What I won’t say about SOTE is that it’s bad. What I will say is that I’ve been enjoying it about as much as I enjoyed the Altus Plateau. Make of that what you will, and also SOTE is bad.
The Open World
I couldn’t be any less inclined to spend more time than I need to in Shadow of the Erdtree. The bosses themselves stretch the patience of my already worn-thin gaming habits. I played through a few extremely thorough characters on Elden Ring before moving onto SOTE, just so I could be sure my opinion on the base game was ripened before moving on.
And I gotta say, those playthroughs did not help to prepare me, mentally, for SOTE. By prepare, I don’t mean mechanically. I already knew what I was getting myself into prior to even buying SOTE, as the writing was on the wall with Elden Ring’s base game.
What I mean is that I had hoped base ER playthroughs would have let me ease myself into a mentality that enjoys mathematical slogs through bosses that are designed to extend playtime as much as possible in an open world that is already far too bloated. It did not.
The open world of SOTE is arguably worse than base ER, and that really is saying something. It’s repetitiveness is saved, in part, only due to the fact that there isn’t that much content for itself to be repetitive in. And my god does playing SOTE make me wanna go play the Dark Souls trilogy once again (save me, DS2!)
I follow the same philosophy in SOTE as I do in ER’s open world: rush to pick up all the items littered around (just because I feel obligated to) and then move onto the next boss. The world doesn’t deserve any more time than that.
The Bosses
Let’s talk about FromSoftware’s addiction to artificially increasing playtime. Naturally, we’re talking about a video game, so everything to do with everything is artificial, in the traditional sense of the word. What I mean when I say artificial is unintuitive, but in a way that’s intentional and punitive.
It sounds confusing, but it makes perfect sense when you play Shadow of the Erdtree. The bosses all have a “second phase punishment” philosophy that act as a way to make sure the player has to spend thrice the amount of time on a boss than they otherwise would have.
Consider this: you spend 45 minutes learning how a boss works: enough to get them down to half HP, even! Now that boss introduces its second phase, and with the introduction, a group of highly punitive moves that can one or two-tap your character. Of course, you don’t know what these moves do, yet, so the first one it performs kills you, forcing a restart against the boss.
This sort of design makes the boss-fights in SOTE (and ER)less gameplay and more time-centric mathematics. You can learn the first phase of the bossfight in X amount of time without restriction because there is no requirement to accessing that phase but for your own ability to start the boss fight, so it’s always available.
But that second phase can only be learned by getting passed the first! Which means that X, the amount of time required to learn the first phase, is a partial prerequisite to learning the second phase, which can be represented by Y, where Y is equal to the amount of time required to learn the first phase of the boss fight, plus the amount of time required to consistently beat that first phase, plus the amount of time to then repeat the learning phase, but with fewer allotted attempts to do so.
This is a really complicated way of saying that because learning the second phase of a boss fight is locked behind getting past the first phase repeatedly, FromSoftware has intentionally created a exponentially increased time requirement to succeed in their games.
Solve for enjoyable, as represented by Z. (It’s always 0)
I’d also like to say that the camera view the player has access to is not built properly for the sheer scale of the bosses. The Divine Beast is straight up invisible for a quarter of its fight thanks to the camera not knowing how to pan out or reposition without smashing into our character’s body. Can’t see a damn thing.
Shadow of the Erdtree is More of the Same, and that’s Bad
It’s not like I’ve finished the thing, yet. But SOTE isn’t going to get my benefit of the doubt. Not this time. FromSoftware are going all in on exponential time gates, bloated open worlds, and boss fights that are less fun and more frustrating (and are also simply reused assets).
A full(er) review will be out once I finish this DLC, and then I can never ever touch this game ever again. Praise the sun.
GLHF,
-E
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