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The Weight of Expectation
Elden Ring is a monumental game. Not just for FromSoftware, the iconic developers behind the hit game, but also for the gaming industry on the whole. In a world of plain, open world games with cluttered map icons and quest markers tightly holding your hand throughout a game’s duration, Elden Ring stood out head and shoulders above the competition. Mixing in the classic FromSoftware gameplay, meticulously honed since the release of Demon’s Souls, with a nostalgic take on a modern open world setting, Hidetaka Miyazaki (FromSoftware President and Elden Ring Game Director) was able to create a game that was instantly loved by fans both old and new to the scintillating genre known as Soulslikes.
As tired as this title may have become, the term Soulslikes is nothing if not an endearing nod to the forerunners of the genre, as very few are able to faithfully recreate the feeling of FromSoftware’s modern masterpieces. I use the word masterpiece very intentionally here, as the developers at FromSoftware have released 4 games that have been nominated for the prestigious Game of the Year Award since 2014, and they went on to win it twice with Sekiro and Elden Ring, respectively.
I say this to help paint the picture of the expectation that weighed on the shoulders of Miyazaki and his team during the development and release of Shadow of the Erdtree, because it was obvious from the beginning, that the DLC had to be something truly spectacular to live up to the extremely high standard set by the base game. The task at hand then was to satisfyingly expand upon the world of Elden Ring and The Lands Between (the setting the player inhabits within the game) in a way that maintains the GOTY winning quality, whilst also giving players a fresh new experience that doesn’t feel stale or reductive. It is with great relief then to be able to say here; that Shadow of the Erdtree emphatically continues the success of Elden Ring and is indeed a worthy expansion. I highly recommend this DLC to anyone who remotely enjoyed the base game.
Let me break down exactly how and why Shadow of the Erdtree is once again causing quite the stir amongst this year's GOTY contention conversations.
The Land of Shadow
Shadow of the Erdtree takes place in a sort of pocket dimension within The Lands Between and this will be your new playground for the next 20-30 hours, if not more. You are here as a result of touching the withered hand of the Demigod Miquella after defeating his Demigod half brother; Mohg, Lord of Blood. This information is crucial to remember for story beats that I won't go into in this review, to avoid spoilers. Suffice it to say, remember the significance of exactly how you ended up in The Land of Shadow.
Upon arriving, much like the base game, you are greeted with yet another stunning vista that opens up before your eyes, with various locations and enemies within your immediate vision. This is not only a beautiful way to showcase the phenomenal art direction of the game but also to help guide the player, naturally, to relevant points of interest off the bat. This is important, as this was one of the biggest strengths of the base game and what largely sets this open world apart from many of its contemporaries in today's market. Elden Ring, and by extension Shadow of the Erdtree, isn’t afraid to let the player go out and discover things for themselves and quite possibly miss things that they will have to come back to in subsequent playthroughs. Many games today are afraid of the risk of players not seeing all the content that they have on offer, and they then dilute the experience by literally pointing out the way with clumsy markers dotted all over the map. FromSoftware on the other hand gives the player far more agency and trust, that they can make their own way in the open world that they’ve created for us.
The end result of this design ethos then is that you, the player, end up getting completely absorbed in this eerily beautiful land of muted darkness and have nothing but your gaming intuition and the gentle guidance of grace to send you on your way. Well, that isn’t entirely true for the DLC, as FromSoftware have done something particularly unusual here and that is having NPC’s loosely signposting you along the path to Miquella, offering a little more direction than that of the base game. This doesn’t mean that suddenly you have a quest log and dots all over the map telling you where the next boss is, far from it, but it does signify a slight change in the way Miyazaki shapes the world around the player.
With the new NPC’s gently assisting you in this foreign new land, you will soon find yourself in and out of vastly different locales, each as beautifully crafted as the next. Some of these areas are entirely new and refreshing, such as the Cerulean Coast, and others are more familiar to what you will have seen in The Lands Between. There are also plenty of poison bogs that Miyazaki loves to splash in his games, thankfully though, Torrent can make short work of most of them.
To summarise my thoughts on the setting of Shadow of the Erdtree, I believe FromSoftware have created a beautiful parallel to The Lands Between, with an art direction that is both consistent and captivating. My only criticism is that some of the areas further into the DLC feel more baron than that of the base game, leading to a situation where you aren’t as rewarded by exploring the environment as much as you are earlier in the game. That being said, if you enjoyed frollicking about in the open world of Elden Ring, you will most certainly love exploring its veiled counterpart in the DLC.
The Not-So Open World
Now the open world is fantastic and all but what about the content that doesn’t take place in the overworld? Shadow of the Erdtree, like Elden Ring before it, has various catacombs, delves and other such similar side dungeons, as well as the much larger Legacy Dungeons (as named by the developers). Naturally, there are fewer of these than in the base game but considering the Land of Shadow is roughly a third the size of The Lands Between, it’s fair to say that’s acceptable.
I’d go one further in fact and say that it may be an improvement, in the sense that the smaller dungeons/delves in the DLC feel a lot more unique than those found in the base game. One of Elden Ring’s admittedly few criticisms was that some of the side content felt a bit samey after a while, whereas I think SotE has more diligently balanced it’s quality and quantity.
The Legacy Dungeons however are just as iconic as those of the base game. To contextualise, Legacy Dungeons are where the player often finds the most narratively important bosses at the end of a much bigger dungeon crawling experience. For example, Belurat, Tower Settlement is likely the first Legacy Dungeon you will encounter in the DLC and as you make your way through this ruined place, exploring, finding shortcuts and ultimately ascending to the top of the area, you will then encounter the main boss of Belurat. Of the 5 Legacy Dungeons in Shadow of the Erdtree, I would say only one of them felt slightly underwhelming to me but even then, those feelings of “Oh, was that it?” were quickly quelled when I reached the boss, which swiftly reminded me exactly what we all play these games for; engaging and exhilarating boss fights.
The Embrace of Messmer’s Flame
Much like the base game, Shadow of the Erdtree is at its absolute best when you are neck deep in an enthralling dance to the death with the plethora of bosses found within. Elden Ring left an extraordinarily high bar for the team to measure up to, if not exceed, with highlight bosses such as; Malenia, Blade of Miquella, Godfrey, First Elden Lord and Maliketh, The Black Blade. How then were FromSoftware going to top this? Well, your guess is as good as mine as to how they did it but my God, they did.
I believe that Shadow of the Erdtree has some of the best boss fights anywhere in gaming. Period. To put into perspective; as well as having previous Soulslike experience, I have thousands of hours in the Monster Hunter series, a series also known for their excellent boss encounters, and I believe that this DLC has bosses that give all of these games a run for their money.
I can’t mention too much here as to avoid spoilers but I will highlight both Divine Beast Dancing Lion and Messmer, The Impaler, due to them being heavily featured in the game’s marketing. The Divine Beast is a fantastic early DLC boss that has both spectacle and fair difficulty to boast, with multiple distinct phases that change the way it fights. Messmer, The Impaler is quite possibly one of the best bosses I have ever fought in any game. He is ruthless and aggressive but open to punishes by tightly rolling into his attacks, leaving him feeling overall challenging but fair. He has a hyper aggressive attack, similar to that of Malenia’s infamous waterfowl dance, however Messmer’s assault doesn’t feel quite as punishing.
I could gush about the brilliance of the bosses all day long, however, it would be remiss of me to not talk about the glaring elephant in the room, so let’s talk now about the difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree.
A Difficult Discourse
The history of FromSoftware is infamously tied to the discourse surrounding the difficulty of their games, especially since the release of Dark Souls. They have pretty much been known as the guys that only make soul grindingly difficult games and if you can conquer them, you’re a real gamer and if you can’t, well, guess you are a casual then. I wish I was being hyperbolic but this was the unfortunate stigma attached to FromSoftware and their fans for the longest time, and the narrative has only recently shifted with the release of Elden Ring.
For the record, I don’t agree with the prior mentioned generalisation, but I have to acknowledge that, to the wider gaming community, this was the reality. It’s important for me to highlight this as it helps to explain why the topic of difficulty is both so important and so divisive.
Elden Ring is widely considered to be the most beginner friendly of FromSoftware’s modern releases and this is something that I wholeheartedly agree with. That’s not to say that Elden Ring is easy per se, rather that it gives the player an awful lot of freedom with how they overcome any given challenge, as well as plenty of tools to assist you on your journey to the Elden Throne, such as the massively useful Spirit Ash summons. The open world nature of the game means that if you find yourself stuck against a tough boss, you can just go somewhere else, level up and come back later, which is a stark difference from the more linear Souls games that came before.
The problem with this amount of freedom is that it is easy to become too powerful for the content within the game, potentially trivialising bosses, which defeats the purpose of playing these games in the first place. FromSoftware’s design solution to this problem then was to make the bosses, and even the regular enemies, of late game areas hit like a truck with, inflated HP pools to compensate for the potential power of the player character.
This becomes a problem because you end up hitting a point in Elden Ring where you notice a massive difficulty jump, usually about when you enter the Mountaintops of the Giants area. What happens then is you feel considerably weaker than you did just a few moments before and that can lead to unsatisfying and/or frustrating gameplay.
In Shadow of the Erdtree then, FromSoftware had an even more difficult challenge to overcome from a game design perspective; How to make this game fair and balanced for lower level players, higher level players and players who are NG+ and beyond? For transparency, my first playthrough of SotE was on my NG+6 character and my God was that a bad idea. Before I go on, I must stress that for your first playthrough, I highly recommend going in with either a New Game character or at most NG+.
To remedy this, the developers made a key mechanical change to the DLC which is the introduction of items called Scadu Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes, which can be collected to essentially buff your character and Spirit Ash summons whilst in the Land of Shadow. This meant that the developers, theoretically, could even out the challenge between all types of players, but what I found was that it would simply just force the player to go scouring the world to search out as many of these fragments as possible, in order to just have a fighting chance.
FromSoftware have since patched the game to make the buff more powerful early on, leading to a more gradual and immediately noticeable increase in power levels. On my second character (which is only NG+1) I found this to be a more balanced system and solves a lot of the problems that this DLC faced at launch. The Scadu Blessings can be detrimental to one’s success in this DLC and I would suggest looking up maps online showing their locations to anyone who is finding the game frustrating, even with their Spirit Ash Summons.
Overall, my thoughts on the unending debate of difficulty in this game is that SotE is undoubtedly hard at first IF you don’t collect your buffs or IF you are a NG+6 or above character. The developers have made improvements to the Scadu Blessing system since launch and I haven’t felt nearly as frustrated on my second playthrough.
Conclusion
Shadow of the Erdtree is unquestionably one of the best DLC’s ever released, alongside juggernauts like The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine and Oblivion’s Shivering Isles (not the horse armour). FromSoftware gets so much right here that carries on from the base game; the world design, the art direction, the incredible music, the industry leading boss fights and the sheer amount of content baked into this release. The difficulty will always be a point of contention for these games but I truly feel like Elden Ring, and indeed SotE, have given players more than enough tools to be able to conquer all there is to overcome and become whatever kind of Lord they want to be.
