Shadow of the Erdtree Review - A Poor Followup

if the expansions to from software games have one reputation it's that they're consistently some of the best parts of their respective games I was one of the few people who was disappointed with eldering but I agree that their expansions have that reputation for a good reason so I was willing to give shadow of the UR tree a try more than anything I was just curious if from software would be able to see the problems that Elden ring has and try to fix them or if it's run way success would lead them down the wrong path unfortunately it's more of the ladder that isn't to say that this expansion has nothing going for it what Elden ring did well shadow of the earth tree does well too from the first reveal of the gravesite plane onto the end of the expansion each area is visually unique with plenty of inspiring Vistas many parts of the map can be accessed through alternate routes which when combined with an even greater degree of verticality makes Zone transitions much smoother and less abrupt one of my complaints about Elden ring was that the map gave the player too much information making navigation trivial in Shadow of the earth tree the map is still useful but it doesn't tell the player everything there is to know many parts of the world space are on a lower layer than the topmost one meaning that they aren't fully shown on the map this hides many of the secret passages to new areas making them a genuine joy to discover instead of having them be spoiled for you by the map of course that does make them missable but anyone who is upset over not having found these paths should reflect on the fact that for the discovery of something to have any meaning it has to be hidden in the first place personally I prefer to discover things through playing the game rather than having them shown to me on a map the path to the Abyssal Forest might be the best example of this a side path in the shadow ke leads to a coffin that can be ridden down into a lake from there following the river leads to a series of cliffs that can be descended by dropping onto the Tombstones finally we reach some catacombs at first I was very worried since catacombs were my least favorite area type in the base game but these do something special instead of ending in the same generic room as every other catacomb they exit into an entirely new area using smaller dungeons to link together different zones was an underutilized Tech technique in the base game and I was happily surprised to see it return here the key thing here is that the path I just outlined is not entirely visible on the map especially its beginning and end sections it's perfectly findable but doing so requires players to explore and observe the environment adequately although I would prefer to have no map at all this is a big step in the right direction as it happens the Abyssal Forest is my favorite area in the expansion although I know a lot lot of people are going to hate it the surprise reveal sets it up well and then the gloomy visuals and ominous music combine into an atmosphere of dread even though the developer messages are too excessive but more than all of that I love the abyss because it's the only open area in the game that does not allow us to summon torrent if you've seen my original critique of Elden ring you'll know that I have a serious Grudge with torrent and not just because from software forgot to make him summonable against Elden Beast for over 2 years after the game released to summarize torrent trivializes all open world enemies because they aren't designed with his high speed and mobility in mind in turn this removes all tension from open world exploration because players can always run away on torrent to heal on the other hand trying to engage in combat well mounted is an exercise in tedium without the ability to block Dodge use both equipped weapons or even use ashes of war the only viable strategy on Horseback is to run back and forth past an enemy while taking swings at them it can be very effective since enemies are too slow to keep up but it's also extremely repetitive leading to players choosing to run past enemies on torrent while picking up items along the way if the open world enemies are ineffective at barring the players progress and are uninteresting to fight then I think we need to admit that the open world combat in Elden ring is a disaster on some level from software recognizes this as well because otherwise they wouldn't have disabled torrent in the abyss the frenzy inflicting enemies here are already pretty easy to avoid which is probably a necessity due to how simple stealth is but torrent would have turned them into a complete joke and ruined the tension of sneaking past them I just wish that this had been applied to the rest of the open world as well I know people would complain to no end that they can't zip across the map without any of those pesky inconveniences like having to fight enemies but disabling torrent completely would have made traveling across the open world feel vastly more rewarding there's even an easy excuse for doing so michelo is torrance's former master and we could say that torrent doesn't want to help the player against him it's a better reason than being afraid of frenzy when he never is in the base game as much as I dislike torrent I will admit that his implementation has been improved moved if only slightly in the base game torrent didn't have any way to gain health or damage resistance so by the end of the game a single attack could easily Dismount players or even Kill torrent outright which only further encouraged using the most boring possible hit and run tactics thankfully the new revered Spirit Das system goes some way to remedy this but by the end of the expansion enemies deal so much damage that we just end up back where we started while the revered Spirit ashes ended up being a wash for me since torrent rarely gets hit anyways I can't say the same about the scatter tree fragments although not technically required the player's scatter tree blessing level has a massive effect on damage dealt and received making this system an effective necessity for anything outside of extreme Challenge runs however this system is highly flawed in multiple ways firstly it lacks any degree of decision making when leveling up players have to choose which attributes to invest in characters become more powerful as they level up but they also become more specialized the same can be said for weapon upgrade levels choosing to upgrade one weapon Bears a certain level of commitment at least until you get the appropriate smithing Stone Bell bearing the scatter tree blessings are not like this they're straight upgrades that every character benefits from equally and because of how strong these upgrades are play are incentivized to scour the open world for scatter tree fragments this reveals the second problem that the actual hunt for scattered tree fragments is awful thoroughly combing every inch of the map will get you plenty of them but due to the inherent issues with traversing the open world on torrent this gets old fast making matters worse are the tons of useless items to pick up along the way the fragments are considered purple rare items but so are plenty of crafting materials and consumables if items are going to be color coded they should at least be coded by item type instead of an arbitrary Rarity level as it turns out almost all of the scattered tree fragments are found either in obvious locations like at micholas crosses and statues of America or by killing certain mini boss enemies but not quite all of them are found like this without looking up a guide and spoiling where they are players have no way of knowing which items are even worth the time spent picking them up so we end up wasting our time by picking up everything in the base game there were similar pseudo mandatory upgrade items the golden seeds and sacred tear I didn't like these items either since every new character has to go through the same time- wasting process of running around to collect them but scatter tree fragments are even worse because there are 50 of them and unlike with golden seeds all 50 are required to reach the maximum upgrade level you might say that players aren't expected to reach that maximum upgrade level but that leads right into the next issue the blessing level that players are expected to be at for any given area is very unclear if an area or boss is giving a player trouble they have little way to know if they need to go and find more fragments or if it's just a difficult fight the normal Rune leveling system solves this problem elegantly more difficult areas have enemies that drop more runes so even if a player enters an area at a lower than expected Rune level if they're persistent the higher Rune drop rate lets them catch up to the Rune level range that the area was designed for blessings do not have any equivalent to this players can acquire a large number of fragments without fighting any enemies but how many they should get before trying any given location is up to guesswork the common argument is that scatter tree fragments serve as a motivation for exploring but the reality is that if the open world simply had good game playay we wouldn't need these PowerUp Collectibles to get us to explore it for me they aren't motivators they're demotivators because the thought of having to recollect them all on a new character kills any enthusiasm I had about replaying shadow of the earth tree if the expectation is that players should get to a certain blessing level before tackling each major location then I have to ask what's the point why not just cut out the fragments and scale enemy damage and health down to their effective equivalents at the expected blessing level if anything removing scatter Tre fragments would actually allow for more free form progression because players could travel between locations without having to worry about searching every square inch of the map for fragments as they go it's possible that the blessing system was implemented to prevent players at higher Rune levels from finding the expansion too easy if so I think that this concern was unwarranted shadow of the UR Trey is gated behind Moog an endgame boss so it should be expected that players who aren't intentionally limiting their Rune level will start the expansion at in-game levels easily upwards of 100 at these levels it's not long before leveling up has severe diminishing returns so high Rune level characters aren't at as much of an advantage as their level might suggest besides if High run level characters were the perceived issue I don't think implementing A system that affects all characters was the right choice after the expansion's release scatter tree blessings were patched so that the earlier levels gave larger bonuses than the higher ones this does reduce the overall difficulty but it does nothing to eliminate the underlying issues with this progression system fragments are always going to be uninteresting and timeconsuming to acquire tweaking some numbers is not a solution for a attacked on borrowed power progression system that mainly serves to waste the players's time I don't think many people will be willing to admit it but the open world and the new progression systems are just filler Elden ring already had severe issues in how it handled its open world but in some ways shadow of the UR Trey manages to be even worse I criticized Elden ring harshly for its constant recycling of enemies and bosses to the point of absurdity this was the one area that I really hoped from software would improve on in the expansion both because it did seem to be a common criticism and because a smaller World space would necessitate fewer assets and thus less repetition if you feel the same way about this then you know how I felt when I came across the first ghost flame dragon it's difficult to even describe the degree of apathy I have for the field bosses as they're called in Shadow of the Earth Tree in Elden ring there are already too many dragons too many ulcerated tree spirits too many tibia Mariners too many death right Birds too many Rune bears and all of these have been copied and pasted into shadow of the AR tree with a minimal visual changes and little to no reasoning behind where they are placed in the world there is no benefit from having these encounters they do nothing except devalue and tarnish any positive experience that finding these enemies for the first time might have brought I recognize that some amount of asset reuse is a necessity of budgets and deadlines I'm really trying to not be unreasonable here I don't mind that the shadow Nobles and commoners are just normal Nobles and commoners with a shadow effect put on them it makes sense and is thematically appropriate but at some point I have to draw the line everyone has a limit and for me this is it there is shockingly little in the way of new enemy types in this expansion the main bosses are unique mostly but almost all of the normal enemies and field bosses are reskinned versions of Base game assets many of which were themselves pulled from previous from software games putting a boss health bar at the bottom of the screen and playing the same field Boss music I've heard 50 plus times is not somehow going to turn yet another dragon fight into some sort of climactic Epic experience I sincerely refuse to believe that many people get excited to fight rugala the great red bear or how could I forget what about rala the great red bear I didn't even fight that one I'm not going back to get footage of it it's the same thing pretending like these are different boss encounters is an insult to my intelligence and my time in fact these aren't even bosses they don't gate progress behind them they don't serve as a Capstone to an Era or have any narrative significance in any of the souls games games these would have just been categorized as mini bosses that is enemies that are an outlier in terms of difficulty and don't respond after you kill them and maybe drop a unique item but in Elden ring they get elevated to boss status with the iconic health bar and enemy defeated notification because that lets the marketing team add another tick to the boss count to use an advertisements and press material if you are one of the people who feels accomplished when you see this enemy defeated pop up please stop fing for for it these are just normal enemies dressed up as bosses they're presented this way only to make you feel good about yourself for beating up the big bad monster and keep you playing it's a simple psychological trick to make people think that the open world is more engaging than it really is but it's completely auser if these enemies didn't have boss health bars I know you wouldn't fight them you don't fight the other room Bears I don't either no one does it takes too long and there are too many of them we all just run past them but because some of these generic enemies are arbitrarily considered to be bosses suddenly shadow of the AR Tre is the biggest expansion ever with so much content there is a large world to explore but it's a lot less impressive when most of it is filled with enemies we've already fought many times over putting bosses like this in an expansion takes next to no effort from the developers and as players we should give it no respected return since we are the ones giving up our time to play the game I've been extremely negative so far so it might surprise you to hear that I did have a good time with parts of Shad of the AR Trey the traditional Legacy dungeons are quite good just like in the base game jumping is used to great effect with plenty of vertical traversal each time I went through one of these zones and even the smaller side dungeon it served as a reminder that this is where the core gameplay of Elden ring really shines taking your time to carefully make your way through a dungeon trying to spot ambushes before they spring on you rationing your resources efficiently it's all here just like it always has been and I don't think I can say anything new about it if you've played the game you intuitively understand that this is exactly what the combat system was designed for and it works writing this makes me want to play through these areas again with new characters and builds it's the rest of the game the open world wasting time picking up scatter tree fragments that is what is holding me back Elden ring was already a bloated mess of a game with relevant equipment spread so thinly across its many side areas that just creating a new character and getting them equipped at a basic level can take longer than it does to finish an entire Souls game what Elden ring desperately needed more than anything was more proper large scale Dungeons and while shadow of the earth tree does provide some they are paired with yet more of the same exhaustively unappealing open world keep in mind my praise for the Legacy dungeons was meant only for the dungeons themselves not for their bosses one of the first bosses I fought in Shadow of the UR Trey was demium swordmaster on ons this guy is not very difficult I beat him on my first try however when I saw him using attacks that are very obviously taken from SEO boss move sets I knew that from software was going to jump the shark with their boss combat design in this expansion even if I ignore the blatant camera issues that from software is seemingly unwilling to fix the quality of the bosses on offer here is low yes people can and will beat every boss in the expansion without taking damage but that does not mean that they are well-designed or effective combat encounters people love to forget this but Elden Ring's combat is directly descended from the combat in Demon Souls a game that excelled in large part due to how perfectly its slow and methodical combat synergizes with exploring complex levels that have high attention to detail even with the significant increases to player Mobility over time this is still the fundamental strength of Elden Rings combat that's why the Legacy dungeons are still the most enjoyable parts of the game even when much of the focus seems to have shifted away from the levels and towards the bosses it's probably impossible to create a combat system that works well both for fighting through a gauntlet of the normal relatively weak enemies that most of the game is filled with and for fighting something like promis conort Ron when the only defensive tool that players are guaranteed to have is a Dodge roll with some invincibility frames there's only so far that you can push the combat difficulty before attacks cease to be consistently avoidable and it seems like we are at that point ironically bosses demanding ever tighter Dodge timings and doing so much damage has finally gone so far that we've circled back around to the dominant strategy being to just block everything this could be praised for encouraging different play Styles but it's really the exact opposite as difficulty increases players are just going to stop using anything except for the most meta builds some level of difficulty is necessary for overcoming challenges to feel satisfying but fights like this do not encourage creativity or get players to experiment because for the average player anything outside of the most effective builds is just not going to be viable instead it leads to less creativity people are more likely than ever to just follow guides copy other people's builds and all Converge on one of the few strategies that turnab boss from being a huge challenge into a boring snoozefest this isn't helped by the ability to reallocate your character's attributes there's a popular demand for this so-called quality of life feature but the downstream consequence is that developers no longer have to balance encounters to accommodate the wide variety of builds that players could make when the most broken builds are just an online search and a quick visit to renala away every character is the best character developers have an excuse to cut corners on Boss design because as long as there is at least one build that people can use to clear it every character has access to that build some people would want the limit on the amount of times a character can resp to be removed but this is missing the forest for the trees you should be asking for better combat design where you don't feel the need to respect to overcome the challenge this is essentially the same argument that people have been using against fast travel for who knows how long Fast Travel disincentivizes developers from making traversal mechanically interesting because people will just fast travel anyways my argument is is respecing disincentivizes developers from balance and combat because players were just switch to the best build anyway unfunny enough Elder ring suffers from the Fast Travel traversal issue just as much as the respect balance issue I'm not going to get back into complaining about the open world but it's such a shame because neither of these were issues for from software games in the distant past in the early Souls games levels were tightly designed with no wasted space and the pacing of traversal through each of them benefited from this sure you might come across an area or boss that your build wasn't perfectly suited for dealing with but the difference between optimized and unoptimized builds was never as Extreme as it is in Elden ring and even more so in Shadow of the UR tree some parts of the game would be easier or harder depending on how your character was specialized but that made every playthrough feel unique now that every character is the same character every boss is the same boss too incessant attacks endless Health pools blinding visual effects and medify powerups have turned every boss into standardized Factory produced copies of each other when bosses lack any Unique Mechanics and are all fought in the same flat open Arenas I lose any desire to care about these bosses as characters let alone to memorize yet another set of inconsistent attack timing this was another big disappointment for me because although Elden ring had similar boss design especially in its in-game bosses there were some signs that from software was willing to experiment with having more unique and varied boss fights a lot of the ideas here were recycled from previous games but I still thought that these ideas were executed on well enough to justify seeing them return there was one major boss however that was unlike anything in any previous from software game Star Scourge foron it isn't perfect it's kind of janky to repurpose the summoning system for characters that are supposed to be in the same world as us but I'm willing to forgive that because it allowed from sofware to create a truly unique encounter that was able to capture the feeling of fighting a foe so powerful that you are for once absolutely expected to get help for it and not just one or two summons but as many as you can get seeing redon at the end of shadow of the earth tree resurrected by mola's foul necromancy just to serve as another boss that adheres to the same rigid design as every other fight in this expansion does not leave me hopeful about the future of from software games I know that this is a new model with new animations and there are plenty of post talk lore justifications about how this was totally planned end from the beginning but it just feels wrong to me like when a series far past its prime brings back a fan favorite character as Nostalgia bait in too many places shadow of the AR Trey felt like a bad parody of common from software tropes without any self-awareness I didn't think we were already at that point with Elden ring but I guess I was giving from software too much credit as a final point I'm going to to discuss the idea that eldering is somehow going against the trends of modern game design in short I find this premise to be absurd in general each successive Souls game became more conventional than the last and Elder ring is just the next step in the same direction this isn't necessarily bad convention exists for a reason but it is incredibly naive to claim that a game with resps fast travel and open world with a horse unkillable NPCs and frequent checkpoints is anything except conventional just because it doesn't have an explicit difficulty slider people like to pretend that this game isn't mainstream so they can feel cool about beating it but eldering has sold tens of millions of copies and it would not have reached that level of financial success without making these concessions that appeal to wider audiences I'm not saying that people shouldn't enjoy Elder r or shadow of the earth tree it's still better than other AAA games in most ways and I'm sure that for some people it will serve as a stepping stone for getting into more Niche and unconventional games but anyone saying that Elden ring bucks modern gaming convention is lying to themselves for the sake of their own ego if you have an emotional attachment to the idea of Elden ring being a super difficult game that doesn't appeal to mainstream audiences you have fallen for one of the most effective marketing campaigns in video game history if people truly cared about playing games for the difficulty alone they would not be playing Elden ring there are many many games which were far more difficult it's sad to see both from software and the player base at large forget that there is much more to this style of game than overdesigned boss Encounters this sort of meta discussion doesn't really affect the quality of the game itself but it's still worth talking about because it does affect the quality of future games if players refuse to critique games even ones they like game studios are going to keep repackaging the same games to sell back to them again and again it's simple economics when a franchise becomes too big to fail each entry becomes an Ever more degenerated version of the original concept an unwillingness to call this out whether by New or Old players only results in the continued degradation of games as a whole

Channel: Merlin

Views: 2,674

Keywords: shadow of the erdtree critique, elden ring dlc review

Id: 0X_zSDAcfzA

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2024