Anyway guys, Shadow of the Erdtree DLC was a little disappointing. There's a significant portion of the map seems to be wasted space with not much exploration involved. certain parts are fairly dense and interesting, but not the level of Stormveil castle in the base game. There was maybe one dungeon that was very interesting, but the scale of the dungeons doesn't compare to the huge base game dungeons. I'm one of the persons that luv exploring huge dungeons. Bigger with many paths, hidden path, the better to get lost in. I luv it when there are tons of paths that makes my decisions difficult and I have to remember to take the other paths. It's a lot of fun. lol Some of the hidden paths that was created in Elden Ring were genius!
Similar to metroidvanias, finding the bonfires or the save points hidden in a huge dungeons with multiple paths feels very rewarding.
I found the bosses even more spammy than the base game. You have to beat Mohg to start the DLC, and Mohg is already a spammy and unfun boss. Bosses sucked, so I just used my mimic tear to get through it. I don't feel any satisfaction from beating Fromsoft bosses anymore as they got very spammy AOE and cheap. So, in this DLC, they designed bosses to do very long combos you have to dodge through, which is kinda bs. So what ends up happening is people would start to use great shield builds to mitigate the spammy combos. Just bad design. IMO, Lies of P did bosses much better than what Fromsoft is doing at the moment.
Not a great DLC. Bulk of enemies were reused from base game. In general, not a huge fan of the Elden Ring series. However, this DLC's vibe is much closer to Dark Souls with it's dark tones. Visually stunning.
Other positives would be that there was some really creative puzzles, which I liked. Certain things, they hid too well, kinda mixed about that. In general, it was nice to be able to get on torrent and explore, that's the main fun of Elden Ring. Boss fights suck though.
Like I mentioned, it's visually stunning. The areas look great, and especially going through the dragon area on torrent felt epic. I liked that part. It's really cool, riding your mount toward the summit or the peak to fight the elder dragon. Very awesome! When you play a fantasy game, you want this kind of feeling of epic-ness.
I know it's early and not had time to balance with patches, but balance is pretty bad with the scadutree fragments. Initially, you'd be super underpowered, and then once you start getting a lot of them, you are too OP. this is the issue with open world compared to linear sequenced (IMO, even open world should have some sort of sequence if game depends on leveling). If you didn't explore some easy areas, and you do it later, you are OP. But, that is how metroidvanias ends up happening toward the end as well.
They haven't solved the open world proper balancing problem. Should be addressed as there's got to be a solution to it.
Still with all these issues, Elden Ring is way way way way way better than the newest Zeldas for kids.
