Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring’s latest and only DLC, is about as a solid of a confirmation as I needed to get: FromSoftware’s heads are right up their own asses.
I played SOTE with the intention of figuring out just how blunt the message was. I had read the steam reviews and watched a video essay or two, and all of them pointed to a DLC experience that was solely focused on ramping up the difficulty to as much as (un)reasonably possible.
The message, by the way, was a strong “this is what we care about when making games” by FromSoftware: Difficulty. I’m not under any illusion that this hasn’t been a trend from the devs for a while now. One could see in Dark Souls 2, for example, the lean into “difficulty” as a marketing tool, despite that game being arguably easier than its predecessor in most ways, if not all.
But Elden Ring took that philosophy into a direction that, for the first time in FromSoftware history, sacrificed a rich world and qualitative experiences for more experiences that are placed in a check-list environment akin to that of a theme-park tailored for mass consumer enjoyment.
Shadow of the Erdtree is more of the same.
Shadow of the Erdtree | A Review
The DLC introduces the player to the newest, most infuriatingly designed bosses in Elden Ring. Foes such as The Divine Beast and Consort Radahn are the main courses here, and as such, they are beyond the possibility of ignoring for this review.
While this DLC doesn’t get everything wrong with its bosses (Messmer was top tier), it features a lot of spectacle that Elden Ring, and by extension the Dark souls trilogy, just wasn’t made for. The Divine Beast launches itself into the air, often becoming difficult, or impossible, to see. The camera struggles to contend with the aerial effects of a man wearing a dancing dragon costume while I, the player, become all things mithered with the fact that I spent 40 dollars on this DLC experience.
If The Divine Beast launches himself at you whilst near a wall, you’d better have gotten the sound queues down to a T, or you’ll be getting cracked back to a reset. The same can be said for Consort Radahn, who stands with such size against the player that the camera feels obligated to look up at him when in melee range such that the world under the character begins clipping, often when near mounds, which are featured in the center of his arena.
Unlike these bosses, which can’t be ignored, the world itself is more of the same: needlessly wide, overburdened with enemy spam, and at the very same time extraordinarily empty of any true gaming experiences one would associate with “Game of the Year”. The world can be ignored, it isn’t worth exploring inch by inch in the same way Lordran was. In fact, invoking Dark Souls 1’s quality for comparison is a bit misleading, because it implies that Elden Ring is poor when compared to what came before, when in reality it’s poor all on its own.
To encourage players to actually engage with the underwhelming open world, FromSoftware devised a “new” scaling method: Scadutree Fragments.
Scadutree Fragments serve as “buffs” to the player. They are rewarded, mostly, for exploration and for defeating bosses, unlocking new areas. These fragments, when spent on the player’s blessing, give the player more damage and reduce the damage taken, both by a percentage that, at level 20 blessing, takes the players damage to roughly double and brings the damage taken roughly down to half.
The dialogue around Scadutree fragments are about as plain as you could imagine. They are “buffs” and buffs are good, so FromSoftware are good. In reality the fragments are straight nerfs. Because they exist, FromSoftware felt comfortable upping the total HP and damage of each enemy in the DLC by an extraordinary amount. So Instead of the player using their build to solely dictate their performance, they now have to rely on getting Scadutree fragments to become sufficiently “buffed” to play through the DLC reliably.
Experienced players obviously won’t need these fragments, but that’s a moot point: experienced players play through FromSoftware games without getting hit a single time, so to use their experiences as a arguments against the poor design of scadutree fragments (or anything else in the game) stands to waste everyone’s time.
Scadutree fragments poorly obscure the fact that enemies in Shadow of the Erdtree are massively overtuned to enforce player exploration, and this design choice was made because the world itself isn’t worth exploring without rewards. You’ll be so eager to end the nightmare that is playing through this DLC (and beating Radahn) that exploring to obtain fragments will seem like a necessary pain needed to ease the burden of learning the boss(es) and their absurd movesets. Speaking of which:
Consort Radahn and the Exponential Learning Curve
The philosophy is simple: teach the player a basic moveset in Phase 1, then complicate that moveset with obscured vision, AOE additions, and a whole new set of moves to accompany Phase 2.
Melania followed this exact formula. From the developer’s perspective, there are a few benefits to designing bosses this way; it provides bosses with more depth, makes them more challenging, gives them more aesthetic and lore flavor and, most importantly, takes more time away from the player.
You see, Consort Radahn’s second phase is, objectively, and by design, unfair to the player. That said, if his second phase was his only phase, he would a significantly easier boss.
This is because understanding his second phase requires actually learning it, and that requires getting through his first phase, which not only doesn’t include any of his most deadly of moves, but actively changes the way his original moveset works, often punishing players who have already developed the muscle memory to dodge them without accounting for phase 2’s AOE additions to all of his swipes.
Because of this two-phased system, the time needed to learn the boss in full is multiplied many times over behind a first-phase unlock. This doesn’t just mean getting good enough to get through the first phase to begin learning phase two, but getting good enough to reliably, consistently get through phase one so that learning phase two is equally consistent.
The two-phase system is not designed to primarily enhance the player experience, but to “artificially” increase playtime by locking an extremely punitive learning curve behind another, more forgiving learning curve that stands in the way of learning the most important boss mechanics.
This is to say nothing the fact that, in Consort Radahn’s case, those important mechanics are designed to hide information from the player and one-tap characters who aren’t googling what to do in each scenario.
In the second phase, Miquella’s hair often obscures Radan’s movesets, Radahn’s movesets consistent of many “phantom” attacks, which are instant and unavoidable to anyone who hasn’t learned to predict them, his meteor attack require running away from the fight to avoid, his slam move at around 35% HP one-taps players who haven’t learned that they need to run non-stop in one direction upon his jumping into space.
And all of this is locked behind a first phase, which is arbitrarily made all the more time-consuming if a level 150 player can’t be bothered to engage with the majority of the map (because it’s so damned boring).
There’s no real point in discussing all of the loot you can find: it’s littered everywhere, and all of the additional weapons and spells in the DLC matter little, for a player can be given 1000 different spoons to eat their food with, but it matters not at all when what they’re served is rank.
Shadow of the Erdtree is worth skipping, even if given away for free.
GLHF,
-E
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