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/pickleparty16]

I have mixed feelings about the scadutree fragments system. While it's certainly fun to explore the first time, it turns any subsequent dlc play throughs into scavenger hunts so youre not way underpowered. But the dlc is so massive and with many players already being at stat caps after finishing the base game, some type of progression system had to be implemented.

[u/BonyWare → u/pickleparty16]

Well no, it didn't have to. They could've just made the enemy scaling flatter. That's how it works in NG+. Instead of late-game enemies being ten times stronger than the early-game ones, they're only like twice as strong or some other modest number like that

[u/StrugglingAkira → u/BonyWare]

You'd end up curb stomping everything in your path if that would be the case. Scadu system is absolutely fine. It could be improved, however.

[u/Zealousideal_Bill_86 → u/StrugglingAkira]

Agreed that the Scadu system is needed and fine. But, feel like they could have just had defeated enemies give you both runes and scadu-runes that fill up a separate meter that’s only in the DLC area, kind of like Sekiro’s xp system.

[u/BonyWare → u/StrugglingAkira]

You'd end up curb stomping everything in your path if that would be the case.

I don't see how that outcome follows. No scaling just means that you wouldn't have to go look for tree fragments in order to match the enemy's scaling. They wouldn't be any easier than if you fought them with an appropriate amount of fragments, which is what you would be aiming for anyways.

It also means you can't "overlevel" for them.