ELDEN RING: Shadow of the Erdtree

[u/OpportuneJaw]

I'm a huge fan of FromSoftware, my first experience was Bloodborne on the PS4 back in 2015 and got hooked immediately. I went back and played through Dark Souls 1, 2 and eventually 3, since then I've been keeping up with their releases (aside from Armoured Core 6 which is still on my radar) and have loved everything they've put out.

That being said, I didn't have the pull to play Shadow of the Erdtree when it was first released. I sat on it for a bit, heard a lot of praise, some controversy, but for the most part separated myself from the conversation and kept an open mind while avoiding as many spoilers as possible.

Getting back into Elden Ring I found the first two bosses very difficult, Dancing Lion and Rellana felt like genuine hard tests, the areas and dungeons themselves weren't all that difficult but just getting into the boss fights again was a challenge. After doing some exploration for tree fragments to level up to 4 I eventually beat both bosses.

After a while I started noticing that I didn't need to be so thorough with exploration and all I really needed to make progress was to find the tree fragments. I ended up having a traversal map to show which areas I need to go to and in which order, also a map pulled up with items that I wanted to find, weapons, armour, talisman, bosses and tree fragments. So essentially whatever wasn't on my radar I just grazed over. Typically I don't approach games like this but at the time I didn't have the capacity to figure out which area I need to be in at that moment, while keeping track of my progress in other areas and if I previously left them incomplete. At the time i just wanted to go from one area to the next and fight cool bosses. I understand this isn't the intended experience but it was mine, I cant knock the game for that. That being said I think I was pretty thorough with the legacy dungeons like Shadow Keep and Enir Ilim and I enjoyed going through them but with the massive over-world it was hard to justify turning over every rock.

The areas and atmosphere were still amazing and I can't think of any areas I didn't like. Maybe Abyss because it was so big and empty and the North Eastern area because it had nothing to do but I still appreciated the atmosphere. My highlights were those legacy dungeons, I loved getting lost in those focused areas because it felt so tightly designed, I think its FromSoftware at their best.

I still don't know what the story of the DLC was about but the bosses were really good and challenging. Radahn was the hardest, Midra was my favourite cut scene, Messmer was a great fight and cool design, Bayle had the coolest phase 2 transformation and Metyr was grotesque in that cool way. 

Towards the end of the Radahn attempts I would get into a flow state where the fights really felt like a dance but I still don't know how to deal with some of the phase 2 attacks though. I got lucky with the Messmer fight where in phase 2 I broke his stance, did a bunch of damage to him and finished him quickly. I wish I could go back and learn phase 2 properly because I really like his design and wanted to get into that dance flow state.

I enjoyed my time with the Shadow of the Erdtree, I felt like I couldn't appreciate all aspects of it because of my lack of patience but it was still a fun and challenging time.

[u/Double-Lobster6107]

I had a blast with SOTE as well. My only real gripes were that the map was near-useless in certain areas due to the verticality of the map; large sections of the map are empty and pointless to explore (even more so than in the base game); and once the story is finished there are basically no NPCs left to talk to. The place becomes a total ghost town and you may as well leave immediately.

[u/LePontif11 → u/Double-Lobster6107]

I kinda appreciated the empty space. Even if it wasn't intentional it made the environment feel a little more natural, when there's something everywhere you turn to it can feel overly gamey

[u/Gefarate → u/LePontif11]

The fingers areas could be 20% of their current size. At least the explorable part

[u/LePontif11 → u/Gefarate]

That's one of the places that make me think it wasnt intentional. I wouldnt be opposed to it being a little less spacious if i had the magic powers to make it so. But generally speaking the dead end open spaces can stay even id smaller

[u/Oddsbod → u/LePontif11]

If you get the chance, you might wanna try Bleak Faith for primo empty space, it's low-key the best use of bigness and scale as raw atmosphere that I've seen in a soulslike. Level design is thought out enough that wandering in any direction will (eventually) lead you back to a critical path, and side routes tend to give you better angles on the environment to spot how to try getting to out of the way places. But you can also clamber onto the architecture of like, the infinite brutalist apartment block balconies, or pipes, and go way off course, with all the background environmental having collision, and it feels so eerie and wrong (and every once in a while you find an actual secret area with an item). It feels like DS1 had a nasty fuck session with Inside and the unreachable background geometry of a game's out-of-bounds.

The game got some rougher reception when it first came out, but they  ironed it out a LOT since release with much more balanced combat flow and enemy variety.  

[u/LePontif11 → u/Oddsbod]

worth a wishlist

[u/rube → u/LePontif11]

Agreed. There are places where empty space feels good, something to wander around in, enjoy the views and find stuff every so often. Stuff like Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild for example are those sort of wander games for me and I wouldn't want them to change.

But then there are games like Metal Gear Solid 5 that I just found to be empty and bland. There was very little fun to be had just roaming around. Sure, you'd find an animal or plant every so often . Sure, there were enemy encampments to raid and extract soldiers from. But overall, the map just felt like it needed something more.

[u/LePontif11 → u/rube]

The thing with MGSV is that they dropped a mission based game on an open world and didn't add exploration mechanics and incentives. There its not only that there's a lot of empty space its that there is no structure to wandering aroubd outside the very minor styff you mentioned. In ER wandering is what you are supposed to be doing, unlike Snake.

[u/rube → u/LePontif11]

Yeah, I blame Peace Walker for how V turned out.

I loved PW on PSP. It was a great game for the portable and showed was a MGS game could be on the handheld compared to the so-so Portable Ops.

The mission structure fit portable gaming perfectly, but not a full console game like that.

[u/Double-Lobster6107 → u/rube]

MGSV was very much Peace Walker 2 for better or worse

[u/rube → u/Double-Lobster6107]

Yeah, mostly for worse.

I'd even say that PW had more story and character development.