Hi everyone! Thank you so much for watching and sharing your opinions on the video and the DLC itself. I am humbled by the very positive feedback, but the video is not without problems, and I want to address some of them here and clarify a few things. Firstly, as many of you have pointed out, I was incorrect in the "Bob" segment - it's not inconsistent. What seems to be happening is that if Bob two-hands the sword AND does an attack AND you don't hit him with a heavy enough weapon during the first few frames of that attack - he gets hyper armor that stops you from interrupting him. It appears to be consistent, and I didn't catch it because I was confused after interrupting him several times when he WAS two-handing (thought the other conditions weren't met). As you can tell, I'm not as familiar with the PvP mechanics that are in play against NPC fights, and it's my bad. I still don't think it's good design for those fights, but that wasn't my argument there, so I am sorry for that mistake. My point against Commander Gaius' attacks still stands. During the editing, one of the clips showcasing the evidence of inconsistency for his boar back-kick-attack got cut at the start, and I didn't notice. That was quite unfortunate, and sadly I can't insert it back at this point. If you don't believe that he kicked me through the shield - I urge you to test it yourselves by trying to ONLY block his attacks for a few minutes - you will be surprised by the amount of times you'll get hit. Also, when I block his magic spear attack the first time - I know I still take damage because the shield doesn't have 100% magic negation - that's not the problem. The problem is shown in the next clip, where the shield is ignored entirely. I thought that was obvious, but maybe not to all. I should've outlined more differences between Rellana and Radahn when I was talking about similar initial reactions to them. Rellana is without a doubt a much better boss with clearer attacks, and I should've made it clearer as well. In terms of difficulty - I am not saying that I want bosses to be easier - I am saying that I want them to be less frustrating to learn. Which is why when I suggest at least lowering enemy damage output, I also say that it should be compensated with them having higher health. That will probably not be enough, but it's the simplest step in the right direction, in my opinion. And finally, to those who that tell me that the reason we search for Miquella is because there can only be one Elden Lord and so he needs to be dealt with - no it's not. Eventually that might become our concern, but before entering the DLC - we had no clue. Not only that, but the shadow lands have 0 (ZERO) impact on the base game. You can still become Elden Lord while ignoring the Shadow Lands in their entirety, and still get the same amazing endings we got before. None of them feature the return of Miquella, so I guess if you were happy with the motivation provided in the base game - that's even less of a reason to go anywhere. And even if, in the hindsight, you could imagine that the grace, or something equally abstract, guided us there to figure out what needs to be done (despite it still not changing anything) - it was communicated very poorly. At the end of the day, I, like many others, was playing through the whole DLC without any clue as to why we kill those bosses. I understand why I do that as a player - because I enjoy the gameplay - but not the character. And call it a controversial take, but I would've liked to know.
with your last point the reason the tarnished enters the shadow lands is because were guided by grace to do so. sure the tarnished doesn't know exactly why grace is guiding us, but we have followed it the whole way through the base game so why would we stop once were Elden lord, thus giving the tarnished a reason to be there. And you come to learn why grace guided us to the lands through Ansbach.
and bro realized that you dont need to do bosses solo to have fun with the game. the bosses are not designed around summons there designed to be beatable with any build, some just happen to be easier with different builds
Going by that logic, there is no reason to go to the Ringed City if you didn't play Ashes of Ariandel, and there is no reason to go to the Old Hunters cause it's just a nightmare spiritual plane and not an actual place. There are in-universe reasons of course, but if we're talking player character relevance, the whole "Miquella being potential competition" thing probably has more relevance than any prior From dlcs(we do know he was trying to create his own order similar to Ranni from item descriptions in the base game). On the topic of not knowing why you fight bosses, you won't know why you fight any boss in Bloodborne/Ds1/Ds3 outside of just self-defense and the same goes for Elden Ring. There are exceptions of course, but do you know why you had to fight the Crystal Sage? Or Curse Rotted Greatwood? Or the Old Demon King that doesn't even bother you unless you seek him out? Or the Witches of Hemwick? Or the Taurus/Capra Demon? Or the Demon Prince? Or Champion Gravetender? Or the Living Failures? Or Laurence? Or hell even Artorias and Sanctuary Guardian. Of course, a lot of these would be answered with "cause of self-defense" and that's fine.
It sounds like a rework of Joseph Anderson's joke for his review of the base game where he said it's a masterpiece, but a shattered one. This one hits for both parts in terms of tying it to the game though.
@@solomongrundy1905well Joseph’s tied to the game as well because Elden ring being a shattered master piece also refers to the shattering that happened in game
@@slothorne8222 That's why I said both parts hit for this one, since "Jagged" and "Peak" both come from the game, while "Shattered" matches but "Masterpiece" doesn't
They hit me harder then mesmer did. They are harder for me to best. But I have trouble with every enemy on horse I just struggle with even basic enemies
@@bombyo3634 everyone has certain enemies that just give you hell. Compared to everything else in the dlc I felt like I had all day to dodge their attacks.
@YOGO_MUSHI I tried to fight romance at the end my controller dropped I just picked it up to see it start over right after I picked it back up. 😶🌫️😭😭😭
Yeah, record breaking game, but we still cant solve cameras. Or mobility issues. It feels so weird to have a stamina bar against enemies who seemed to have none. Endless chains into input read spams. Or only having a fucking roll when these bosses are near jumping wall to wall in 1 second. In bb and sekiro. It feels like my character can actually keep up and is suited for the bosses. In elden ring it feels like i need to use gimmicks.
What Im personally tired with is that all of Elden Ring has to go around "difficulty", if people liked how the bosses works compared to player or not... You know what objectively is an issue and changing it would benefit everyone of us, Elden Ring fans, haters o anyone? Improve the optimization, that since OG Dark Souls had been very bad on some areas, improve the camera, which doesn´t do any justice to giant boss fights, improve the hitboxes, who technology had advanced enough already to not have giant cilinders on weapons.
I get that these are supposed to be sad games but honestly it’s hard to invest in any NOC quests in these games knowing basically every one of them will die horribly.
Yeah it really begins to hamper the effect of it when it's done over and over again, the same goes for alot of the other things fromsoft loves to reuse
@@gabriellecollier8127 yeah the issue is that it all feels for naught knowing they'll just go batshit insane tweaking and try to kill you fail, but yeah :(
Heavily agree with you on the feeling after the final boss. I didn't feel like I learned anything. In fact, for most bosses, I would get a lucky win far before ever reaching mastery which just felt so underwhelming. Midra was the one of the few bosses this didn't happen with for me. I actually had 0 flasks when I beat him and it felt like I overcame a true challenge of my skills. Best boss in all of ER imo.
On motivations: Ansbach and Thiollier’s quests individually lead you to understand that Miquella is very dangerous and has to be dealt with. I found my own motivations reversed by those discoveries and felt engaged when facing Leda and the final boss.
This was my experience too. At the start I was just there to meet miquella cuz he seemed like a cool guy but the longer I played the more I felt he was a problem and needed to go down. So the final confrontation gave me the closure I needed. It‘s like the first dark souls DLC, noone was there to applaud you for taking down artorius, in fact your deeds will be misappropriated to him, but you did them because they needed to be done. It‘s a thankless job but you‘re the only one who can do it.
@@_CrimsonBladeThe issue here is that Miquella wants to make the world better by subduing everyone’s minds with his enchantment. Basically he would eradicate free will in order to make the world a “better” place. This is unambiguously dangerous.
Shaman village is probably my favorite location in the entire game, upon first stepping in there I knew it was special. Then you learn all the lore, amazing.
@@Braylenc123 I fought radahn for like, 6 hours, and then proceeded to get bored and stopped having fun with the fight. At that point I felt like I had to force myself to keep fighting him. So I just used a mimic tear and beat him 3rd try. Crazy how easy the dlc is if you summon.
@@Braylenc123 glad I sticked through! such a fun fight without cheese. i missed bosses that are really hard and you have to learn the whole pattern. not just trading blows and eventually winning. base game was honestly too easy
Elden ring and it's dlc is something I both love and hate at the same time. The world and art design is amazing and a joy to explore, but there's little to find in it, and the pve honestly just isn't that fun. In previous from games, the pve was amazing, with the bosses just being the cherry on top, while in elden ring the game feels like a beautiful, but empty, ice cream cone, with a scorpion pepper on top.
As I'm currently doing a second playthrough of the DLC, I agree with the Scadutree Fragment criticisms because if they are basically a requirement to be able to have any chance of tackling a boss, I feel that they should have had at least a fair chunk be rewards after bearing the major bosses or a miniboss in the legacy dungeon. Hell, there are 5 fragments located behind one of the optional remembrance bosses, and they give you one for beating the hippo boss at the start of the Shadow Keep so it should have been a no Brainer to have them more as rewards, while keeping ones located at crosses. Cause it would give you a minimum fragment level for each of the legacy bossed that is essentially, "this is where you should be at the minimum" and all the remaining ones are the optional ones to make things easier for you if you want
I played Sekiro after Shadow of the Erdtree, and wow, the bosses are about equally fast and aggressive. BUT, each and every Sekiro boss fight feels incredibly engaging. Sekiro has the agility and the tools to outmanoeuvre any boss once learned. Fighting Maliketh, Malenia, Rellana, Radahn, feels outrageous in comparison. I wish I could fight them as Sekiro - they’d still be tough, but fair and likely even fun.
Thats the thing about sekiro they gave us one weapon and designed bosses around that id rather from give us a main character ,one or two weapons and 6 or 7 good unique bosses then elden trash bosses
I 100% agree that if Fromsoft go down the path of thinking “the community will accept any level of absurd difficulty as long as we give them multiple ways to invalidate it” then the magic of the souls games will be lost. Fromsoftwares souls games are long overdue an update in core gameplay mechanics especially when you consider that dodge roll/attack during enemy’s recovery frames is a gameplay loop that started in 2009 with Demon souls. Sekiro to me marks Froms successful attempt at increasing difficulty in a fair and interesting way and I hope they returns to new combat innovations. Ever since I played Lies of P I can’t escape the feeling that if Elden ring had Lies of Ps core combat mechanics it’d be by far my favourite game of all time and when you look at lots of its bosses through the lens of Lies of Ps combat they feel like absolute masterpieces of boss design held back by archaic combat design.
What "absurd difficulty"? Of all the souls games Elden Ring is by far the most accessible which throws the least roadblocks at you. Unless you decide to make a challenge run on your own volition, but that's on you, not on the game then.
@@shiroamakusa8075i think you didn’t read the comment, so I’ll repeat it, any absurd difficulty if they give them ways to invalidate it. If a boss like radhan fills the screen with incomprehensible lights and does one shot you, you should just, you know, search for a way to trivialize the fight with a bugged ash of war, summons and 5 mins of pre-buffing. If radhan did the less damage, and his attacks were more visible (using the sekiro camera angles maybe?), do you think that would be too easy? That it wouldn’t make the community to look out for other build than the meta and abusing the “let my clone fight” ? Wouldn’t make it easier to actually appreciate the fight and encourage a duel of learning the timings and overcoming it, instead of just put the most damage and the most poise and wish for good rng? Or maybe yeah the game would be better if every attack was a one shot. Maybe why have health even!
@@trg2516 what did i say then, cause i mostly asked questions. So you don’t think than when big damage numbers aren’t tied to a fight, people don’t start learning how to fight? Cause then you would be surprised to know the existence of a game called Sekiro.
This is hands down the best critique of the DLC I have seen. There are some good ones out there, but I feel people go too soft on Elden Ring/the DLC just because FromSoft at their worst is still a GOTY.
@@jameslough6329and worst, directionless of dlc, Inconsistency in quality and storytelling, showing signs of limitations of dodge roll/ attack combat, balancing etc. This dlc is basically fromsofts attempt of supplementing quality with quantity so dlc does not fell wasted. Its right in same range as Ashes of Ariandel in quality (and thats was considerd the worst Fromsofts dlc till now).
@@Vengeance_Im did you heard of Ringed city, Old hunter dlcs? Content vise it is the biggest one yet (so if we are judging by content amount standards then maybe yes, but thats the rabbit whole that should not be encouraged in future since Fromsoft could could end up in Ubisoft situation and print low grade content for sake of it), but quality is significantly worse then any previous dlcs.
@@madkoala2130 I strongly disagree with you. I think the quality of SOTE's content is MUCH more consistent than the base game of Elden Ring and FromSoft definitely went with a quality over quantity approach to the DLC. From my experience, the quality of the new remembrance bosses, legacy dungeons, new weapons classes, art direction, environmental storytelling, and even minor side dungeons has all been consistently great from start to finish. Sure there are a couple stinker bosses, and the lore of the Final Boss could have definitely been handled better. But overall the DLC is without a doubt FromSoft's best work to date.
I’m shocked Rellana had no intro cinematic or build up. You don’t need an intro cinematic to make the build up to the boss awesome. Bayle was perfect in that way. The build up was incredible and the payoff truly hit. But given the gravitas of Rellana… where was hers?
Yeah. Half the bosses get no cutscene and barely any lore but it was very important that when you empty the water in shadow keep church district or burn the sealing tree you watch a minute long cutscene.
100% agree. Especially considering what an important role she has from a lore perspective, linking the Erdtree world to the Shadowlands. You just enter the door and she starts fighting you like you entered a demi-human queens hideout.
I looked for the missing closure at the end by returning to saint trina, because she is an aspect of miquella, who asked me to kill him, but she was simply dead too, which makes sense, I suppose, but was disappointing nonetheless
Sorry but that’s a you problem. On subsequent playthroughs these bosses are really fair, even radahn. The only problematic one is gaius. They’re in general just more complex and harder to learn. But infinitely more satisfying than any piss easy excuse for a boss in dark souls 3
@@Stanzbey69i agree idk if elden ring was your first souls game but having played all their other titles afterwards the bosses felt like they could be basic enemies in elden ring in terms of difficulty
When I've struggled on a boss for a long time, I've been told to just use Mimic Tear or to summon another player, and I always refuse. While part of me does this out of a stubborn "I want to do this by myself" mentality, another part is because I have to partly relearn the boss. When there's more than one target, the boss becomes unpredictable and will sometimes do one half of a combo to one target and the rest to another. They can also change targets for single attacks on a whim; for example, a boss might raise a sword to slam down on my summon, but at the last second they might spin on a dime to attack me instead. I now have no way to know when the boss is gonna attack me, or I'll get swiped by a hitbox I didn't know existed because I'd always dealt with a combo in one way. It just really throws any sense of flow off and bosses just don't seem to function well when facing more than one attacker. Their animations can look like they're on the verge of bugging out and it takes away from the experience for me.
We've got a similar experience, I beat all FS games multiple times, in total over 1000h+. And I fully agree with your review about the difficulty. DLC is hard not becuase you are underleveled, it's hard becuase bosses introduce cheap difficulty, spam aggro for 15s to give you 1 quick attack window or if you need to heal then 0 attacks and the cycle repeats. Additionally you get full arena AOE and fights are designed to hide information about incoming attacks to kill you everytime the new strong attack/combo is introduced which makes learning fights very unfun. Also, new weapons face some problems. If you have only a short window to attack, you need to maximize the damage which favors 2x big bonks & jump attack which feels like all new weapons are useless for boss fights. On top of that you get input reading and programmed punishment for natural reactions. You pass the phase of well telegraphed attacks and then a new attack is coming that you can't guess how to avoid and it insta-kills you, then you struggle to get to this point again and you get killed again. This is not a good design, it's a design to hold you on this boss for longer. Also, these bosses are 20x aggro Bloodborne, but you still play with DS3 character with no additional things to balance it, besides extra jump attack. There is no duel anymore in DLC, it's roll roll roll roll roll roll roll, hit once with a toothstick. I remember epic duels from Bloodborne (like Lady Maria, father Gascgoigne, Ludwig, etc.) which were so intense, a lot of parrying and good stuff, that's what the well designed fight is, interactive fight, hit for hit, a few attacks by the boss, and then it's my turn, not watching infinite combos over and over again. This DLC introduces the worst boss balance in their franchise, which in many places feels like cheap difficulty or being hard for the sake of being hard. They broke the game because of ashes, I knew since the beginning that adding ashes will kill the boss balance and it did. Now you can either play solo and the difficulty is broken or you can play with ashes and it trivalises the fight completely.
I've beaten the final bosses solo on 2 of my characters and I gotta say, its a bad boss not (just) bc its too hard and bc the second phase puts a lot of shit on the screen that fucks your visibility, but because this boss punishes build variety a lot, I beat him first with my dex arcane bleed build, normal character nothing out of the ordinary, was using a blood infused milady. But for my pure faith caster/cleric build I didnt cast a single spell to beat him bc he doesnt give you enough room to safeky cast any spell that isnt fast like glintstone pebble bc he never stops attacking and I didint wanna just spam catchflame for the fight. I basically had to beat him through parrying and critical hits on my pure caster build bc using spells on him solo was really risky and not worth the danger you had to put yourself through, not to mention that almost half of the dlc incantations are slow as shit and really hard to use in most of the bosses bc of it. (The new butterfly rot spell is a fucking joke, takes longer than scarlet aonia and deals less damage and less scarlet rot build up all that without hyper armor in the cast anymation, thank you for a fucking useless spell fromsoft)
On my int build playthough, have been trying the new DLC spells and other underutilized spells to fight Radahn The only reliable spells to punish his attack are just Carian slicer and Glintstone pebble speed spell like Night comet or Comet Tried Gavel of Haima and Adula's Moonblade but you really need a large opening for that There is no difficulties in between for mages, it is either piss easy or CBT
I didnt really enjoy the DLC. Some bosses were very good but i found exploration disappointing. You either get the scooby doo fragment (whole idea of these things even existing is bad imho) or just a cookbook. So many areas like coast or abyssal woods were just empty and all you got for exploration was just the views. Are pretty graphics inportant in making good game? For sure. Can they carry whole exploration if they are the only upside to it? No, not for me at least. Overall boss design was ok. Some I really enjoyed, some i absolutely hated. Im afraid that FS is starting to prioritize flashy combos and overall cinematics over making an actual fun boss. I liked dark souls and Sekiro bosses more. I hope that FS fans wont kill me for saying all of that. DLC is 6/10 for me.
Unfortunately seems like they are on the witch hunt for those who have negative opinion of dlc, just look what happend to Feeble king. All tho some of the things he said are bs, but he nailed in the head with exploration criticism. Those people are not Fromsoft fans (if they were, they would know drop in quality is this dlc to previous dlcs) those are fresh elden ring fans who maybe tried playing previous games once and never tried it again.
The fragments were a great idea though. They stop you from just steamrolling the dlc with your endgame build while also not necessitating the need to grind levels if you were lower level in order to catch up to what amounts to post game content essentially They also make the co-op experience better since the matchmaker goes off of your character level rather than the scadutree level. I've been able to be summoned to help people with every boss in the dlc even after beating it since leveling my character wasn't the primary goal. In the base game, you pretty much get locked out of fighting earlier bosses with people since your level determines everything. Not a concern in the dlc unless you do grind and overlevel yourself.
@@bondrewd5935 real fromsoft wouldnt blindly say "This is best dlc ever!" while also ignoring glaring issues that makes it no way near the quality of previous dlcs and would not go full on witch hunt for those who criticised it and had good reasons why this isnt the best one for them (same thing is why non of us can agree on which Soulsborn game is the best one). Dont prosecute people for saying something contrary to publics opinion, this dlc here is.pure case in that.
@@madkoala2130yes but everyone has an opinion. As a fromsoft fan my complaints are exploration rewards being mostly lackluster, lack of the new weapon types, some bosses having wonky moves and hit boxes, and a slight slight disappointment with the story and lore of the dlc, mainly the radahn thing. But even that isn’t bad for me, just could have been better lore wise. But a 6 form the comment above? That’s barely above average. I mean I get everyone has an opinion but I think most people disliking the dlc are exaggerating the complaints and forgetting the positives. And I feel like most of them also probably did not like Elden ring either. For me it’s a nice 8.5/10 for me. But the “oh I needa be different so ima say this dlc is shit and anyone who disagrees is now a fromsoft super fan who is brain dead”, is stupid and really cringe honestly. U can have opinions on this dlc but to force people to also think it’s bad is another type of cringe. Also this video doesn’t necessarily mean the game is bad. If someone were to only focus on the good things of the dlc then u would think the dlc is the best thing ever made. It seems the people in the comments think the dlc is just negative cause of a honest critique video
People are too invested in the hype train and gaslight themselves to believe this is another nigh flawless "masterpiece". Just like in the base game, the ideas are there, but From‘s bitten off more than it can chew and the cracks are blatantly visible. Sometimes, less is more.
14:06 so pretty much the reason why are are confronting miquella is because both of our goals are in opposition to one another, you becoming Elden Lord and Miquella becoming a God. We unfortunately can't have both. It's really not that more complex. Granted like you mentioned, Miquella kinda manipulated everyone from the start so maybe a bit of revenge is in order as well. Miquella's age of compassion is flawed because he shedded away the most important thing, his love (st. trina). You can't have compassion without love. So In a way he's committing the same mistakes Marika did.
@@High_Rate136 The Elden Lord is the consort to the resident god and Miquella already chose someone who isn't you. Also, he plans to supplant Marika's Golden Order with his own while you are poised to inherit it, so there's no way for the both of you to coexist.
I think we're confronting Miquella because if he becomes a god he will rule as a tyrant. Even if Miquella's intentions are good and he's blind to his own evil, he's still evil.
FYI the reason he sometimes poises through attacks is greatsword get a poise boost while two handing and attacking. It’s so heavier weapons can trade with smaller ones in pvp
After looking through all of my footage with him again, I think you are right. I was confused because I actually interrupted his two handed attacks at least twice. Maybe it's because I hit him very early into his attack, or he did a weaker version, not sure. But it doesn't seem to happen when he's not two-handing the weapon, so at least there's that consistency
@@Umbriferous Yeah that’s right - just early into the attack. A bit of a weird one given it depends on the armor of the npc but the armor of solitude has a lot of poise. E.g. you won’t see that as an issue for the ancient dragon man fight given hyper armor values of the great katana and the poise of his armor
35:00 I hope the next game gives you a boss rematch feature. There's certain bosses I would love to fight again but I don't want to replay the whole game again.
@@skinnytimmy1like, this is my main criticism of Radahn reuse and its defenders. If you really wanted a rematch against prime version of that boss, then put like dream bosses in Hollow Knight or boss rush mod etc. do not force it as final fight of dlc. I know its not the same model or moveset, but still i didnt get through all dlc just to fight Radahn again.
The reason why it doesn't feel fun being stuck on a boss anymore is because it happens with every boss now. Every remembrance boss has countless delayed or unnatural-looking attacks that you can't intuit how to dodge on your first attempt. This means that you're guaranteed to die 10+ times figuring out how to dodge these attacks. It used to be interesting when you ran up against a wall like that because not every boss was extremely hard and it was fun to finally meet a real challenge. But when every boss is a roadblock, it gets exhausting. You lose the motivation to learn him and fight fair because you know the next boss after him will just be another roadblock.
It’s important to remember that despite us all playing this like a separate video game this is an end game dlc with end game content and I only really want bosses I have to take my time on. Put in the context of a full playthrough it makes sense. One of the major criticisms of the main game was how easy it was to get overpowered without even realizing it and never having to learn any of the bosses. The DLC fixed this problem and people are still complaining
@@bobdylanlovr69 I would wager that the vast majority of players did not complain that they could become "overpowered" in the base game. That was [likely] an extremely small subset of diehard fans. I would wager that the same people complaining then are complaining now (since most ppl who bought the game did not make it to mogh). Ironic, that it's impossible to please the hardcore From fans lol
@@masque9446speaking as someone who over-leveled and upgraded through meticulous exploration with the main game and then felt the bosses were too easy and felt like I accidentally made my first playthrough worse, I liked the challenge of this DLC and the scadutree blessing system is a neat way to ensure you can keep it challenging if you want
I don’t agree with this at all. For me, being stuck on a boss and having to learn to dodge a multitude of difficult combos just makes it more satisfying and rewarding to beat that boss. And also there are so many ways you can make even the hardest bosses a breeze (perfume bottles for fuck sake).
Great video that provides a fair critique of something you enjoy. Extremism can be all too common to come across when hearing this about the DLC. One issue that I had with the DLC that I don't hear much discussion about was the actual in-game map. With how dense and layered the open world is in the DLC I don't think that the map is as useful of a tool as it was in the base game. Personally, I have a hard time remembering which sites of grace are on which level of the world. I wish they had a map of the subterranean layer you could view independent of the surface map just like they did for underground segments in the base game. I somehow missed the connection that there was an impromptu infirmary set up for the jar victims in Shadow Keep. Thanks for pointing out that cool world building detail.
Something the DLC did and I wished was more prevalent in the main game was the abyssal wood's entrance, it's through a catacomb, imagine if it had megaman legend style of dungeons where they are all linked somehow to a greater underground instead of how sporadic caves, and catacombs felt in the lands between
@@buffoonustroglodytus4688 I know, it's the part of me that wished the game map was smaller, like a more condensed experience, it hurts the environmental storytelling and some progression aspects but it's such a cool feature
yeah those early reviews that the big fromsoft content creators put out where definitely overhyping this dlc. its a fun expansion and its definitely worth the 40 bucks but it has just enough things going against it to make it end up being like a 7.5/10 to me
Yeah once the final boss is patched or reworked it might be closer to an 8 for me, but this is the least I’ve enjoyed a roster of FromSoft bosses to date. Not necessarily in terms of quality for each boss but for the exhausting experience their movesets + design create for most builds
@@ryanmattioli9790 stop doing hard drugs. They can impair your ability to think and you can lose brain function that you will never recover. Based on your previous statement, you're already significantly impaired, maybe if you stop smoking meth now it's not too late for you...
My victory over Radahn was the most Hollow victory I had ever experienced. I could consistently No-hit his first phase but the second phase? Nah, it shows Fromsoft has lost the plot. It's not fun, it's not fair, it's not even challenging in the right way. The mere fact you can perform damn near perfectly only for him to say 'Lol no you actually die' with his 'Meteor strike electric Boogaloo' attack near the end is the biggest 'fuck you' I've ever seen thrown in. it's a roll of the dice if you live or die it's actually absurd. I had to resort to a shield and bleed (Not a spear) along with a Tank summon to actually pull a win. Radahn alone has made me unenthused for future Fromsoft titles. I've done SL1 playthroughs on all games and those were torture but it was torture of my own making. Radahn? No, it's active hostility towards players by design.
All you have to do is run one in direction to dodge the meteor strike lmao what're you talking it, it's almost a guraunteed no hit if you just run away.
The actual attack you should be talking about is his Meteor throw in Phase 2, i think in all of my 5 hours of fighting him i think i dodged the second part of that move twice. Absolute run killer for me, not to even mention one of his Slash comboes is literally a frame perfect dodge or else you eat the attack is just horrible boss design. A boss fully designed to widdle you down and force you to into panicking, just so frustrating. Atleast with Malenia there was pretty clear ways to combat her big moves. For Radahn it just felt like either im gonna get lucky and dodge it or suffer 2 flasks or just die.
Well done and very fair breakdown of the DLC. I sort of hope the next FromSoft Soulsborne game will be a more linear and contained experience like Sekiro or Bloodborne and bring some fresh gameplay elements to the table. It's much easier to balance around an intended playstyle than having so many options and paths to go down. I might be biased towards Sekiro, but it offers a combat system that you can master to a degree where you can easily beat the bosses just using the base mechanics. Additional mechanics like the prosthetic tools, consumables, throwables, weapon arts can help you vary your playstyle or arguably make fights easier, but you don't need any of them. Meanwhile, in Elden Ring but especially the DLC it seems like you want to use any in-arena NPC collaborators, spirit ashes, cheesy spells, overpowered weapon arts etc. if you don't want to feel frustrated. The DLC's most enjoyable bosses to me were Romina, Messmer, Putrescent Knight, BAYLE and hippo (although the latter two having heavy camera issues). Dancing Lion and Rellana seemed like they should have been the last 2 bosses before Messmer in terms of difficulty and relentless move sets. And yes, Radahn phase 2 is just straight up BS. On the topic of Lies of P: yes, introducing parry and rally in that game was a good idea to make the gameplay more interactive, but the game IMO had other issues, mostly with animations, camera and perceived parry timing. Plus making parry an arguably worse and more risky option than blocking in many cases, since you can rally back so much health. Meanwhile if you mistime the kind of unforgiving parry windows, you get flat out hit and can't rally back anything. And zero poise for heavy builds was definitely also a choice... But that's just some of my thoughts. Nevertheless, hyper aggressive enemies require other was to interact with them than dodge rolling and jumping. Yes you can parry SOME bosses in DS/ER, but that requires a certain build and play style, which brings us back to limited build variety if you don't want to be frustrated by boss encounters.
Some bosses are like getting into a fight with someone who doesn't know how to and just run up doing rapid-slaps while craning their head back as far as possible... except each one of those slaps carry the force of a heavy-weight boxer's haymaker
that Radahn presentation pretty much says it all. there's no fitting description for that other than bullshit. you forgot to mention how every boss and their mother has a tendency to outright fly into the air repeatedly so you can't hit them. the centipede lady does that shit all the time and its fucking frustrating to deal with.
@@andreybelyshev5093 Cerulean Coast needs to be big but it also could've used more actual filling in it The Finger Ruins also could've used a roaming boss or something at least.
@@andreybelyshev5093 it's most areas for me too much riding torrent into open spaces. Legacy dungeons are also very disappointing shadow keep is big but not very enjoyable.
Yep. Why do some of these areas even exists? Why does the red area exists when it has nothing but reused base game minibosses? Why is there THREE finger ruin areas? Why not just make one and actually put stuff in it? Put a little legacy dungeon there. What’s the point of abyssal woods? Stealth in a fromsoft game is a terrible idea. Why not just put a stealth section in Midras Manor and put the Manor somewhere else? There is so much places where content in useless areas could be put. Miyazaki said the world needed to be big in order to capture that scale of original Elden Ring. Unfortunately he didn’t extent that into the legacy dungeons, they are pitifully small besides Shadowkeep.
Amidst the seas of rapturous praise, I think videos like these are especially important. It's extremely useful for fostering your critical eye to deeply and thoroughly dissect what it is you like, dislike, and think could be better, while also offering up new ideas going forward. It's very rare, in both videos of extreme praise and overwhelming negativity, for you to completely agree with either one, so I think every single one of these videos discussing the ups and downs of this particular DLC and how it recontextualizes stuff from the base game is a worthy critique. Love the vid, love the points, keep it up 👍👍
Fantastic Review/Critique. Finaly more nuance then "Its just bad Bosses and to much reused Stuff" and "EZ Boss its not bad just git gud and a perfect World". Great Video, keep it up!
I think the reason Leda and her allies attack you is because of the broken enchantment letting her paranoid side out. Once Miquella's great rune is shattered and his spell is lifted, all of the npcs begin to show free will from him, and Leda's free will is very paranoid. She talks about others possibly being disloyal and asks about your suspicions, and can even kill Ansbach if you let her. It's this paranoia that eventually leads her down the line to you, and like Ansbach she finds a reason to believe you're against her cause, rallying up her allies to attack you. It's interesting to note as well that npcs whose questlines you've progressed through don't seem to show up as part of her group in the arena. I helped beat Messmer with the Hornsent and healed the brood for Moore, and then neither appeared in the fight, making me believe it's Leda that convinces anyone who hasn't been helped by you to turn against you. If it's truly the case, I think it's an amazing detail.
The biggest flaw in this dlc were the bosses, for me. The lack of cutscenes or dialogues was a shame. In the base game I got attached to the main bosses because they felt alive, they had character, they weren’t hollow shells you had to fight. They had a weight, a resonance in the fight. In the dlc I entered a boss room and I had to fight a random ripoff of sulyvahn don’t knowing why, a scarlet rot quelaag because… yeah, I guess, and that’s it. They die anonymously as they lived. It’s a pity. Then, with some exceptions, they didn’t feel dlc bosses at all. There was an excess of artificial difficulty: when even a single grab (like the Messmer one - which btw is the best boss in the dlc) can one shot you, or plenty unreadable combos leave you with one second to attack or heal, is not fun. Gael was a very difficult boss, but were necessary like 4 or 5 hits to kill you, and had a lot of windows. Finally, in other fromsoft games dlc bosses had something more as compared the main game ones, but here is the opposite. They had nearly nothing that made me gasp, like a mechanic or a moveset: midra is just an old man with frenzied flame incatations and 5 attacks, rellana is sulyvahn with base game sorceries and a unique one, consort radhan phase 1 is simply starscourge radhan with a blood flame attack (I refuse to consider the second phase a boss fight). The main game bosses felt more unique, experimental and in a nutshell… fun. As it should be for a dlc boss. I still love the dlc, but I can’t understand all the praise it received “bosswise”. They could have done so much more… PS: Sorry for my English is not my first language
An observation I made that contributes to the lack of boss cutscenes is that in SotE, there are only 1 demigod and 1 god, whereas in the base game, there were plenty of demigods. FromSoftware made sure each demigod was given a cutscene or two to characterize them and to show off their second phase twist. Outside of that, main story bosses such as Renalla, the Fire Giant, Maliketh, and Godfrey received similar treatment using cutscenes too. Suffice to say, it was the exception rather than the norm for a rememberance boss to lack a cutscene during their boss fight. To be honest, it makes it all the more upsetting that bosses like Rellana, Romina, Metyr, and Bayle didn't get their own boss cutscenes despite being lore significant/main story bosses
@@iamdoom9810metyr reveal plays much better without a cutscene. U get teleported to a freakish area with a eldrich being off in the distance. It makes everything way more eerie and off putting which is the intended reaction. A cutscene would’ve been cheesy in that scenario Also Bayle is supposed to be a immersive gameplay focused boss with the lead up. Bayle in all respect is a no bullshit no time to waste kinda boss so it makes sense he storms down on u. Rellana shoulda got a cutscene though
Messmer's grab attack does not one shot you I can attest to that, got hit by it multiple times but survive and he has no unreadable combos. I think the one combo people struggle with is the one where he lunges into the air and rapidly thrusts his spear with fire 5 times. That attack is extremely telegraphed, he always uses the same slash attack that dodges towards you and gives you time to react and roll towards or run away from his rapid thrusts in the air. What is a problem is Commader Gaius' thrust that instantly knocks out all fun from the fight. Screw that boss. Screw Jori Elder Inquisitor too. Though I agree with your take on how the bosses have like no cutscenes. There are only 3 bosses with cutscenes when every major boss is a remembrance boss. It's a huge disappointment that Rellana was given the Sulyvahn Treatment with no cutscenes and the same goes for Romina
"artificial difficulty" Funny, I didn't notice any. "unreadable combos" Nor of these. "leave you with one second to attack or heal, " Hardly ever this. "Gael was a very difficult boss, but were necessary like 4 or 5 hits to kill you," Yes he didn't do enough damage. "midra is just an old man with frenzied flame incatations and 5 attacks" Midra has like 20 attacks? "rellana is sulyvahn with base game sorceries" She has similarities to Pontiff but it's a very different boss. Rellana's move-set is much more complex and she has a lot more moves/longer combos. "The main game bosses felt more unique, experimental and in a nutshell… fun." To each their own I guess. While the base-game bosses slap, I think the DLC ones are, on average, better.
I think midra was fine. He didn’t feel bloated like rellana or radahn and had actual cutscenes and a cool atmosphere to go with the relatively simple moveset. Bayle is an amazing fight and messmer is self explanatory. I think romina is decent too but I hate the lack of cutscene
Genuinely just thank you for this video. I’m so glad to hear some actual fair criticism on the DLC. So many moments I was thinking “exactly” during this lol
You've put into words why summons bother me. Elden Ring was my first From game. I used them on my first playthrough, and when I beat the game, I didn't feel like I knew anything about any of the bosses. I felt I just got lucky. I went back and did a full replay, melee and no summons, and that's the moment the genre "clicked" for me. It built my confidence so much that I even went on to beat the game at level 1 and I went on to beat DS3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro since. The design of the summons are really cool and I would love to use them while still keeping the constant threat of being hit. Maybe make them weaker and don't have bosses aggro them? Great video.
Nah that's only your opinion. Lots of people like using summons and love having them to fight along them. Especially if u need game pass or online mode to be summons help and u don't want to pay Summons are perfect. Your not forced to summon so don't use it
@@bombyo3634 Yeah, it’s just my opinion. I never claimed this as an objective statement. I used summons on my first playthrough and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as my second where I didn’t use them. Not sure what you’re trying to prove. Keep using summons, that’s fine.
@@bombyo3634Summons are fine but the OP isn't wrong, there is a vast difference in truly learning the boss going in Solo and using spirit ashes. My thing is that I give a boss a few times solo and use ashes if I cannot get it, both are fine playstyles but you do in fact learn boss movesets better going solo.
@JustKelso1993 That's probably true for learning bosses but the entire argument is just opinion. Some people myself included don't care about learning a boss and just wants to beat it and move on. So summons and being OP is fine. Cheese is fine. Super cheese is fine. You can choose how u want to play.
I kind of somewhat agree a little bit. On repeat playthroughs, the open world is really boring and tedious to traverse. And most of fromsoft’s environmantal storytelling is done in the legacy dungeons, while the open world is quite barren and plagued with reused assets. While I enjoyed elden ring’s open world the first time and think it was a good for this game, I also hope fromsoft’s future games are more linear like sekiro. Less open world but also with the ability to explore different areas and get stronger if you get stuck.
I don't think open world design is inherently bad for soulslikes. The problem is that things were too spread out to have meaningful encounters and you were incentivized to just ride past everything on Torrent. As much as I enjoyed horse combat, the game would have been better if the open world was condensed to half its size but you had to traverse all the areas on foot.
And I'm having a lot more fun exploring the levels and smaller open areas in Stellar Blade. In 13 years of gaming I've only completed 3 big open world games (Elden Ring base game / Fenyx Rising / Skyrim). And Skyrim to this day is the only open world game I've finished twice (once on PS3 and once on PS4). That's why I see it as a big plus, when a game doesn't have a huge open world. But what's worse is that I no longer enjoy the combat encounters either. I don't know how you play the game... but I feel like I'm way too limited in my actions. Even when watching way better players, most people simply use one type of attack. Enemies aren't defeated with different combos, with a variety of spells, or with multiple weapons - but with a single ability. Sure, different weapons / skills are used (like Asmongold switching from jump attacks to guard counters) but that's not a combat system I find engaging. I play the game with light gear for example. So I can use and switch between multiple weapons and also because light armor looks nicer. And I also use different spells to further mix up the combat encounters. That's what I want from a fantasy RPG / big sandbox and what's fun to me. (Unless the basic combat system is so fun that it doesn't require multiple weapons.) But in "Shadow of the Erdtree", efficiency is pretty much everything due to the difficulty and very small recovery windows in which you can perform an action. To me, it's like getting the full job kit in FF14 but being limited to playing a low-level dungeon where you only have access to one or two skills. But not because you don't have access to the kit, but because if you press more than one button or perform an action that lasts longer than 2 seconds, you die. Sure, there are summons that give you a little more leeway... But summons don't really add anything to the encounter or gameplay unless being a summoner is your class fantasy. But even from that perspective, the system isn't that fun.
I did feel like the difficulty of this DLC is pretty uneven. Early doors it can be very hard, then once you've got some scooby snacks and a good build the mid to late game is straight cruising and then the final boss is crushing again regardless. I've enjoyed the DLC as a whole though but I do agree some other recent soulslikes have added quality of life and story telling features that feel noticeably absent here now. A solid critique 👍
12:34 somehow this line perfectly describes how I believe marika feels when she is finally free from the curses she and her family has, it’s just a throwaway line from godricks last bit of his dialogue and yet the way it flows with the hum of marika’s theme just makes me sit back and listen… Beautiful…
Excellent and well-thought critique. I think the Scadufragment system did more harm than good. It’s a chore to collect but nothing arduous. What’s worse is the balancing system around co-op, because they had to take PVP into account. To summarize, regardless of your own Scadlevel, if a host’s Scadlevel is lower, you’re downgraded to their level; worse yet if they’re on NG+2 or 3, find themselves struggling because they can’t find enough fragments or refuse to level them, and therefore resort to summoning. In the base game the co-op sorting system relies on Rune level and weapon upgrade to match you with players within your range (unless you use passwords). In the DLC however, I could be adequate or even overpowered in my own file, and find myself getting killed in one or two hits even with adequate defense (armor/talismans) and buffs. But it hasn’t been a month since DLC release and I suspect once the honeymoon is over, players might be honest enough to admit that while FromSoft are capable of producing brilliant, S-tier level games, they’re not infallible or above making poor decisions.
Dude I felt like a crazy person with the Gaol Knight. Feels good to be validated. Another fight that was weird was the Dragonkin NPC you fight in a catacomb. He would stagger on hit but after the first stagger he would recover and hit you back even before the time it took to finish my follow up swing. It was literally forced damage. And it's not like I was using a slow weapon. I had the uchigatana Anyway, good video!
I think with a few of them, the big issue is the camera. Like the Lion. Has one of the worst cameras in any souls boss ever, which is a shame cause I think there could be arguments for strong mechanics.
I am also tired of hearing people talk about Scadutree fragments and act like they excuse From from all criticism. They basically refuse to balance anything themselves and place all the burden on the player, then when the player doesn't get it right they and all their cultists tell them to git gud and collect fragments.
I guess your idea of "balance" is then "I get to one-shot all the bosses no matter what I do", then? Because that's the only way your comment makes sense.
I personally like the concept behind the fragments (localized difficulty scaling), it's the random distribution that makes it annoying I'd rather the fragments come from each demigod equivalent boss, so you power up by beating the major bosses pre radahn rather than searching random places
I'm tired of people talking about leveling up. Fromsoft should balance the game around level 1 because I don't want to engage with any rpg elements. (This is how you sound)
It's the opposite they did balance the game by adding fragments so everyone can do it ..If some is higher skill then you he will need like 2 of them and you will need 10 ,they are all over the place and not hard to find ..But your logic if you suck at boss balance is not good meanwhile there is a girl on yt beating same boss as you with legs,isnt that embarrassing,so you crying that they need to balance the game to your skill then it will be good but all guys who are higher skill will walk through dlc in two hours so who cares about them if you had fun.. Fragments are best thing ever they added..On lvl 150+ one level take 100k souls so if you go farm a milion to 10 lvls ,if you go to Malenia with 150 or 160 lvl its same shit ,10 levels wont make any difference and will take forever to farm them,but 4 fragments with 5% bonus dmg and defence will make massive difference,use you head before you type
Everything BUT the boss fights were top tier. Look, play how you want. Summons or not. I don’t use them because that’s a personal preference. But the bosses in the dlc were just silly. Fromsoft is losing its touch on the fights. No longer is it based on natural reaction and reading, it’s more of a memorization of patterns. You learn a telegraph or when a certain moveset is to occur, dodge roll jump whatever. I honestly became so exhausted of it that for some encounters I just hit up my summons and cheese it. It’s just fucking stupid. A complete waste of time IMO.
Man, you basically put everything I've been trying to figure out about this DLC and how it sat with me, in better words than I could ever muster. Especially with Radahn, I felt... No joy in beating him.
honestly this has nothing to do with the video but why would they hide midra so well only to give him what feels like such low scaling? that boss’s design is so good but held back by the level most people will be when finding him.
when you said we're friends with all the npcs to then just turn and kill them without reason you're missing the point entirely, Miquella wanted to ascend to a god and make Radahn his Elden Lord, we are supposed to become Elden Lord, we can't just let that happen, we infiltrate into Miquella's charmed followers, locate some possible allies (Ansbach with his allignance to Mohg and Thiollier with St. Trina) and disrupt the entire plan because to us Miquella is no more than a competitor we must crush in our journey, we actually betray Miquella's followers with clear reason, nothing "just happens" randomly
My question to that would be, why can't this be a choice? Like yeah, I totally see that as a valid option with good reasoning. But then again, why can't we choose to side with Miquella (despite the red flags admittedly) and get a new ending for the base game, assuming you haven't already done that yet? It could be played off as you paving the way for Miquella to surplant the Golden Order in the Lands Between by killing Radagon and destroying the Elden Ring once and for all. I don't mind if the final cutscene isn't afraid to portray it as a terrifying conclusion and tries its best to make you feel bad for falling for Miquella's charm in a "is this what you really wanted" kind of way, but I don't see what'd stop you from abandoning your initial purpose like he has.
@@iamdoom9810 I think it comes down to his consort being Radahn, why would YOU kill Radagon and pave the way if you're to be just some random helper guy? Everything Miquella orquestrated was with Radahn in mind as his Lord, he even made a vow, in his fight he asks you to step down and just watch he create a new era, if that's what you actually believe then just don't fight him, this way you actually let him do his thing and you can RP pleading allegiance to him or something, even tho he is an empyrean and a god candidate i think it fits that he just doesn't care about us and thus becomes our competitor, let's be honest, if we're talking empyreans id drown into that rotussy as my godess after beating her up but the story just doesn't work that way
I think it is random in the sense of "why even frame them as allies at the begining when we all know we went to the Shadow Realm to duel and kill Miquella". Why not frame them as enemies from the begining if there was no choice? The only who get the surprise is the NPCs, and NPC fights suck, so why? I believe there was a missing opportinity: If we had the option to use Miquella's Great Rune to remove the brainwash on Leda and company and show them the true side of Miquella, it would have been great to see them join the final battle just as we had with Radahn in the base game. Then have them at the arena after the fight for some closure.
One thing that annoys me about the skibidi tree fragments is that they didn’t just give you one after a boss fight and scale it accordingly like how sekiro did it with boss remembrances being used to raise attack power. Fromsoft stated outright that the skeet fragments were going to be similar to the remembrances so WHY MAKE THE SYSTEM WORSE?
The system was used to encourage exploration. If players knew the only way to boost their defense and attack was through boss remembrances then they would just bum rush the bosses and not explore the open world. Which half the game is exploration.
@@buffoonustroglodytus4688 then have mini bosses hidden around the world that also give you the fragments just like Sekiro did, carefully placed bosses at locations that encourage exploration while also adding to the replayability. Main bosses don’t have to be the only ones that drop the fragments, not a tough development question at all and it’s a shame that they answered it so poorly considering their success in a previous game that had the exact same thing.
@@DandifiedToe yeah I can see where you are coming from, and I agree sekiro did the system better. I don’t know if I can think of a reason why they chose to do it this way instead of the sekiro way. Maybe they couldn’t make enough interesting bosses for all the schadenfreude levels?
Just to throw out another perspective: For a first-time playthrough, I actually preferred the exploration-based scadutree fragments to the Sekiro remembrance system. In Shadow of the Erdtree, if you’re stuck on a boss or sick of fighting a boss, the best antidote is to fully take a break from combat. Go explore, relax, shift your mindset from “fight” to “discover.” I enjoyed this. In Sekiro, if you were struggling on a boss, the answer was, “see if you can find and defeat another boss.” Boss fights all the way down. All that said, I agree that on repeat playthroughs, the Sekiro system works better, because exploration is by far the most fun the first time, while boss fights tend to remain fun for multiple playthroughs.
The intro felt very reminiscent of Joseph Anderson's video, which I recently rewatched. The "yeah probably, but" thing. Not sure if intentional, but I enjoyed it.
FS created Sekiro and that was the best fighting mechanics they put out, ever. Only to completely abandon it in ER. They don't need to get inspired by Lies of P, they need to remember how great Sekiro was!
Loved the intro pun. Bravo! B) Really great video! I thought you laid out and navigated your points very thoroughly. The effort you put into this really shows, great job! :)
I miss when stamina actually meant something in souls games. 99.99% of my time in combat was just reacting to attacks instead of planning of what I'm going to do. Bosses punish playing aggressive too much and with stamina being so generous, it was just too much reaction. I played Ds1 and remembered that you can't just roll then attack immediately after all the time. You had to plan every move, everything you did mattered. Every dodge, every spell, every block, every attack had weight in the fight. Healing was riskier as you had to stand still. Spells were actually fun to use as you didn't need to have a ton of FP to use. Just as long as you met the requirements to cast the spell, you could cast it. No need to level up 2 stats for it, just level up the one and you're good. It allowed more flexibility in it. Dark Souls 2 perfected it as spells actually used stamina, but still didn't use the FP system
I feel like part of the issue is that in recent games they really feel like they need to up the spectacle for most major bosses. With very long animation chains and big signatures moves, but never really updated the way they expect the player to move in order to avoid said attacks. Meaning that they’re increasingly reliant on I frames to avoid these moves, rather than having believably avoided it by moving out of the way. Plus a lot of these moves have such a wide visual effect you can’t look at it and intuitively work out where to go to avoid it.
The 2nd phase of the final boss had me thinking it wasn't worth it and I should delete my save to stop me from wasting more time on it. I didn't, I've beat it twice, and I'm sure it wasn't worth it. I didn't "gitgud", I got lucky. The second victory took a tiny number of attempts compared to the first, but it still feels more like luck than skill.
But one that was present since launch. Like oh boy we can buy string. But what about Arteria leafs or StTrinas Lilly's. The actual most annoying material to farm
ER and SotE has taught me that a game without clear balance and limits is just a mess of mechanics. The problem with the difficulty in ER and SotE is that it just feels like Fromsoft is reacting to and overcompensating for challenge runners. Fromsoft must NOT use challenge runners as the baseline metric to set the average difficulty. Challenge runners and hardcore gamers don't represent the majority of players, and will get absurdly good at a game whether they like it or not. They must stop trying to one up themselves and they must stop trying to escalate the difficulty to absurd degrees in the base game. They just need to focus on making well tuned, interesting and complex combat and movesets. They can keep to their philosophy but must also keep the average player in mind. Difficulty must not come before or at the expense of balance and game mechanics. They must also focus a lot more on balancing their games and not give the player spells and skills that can break the game. They must commit to making their games balanced around a challenging difficulty and not give the player things that completely break that balance. Likewise they must not make overtuned bosses just for the sake of difficulty. All enemies and bosses should be properly tuned for the player to comfortably handle and push that comfortability in more difficult modes. A possible solution is to offer a baseline challenging experience in the main game for casuals and offer further challenge with additional game modes like New Game Plus, Boss selection and Boss gauntlets. I find it crazy that ER and SotE don't have boss select and boss gauntlets. Even Bloodborne sort of did this with the FRC chalice dungeons and Sekiro with its boss gauntlet. Hollow Knight did a great job of this with the Pantheons DLC, which is basically made for hardcore gamers and doesn't take away the experience of the main game for casual players. Also the difficulty in the pantheons can be customized with bindings, that make you weaker and make the fights more challenging. At this point Fromsoft is trying to make every boss Ascended Any Radiance and expecting casual players to enjoy it.
Sometimes it feels like those who worked on the final DLC boss (or most endgame bosses) didn't know we don't have access to sekiro's parry system and Bloodborne's dodging.
I suspect the honey moon phase is slowly coming to an end and in a couple months time, a lot more people will be calling out the DLC for what it is. a 6 or 7/10 and no more.
If From balanced bosses around using summons, they have a weird way of showing it, cause most bosses will nuke you in the summon animation lmao. It's absolutely terrible. I had to use the cheese strat of fingerprint shield + rapier for radahn and I just... I hate it. I hate the DLC, lol. The entire thing was a fragment collectathon for me following a youtube guide. It wasn't a game full of exploration and wonder, it was "crap I hope the fragments I got up to now are enough for this boss to get more fragments". It sucked, the entire thing required gimmick builds to get through for slow-reflex people like myself.
The difficulty is meant to either be from learning how to fight the boss or being so strong you don’t have to. I spent 12 hours learning to fight Radahn and had a lot of fun with him. Like 20 minutes later I saw someone kill him in 30 seconds with a crazy busted build. Some people find that more fun. It’s hard to really optimize something like that but with the ease of communication everyone can spread the busted builds they find and soon everyone is using them. TLDR: unbalanced builds are actually really cool because they let you just go crazy if you’re willing to go out of your way to do so.
I wish they were like the golden seeds where you didn't need to collect all of them to max out you stats. Especially when random pot enemies can have them
@@makito106 I think FromSoftware did not understand what people liked about the progression in the base game this time around(which is fine, they tried something in dlc, didn't work great IMO, they learned, it will be better in the future). IMO progression should NOT be tied to searching for an item, but more so to defeating an enemy(bosses, mini-bosses, dragons, Those firey things that dropped phisique tears). It will make it easier for people to progress more organically. There were plenty of bosses that were present in caves and all around scattered throughout the whole world. Make them drop these items that make your character stronger. That literally mimics the way the base game worked - a boss is too hard -> you go search for other enemies/minibosses -> defeat them -> get stronger by defeating them -> kill the boss that was giving you a headache -> progress forward. Going around just to gather these shadow tree fragments, while often there was nothing that interesting around them was not fun.
Levelling up my scadu blessing did not make the bosses any more fun nor decrease their combo length from 15 hits to 10 hits or something. Gitting gud just means I'm smart enough to walk backwards for 10 seconds and poke them once. Where is the fun?
The director of the game uses summons and toxic fanboys will still attack you about using them. It's sad that this great game is plagued by kids that yell skill issue when someone gives valid criticism about the game.
Our tarnished is a demi God Refborn from the walking monolith. The half blood offspring. That's why we van slay gods. As to why we are "unknown" we were bastards tarnished/ demigod and died off of the lands between. Brought back to be buird as a guarded demigod You can hear the bell, the roar and stomp when we wake up
21:53 As both a gamer who´s been playing fromsoft stuff for years and someone who´s profession has to do with reading comprehension and writing, you´d be surprised of how much this is so not the case. People don´t read. And because they don´t read, they miss out on key chunks of information. This is happening everywhere in life: college, work, everyday life and, of course, videogames. I agree with you on the fact that we cannot dismiss valid criticism with a simple "git gud" cause that shit is cringe, but the total obliviousness and lack of willingness to engage with any fundamentally complex written text in any form of media is a real phenomenom. I´ve seen it expressed in Elden Ring players who´ve had the game for two years now and still haven´t got a clue of how to make life easier for themselves, cause they just boot it up and hack away till they lose so much they get bored. The amount of times people I´ve discussed the DLC with aren´t even aware of the existence of the scadu tree fragments is mind blowing. Nice video, it had some thoughtful insights :)
@@DionPanday he said that just for the lolz… he’s been quoted in interviews saying the exact opposite: that he underestimated he time it would take to complete the dlc cause he breezed past it, partly cause he designed it and partly cause he uses all the tools the game gives him 😂
This is genuinely so frustrating. And I do certainly also engage in that type of behavior sometimes. But it is insane to see friends of mine, even those that I find to be intellectual and thoughtful people, routinely skip over chunks of dialogue or tutorial popups in game, then not know what to do, get frustrated and blame the game. I can't speak about other walks of life, but I assume to many, games are just something to turn your brain off and have fun. Or they simply aren't willing to give the game the same amount of energy and curiosity as they might have when they were younger and now just expect the dopamine to flow. As for Shadow of the Ertdtree, just letting yourself be summoned to help people with the bosses will give you a good idea of the type of player you're speaking about.
Might be multiple replies as i digest the video. Yes saw some challenge runners also say how some bosses are just badly designed and inconsistent. As you mentioned with bob. This attack should stagger him. But those times he just gets something off is so dumb. This challenge runner brought it up by malenia. How sometimes she gets hyper armor. Or how some bosses take multiple parries. It makes the parry less rewarding or just not as consistent.
I dont think fromsoft is going per say a bad direction. Armored core and sekiro being releases near elden ring shows me they still know to make a good game. We saw ds2, and immediately saw them release bb ds3. I think for elden ring they just got lost in the sauce. Openworld leads to more reuse. Ppl expecting insane bosses. Which i dont think we are expecting crazy difficult bosses. I believe most of are just looking for good designed bosses. Midra, rel, messmer give me well designed. Messmer may have some funky hitboxes. But lore wise and battle wise they feel right at home in. Nothing to crazy. Some nice unique characteristics and interesting lore.
Very good video! Some people just refuse to think and see clear outdated design and say everything FS does is gold. I would add 2 things: First, you only mention the ash of war situation, they are so cool, but totally unusable against bosses, Messmer ash of war has 3 inputs, and it's literally impossible to reach even the 2nd one without taking damage, that is, you have over 101 poise and do not get interrupted after pressing the first input. Why did worked so hard to have a build with 2 Hands of Malenia, if I cannot use Waterfowl Dance against any boss, no matter the build ? Second, the story, Miquella needs our character to defeat Messmer and the other bosses so that he becomes a god. Ok, so first of all, why ? After the defeat of Radhan and Mogh, doesn't he have a very strong ally that can help him ? But let's consider he does indeed needs our avatar, why does our character help him ? Overall it's a good game, but it just has so many problems, especially with the combat, that feels so outdated, so boring, and the difficulty seems so cheap. Coming from someone who played Jedi Survivor, Lies of P and Rise of the Ronin before, games where the combat and general gameplay feel so refined, not just the combat, but the puzzels and the side quests. Like, what is the point of them, if everybody looks them up on google/wiki ?
Great critique, you aren't just criticizing everything for the sake of negativity like some other youtubers you are also praising the great parts about the dlc For me personally I think the dlc is just more elden ring, it didn't improve much, some parts are better others aren't and that's okay for me because base game elden ring is already my favorite game up there with Sekiro, I do like the base game more than the dlc tho simply because it's more repayable for me
Hi everyone! Thank you so much for watching and sharing your opinions on the video and the DLC itself. I am humbled by the very positive feedback, but the video is not without problems, and I want to address some of them here and clarify a few things.
Firstly, as many of you have pointed out, I was incorrect in the "Bob" segment - it's not inconsistent. What seems to be happening is that if Bob two-hands the sword AND does an attack AND you don't hit him with a heavy enough weapon during the first few frames of that attack - he gets hyper armor that stops you from interrupting him. It appears to be consistent, and I didn't catch it because I was confused after interrupting him several times when he WAS two-handing (thought the other conditions weren't met). As you can tell, I'm not as familiar with the PvP mechanics that are in play against NPC fights, and it's my bad. I still don't think it's good design for those fights, but that wasn't my argument there, so I am sorry for that mistake.
My point against Commander Gaius' attacks still stands. During the editing, one of the clips showcasing the evidence of inconsistency for his boar back-kick-attack got cut at the start, and I didn't notice. That was quite unfortunate, and sadly I can't insert it back at this point. If you don't believe that he kicked me through the shield - I urge you to test it yourselves by trying to ONLY block his attacks for a few minutes - you will be surprised by the amount of times you'll get hit. Also, when I block his magic spear attack the first time - I know I still take damage because the shield doesn't have 100% magic negation - that's not the problem. The problem is shown in the next clip, where the shield is ignored entirely. I thought that was obvious, but maybe not to all.
I should've outlined more differences between Rellana and Radahn when I was talking about similar initial reactions to them. Rellana is without a doubt a much better boss with clearer attacks, and I should've made it clearer as well.
In terms of difficulty - I am not saying that I want bosses to be easier - I am saying that I want them to be less frustrating to learn. Which is why when I suggest at least lowering enemy damage output, I also say that it should be compensated with them having higher health. That will probably not be enough, but it's the simplest step in the right direction, in my opinion.
And finally, to those who that tell me that the reason we search for Miquella is because there can only be one Elden Lord and so he needs to be dealt with - no it's not. Eventually that might become our concern, but before entering the DLC - we had no clue. Not only that, but the shadow lands have 0 (ZERO) impact on the base game. You can still become Elden Lord while ignoring the Shadow Lands in their entirety, and still get the same amazing endings we got before. None of them feature the return of Miquella, so I guess if you were happy with the motivation provided in the base game - that's even less of a reason to go anywhere. And even if, in the hindsight, you could imagine that the grace, or something equally abstract, guided us there to figure out what needs to be done (despite it still not changing anything) - it was communicated very poorly. At the end of the day, I, like many others, was playing through the whole DLC without any clue as to why we kill those bosses. I understand why I do that as a player - because I enjoy the gameplay - but not the character. And call it a controversial take, but I would've liked to know.
with your last point the reason the tarnished enters the shadow lands is because were guided by grace to do so. sure the tarnished doesn't know exactly why grace is guiding us, but we have followed it the whole way through the base game so why would we stop once were Elden lord, thus giving the tarnished a reason to be there. And you come to learn why grace guided us to the lands through Ansbach.
and bro realized that you dont need to do bosses solo to have fun with the game. the bosses are not designed around summons there designed to be beatable with any build, some just happen to be easier with different builds
Makes a lot of sense!
Going by that logic, there is no reason to go to the Ringed City if you didn't play Ashes of Ariandel, and there is no reason to go to the Old Hunters cause it's just a nightmare spiritual plane and not an actual place. There are in-universe reasons of course, but if we're talking player character relevance, the whole "Miquella being potential competition" thing probably has more relevance than any prior From dlcs(we do know he was trying to create his own order similar to Ranni from item descriptions in the base game). On the topic of not knowing why you fight bosses, you won't know why you fight any boss in Bloodborne/Ds1/Ds3 outside of just self-defense and the same goes for Elden Ring. There are exceptions of course, but do you know why you had to fight the Crystal Sage? Or Curse Rotted Greatwood? Or the Old Demon King that doesn't even bother you unless you seek him out? Or the Witches of Hemwick? Or the Taurus/Capra Demon? Or the Demon Prince? Or Champion Gravetender? Or the Living Failures? Or Laurence? Or hell even Artorias and Sanctuary Guardian. Of course, a lot of these would be answered with "cause of self-defense" and that's fine.
"Is it Peak?"
"Yeah, but it's a jagged one 🔥✍🔥."
I owe you an apology I wasn't familiar with your game.
😂
That intro went so hard for no reason lol
do you understand the reference @@catagecat
Jagged Peak bit got a needed chuckle out of me.
It sounds like a rework of Joseph Anderson's joke for his review of the base game where he said it's a masterpiece, but a shattered one. This one hits for both parts in terms of tying it to the game though.
@@solomongrundy1905well Joseph’s tied to the game as well because Elden ring being a shattered master piece also refers to the shattering that happened in game
@@slothorne8222 That's why I said both parts hit for this one, since "Jagged" and "Peak" both come from the game, while "Shattered" matches but "Masterpiece" doesn't
Those tree sentinels felt like teddy bears that far into the DLC.
They hit me harder then mesmer did. They are harder for me to best. But I have trouble with every enemy on horse I just struggle with even basic enemies
@@bombyo3634 everyone has certain enemies that just give you hell. Compared to everything else in the dlc I felt like I had all day to dodge their attacks.
I love tree sentinels. Their moves are so beautiful and graceful and fun and fair.
@YOGO_MUSHI I tried to fight romance at the end my controller dropped I just picked it up to see it start over right after I picked it back up.
😶🌫️😭😭😭
When I saw them, I was, "Oh, hey! I know these guys." Wanted to give them a hug. It was like a nice reunion.
I am so tired of certain reviewers forever sucking up to fromsoftware and refusing to acknowledge some of these glaring issues
Yep, and whenever you have a valid critique of the game, your inbox will just be filled with “sKiLL iSsUe” -🤓
Yeah, record breaking game, but we still cant solve cameras. Or mobility issues. It feels so weird to have a stamina bar against enemies who seemed to have none. Endless chains into input read spams. Or only having a fucking roll when these bosses are near jumping wall to wall in 1 second.
In bb and sekiro. It feels like my character can actually keep up and is suited for the bosses. In elden ring it feels like i need to use gimmicks.
What Im personally tired with is that all of Elden Ring has to go around "difficulty", if people liked how the bosses works compared to player or not...
You know what objectively is an issue and changing it would benefit everyone of us, Elden Ring fans, haters o anyone? Improve the optimization, that since OG Dark Souls had been very bad on some areas, improve the camera, which doesn´t do any justice to giant boss fights, improve the hitboxes, who technology had advanced enough already to not have giant cilinders on weapons.
@@bboyExiano boss has endless chains
Those are not issues. Those are souls features 😏
I get that these are supposed to be sad games but honestly it’s hard to invest in any NOC quests in these games knowing basically every one of them will die horribly.
Npc*
you'll die one day too but i hope someone is invested in you
Yeah it really begins to hamper the effect of it when it's done over and over again, the same goes for alot of the other things fromsoft loves to reuse
It's not about their deaths. It's about the journey to their deaths.
@@gabriellecollier8127 yeah the issue is that it all feels for naught knowing they'll just go batshit insane tweaking and try to kill you fail, but yeah :(
I killed igon because I thought the game wanted me to put him out of his misery
I almost did the same thing, lol.
CUUUUUUUUURSE YOUUUUUUUUUUU.... LAWBISON
Heavily agree with you on the feeling after the final boss. I didn't feel like I learned anything. In fact, for most bosses, I would get a lucky win far before ever reaching mastery which just felt so underwhelming. Midra was the one of the few bosses this didn't happen with for me. I actually had 0 flasks when I beat him and it felt like I overcame a true challenge of my skills. Best boss in all of ER imo.
I think messmer, bayle, and midra are the only great bosses in this dlc imo
@@jaswanthvardireddy2243those and the rot centepede lady are what i think were good gameplay wise. I don't mind rellana but she's kinda annoying
Rellana, Messmer, radhan and midra are my fav, all very fun to fight
Finally respect for Midra.
@@jaswanthvardireddy2243 messmer made do me do like 30 extra attempts just because of 1 move. It felt like waterfowl all over again lol
On motivations: Ansbach and Thiollier’s quests individually lead you to understand that Miquella is very dangerous and has to be dealt with. I found my own motivations reversed by those discoveries and felt engaged when facing Leda and the final boss.
This was my experience too. At the start I was just there to meet miquella cuz he seemed like a cool guy but the longer I played the more I felt he was a problem and needed to go down. So the final confrontation gave me the closure I needed.
It‘s like the first dark souls DLC, noone was there to applaud you for taking down artorius, in fact your deeds will be misappropriated to him, but you did them because they needed to be done. It‘s a thankless job but you‘re the only one who can do it.
Dangerous because he wants to turn a crappy world a little bit better? Wtf is this writing
@@_CrimsonBladeThe issue here is that Miquella wants to make the world better by subduing everyone’s minds with his enchantment. Basically he would eradicate free will in order to make the world a “better” place. This is unambiguously dangerous.
@@_CrimsonBladewhy are u writing takes when u dont understand the story ? This is like basic level lore. R3tarded take💀
@@_CrimsonBladeeven if u played like 2h of dlc you would know he doesnt wanna make it „better“. He is tryna brainwash everyone
When the final boss died, after 10 hours of fighting it, I didn’t jump for joy. I did a bit of a mental shrug.
I had seizures when fighting radahn
I’ve put off even trying him for almost a week now just because the 2nd phase completely tanks my frame rate
@@zaleost same here. Beat him once and I did 2 NG runs and I ignored him in both
@@zaleost same here haha
That’s just part of the difficulty, git gud
That’s a feature
Shaman village is probably my favorite location in the entire game, upon first stepping in there I knew it was special. Then you learn all the lore, amazing.
seems like i need to find all scooby snacks so when I will get left-right good night from another boss I won't have an excuse and have to git gud
all the bosses in the DLC are very beatable with anything +12. radahn might be the only exception
@@Braylenc123 I fought radahn for like, 6 hours, and then proceeded to get bored and stopped having fun with the fight. At that point I felt like I had to force myself to keep fighting him. So I just used a mimic tear and beat him 3rd try. Crazy how easy the dlc is if you summon.
@@treemonsterman3611 lmao i just used the bloodfiends arm after a certain point with endure and took like 3 tries
For me it was thorns. Couldn't get good dps, although it looks like the damage i got was normal for a mostly slapped together build.
@@Braylenc123 glad I sticked through! such a fun fight without cheese.
i missed bosses that are really hard and you have to learn the whole pattern.
not just trading blows and eventually winning. base game was honestly too easy
Elden ring and it's dlc is something I both love and hate at the same time. The world and art design is amazing and a joy to explore, but there's little to find in it, and the pve honestly just isn't that fun. In previous from games, the pve was amazing, with the bosses just being the cherry on top, while in elden ring the game feels like a beautiful, but empty, ice cream cone, with a scorpion pepper on top.
As I'm currently doing a second playthrough of the DLC, I agree with the Scadutree Fragment criticisms because if they are basically a requirement to be able to have any chance of tackling a boss, I feel that they should have had at least a fair chunk be rewards after bearing the major bosses or a miniboss in the legacy dungeon. Hell, there are 5 fragments located behind one of the optional remembrance bosses, and they give you one for beating the hippo boss at the start of the Shadow Keep so it should have been a no Brainer to have them more as rewards, while keeping ones located at crosses. Cause it would give you a minimum fragment level for each of the legacy bossed that is essentially, "this is where you should be at the minimum" and all the remaining ones are the optional ones to make things easier for you if you want
The rememberance hippo give you 2 actually
I played Sekiro after Shadow of the Erdtree, and wow, the bosses are about equally fast and aggressive. BUT, each and every Sekiro boss fight feels incredibly engaging. Sekiro has the agility and the tools to outmanoeuvre any boss once learned. Fighting Maliketh, Malenia, Rellana, Radahn, feels outrageous in comparison. I wish I could fight them as Sekiro - they’d still be tough, but fair and likely even fun.
Hit the nail on the head here
Theyd be jokes in sekiro
@@V2ULTRAKill And they would be fun
Thats the thing about sekiro they gave us one weapon and designed bosses around that id rather from give us a main character ,one or two weapons and 6 or 7 good unique bosses then elden trash bosses
@@boshwa20same in elden ring. But u cant compare a linear small game with 1 weapon to ER. Ofc the first is gonna have much better balancing
I 100% agree that if Fromsoft go down the path of thinking “the community will accept any level of absurd difficulty as long as we give them multiple ways to invalidate it” then the magic of the souls games will be lost. Fromsoftwares souls games are long overdue an update in core gameplay mechanics especially when you consider that dodge roll/attack during enemy’s recovery frames is a gameplay loop that started in 2009 with Demon souls. Sekiro to me marks Froms successful attempt at increasing difficulty in a fair and interesting way and I hope they returns to new combat innovations. Ever since I played Lies of P I can’t escape the feeling that if Elden ring had Lies of Ps core combat mechanics it’d be by far my favourite game of all time and when you look at lots of its bosses through the lens of Lies of Ps combat they feel like absolute masterpieces of boss design held back by archaic combat design.
What "absurd difficulty"? Of all the souls games Elden Ring is by far the most accessible which throws the least roadblocks at you. Unless you decide to make a challenge run on your own volition, but that's on you, not on the game then.
@@shiroamakusa8075 define "challenge run"..cause if you mean "solo" then you are objectively wrong.
@@shiroamakusa8075i think you didn’t read the comment, so I’ll repeat it, any absurd difficulty if they give them ways to invalidate it. If a boss like radhan fills the screen with incomprehensible lights and does one shot you, you should just, you know, search for a way to trivialize the fight with a bugged ash of war, summons and 5 mins of pre-buffing. If radhan did the less damage, and his attacks were more visible (using the sekiro camera angles maybe?), do you think that would be too easy? That it wouldn’t make the community to look out for other build than the meta and abusing the “let my clone fight” ?
Wouldn’t make it easier to actually appreciate the fight and encourage a duel of learning the timings and overcoming it, instead of just put the most damage and the most poise and wish for good rng?
Or maybe yeah the game would be better if every attack was a one shot. Maybe why have health even!
@@TheJulik2 and all that is unfortunately objectively wrong besides visuals and the bug none of what you said was right
@@trg2516 what did i say then, cause i mostly asked questions. So you don’t think than when big damage numbers aren’t tied to a fight, people don’t start learning how to fight? Cause then you would be surprised to know the existence of a game called Sekiro.
The Joseph Anderson we didn't deserve but the one we needed. Just don't do a witcher 3 critique!
Joeseph anderson is a scrub who doesn't understand the games mechanics and croes sounding like an idiot
you mean the guy that didn't interact with any mechanic and when people pointed that out he doubled down and said he should play how he wants.
@@trg2516 yup
Joseph anderson is a fraud who doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.
@@trg2516Yeah, I really didn‘t like his review of Elden Ring.
Jagged peak is peak
This is hands down the best critique of the DLC I have seen. There are some good ones out there, but I feel people go too soft on Elden Ring/the DLC just because FromSoft at their worst is still a GOTY.
This is definitely FromSoft at their best and not at their worst imo
@@jameslough6329and worst, directionless of dlc, Inconsistency in quality and storytelling, showing signs of limitations of dodge roll/ attack combat, balancing etc.
This dlc is basically fromsofts attempt of supplementing quality with quantity so dlc does not fell wasted. Its right in same range as Ashes of Ariandel in quality (and thats was considerd the worst Fromsofts dlc till now).
Lol SOTE is the best DLC in history, even despite it's problems
@@Vengeance_Im did you heard of Ringed city, Old hunter dlcs? Content vise it is the biggest one yet (so if we are judging by content amount standards then maybe yes, but thats the rabbit whole that should not be encouraged in future since Fromsoft could could end up in Ubisoft situation and print low grade content for sake of it), but quality is significantly worse then any previous dlcs.
@@madkoala2130 I strongly disagree with you. I think the quality of SOTE's content is MUCH more consistent than the base game of Elden Ring and FromSoft definitely went with a quality over quantity approach to the DLC.
From my experience, the quality of the new remembrance bosses, legacy dungeons, new weapons classes, art direction, environmental storytelling, and even minor side dungeons has all been consistently great from start to finish.
Sure there are a couple stinker bosses, and the lore of the Final Boss could have definitely been handled better. But overall the DLC is without a doubt FromSoft's best work to date.
I’m shocked Rellana had no intro cinematic or build up. You don’t need an intro cinematic to make the build up to the boss awesome. Bayle was perfect in that way. The build up was incredible and the payoff truly hit. But given the gravitas of Rellana… where was hers?
Yeah. Half the bosses get no cutscene and barely any lore but it was very important that when you empty the water in shadow keep church district or burn the sealing tree you watch a minute long cutscene.
100% agree. Especially considering what an important role she has from a lore perspective, linking the Erdtree world to the Shadowlands.
You just enter the door and she starts fighting you like you entered a demi-human queens hideout.
i legit had no idea who the bosses were or why im fighting them, and i was reading almost all of the lore on the new tie ms that i got
@@yourlocalhuman3526 tie ms? Autocorrect strikes again
@@Bliss467 items sorry😂
I looked for the missing closure at the end by returning to saint trina, because she is an aspect of miquella, who asked me to kill him, but she was simply dead too, which makes sense, I suppose, but was disappointing nonetheless
I never felt like i ever "beat" a boss, I just got lucky they didnt spam their one shot move
Sorry but that’s a you problem. On subsequent playthroughs these bosses are really fair, even radahn. The only problematic one is gaius. They’re in general just more complex and harder to learn. But infinitely more satisfying than any piss easy excuse for a boss in dark souls 3
I only felt like that with Commander Gaius, the golden hippo, and the final boss (of the dlc)
@@Stanzbey69i agree idk if elden ring was your first souls game but having played all their other titles afterwards the bosses felt like they could be basic enemies in elden ring in terms of difficulty
When I've struggled on a boss for a long time, I've been told to just use Mimic Tear or to summon another player, and I always refuse. While part of me does this out of a stubborn "I want to do this by myself" mentality, another part is because I have to partly relearn the boss.
When there's more than one target, the boss becomes unpredictable and will sometimes do one half of a combo to one target and the rest to another. They can also change targets for single attacks on a whim; for example, a boss might raise a sword to slam down on my summon, but at the last second they might spin on a dime to attack me instead. I now have no way to know when the boss is gonna attack me, or I'll get swiped by a hitbox I didn't know existed because I'd always dealt with a combo in one way. It just really throws any sense of flow off and bosses just don't seem to function well when facing more than one attacker. Their animations can look like they're on the verge of bugging out and it takes away from the experience for me.
We've got a similar experience, I beat all FS games multiple times, in total over 1000h+. And I fully agree with your review about the difficulty.
DLC is hard not becuase you are underleveled, it's hard becuase bosses introduce cheap difficulty, spam aggro for 15s to give you 1 quick attack window or if you need to heal then 0 attacks and the cycle repeats. Additionally you get full arena AOE and fights are designed to hide information about incoming attacks to kill you everytime the new strong attack/combo is introduced which makes learning fights very unfun.
Also, new weapons face some problems. If you have only a short window to attack, you need to maximize the damage which favors 2x big bonks & jump attack which feels like all new weapons are useless for boss fights.
On top of that you get input reading and programmed punishment for natural reactions. You pass the phase of well telegraphed attacks and then a new attack is coming that you can't guess how to avoid and it insta-kills you, then you struggle to get to this point again and you get killed again.
This is not a good design, it's a design to hold you on this boss for longer. Also, these bosses are 20x aggro Bloodborne, but you still play with DS3 character with no additional things to balance it, besides extra jump attack.
There is no duel anymore in DLC, it's roll roll roll roll roll roll roll, hit once with a toothstick. I remember epic duels from Bloodborne (like Lady Maria, father Gascgoigne, Ludwig, etc.) which were so intense, a lot of parrying and good stuff, that's what the well designed fight is, interactive fight, hit for hit, a few attacks by the boss, and then it's my turn, not watching infinite combos over and over again.
This DLC introduces the worst boss balance in their franchise, which in many places feels like cheap difficulty or being hard for the sake of being hard. They broke the game because of ashes, I knew since the beginning that adding ashes will kill the boss balance and it did. Now you can either play solo and the difficulty is broken or you can play with ashes and it trivalises the fight completely.
No body read all of that bruh trust me
“Hard for the sake of being hard”
Remember when they did DS2 without Miyazaki and they thought that was the way to go?
@@1xtcyI just did buddy, time to find a new hobby
@@1xtcyman I'm nobody
@@noahdiederich9262 😂 it ain’t that deep corny dude
I've beaten the final bosses solo on 2 of my characters and I gotta say, its a bad boss not (just) bc its too hard and bc the second phase puts a lot of shit on the screen that fucks your visibility, but because this boss punishes build variety a lot, I beat him first with my dex arcane bleed build, normal character nothing out of the ordinary, was using a blood infused milady. But for my pure faith caster/cleric build I didnt cast a single spell to beat him bc he doesnt give you enough room to safeky cast any spell that isnt fast like glintstone pebble bc he never stops attacking and I didint wanna just spam catchflame for the fight. I basically had to beat him through parrying and critical hits on my pure caster build bc using spells on him solo was really risky and not worth the danger you had to put yourself through, not to mention that almost half of the dlc incantations are slow as shit and really hard to use in most of the bosses bc of it. (The new butterfly rot spell is a fucking joke, takes longer than scarlet aonia and deals less damage and less scarlet rot build up all that without hyper armor in the cast anymation, thank you for a fucking useless spell fromsoft)
Good, good. Mages get f'ed.
Mages got decent spells, it's the faith builds that didnt get anything just like the base game@ricklubbers1526
@@Shyste_pkinda crazy to say. Ancient dragons lightning strike cheeses the whole game.
On my int build playthough, have been trying the new DLC spells and other underutilized spells to fight Radahn
The only reliable spells to punish his attack are just Carian slicer and Glintstone pebble speed spell like Night comet or Comet
Tried Gavel of Haima and Adula's Moonblade but you really need a large opening for that
There is no difficulties in between for mages, it is either piss easy or CBT
So can we all agree strength builds aren't hard/normal mode for this series, rather it's easy?
I didnt really enjoy the DLC. Some bosses were very good but i found exploration disappointing. You either get the scooby doo fragment (whole idea of these things even existing is bad imho) or just a cookbook. So many areas like coast or abyssal woods were just empty and all you got for exploration was just the views. Are pretty graphics inportant in making good game? For sure. Can they carry whole exploration if they are the only upside to it? No, not for me at least.
Overall boss design was ok. Some I really enjoyed, some i absolutely hated. Im afraid that FS is starting to prioritize flashy combos and overall cinematics over making an actual fun boss. I liked dark souls and Sekiro bosses more.
I hope that FS fans wont kill me for saying all of that. DLC is 6/10 for me.
Unfortunately seems like they are on the witch hunt for those who have negative opinion of dlc, just look what happend to Feeble king. All tho some of the things he said are bs, but he nailed in the head with exploration criticism. Those people are not Fromsoft fans (if they were, they would know drop in quality is this dlc to previous dlcs) those are fresh elden ring fans who maybe tried playing previous games once and never tried it again.
The fragments were a great idea though. They stop you from just steamrolling the dlc with your endgame build while also not necessitating the need to grind levels if you were lower level in order to catch up to what amounts to post game content essentially
They also make the co-op experience better since the matchmaker goes off of your character level rather than the scadutree level. I've been able to be summoned to help people with every boss in the dlc even after beating it since leveling my character wasn't the primary goal.
In the base game, you pretty much get locked out of fighting earlier bosses with people since your level determines everything. Not a concern in the dlc unless you do grind and overlevel yourself.
@@madkoala2130 Right! A real From software fan would hate on this DLC for no reason ignoring all His merits!
@@bondrewd5935 real fromsoft wouldnt blindly say "This is best dlc ever!" while also ignoring glaring issues that makes it no way near the quality of previous dlcs and would not go full on witch hunt for those who criticised it and had good reasons why this isnt the best one for them (same thing is why non of us can agree on which Soulsborn game is the best one). Dont prosecute people for saying something contrary to publics opinion, this dlc here is.pure case in that.
@@madkoala2130yes but everyone has an opinion. As a fromsoft fan my complaints are exploration rewards being mostly lackluster, lack of the new weapon types, some bosses having wonky moves and hit boxes, and a slight slight disappointment with the story and lore of the dlc, mainly the radahn thing. But even that isn’t bad for me, just could have been better lore wise. But a 6 form the comment above? That’s barely above average. I mean I get everyone has an opinion but I think most people disliking the dlc are exaggerating the complaints and forgetting the positives. And I feel like most of them also probably did not like Elden ring either. For me it’s a nice 8.5/10 for me. But the “oh I needa be different so ima say this dlc is shit and anyone who disagrees is now a fromsoft super fan who is brain dead”, is stupid and really cringe honestly. U can have opinions on this dlc but to force people to also think it’s bad is another type of cringe. Also this video doesn’t necessarily mean the game is bad. If someone were to only focus on the good things of the dlc then u would think the dlc is the best thing ever made. It seems the people in the comments think the dlc is just negative cause of a honest critique video
People are too invested in the hype train and gaslight themselves to believe this is another nigh flawless "masterpiece".
Just like in the base game, the ideas are there, but From‘s bitten off more than it can chew and the cracks are blatantly visible.
Sometimes, less is more.
nah lmao
14:06 so pretty much the reason why are are confronting miquella is because both of our goals are in opposition to one another, you becoming Elden Lord and Miquella becoming a God. We unfortunately can't have both. It's really not that more complex. Granted like you mentioned, Miquella kinda manipulated everyone from the start so maybe a bit of revenge is in order as well.
Miquella's age of compassion is flawed because he shedded away the most important thing, his love (st. trina). You can't have compassion without love. So In a way he's committing the same mistakes Marika did.
Which the game never makes clear. It never says that gods and Elden Lords cannot coexist
I think the final fight dialog clearly state it. If you couldn't pick up on it, git gud blud. @@High_Rate136
@@High_Rate136 The Elden Lord is the consort to the resident god and Miquella already chose someone who isn't you. Also, he plans to supplant Marika's Golden Order with his own while you are poised to inherit it, so there's no way for the both of you to coexist.
I think we're confronting Miquella because if he becomes a god he will rule as a tyrant. Even if Miquella's intentions are good and he's blind to his own evil, he's still evil.
Leda outright tells you its Elden Lord vs Miquella.
FYI the reason he sometimes poises through attacks is greatsword get a poise boost while two handing and attacking. It’s so heavier weapons can trade with smaller ones in pvp
After looking through all of my footage with him again, I think you are right. I was confused because I actually interrupted his two handed attacks at least twice. Maybe it's because I hit him very early into his attack, or he did a weaker version, not sure. But it doesn't seem to happen when he's not two-handing the weapon, so at least there's that consistency
@@Umbriferous That's the issue I have with fights that use the player's mechanics
@@Umbriferous Yeah that’s right - just early into the attack. A bit of a weird one given it depends on the armor of the npc but the armor of solitude has a lot of poise. E.g. you won’t see that as an issue for the ancient dragon man fight given hyper armor values of the great katana and the poise of his armor
35:00 I hope the next game gives you a boss rematch feature. There's certain bosses I would love to fight again but I don't want to replay the whole game again.
Love how they make a boss rush mode for their shortest game, but not for their longest game.
@@skinnytimmy1like, this is my main criticism of Radahn reuse and its defenders. If you really wanted a rematch against prime version of that boss, then put like dream bosses in Hollow Knight or boss rush mod etc. do not force it as final fight of dlc. I know its not the same model or moveset, but still i didnt get through all dlc just to fight Radahn again.
You can rematch by helping other players beat them :)
@@TotalTimoTime doesnt really count as a rematch does it since you cant control the fight
I really have no idea how a boss rematch feature is not the standard after they did it for Sekiro.
The reason why it doesn't feel fun being stuck on a boss anymore is because it happens with every boss now. Every remembrance boss has countless delayed or unnatural-looking attacks that you can't intuit how to dodge on your first attempt. This means that you're guaranteed to die 10+ times figuring out how to dodge these attacks. It used to be interesting when you ran up against a wall like that because not every boss was extremely hard and it was fun to finally meet a real challenge. But when every boss is a roadblock, it gets exhausting. You lose the motivation to learn him and fight fair because you know the next boss after him will just be another roadblock.
It’s important to remember that despite us all playing this like a separate video game this is an end game dlc with end game content and I only really want bosses I have to take my time on. Put in the context of a full playthrough it makes sense.
One of the major criticisms of the main game was how easy it was to get overpowered without even realizing it and never having to learn any of the bosses. The DLC fixed this problem and people are still complaining
@@bobdylanlovr69 I would wager that the vast majority of players did not complain that they could become "overpowered" in the base game. That was [likely] an extremely small subset of diehard fans. I would wager that the same people complaining then are complaining now (since most ppl who bought the game did not make it to mogh). Ironic, that it's impossible to please the hardcore From fans lol
@@masque9446speaking as someone who over-leveled and upgraded through meticulous exploration with the main game and then felt the bosses were too easy and felt like I accidentally made my first playthrough worse, I liked the challenge of this DLC and the scadutree blessing system is a neat way to ensure you can keep it challenging if you want
I don’t agree with this at all. For me, being stuck on a boss and having to learn to dodge a multitude of difficult combos just makes it more satisfying and rewarding to beat that boss. And also there are so many ways you can make even the hardest bosses a breeze (perfume bottles for fuck sake).
@@howard2551perfume got nerfed
Great video that provides a fair critique of something you enjoy. Extremism can be all too common to come across when hearing this about the DLC. One issue that I had with the DLC that I don't hear much discussion about was the actual in-game map. With how dense and layered the open world is in the DLC I don't think that the map is as useful of a tool as it was in the base game. Personally, I have a hard time remembering which sites of grace are on which level of the world. I wish they had a map of the subterranean layer you could view independent of the surface map just like they did for underground segments in the base game. I somehow missed the connection that there was an impromptu infirmary set up for the jar victims in Shadow Keep. Thanks for pointing out that cool world building detail.
Something the DLC did and I wished was more prevalent in the main game was the abyssal wood's entrance, it's through a catacomb, imagine if it had megaman legend style of dungeons where they are all linked somehow to a greater underground instead of how sporadic caves, and catacombs felt in the lands between
I agree it is a cool idea but it’s probably a designing nightmare, trying to figure out how all these catacombs would link up to new areas.
@@buffoonustroglodytus4688 I know, it's the part of me that wished the game map was smaller, like a more condensed experience, it hurts the environmental storytelling and some progression aspects but it's such a cool feature
"Curse you, Bayle!" Best... NPC... EVER!
yeah those early reviews that the big fromsoft content creators put out where definitely overhyping this dlc. its a fun expansion and its definitely worth the 40 bucks but it has just enough things going against it to make it end up being like a 7.5/10 to me
Yeah once the final boss is patched or reworked it might be closer to an 8 for me, but this is the least I’ve enjoyed a roster of FromSoft bosses to date. Not necessarily in terms of quality for each boss but for the exhausting experience their movesets + design create for most builds
@@matcompost8582every boss is completely fair so is radahn
@@ryanmattioli9790 stop doing hard drugs. They can impair your ability to think and you can lose brain function that you will never recover. Based on your previous statement, you're already significantly impaired, maybe if you stop smoking meth now it's not too late for you...
@@ryanmattioli9790 I can't see half the fight in his second phase how is that fair?
@@ryanmattioli9790 yes the nigh undodgeable x slash is very fair.
My victory over Radahn was the most Hollow victory I had ever experienced. I could consistently No-hit his first phase but the second phase? Nah, it shows Fromsoft has lost the plot. It's not fun, it's not fair, it's not even challenging in the right way. The mere fact you can perform damn near perfectly only for him to say 'Lol no you actually die' with his 'Meteor strike electric Boogaloo' attack near the end is the biggest 'fuck you' I've ever seen thrown in. it's a roll of the dice if you live or die it's actually absurd. I had to resort to a shield and bleed (Not a spear) along with a Tank summon to actually pull a win. Radahn alone has made me unenthused for future Fromsoft titles. I've done SL1 playthroughs on all games and those were torture but it was torture of my own making. Radahn? No, it's active hostility towards players by design.
All you have to do is run one in direction to dodge the meteor strike lmao what're you talking it, it's almost a guraunteed no hit if you just run away.
@@kaodnewq8396 I did that and still got hit by it. 🤷♂
The actual attack you should be talking about is his Meteor throw in Phase 2, i think in all of my 5 hours of fighting him i think i dodged the second part of that move twice. Absolute run killer for me, not to even mention one of his Slash comboes is literally a frame perfect dodge or else you eat the attack is just horrible boss design.
A boss fully designed to widdle you down and force you to into panicking, just so frustrating. Atleast with Malenia there was pretty clear ways to combat her big moves. For Radahn it just felt like either im gonna get lucky and dodge it or suffer 2 flasks or just die.
This is one of the best videos on the subject ive seen holy hell
Well done and very fair breakdown of the DLC.
I sort of hope the next FromSoft Soulsborne game will be a more linear and contained experience like Sekiro or Bloodborne and bring some fresh gameplay elements to the table. It's much easier to balance around an intended playstyle than having so many options and paths to go down. I might be biased towards Sekiro, but it offers a combat system that you can master to a degree where you can easily beat the bosses just using the base mechanics. Additional mechanics like the prosthetic tools, consumables, throwables, weapon arts can help you vary your playstyle or arguably make fights easier, but you don't need any of them. Meanwhile, in Elden Ring but especially the DLC it seems like you want to use any in-arena NPC collaborators, spirit ashes, cheesy spells, overpowered weapon arts etc. if you don't want to feel frustrated. The DLC's most enjoyable bosses to me were Romina, Messmer, Putrescent Knight, BAYLE and hippo (although the latter two having heavy camera issues). Dancing Lion and Rellana seemed like they should have been the last 2 bosses before Messmer in terms of difficulty and relentless move sets. And yes, Radahn phase 2 is just straight up BS.
On the topic of Lies of P: yes, introducing parry and rally in that game was a good idea to make the gameplay more interactive, but the game IMO had other issues, mostly with animations, camera and perceived parry timing. Plus making parry an arguably worse and more risky option than blocking in many cases, since you can rally back so much health. Meanwhile if you mistime the kind of unforgiving parry windows, you get flat out hit and can't rally back anything. And zero poise for heavy builds was definitely also a choice... But that's just some of my thoughts. Nevertheless, hyper aggressive enemies require other was to interact with them than dodge rolling and jumping. Yes you can parry SOME bosses in DS/ER, but that requires a certain build and play style, which brings us back to limited build variety if you don't want to be frustrated by boss encounters.
Some bosses are like getting into a fight with someone who doesn't know how to and just run up doing rapid-slaps while craning their head back as far as possible... except each one of those slaps carry the force of a heavy-weight boxer's haymaker
that Radahn presentation pretty much says it all. there's no fitting description for that other than bullshit.
you forgot to mention how every boss and their mother has a tendency to outright fly into the air repeatedly so you can't hit them.
the centipede lady does that shit all the time and its fucking frustrating to deal with.
Desperately hoping that we get a patch with a Godwyn bossfight.
The Map is far too big for what's in it.
I'd only agree for a few areas (Mainly the finger ruins, they have no reason to be that big)
@@andreybelyshev5093
Cerulean Coast needs to be big but it also could've used more actual filling in it
The Finger Ruins also could've used a roaming boss or something at least.
@@andreybelyshev5093 it's most areas for me too much riding torrent into open spaces. Legacy dungeons are also very disappointing shadow keep is big but not very enjoyable.
Yep. Why do some of these areas even exists? Why does the red area exists when it has nothing but reused base game minibosses?
Why is there THREE finger ruin areas? Why not just make one and actually put stuff in it? Put a little legacy dungeon there.
What’s the point of abyssal woods? Stealth in a fromsoft game is a terrible idea. Why not just put a stealth section in Midras Manor and put the Manor somewhere else? There is so much places where content in useless areas could be put.
Miyazaki said the world needed to be big in order to capture that scale of original Elden Ring. Unfortunately he didn’t extent that into the legacy dungeons, they are pitifully small besides Shadowkeep.
@@wilfredwayne7139shadow keep is the best dungeon they have ever made
Amidst the seas of rapturous praise, I think videos like these are especially important. It's extremely useful for fostering your critical eye to deeply and thoroughly dissect what it is you like, dislike, and think could be better, while also offering up new ideas going forward. It's very rare, in both videos of extreme praise and overwhelming negativity, for you to completely agree with either one, so I think every single one of these videos discussing the ups and downs of this particular DLC and how it recontextualizes stuff from the base game is a worthy critique. Love the vid, love the points, keep it up 👍👍
Fantastic Review/Critique. Finaly more nuance then "Its just bad Bosses and to much reused Stuff" and "EZ Boss its not bad just git gud and a perfect World". Great Video, keep it up!
I think the reason Leda and her allies attack you is because of the broken enchantment letting her paranoid side out. Once Miquella's great rune is shattered and his spell is lifted, all of the npcs begin to show free will from him, and Leda's free will is very paranoid. She talks about others possibly being disloyal and asks about your suspicions, and can even kill Ansbach if you let her. It's this paranoia that eventually leads her down the line to you, and like Ansbach she finds a reason to believe you're against her cause, rallying up her allies to attack you. It's interesting to note as well that npcs whose questlines you've progressed through don't seem to show up as part of her group in the arena. I helped beat Messmer with the Hornsent and healed the brood for Moore, and then neither appeared in the fight, making me believe it's Leda that convinces anyone who hasn't been helped by you to turn against you. If it's truly the case, I think it's an amazing detail.
The biggest flaw in this dlc were the bosses, for me.
The lack of cutscenes or dialogues was a shame. In the base game I got attached to the main bosses because they felt alive, they had character, they weren’t hollow shells you had to fight. They had a weight, a resonance in the fight. In the dlc I entered a boss room and I had to fight a random ripoff of sulyvahn don’t knowing why, a scarlet rot quelaag because… yeah, I guess, and that’s it. They die anonymously as they lived. It’s a pity.
Then, with some exceptions, they didn’t feel dlc bosses at all. There was an excess of artificial difficulty: when even a single grab (like the Messmer one - which btw is the best boss in the dlc) can one shot you, or plenty unreadable combos leave you with one second to attack or heal, is not fun. Gael was a very difficult boss, but were necessary like 4 or 5 hits to kill you, and had a lot of windows. Finally, in other fromsoft games dlc bosses had something more as compared the main game ones, but here is the opposite. They had nearly nothing that made me gasp, like a mechanic or a moveset: midra is just an old man with frenzied flame incatations and 5 attacks, rellana is sulyvahn with base game sorceries and a unique one, consort radhan phase 1 is simply starscourge radhan with a blood flame attack (I refuse to consider the second phase a boss fight). The main game bosses felt more unique, experimental and in a nutshell… fun. As it should be for a dlc boss.
I still love the dlc, but I can’t understand all the praise it received “bosswise”.
They could have done so much more…
PS: Sorry for my English is not my first language
An observation I made that contributes to the lack of boss cutscenes is that in SotE, there are only 1 demigod and 1 god, whereas in the base game, there were plenty of demigods. FromSoftware made sure each demigod was given a cutscene or two to characterize them and to show off their second phase twist. Outside of that, main story bosses such as Renalla, the Fire Giant, Maliketh, and Godfrey received similar treatment using cutscenes too. Suffice to say, it was the exception rather than the norm for a rememberance boss to lack a cutscene during their boss fight. To be honest, it makes it all the more upsetting that bosses like Rellana, Romina, Metyr, and Bayle didn't get their own boss cutscenes despite being lore significant/main story bosses
@@iamdoom9810metyr reveal plays much better without a cutscene. U get teleported to a freakish area with a eldrich being off in the distance. It makes everything way more eerie and off putting which is the intended reaction. A cutscene would’ve been cheesy in that scenario
Also Bayle is supposed to be a immersive gameplay focused boss with the lead up. Bayle in all respect is a no bullshit no time to waste kinda boss so it makes sense he storms down on u. Rellana shoulda got a cutscene though
Messmer's grab attack does not one shot you I can attest to that, got hit by it multiple times but survive and he has no unreadable combos. I think the one combo people struggle with is the one where he lunges into the air and rapidly thrusts his spear with fire 5 times. That attack is extremely telegraphed, he always uses the same slash attack that dodges towards you and gives you time to react and roll towards or run away from his rapid thrusts in the air. What is a problem is Commader Gaius' thrust that instantly knocks out all fun from the fight. Screw that boss. Screw Jori Elder Inquisitor too. Though I agree with your take on how the bosses have like no cutscenes. There are only 3 bosses with cutscenes when every major boss is a remembrance boss. It's a huge disappointment that Rellana was given the Sulyvahn Treatment with no cutscenes and the same goes for Romina
"artificial difficulty"
Funny, I didn't notice any.
"unreadable combos"
Nor of these.
"leave you with one second to attack or heal, "
Hardly ever this.
"Gael was a very difficult boss, but were necessary like 4 or 5 hits to kill you,"
Yes he didn't do enough damage.
"midra is just an old man with frenzied flame incatations and 5 attacks"
Midra has like 20 attacks?
"rellana is sulyvahn with base game sorceries"
She has similarities to Pontiff but it's a very different boss. Rellana's move-set is much more complex and she has a lot more moves/longer combos.
"The main game bosses felt more unique, experimental and in a nutshell… fun."
To each their own I guess. While the base-game bosses slap, I think the DLC ones are, on average, better.
I think midra was fine. He didn’t feel bloated like rellana or radahn and had actual cutscenes and a cool atmosphere to go with the relatively simple moveset. Bayle is an amazing fight and messmer is self explanatory. I think romina is decent too but I hate the lack of cutscene
Genuinely just thank you for this video. I’m so glad to hear some actual fair criticism on the DLC. So many moments I was thinking “exactly” during this lol
You've put into words why summons bother me. Elden Ring was my first From game. I used them on my first playthrough, and when I beat the game, I didn't feel like I knew anything about any of the bosses. I felt I just got lucky. I went back and did a full replay, melee and no summons, and that's the moment the genre "clicked" for me. It built my confidence so much that I even went on to beat the game at level 1 and I went on to beat DS3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro since.
The design of the summons are really cool and I would love to use them while still keeping the constant threat of being hit. Maybe make them weaker and don't have bosses aggro them? Great video.
Nah that's only your opinion. Lots of people like using summons and love having them to fight along them.
Especially if u need game pass or online mode to be summons help and u don't want to pay
Summons are perfect. Your not forced to summon so don't use it
@@bombyo3634 Yeah, it’s just my opinion. I never claimed this as an objective statement. I used summons on my first playthrough and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as my second where I didn’t use them. Not sure what you’re trying to prove. Keep using summons, that’s fine.
@kenanjabr1992 not proving anything. Most elden ring fans are crazy and have some to prove all of the time
@@bombyo3634Summons are fine but the OP isn't wrong, there is a vast difference in truly learning the boss going in Solo and using spirit ashes. My thing is that I give a boss a few times solo and use ashes if I cannot get it, both are fine playstyles but you do in fact learn boss movesets better going solo.
@JustKelso1993 That's probably true for learning bosses but the entire argument is just opinion.
Some people myself included don't care about learning a boss and just wants to beat it and move on. So summons and being OP is fine. Cheese is fine. Super cheese is fine.
You can choose how u want to play.
very well written and edited video, I was shocked to see you only have 900 subs
I went back to Dark Souls 1 and im having way more fun exploring Lodran than i did in this bland open world
I kind of somewhat agree a little bit. On repeat playthroughs, the open world is really boring and tedious to traverse. And most of fromsoft’s environmantal storytelling is done in the legacy dungeons, while the open world is quite barren and plagued with reused assets.
While I enjoyed elden ring’s open world the first time and think it was a good for this game, I also hope fromsoft’s future games are more linear like sekiro. Less open world but also with the ability to explore different areas and get stronger if you get stuck.
I don't think open world design is inherently bad for soulslikes. The problem is that things were too spread out to have meaningful encounters and you were incentivized to just ride past everything on Torrent. As much as I enjoyed horse combat, the game would have been better if the open world was condensed to half its size but you had to traverse all the areas on foot.
And I'm having a lot more fun exploring the levels and smaller open areas in Stellar Blade.
In 13 years of gaming I've only completed 3 big open world games (Elden Ring base game / Fenyx Rising / Skyrim).
And Skyrim to this day is the only open world game I've finished twice (once on PS3 and once on PS4).
That's why I see it as a big plus, when a game doesn't have a huge open world.
But what's worse is that I no longer enjoy the combat encounters either.
I don't know how you play the game... but I feel like I'm way too limited in my actions.
Even when watching way better players, most people simply use one type of attack.
Enemies aren't defeated with different combos, with a variety of spells, or with multiple weapons - but with a single ability.
Sure, different weapons / skills are used (like Asmongold switching from jump attacks to guard counters)
but that's not a combat system I find engaging.
I play the game with light gear for example.
So I can use and switch between multiple weapons and also because light armor looks nicer.
And I also use different spells to further mix up the combat encounters.
That's what I want from a fantasy RPG / big sandbox and what's fun to me.
(Unless the basic combat system is so fun that it doesn't require multiple weapons.)
But in "Shadow of the Erdtree", efficiency is pretty much everything
due to the difficulty and very small recovery windows in which you can perform an action.
To me, it's like getting the full job kit in FF14 but being limited to playing a low-level dungeon where you only have access to one or two skills.
But not because you don't have access to the kit,
but because if you press more than one button or perform an action that lasts longer than 2 seconds, you die.
Sure, there are summons that give you a little more leeway...
But summons don't really add anything to the encounter or gameplay unless being a summoner is your class fantasy.
But even from that perspective, the system isn't that fun.
I did feel like the difficulty of this DLC is pretty uneven. Early doors it can be very hard, then once you've got some scooby snacks and a good build the mid to late game is straight cruising and then the final boss is crushing again regardless. I've enjoyed the DLC as a whole though but I do agree some other recent soulslikes have added quality of life and story telling features that feel noticeably absent here now. A solid critique 👍
I felt personally attacked when he showed the jump attack spam footage and was like “yeah some playstyles make the game too easy” LOL
12:34 somehow this line perfectly describes how I believe marika feels when she is finally free from the curses she and her family has, it’s just a throwaway line from godricks last bit of his dialogue and yet the way it flows with the hum of marika’s theme just makes me sit back and listen…
Beautiful…
Excellent and well-thought critique.
I think the Scadufragment system did more harm than good. It’s a chore to collect but nothing arduous. What’s worse is the balancing system around co-op, because they had to take PVP into account. To summarize, regardless of your own Scadlevel, if a host’s Scadlevel is lower, you’re downgraded to their level; worse yet if they’re on NG+2 or 3, find themselves struggling because they can’t find enough fragments or refuse to level them, and therefore resort to summoning. In the base game the co-op sorting system relies on Rune level and weapon upgrade to match you with players within your range (unless you use passwords). In the DLC however, I could be adequate or even overpowered in my own file, and find myself getting killed in one or two hits even with adequate defense (armor/talismans) and buffs.
But it hasn’t been a month since DLC release and I suspect once the honeymoon is over, players might be honest enough to admit that while FromSoft are capable of producing brilliant, S-tier level games, they’re not infallible or above making poor decisions.
Dude I felt like a crazy person with the Gaol Knight. Feels good to be validated.
Another fight that was weird was the Dragonkin NPC you fight in a catacomb. He would stagger on hit but after the first stagger he would recover and hit you back even before the time it took to finish my follow up swing. It was literally forced damage. And it's not like I was using a slow weapon. I had the uchigatana
Anyway, good video!
in my opinion, a lot of problems that come with sotes bosses aren't really problems with the bosses themselves but problems with learning them.
besides the final boss, he sucks
I think with a few of them, the big issue is the camera. Like the Lion. Has one of the worst cameras in any souls boss ever, which is a shame cause I think there could be arguments for strong mechanics.
Radahn is guaranteed a re-balance. He's overtuned to the point where it's not fun.
I am also tired of hearing people talk about Scadutree fragments and act like they excuse From from all criticism. They basically refuse to balance anything themselves and place all the burden on the player, then when the player doesn't get it right they and all their cultists tell them to git gud and collect fragments.
I guess your idea of "balance" is then "I get to one-shot all the bosses no matter what I do", then? Because that's the only way your comment makes sense.
@@shiroamakusa8075 you are mentally challenged if that is how you interpret that comment.
I personally like the concept behind the fragments (localized difficulty scaling), it's the random distribution that makes it annoying
I'd rather the fragments come from each demigod equivalent boss, so you power up by beating the major bosses pre radahn rather than searching random places
I'm tired of people talking about leveling up. Fromsoft should balance the game around level 1 because I don't want to engage with any rpg elements. (This is how you sound)
It's the opposite they did balance the game by adding fragments so everyone can do it ..If some is higher skill then you he will need like 2 of them and you will need 10 ,they are all over the place and not hard to find ..But your logic if you suck at boss balance is not good meanwhile there is a girl on yt beating same boss as you with legs,isnt that embarrassing,so you crying that they need to balance the game to your skill then it will be good but all guys who are higher skill will walk through dlc in two hours so who cares about them if you had fun.. Fragments are best thing ever they added..On lvl 150+ one level take 100k souls so if you go farm a milion to 10 lvls ,if you go to Malenia with 150 or 160 lvl its same shit ,10 levels wont make any difference and will take forever to farm them,but 4 fragments with 5% bonus dmg and defence will make massive difference,use you head before you type
Everything BUT the boss fights were top tier.
Look, play how you want. Summons or not. I don’t use them because that’s a personal preference. But the bosses in the dlc were just silly. Fromsoft is losing its touch on the fights. No longer is it based on natural reaction and reading, it’s more of a memorization of patterns. You learn a telegraph or when a certain moveset is to occur, dodge roll jump whatever.
I honestly became so exhausted of it that for some encounters I just hit up my summons and cheese it. It’s just fucking stupid. A complete waste of time IMO.
40$ you could buy 2 skins in COD.
Ahhahhha
Why would I do that
@@juneJumperwhat kind of fucking response is this? my brain hurts
@@juneJumper 2 is better than 1.
For 40s u can be tw3 both dlcs and have 20s left over to the buy the game as well.
Super cool video, keep up the amazing content !!
Man, you basically put everything I've been trying to figure out about this DLC and how it sat with me, in better words than I could ever muster.
Especially with Radahn, I felt... No joy in beating him.
honestly this has nothing to do with the video but why would they hide midra so well only to give him what feels like such low scaling? that boss’s design is so good but held back by the level most people will be when finding him.
Glad I’m not the only one that noticed FromSoft’s inability to balance their game smh
Scooby Doo Fragments lmao i'm dying
when you said we're friends with all the npcs to then just turn and kill them without reason you're missing the point entirely, Miquella wanted to ascend to a god and make Radahn his Elden Lord, we are supposed to become Elden Lord, we can't just let that happen, we infiltrate into Miquella's charmed followers, locate some possible allies (Ansbach with his allignance to Mohg and Thiollier with St. Trina) and disrupt the entire plan because to us Miquella is no more than a competitor we must crush in our journey, we actually betray Miquella's followers with clear reason, nothing "just happens" randomly
My question to that would be, why can't this be a choice? Like yeah, I totally see that as a valid option with good reasoning. But then again, why can't we choose to side with Miquella (despite the red flags admittedly) and get a new ending for the base game, assuming you haven't already done that yet? It could be played off as you paving the way for Miquella to surplant the Golden Order in the Lands Between by killing Radagon and destroying the Elden Ring once and for all. I don't mind if the final cutscene isn't afraid to portray it as a terrifying conclusion and tries its best to make you feel bad for falling for Miquella's charm in a "is this what you really wanted" kind of way, but I don't see what'd stop you from abandoning your initial purpose like he has.
@@iamdoom9810 I think it comes down to his consort being Radahn, why would YOU kill Radagon and pave the way if you're to be just some random helper guy? Everything Miquella orquestrated was with Radahn in mind as his Lord, he even made a vow, in his fight he asks you to step down and just watch he create a new era, if that's what you actually believe then just don't fight him, this way you actually let him do his thing and you can RP pleading allegiance to him or something, even tho he is an empyrean and a god candidate i think it fits that he just doesn't care about us and thus becomes our competitor, let's be honest, if we're talking empyreans id drown into that rotussy as my godess after beating her up but the story just doesn't work that way
I think it is random in the sense of "why even frame them as allies at the begining when we all know we went to the Shadow Realm to duel and kill Miquella". Why not frame them as enemies from the begining if there was no choice? The only who get the surprise is the NPCs, and NPC fights suck, so why? I believe there was a missing opportinity: If we had the option to use Miquella's Great Rune to remove the brainwash on Leda and company and show them the true side of Miquella, it would have been great to see them join the final battle just as we had with Radahn in the base game. Then have them at the arena after the fight for some closure.
One thing that annoys me about the skibidi tree fragments is that they didn’t just give you one after a boss fight and scale it accordingly like how sekiro did it with boss remembrances being used to raise attack power. Fromsoft stated outright that the skeet fragments were going to be similar to the remembrances so WHY MAKE THE SYSTEM WORSE?
The system was used to encourage exploration. If players knew the only way to boost their defense and attack was through boss remembrances then they would just bum rush the bosses and not explore the open world. Which half the game is exploration.
@@buffoonustroglodytus4688 then have mini bosses hidden around the world that also give you the fragments just like Sekiro did, carefully placed bosses at locations that encourage exploration while also adding to the replayability. Main bosses don’t have to be the only ones that drop the fragments, not a tough development question at all and it’s a shame that they answered it so poorly considering their success in a previous game that had the exact same thing.
@@DandifiedToe yeah I can see where you are coming from, and I agree sekiro did the system better. I don’t know if I can think of a reason why they chose to do it this way instead of the sekiro way. Maybe they couldn’t make enough interesting bosses for all the schadenfreude levels?
there should be a mod that replaces every cookbook with a scadutree fragment
Just to throw out another perspective: For a first-time playthrough, I actually preferred the exploration-based scadutree fragments to the Sekiro remembrance system.
In Shadow of the Erdtree, if you’re stuck on a boss or sick of fighting a boss, the best antidote is to fully take a break from combat. Go explore, relax, shift your mindset from “fight” to “discover.” I enjoyed this.
In Sekiro, if you were struggling on a boss, the answer was, “see if you can find and defeat another boss.” Boss fights all the way down.
All that said, I agree that on repeat playthroughs, the Sekiro system works better, because exploration is by far the most fun the first time, while boss fights tend to remain fun for multiple playthroughs.
The intro felt very reminiscent of Joseph Anderson's video, which I recently rewatched. The "yeah probably, but" thing. Not sure if intentional, but I enjoyed it.
FS created Sekiro and that was the best fighting mechanics they put out, ever. Only to completely abandon it in ER.
They don't need to get inspired by Lies of P, they need to remember how great Sekiro was!
Loved the intro pun. Bravo! B)
Really great video! I thought you laid out and navigated your points very thoroughly. The effort you put into this really shows, great job! :)
I miss when stamina actually meant something in souls games. 99.99% of my time in combat was just reacting to attacks instead of planning of what I'm going to do. Bosses punish playing aggressive too much and with stamina being so generous, it was just too much reaction. I played Ds1 and remembered that you can't just roll then attack immediately after all the time. You had to plan every move, everything you did mattered. Every dodge, every spell, every block, every attack had weight in the fight. Healing was riskier as you had to stand still.
Spells were actually fun to use as you didn't need to have a ton of FP to use. Just as long as you met the requirements to cast the spell, you could cast it. No need to level up 2 stats for it, just level up the one and you're good. It allowed more flexibility in it. Dark Souls 2 perfected it as spells actually used stamina, but still didn't use the FP system
I feel like part of the issue is that in recent games they really feel like they need to up the spectacle for most major bosses. With very long animation chains and big signatures moves, but never really updated the way they expect the player to move in order to avoid said attacks. Meaning that they’re increasingly reliant on I frames to avoid these moves, rather than having believably avoided it by moving out of the way. Plus a lot of these moves have such a wide visual effect you can’t look at it and intuitively work out where to go to avoid it.
The 2nd phase of the final boss had me thinking it wasn't worth it and I should delete my save to stop me from wasting more time on it. I didn't, I've beat it twice, and I'm sure it wasn't worth it.
I didn't "gitgud", I got lucky. The second victory took a tiny number of attempts compared to the first, but it still feels more like luck than skill.
The craft system of this game is a disgrace, why we dont buy the materials from the site of grace?
That's what is called a nitpick, boohoo you have to go to the base to do something
But one that was present since launch. Like oh boy we can buy string. But what about Arteria leafs or StTrinas Lilly's. The actual most annoying material to farm
@@VanGoghBrrrwow I guess you are more than 20 years old. Fighting on YT comments is pathetic.
careful, fromdrones gonna call you stupid
ER and SotE has taught me that a game without clear balance and limits is just a mess of mechanics.
The problem with the difficulty in ER and SotE is that it just feels like Fromsoft is reacting to and overcompensating for challenge runners. Fromsoft must NOT use challenge runners as the baseline metric to set the average difficulty. Challenge runners and hardcore gamers don't represent the majority of players, and will get absurdly good at a game whether they like it or not. They must stop trying to one up themselves and they must stop trying to escalate the difficulty to absurd degrees in the base game. They just need to focus on making well tuned, interesting and complex combat and movesets. They can keep to their philosophy but must also keep the average player in mind. Difficulty must not come before or at the expense of balance and game mechanics.
They must also focus a lot more on balancing their games and not give the player spells and skills that can break the game. They must commit to making their games balanced around a challenging difficulty and not give the player things that completely break that balance. Likewise they must not make overtuned bosses just for the sake of difficulty. All enemies and bosses should be properly tuned for the player to comfortably handle and push that comfortability in more difficult modes.
A possible solution is to offer a baseline challenging experience in the main game for casuals and offer further challenge with additional game modes like New Game Plus, Boss selection and Boss gauntlets. I find it crazy that ER and SotE don't have boss select and boss gauntlets. Even Bloodborne sort of did this with the FRC chalice dungeons and Sekiro with its boss gauntlet.
Hollow Knight did a great job of this with the Pantheons DLC, which is basically made for hardcore gamers and doesn't take away the experience of the main game for casual players. Also the difficulty in the pantheons can be customized with bindings, that make you weaker and make the fights more challenging. At this point Fromsoft is trying to make every boss Ascended Any Radiance and expecting casual players to enjoy it.
Amazing video. The most well-thought review I've seen so far
Sometimes it feels like those who worked on the final DLC boss (or most endgame bosses) didn't know we don't have access to sekiro's parry system and Bloodborne's dodging.
I suspect the honey moon phase is slowly coming to an end and in a couple months time, a lot more people will be calling out the DLC for what it is. a 6 or 7/10 and no more.
Fax
If From balanced bosses around using summons, they have a weird way of showing it, cause most bosses will nuke you in the summon animation lmao. It's absolutely terrible. I had to use the cheese strat of fingerprint shield + rapier for radahn and I just... I hate it. I hate the DLC, lol. The entire thing was a fragment collectathon for me following a youtube guide. It wasn't a game full of exploration and wonder, it was "crap I hope the fragments I got up to now are enough for this boss to get more fragments". It sucked, the entire thing required gimmick builds to get through for slow-reflex people like myself.
The difficulty is meant to either be from learning how to fight the boss or being so strong you don’t have to. I spent 12 hours learning to fight Radahn and had a lot of fun with him. Like 20 minutes later I saw someone kill him in 30 seconds with a crazy busted build. Some people find that more fun. It’s hard to really optimize something like that but with the ease of communication everyone can spread the busted builds they find and soon everyone is using them.
TLDR: unbalanced builds are actually really cool because they let you just go crazy if you’re willing to go out of your way to do so.
I really feel like the fragments ruined the dlc.
Screwed up the whole difficulty curve.
I really cant understand why they made this change.
I wish they were like the golden seeds where you didn't need to collect all of them to max out you stats. Especially when random pot enemies can have them
Last 3 scadu for me were 3 pot guys. Yeah they should have put in 60 at least.
@@makito106 I think FromSoftware did not understand what people liked about the progression in the base game this time around(which is fine, they tried something in dlc, didn't work great IMO, they learned, it will be better in the future). IMO progression should NOT be tied to searching for an item, but more so to defeating an enemy(bosses, mini-bosses, dragons, Those firey things that dropped phisique tears). It will make it easier for people to progress more organically. There were plenty of bosses that were present in caves and all around scattered throughout the whole world. Make them drop these items that make your character stronger. That literally mimics the way the base game worked - a boss is too hard -> you go search for other enemies/minibosses -> defeat them -> get stronger by defeating them -> kill the boss that was giving you a headache -> progress forward. Going around just to gather these shadow tree fragments, while often there was nothing that interesting around them was not fun.
Levelling up my scadu blessing did not make the bosses any more fun nor decrease their combo length from 15 hits to 10 hits or something. Gitting gud just means I'm smart enough to walk backwards for 10 seconds and poke them once. Where is the fun?
This is a really damn good and thought provoking critique man, well done!
Empty areas are too large. Most secrets are on the point but some secrets feel impossible without guides / not suit the size of open-world.
Miyazaki admitted to using mimic tear you know that right? They opened the floodgates for what jumping a god can look like.
The director of the game uses summons and toxic fanboys will still attack you about using them. It's sad that this great game is plagued by kids that yell skill issue when someone gives valid criticism about the game.
Our tarnished is a demi God
Refborn from the walking monolith. The half blood offspring. That's why we van slay gods. As to why we are "unknown" we were bastards tarnished/ demigod and died off of the lands between. Brought back to be buird as a guarded demigod
You can hear the bell, the roar and stomp when we wake up
This is the type of video I’ll be showing my kids. This shit is perfection.
It's the discussions like this that help me to continue pushing.
Elden Rings most difficult fights are difficult due to confusion and boredom.
21:53 As both a gamer who´s been playing fromsoft stuff for years and someone who´s profession has to do with reading comprehension and writing, you´d be surprised of how much this is so not the case. People don´t read. And because they don´t read, they miss out on key chunks of information. This is happening everywhere in life: college, work, everyday life and, of course, videogames. I agree with you on the fact that we cannot dismiss valid criticism with a simple "git gud" cause that shit is cringe, but the total obliviousness and lack of willingness to engage with any fundamentally complex written text in any form of media is a real phenomenom. I´ve seen it expressed in Elden Ring players who´ve had the game for two years now and still haven´t got a clue of how to make life easier for themselves, cause they just boot it up and hack away till they lose so much they get bored. The amount of times people I´ve discussed the DLC with aren´t even aware of the existence of the scadu tree fragments is mind blowing. Nice video, it had some thoughtful insights :)
Even Miyazaki sucks at his own game, does he not read either?
@@DionPanday he said that just for the lolz… he’s been quoted in interviews saying the exact opposite: that he underestimated he time it would take to complete the dlc cause he breezed past it, partly cause he designed it and partly cause he uses all the tools the game gives him 😂
This is genuinely so frustrating. And I do certainly also engage in that type of behavior sometimes. But it is insane to see friends of mine, even those that I find to be intellectual and thoughtful people, routinely skip over chunks of dialogue or tutorial popups in game, then not know what to do, get frustrated and blame the game.
I can't speak about other walks of life, but I assume to many, games are just something to turn your brain off and have fun.
Or they simply aren't willing to give the game the same amount of energy and curiosity as they might have when they were younger and now just expect the dopamine to flow.
As for Shadow of the Ertdtree, just letting yourself be summoned to help people with the bosses will give you a good idea of the type of player you're speaking about.
@@panito3000but he's the one who added those tools. So he was the ultimate casual all along?
@@kindlingking yeah! Turns out it wasnt about getting Gud, more like get casual lmfao
This felt like a Joseph Anderson video, fantastic analysis. Subbed!
Might be multiple replies as i digest the video. Yes saw some challenge runners also say how some bosses are just badly designed and inconsistent. As you mentioned with bob. This attack should stagger him. But those times he just gets something off is so dumb. This challenge runner brought it up by malenia. How sometimes she gets hyper armor. Or how some bosses take multiple parries. It makes the parry less rewarding or just not as consistent.
I dont think fromsoft is going per say a bad direction. Armored core and sekiro being releases near elden ring shows me they still know to make a good game. We saw ds2, and immediately saw them release bb ds3. I think for elden ring they just got lost in the sauce. Openworld leads to more reuse. Ppl expecting insane bosses. Which i dont think we are expecting crazy difficult bosses. I believe most of are just looking for good designed bosses. Midra, rel, messmer give me well designed. Messmer may have some funky hitboxes. But lore wise and battle wise they feel right at home in. Nothing to crazy. Some nice unique characteristics and interesting lore.
The amount of times I had to die drinking St. Trina's whatever was so dumb.
Legacy dungeon is still peak on the base game. All legacy dungeons on dlc felt short and very linear.
Really cool video! I am surprised this video has only ~1700 views
Very good video! Some people just refuse to think and see clear outdated design and say everything FS does is gold.
I would add 2 things:
First, you only mention the ash of war situation, they are so cool, but totally unusable against bosses, Messmer ash of war has 3 inputs, and it's literally impossible to reach even the 2nd one without taking damage, that is, you have over 101 poise and do not get interrupted after pressing the first input. Why did worked so hard to have a build with 2 Hands of Malenia, if I cannot use Waterfowl Dance against any boss, no matter the build ?
Second, the story, Miquella needs our character to defeat Messmer and the other bosses so that he becomes a god. Ok, so first of all, why ? After the defeat of Radhan and Mogh, doesn't he have a very strong ally that can help him ? But let's consider he does indeed needs our avatar, why does our character help him ?
Overall it's a good game, but it just has so many problems, especially with the combat, that feels so outdated, so boring, and the difficulty seems so cheap. Coming from someone who played Jedi Survivor, Lies of P and Rise of the Ronin before, games where the combat and general gameplay feel so refined, not just the combat, but the puzzels and the side quests. Like, what is the point of them, if everybody looks them up on google/wiki ?
Excellent video. My exact complaint about the boss design but explained in an excellent fashion at the 27 minute mark.
Great critique, you aren't just criticizing everything for the sake of negativity like some other youtubers you are also praising the great parts about the dlc
For me personally I think the dlc is just more elden ring, it didn't improve much, some parts are better others aren't and that's okay for me because base game elden ring is already my favorite game up there with Sekiro,
I do like the base game more than the dlc tho simply because it's more repayable for me
The DLC was rushed? It was released two and a half years after the base game came out.