a detailed breakdown here. I'm a bit disappointed.
Personally, my experience in this dlc with the PS5 has not had any performance issues so far, except for a specific dungeon where every time I was present at a particular point, the frame rate would drop significantly. Other than that, I haven't had any frame rate issues in any part of the DLC. On PC, the gaming experience can easily differ from one gamer to another because their hardware is different, but on a console, how has this level of performance difference come about? I'm completely serious when I say I haven't had any issues with performance so far, having completed two-thirds of the DLC.
I haven't had any issues on PS5 either, at all. As far as I was aware, performance was a problem only on PC.
Same here I never had performance issues on my ps5 but on PC I did have some of those issues where certain spells would cause frame drops and some freezing issues. This is the first I heard of anyone having performance issues on console.
On my PS5 I have had many performance issues, don't know about PC though lol
I played it on PC and this stuttering has been the bane of my existance, I almost quit (and unfortunately it hasnt been fixed). I originally thought there might be something wrong with my PC but after watching this video I'm realizing I'm not the only one who had to put up with these frustrating performance issues.
That's a crazy stutter issue, glad I only had one moment of that during dancing lion
12:44 that’s strange. I’m playing on PS5 also and I never experienced that stutter even during the final bosses lightshow. It would happen in the past with other games until I cleaned my fan. Maybe that’s the issues?
Holy shit. The algorithm actually blessed me once. Accidentally got this video recommended to me. Outstanding! I thoroughly enjoyed your take on the DLC, and I look forward in your future endeavors. I see amazing long-form critiques on your future!
I play on ps5 too and iv never had any performance issues. Anyways. Awesome review dude. I think im about 60% through the dlc and loving it so far. The only issues iv had are that alot of the massive locations seem to have a whole load of nothing in them. And if they do.. it got a bit annoying getting rewarded with smithing stones and cook books
Great review! Very professional.
I've experienced a similar stutter and it's very annoying. It usually manifests in a way where three consecutive stutters will happen in a row every now and again.
I think the DLC has tons of issues that are 1 for 1 from the original game that are only now really being noticed because of the crazy difficulty. Every boss starting with Margit (the first one,) has crazy long delayed attacks that come out almost instantly. It's only really a problem when Messmer does 4 in a row and kills you. All of the base games dragons heads will bounce up and down out of reach but its only really a problem when bayle has killed you 200 times.
Just learn the timings.
@@TrompetenThomas If every enemy can raise their arm, stop for 3 seconds, and then swing, every single enemy becomes just memorize. I have no idea if the enemy will swing or stand still for 3 seconds then swing. Every enemy requires sitting, watching, and memorizing instead of knowing intuitively like every other souls game.
Im not even gonna cap, i love the fact that they have such strong hesitation/ anticipation variations in their moves. It always keeps things fresh for ME at least but there's always signs for me to use so i can properly avoid it. It feels like the boss is RESPONDING to my responses and counter attacks and doing their own counter attacks.
@@TheWindBlack I think the animation is bad if you can't see the swing coming. I think that's the whole point of the animation, and I can't remember it being an issue in Sekiro or Dark Souls 3.
@@Nudderbols I love Elden Ring for that exact reason.
Can someone tell me what the revelation that “hit like a freight-train” based on 2 item descriptions, 1 location, and a single musical cue” that he mentioned is?
The shaman village in the hinterlands, which was marikas hometown
I don't know why Fromsoft hasn't brought back the Bloodborne dash and rally mechanic. This DLC seems like it was designed with them in mind.
PSA: if your struggling on a DLC boss all you really need is Bleed.
Very well written review. Balanced, nuanced thoughts as well. Will definitely check out your other stuff
11:55 So.. I have heard a lot of folks talk about how it’s disappointing that there was so much open space.. I love it. There are times that, if I’m feeling stressed or anxious, I will literally just get on my horse and roam around. It’s kind of like the equivalent of going for a drive on a beautiful scenic highway, or a walk in the woods.. Maybe I’ll fight a little or treasure hunt.. But for the most part I just am doing it because it’s gorgeous and is super relaxing lol Both the base game and the DLC (in my opinion more so the latter) are so immersive and beautiful that it just pulls you in. I think that it’s perfect minus the performance issues.
When I hear someone say "power fantasy" my brain shuts off.
Well you are an fromsoft fanboy
Been looking for a good Shadows of the Erdtree review for a big while. I think you've nailed it the best so far. Great video!
Elden Rings boss design, especially in this dlc has become a caricature and cheap husk of what soulsborne bosses used to be. My main complaint with this game is not that the bosses are "too hard". You can easily beat any boss with summons, broken meta builds, scadutree fragments, blah blah blah... we know this. My complaint is with the fundamental boss design/mechanics. ER's endgame and SOTE bosses consist of frequent 15 hit wombo combos that chunk your health & feel like they never stop, they have insane tankiness and poise, constantly are running away from you, and have a bunch of streamer bait "gotcha!" attacks.
Ultimately, I was hoping this dlc would improve on the base games shortcomings specifically the boss design/mechanics. I was hopeful they would try to tap into what made dark souls, bloodborne, and sekiro bosses enjoyable but instead they tripled down on the ER formula to a comical degree.
wonderfully articulated dude!
The game still allows you to choose your own difficulty and play how you want.
If you want to make it more challenging or easier you are free to do so with a variety of weapons, armours, shields, talismans, physicks, buffs, summons, and so on
Struggling to understand boss patterns and find openings but dont want to use a summon? Put on a shield and now you can see its patterns without the worry of messing up and dying.
Therss a move that you cant seem to through no matter which way you roll? Try jumoing and if that doesnt work try moving out of its range.
The game still gives you all the tools you had but adds more and you just need to figure out what works for you and how difficult/easy you want the experience to be.
Now that doesnt mean the games perfect like all games it has its problems but i feel both sides take this a step too far. One side talk about how its the best game ever to release with no flaws and the other side says its a terribly designed game.
I've had a weird version of your stutter problem. For me the stagger happens all the time, BUT if I stream my game in discord, AND someone watches the stream, then the game runs perfectly smooth. I have yet to figure out why this exact solution works but at least I was able to enjoy the dlc after I figured this out
There are only 2 bosses in the dlc that I summoned for, and not because I couldn't beat them solo. I really believe that, if I can do it, everyone else who enjoys these games can too. I'm no expert gamer, I'm no FromSoft savant. I'm just a dude with the patience and determination to prove something to myself.
There were times where I felt like the boss moves were bs, but in hindsight that was only frustration getting the better of me. Once I noticed, I would put the game down for a while and come back to it. And every time I did, it took just a handful of attempts. It's an infuriating, satisfying, palm-sweating, breathtaking learning experience.
The only real issue I have with this dlc is how empty later areas of the map are, but that's a pretty small complaint. Thankfully, I haven't had any framerate issues. PS4 version on PS5
Agreed. I was muttering to myself about how the bosses were way too fast before immediately reminding myself how I said the same thing about the base game. I do think that they are pushing the limits of the combat system though.
I only summoned for Bayle because of two reasons:
1. The game beating me over the head with an npc, to the point of having a key item just to be able to summon him and making it seem like I have to do it (especially because of his grandiose speech) or else I might miss out on something big.
2. His big laser beam attack.
I got Waterfowl PTSD when I saw that attack and while I really like everything about Malenia and her fight I definitely wasn't in the mood to deal with another trial and error, seemingly rng, overwhelming super attack and just decided to do the fight with Igon after that.
why are people ashamed of summoning? i don’t get it
@@Alex-ef7mu I'm not ashamed. I just know that i don't need to, so I don't. It's like riding with training wheels when you're used to a unicycle. There's no stimulation in it
@@Alex-ef7muYeah, idk why you brought up shame. Some people just want to face a challenge and overcome it by themselves and not by using every advantage the game provides you with.
I don’t see the whole “well they’re punishing me for not using summons” if you’re not using summons then you’ll have a harder time that’s the point of not using summons. Just summon if you don’t want to solo it don’t cry it’s too hard for you without them
Sorry, but storytelling and From games so not go together. They're good at lore, etc, but they're trash at crafting an actual narrative. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be legions of youtube channels dedicated to unpacking (or thinking they are) the story for the developers. As an avid reader of novels, i can say that From aren't good storytellers.
The DLC was... okay. Broken cameras and hitboxes abound. There's at least 3 areas that are mostly barren. And the exploration is mostly a frustrating chore.
Extremely good review. The story coverage is something that I hadn't seen elsewhere much, with so much focus on the combat of the game. Spending so much time on the story and its delivery is absolutely something that is deserved, and I'm glad that you give it its fair dues. It truly does feel unique amongst fantasy narratives, and even unique amongst the narratives and themes of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, seemingly drawing more story inspiration from Sekiro in its meditation on power, good endings, and the costs of that power, both taking and maintaining it, that are often paid in blood. Your thoughts on the matter were deeply interesting to me. I completely agree on the point of level design as well, though I do feel that the context of the base game's world and the knowledge that players will likely have seen most or all of it by the time they go through Shadow of the Erdtree allows them to create more complex areas that draw on that extreme breadth of information the player will have to give more significance to areas. Without a doubt, though, the density, the catacombs and similar forges, and other smaller sub-areas are deeply more well-thought out, less barren, and much more engaging to explore and traverse through, as well as almost all of them being a complete visual treat the entire time. I completely agree with you about the boss design, whenever I've had conversations about Elden Ring, I've always brought up the fact that the bosses, some much more than others, feel designed in such a way that they mandate certain builds or items (See Mohg and the purifying crystal tear, for example). This *can* lead to excessive difficulty for players who do not wish to engage with the system, but it feels strangely limiting in a game seemingly so fundamentally designed to enhance the feeling of player choice to have some of the premier draw of the engagement and fun in combat, the boss fights, to revert to demanding specific strategies or equipment from the player in order to mitigate the frustrations the boss design can impart on the player. Shadow of the Erdtree's bosses feel like they do this a lot better than the base game's did, with examples like Malenia and the Fire Giant being monsters due to movesets or sheer physical size, or Elden Beast, which felt like it was designed with the intent to use Torrent in it, but launched without it for some reason, and so was left completely unchanged until the DLC, almost like they needed an excuse to patch in what seemed like a critically missing feature to avoid the criticism that the game launched with a final boss that was missing a critical feature. The problem that a lot of the Shadow of the Erdtree bosses still seem to face, however, is a lack of good punish windows, variability in combos leading to less consistent punish windows, and, as you mentioned, some difficult to read moves, along with some poor hitboxes that, given fromsoftware's history with such issues, seem unlikely to be resolved in the future.
I'm glad Info and others in this comment section have similar feelings to Elden Rings boss design, being that we the player characters are fighting Bosses similar to Sekiro or Bloodborne aggressiveness but are stuck in the DS3 player format with jump attacks and guard counters being the only new additions. And the fact that the new Hardtear that gives you a deflect mechanic similar to Sekiro only proves this fact that Fromsoft did not properly give it's player base a fair ground to stand on fighting Elden Ring's bosses, both in it's base game and Shadow of the Erdtree. I really hope Fromsoft keeps player balance to boss balance in mind in their future titles. Playing the Souls games I felt that with each death I made progress towards eventually beating the boss in front of me, in Elden Ring I felt that there was no recourse or learning curve that I could use (not including summons) to beat a boss I was stuck on.
Wow. That was a pretty good review.
The bosses aren’t made with summons in-mind, I keep seeing this weird take every now and then sometimes & I keep wondering what makes them say that? The bosses’ movesets are, literally, designed to be able to contend against one, yes one player, it is literally that, adding any summons will break the bosses movesets, instead of aggroing you, it’ll aggro to the summon with those same movesets. Summons have always been in Souls games, they’re nothing new, but now because these games will die out eventually, From Software have added a complimentary system which is Spirit Ashes to help players without needing to play co-op, and I think that is fantastic, we can make the same argument that older Souls games bosses were designed with summons since they have always been an option, Ludwig had around 3 summons close to his fog gate, and he’s a very difficult boss, now he’s built with summons in mind? No, absolutely not.
did you fight consort radahn? solo, no summons, no cheese. if not, what you say makes sense. if you have, well, you're braindead no matter how articulate you try to come off...
@@tronaldtv7099 I did not fight Consort Radahn with summons, his movesets are targeted to one player, all bosses in every Souls games are like that, if you have summons, that same boss targets the other guy but will still engage against that guy with the same movesets, it doesn’t change, it’s just that Elden Ring’s bosses are nuanced, much more complex than previous Souls games.
I did beat Radahn without summons, and you know what? I had a lot of fun, with that being said, I would change some stuff he has, like the unholy amount of effects bombarding my screen (pun intended haha), also he has 1 or 2 moves that need fixing in a simple patch, that’s it, almost everything about the boss is S tier all-time banger IMO.
Given the bosses thrash around for minutes on end with few good opening for attacks and almost no opening for heals, having their aggro drawn by something else to create those opening is clearly intentional. Plus they wouldn't have added a whole new upgrade system based around ashes if you weren't supposed to use them.
@@ironpro7217 good job buddy, you just described why elden ring boss design is trash. in your own words nonetheless!!
@@ironpro7217 Your comment tells me you just don't know how to deal with the bosses, they give you enough time to heal & punish way more often than you think, instead of finding windows to punish, use those to heal, the opening are more than enough, there's no clear cut reason that makes you say they're designed with summons in mind, literally none, if you told me because they're hard then I'll bring you any other aggressive boss from any other Souls games & I'll tell you they're designed around summoning Co-op partners or NPC summons.
Every boss in ER can be solo'd just like in Bloodborne, Dark Souls & Sekiro, but when From Software increased the difficulty of bosses in general, now we need summons to beat them? Where does this start? I'll give you an example, Imagine if a player beaten Vordt of the Boreal Valley on their own but couldn't beat Gael because he's much more difficult so the player used co-op summon for help, does that mean Gael is "balanced" around summons now because that player found it very hard? No lol.
My god, the literary allusions and genre savvy alone in this review place it on a higher tier than most reviews. Of course you didn't miss the Captain Ahab pastiche either! This was a great reminder to keep thinking of Elden Ring as a piece of art and not merely a design experiment by a veteran studio looking to push their own boundaries
a real breath of fresh air after the suffocating "discourse" of difficulty, difficulty, difficulty. Thank you and subbed!
Elden Ring 2:
-Rework Combat system where deflecting is more punishable for this 5 hits combo ass bosses (you know fromsoft, like sekiro)
-Make a more straightforward story yet leave some space for lore fans (you know, like sekiro)
-Remove the awful npc questline system
-add Bloodborne healing %hp system
-Bring back Yuka Kitamura
-bring back real poise for heavy builds
-Hire Brandon Sanderson for world building
And there is, strength builds will happily go tank, Dex builds would deflect more, new people would still use summons and have a great time and Vaati wouldn't have to read 1000 items descriptions 😂
Thank you for the frank heads-up about spoilers. I'll bookmark this to watch after I finish.
the bosses are 100% designed to be doable solo- spirit ashes have always been something you can just add to the mix. if you can’t beat the boss with your “intended” build, then you’re not patient enough to learn the boss’s move set. this is infinitely better than having bosses you could beat in a few tries that would be too easy and boring on repeat play throughs.
Imma try beating the whole thing again with the anvil hammer, solo........I won't pull that off because the hammer is too slow use solo, but you say any build can do it! 😂
Such a long comment to say nothing constructive or disprove his point. Just because it's do able doesn't mean the critique isn't valid
@@Spectrum0122 What else should Fromsoftware do?
@@TrompetenThomasnot try to one up the difficulty of their previous games constantly and work on recapturing the sense of adventure and cohesion of demon's souls
@@natttt7377 Why not make it more difficult? I enjoy it, a lot of people do aswell and From seems to have immense success with it. Now with the Demon's Souls thing, that is just your personal taste, which is completely fine. For me it's actually the polar opposite as I dislike the old Fromsoftware games and want them to iterate on the Elden Ring and Sekiro formula in the future. Now it's up to Miyazaki to listen to the loud minority that wants From to go back to the roots of souls or to the silent majority that loves the new stuff. Elden Ring is still immensely flawed in many ways, but it's the right direction, atleast in my eyes.
I agree with your criticisms and I would personally extend that criticism to the world design too. The art direction is world-class, no doubt. However, this DLC did not need to be another open world, or at the very least, not such a massive one. I got genuinely bored traversing this mostly empty world. While there are some great new items, most of the rewards for exploration are upgrade materials that any player appropriately leveled for the DLC can simply purchase with ease.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the Scadooby-Dooby-Doo Fragments. These are the other primary reward for exploration, but there are entirely too many of them, and it's a highly tedious slog to collect them all. It absolutely requires consulting an external guide too. That's not good design. The rationale behind the fragments makes sense: give players control over difficulty scaling because there are so many variables determining whether a player will enter the DLC over or under-leveled (although I think this rationale is overstated; they could have just scaled difficulty like the base game after Mountaintop of the Giants). The problem is they turned this into a collectathon of 50 collectibles to justify and pad out their excessively large and empty open world.
I never had any performance issues
I just beat Rellana solo for the first time...I did not engage with her honestly..so many combos start with instantly and add some delays..I staggered her down and lucked out honestly....his boss critique was spot on
It's more Elden Ring in the same way that Aria of Sorrow is more Symphony of the Night.
In other words, all the parts are there, the arrangement looks right, and it fails to work.
I love SotE.
Elden Ring has to be my favorite videogame, ever.
I am still not sure if I will ever beat Radahn or Malenia "well", that is, without cheese or excessive buffs.
I love the dlc no complaints, i like playing in the style with no summons and find the game rewarding and challenging, also i think you should plau the dlc multiple times each time focusing on different aspects
No game has ever made me go "WOOOOOAAAAAAAH" so many times than Elden Ring, really. A good example of this was when I made my way down lower in the Ancient Ruins of Rauh for the first time, it was night time, and I honestly thought that I made my to another deep underground area just like Nokron. The game really is just breathtaking.
PS I will say that From Soft does need to improve on the technical side of things. It's mind-boggling that they still aren't allowing us to have higher framerates and higher aspect ratios beyond 16:9.
this was great!
20:00 my experience playing as a mage is representative of what you get at here. for almost all the bosses, my issue ended up being one of spacing rather than loadout. the kinds of spells i used mattered less than what spirit ash i picked, and more often than not i picked ashes that would give me the most breathing room. this resulted in me having to use the same playstyle with bosses with only one notable exception. as big as the base game was, i had a lot more variety in how i fought bosses than in SotE.
On the subject of mechanical issues, after the balance patch, the final boss started to randomly break my game files, causing FPS issues and causing me to be booted for 'Illegal Activity' until I exited and validated my files through steam. I speculate that it's because of EasyAntiCheat, but I don't know. Was there anyone else who had that problem?
Edit: Absolutely agreed on the boss design.
Given the emphasis on summons I think not using them is less a play preference (like leveling str vs. dex or power stancing vs. using a shield) and more a challenge run (like not leveling or not using weapons at all). IMO the problem with elden ring bosses isn't designing for co-op/summoning but doing so poorly, particularly by just adding extra enemies without properly accounting for how they interact or operate together. Otherwise, while I agree with some of the other problems described, particularly regarding difficult to read enemies and attacks with janky timing, I put them down to incorrectly prioritizing presentation over readability, an inflexible camera that doesn't zoom out for large bosses readable the say it should, and the devs over-relying on delayed attacks to compensate for the way dodge roll i-frames are otherwise a one button solution to any enemy attack. These problems were already present and worsening in previous souls games, and I don't think either is impacted much one way or the other by designing with co-op or summons in mind.
I def agree that the dlc is 'more elden ring', including more bosses that do and don't get this right. In it's favor I do want to mention Relanna specifically, who I do think does 'design for summons/co-op' right, with her ability to swiftly switch between targets, even back & forth mid combo, her combination of melee and ranged offense, often on the same attack. She also has big, visually impressive battlefield-wide attacks that are still very readable - helped by the fact that she's a human sized and shaped opponent so she doesn't deteriorate into a confusing mess of indistinct shapes when you get close to her. Really high tier encounter, held back from Lady Maria / Sister Friede / Mallenia tier by the fact that she doesn't have the compelling narrative build up to her encounter that her 'fromsoft boss lady' predecessors do to theirs.
Its not a soulstube video without an analogy about reaching or achieving greater heights
After seeing a lot of comments on a lot of videos, I know my opinion is very much in the minority, but I was so utterly let down by the world design. I think much of it has to do with being in a land of shadows, where everything is under saturated, and awash in a sickly blue or yellow pall. I’ve played through it three times, now, and I can think of nothing that rivals Leyndell, or Farum Azula, for example. Elden Ring is the only Fromsoft game I’ve ever played. Perhaps I fell too much in love with it.
Honestly, Miyazaki didn't lie. The "map" was really not so big. But it does have a lot of layers not shown there LOL.
Personally I think ER & SOTE is a milestone as Fromsoft enters its next era. One think that sorely needs improvement is graphics and performance, but I'm pretty sure with Miyazaki, another signature franchise will emerge.
They could solve the boss issues by giving them different movesets the more enemies there are.
Great Review !
That’s weird I haven’t gotten stutter like you showed yet on my Ps5
🚨 DLC spoilers ahead🚨** my thoughts after beating this AMAZING DLC; first of all it's an awesome surreal experience as far as dlc's go. ✨ On paper it's perfect. Don't get me wrong; however I have to admit there's so many lore inconsistencies, community-wise & in game found description-wise that I have to get off my chest... They could have added more answers to Ranni;a small legacy dungeon/land for her. As well more to Melina, such as her Frenzied flame ending anger if one chose that path;again a small land for her; etc. An area explaining Who or what was the greater will/Gods. But those could be forgiven. The main one arguably is I feel like they robbed us of Godwyn most of all. I feel as though there's so much they could have exchanged instead of some barren lands we got in the dlc and some awesome yet pointless side bosses,or just more added; In Fia's quest at the end there are so many hints that Godwyn is going to be revived somehow and spread across there are lore descriptions of his deathblight infection spreading across the lands. Don't get me wrong I LOVE the DLC, I just think it makes no sense they didn't even mention Godwyn in any true meaningful way. They put in Messmer out of nowhere and now suddenly he's canon, so obviously they could of put in Godwyn somehow. They revived a dead rotted Radahn and yet no Godwyn. While both are amazing bosses, it's ridiculous they had the resources to revive Godwyn and make it canon. They just didn't. I just think that's so odd. In the end it just feels so abrupt,and while it's amazing they added more to Miquella,in a way it revolves too much around him. There's so much more they could have done here. Hate or agree with these words all one wants,I'm just making an observation as a loving Elden Ring Fan. 🙏😊
I've been playing since release on PS5 and I've never experienced the stutter/performance issue you're talking about. Not once. Otherwise excellent review (though I've never felt that any boss required spirit summons or co-op).
Are you sure the stutter issue is caused by the DLC? The way you're describing the symptoms, it seems like it might be an issue with the hardware in some capacity, be that the disc itself or the console. I haven't heard of anyone else having that issue, and the fact that it followed you into the base game doesn't really make sense.
all I can say is that last boss put all my foolish ambitions of completing this DLC to rest…
I personally really like how the bosses in ER control the pace of the fight and keep you on your toes with confusing attacks because not only does this feel like they are doing you dirty and actually trying to win by any means possible which makes victory and progress on their lifebar all the more exilerating but this also allow the boss to last longer in terms of how many times you have to kill them before feeling like you've seen it all and could beat it with any build. To give an example of what the contrary, overly clear attck intents do, I'll bring up Sekiro's red kanji unblockable sign which turned the bosses into wait for dramatic move symbol, input proper counter, punish, rinse and repeat and got me very bored of the game's combat system turning this complex dance into a mini game of waiting for the sign and responsing in time while guarding the rest of the time.
Eitherway great video and interesting critique and I'll join you on your conclusion that it's beyond amazing but also could be improved but I don't think in the same specific areas as you :D
It seems that the performance issue was specific to your PS5, since ps5 is a standerdized device, everyone should be having the same problem, but the performance on ps5 was pretty good, people had problems on pc. I don't think it fair to blame FS in this case.
I know it's not possible on PS5 but on PC, reinstalling the game to my main drive fixed the performance issues including stutter.
For all PC users especially, why did you guys expect this expansion to not have performance issues when the base game was even worse at launch and the gaming community overall has been on a wave of bad PC optimization? I'm not saying it's acceptable, I'm asking why you're surprised. If I played on PC I would have expected the worst and waited for a patch. Again, that doesn't make your complaints unwarranted, but it very much gives surprised pikachu meme. I was expecting issues on my PS4 but it's been extremely minor, just some asset loading delays. Can't speak to the PS5 but I haven't heard nearly as many people talk about tech issues as much as on PC.
Super well put well done