it got spoiled for me and i had already bought the dlc. It wouldnt have touched the dlc if I had known this was the final boss. Its a shit boss. They have been throwing everything and the kitchen sink in with their bosses and its gotten old. Elden Ring it got old really quickly
@@v1l1am95 it was crazy everybody was coping saying it was impossible for it to be that bad. they said the moveset was just godfrey + pontiff, that the arena was a blank map made in an hour by a modder, that the skybox was just limgrave, that the music was phase 1 starscourge at first I also thought it was fake
@@buckiemohawk3643 not a shit boss though. u just ass i guess and cant adapt. sorry trading hits and outhealing didnt work for you :(( finally a boss where you had to try again
Despite what he said about Malenia, she is a boss I always miss after killing her. Maliketh kicked my butt in multiple playthroughs but I always look forward to fighting him in another playthrough. My biggest sadness in ER is I can never fight Margit for the first time ever again. All these feeling, I cannot find them in the DLC. I can start a new playthrough, and go through Gaius and Radahn again. But I kinda don't wanna.
@@hedition9346 margit, morgott, radahon, mohg, radagon, are abse game ones i like as for the dlc, i was hyped as fuck. And i did divine beast whcih i hated, and rellana which i liked the flow of. and i havnt touched it since
I love how literally 99% of the community loves the DLC and then a couple of people hate it and you guys all think YOU are right and EVERYONE ELSE is wrong.
I think this dlc showed that the basic dark souls combat system has been streched to the point of breaking. They have to finally let go of it, or accept that they hit the limit of difficulty in their games and focus on something else.
Yeah fully agree. Feels like they've been in an arms race with the veteran players in making the game difficult enough, and now that's hit it's end state. Feels like they've started delving into making things difficult just for the sake of difficulty and not in any fun or interesting way
@@ennayanne Going back to DS1/DS2 combat would actually make the game way worse imo. It's dated and far too easy to anyone who's played the later Souls games.
@@Invisibleguy-kn7bd it's not dated, it actually holds up perfectly because it's not stretching it past its limit. I'm talking about DS1, not 2. 2 always had problems with its combat. More difficult =/= better combat
I really wish rune arcs were common in the DLC Loot and exploration did feel pretty hollow. Rune Arcs are so stupidly rare in base game (assuming you play offline mostly), they're the only item in the game that is still valuable to the player regardless of level.
Instead of rune arcs, which become so boring to reapply every time you die that I forget to use them, I wish they added some way to make great runes remain active permanently. If they added one of those for each great rune, that's an easy 6 major rewards to give us
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392or in other words.. actual progression for our character. We make no impact, retain nothing of value, don’t get to go into the DLC as our full power lords, don’t carry over any effect from Miquella, have the same hard caps… we’re the same guy. The content isn’t made for the sake of replay-ability, character optimization, or true lore expansion. Nothing that mattered was answered other than “Where is Miquella” like holy hell
It’s really annoying farming rune arcs from rats. Have to reload 5-6 times with 200 discovery just to find 1. So I just gave up on them mostly and only use the Rykard one if I’m exploring instead of using them on bosses where I die more.
@45:50 fun joke, but lore-wise Torrent is spooked because Flame of Frenzy is able to kill not only physical beings but also spirits, that´s why he´s noping out.
Lore explanations just feel so half-assed. If Torrent was allowed, people would be theorizing about how Torrent is willing to die for the Tarnished or something. No matter what they do there will always be some way to justify it afterwards, just like how Mohg's shackle doesn't work on Radahn. If it did work the response would be "Wow look at the attention to detail!" But since it doesn't, people say "Well maybe the Shackle only works on Mohg's soul, or maybe Radahn is just too strong". There is no way to distinguish between an intended design choice or a genuine oversight.
@@FrigidOven "There is no way to distinguish between an intended design choice or a genuine oversight." I am with you there in regards to Radahn. I am not a fan of his, ...., uuuh.... "extended" lore. However, in the frenzied flame ending you see Melina picking up torrent´s whistle which is disintegrating, symbolyzing his death. So that one is established since the base game.
@@FrigidOvento add to svens point, a lot of those "fill in the gaps" elements of lore are one of the appeals of the games, specifically under Miyazaki. Im sure youve heard the story of him as a kid not knowing all the words in the books he read. While yes, it can be a convienent copout, to assume thats the only reason it happens is to assume the worst. I havent had a reason for that to be my immediate assumption after all these years. You give a good example, both of those things are true. It, realistically, doesnt work because the fight is supposed to be hard, no doubt. But its easy enough to logic whatever bs that it wouldnt. If it did, it also would be a great detail. If you want to critique, the quest is why doesnt he have an auto counter attack when you try to use it and destroy it from your inventory. Now *that* would be peak.
Spooky areas in non-spooky games are often the peak but here... even the void has probably more things in it. An idea that I even used in a D&D session was such spooky woods but there was a giant monstrosity with big yellow glowing eyes that wanders around and if it spots you you get stacks of madness. The more madness you had the more weird shit you saw till they defeated the sorcerer in the woods and the whole thing vanished leaving everyone in disturbing silence. My group noped pretty quick out of there.
I entered this video thinking the DLC was OK, like a solid 8. But as the video kept going I realized how much better it could have been. You were so real with the map critique.
honestly 8 is insane. If we compare it to the base game this is actually a 4/10 and a year and a half of development time for a map full of cookbooks and bosses from the base game is actually unacceptable. I think u need higher standards for a company like fromsoft because so many of their games are regarded as masterpieces and SOTE has higher completion time and isn’t anywhere near as good as those games.
@Krispyyaheard idk man i loved the dlc. Im disappointed by things, such as the lack of good items to be found via exploration, undercooked locations (red and blue flower areas severely underutilized, the abyss not really being scary or hard at all) and while i had a good time with the bosses i do think they should have done some smarter design. Still, i really loved it. It could have and should have been better, but thats literally every game
The most annoying part of the DLC is simply visiblity, it feels like Im fighting the particle effects rather than the boss which I think is the fault of fromsoftware's shift towards appealing to an audience that appreciates spectacle rather than actual sound design. A lot of exploration also seems like wasted space, especially the abyssal woods and a lot of middle of the map in general. They vast amounts of recycled enemies dont really help with this issue either. The side content just doesnt really warrant the size of the map. If the game was more similar to the older games with each area consisting of more condensed but uniquely designed zones them it would be a lot more bearable. Instead I have to waste hours traversing the map to even get to the stuff I want to fight.
It isn't just the particle effects, now boss attacks are almost always put under several layers of variable combos and other overcomplications. You are dying more to new shit blindsiding you than to actually hard to avoid attacks. It's super contrived and cheap, they arent actually making the bosses harder, just the learning experience an unenjoyable mess.
That's y I gave up on the Dancing Lion fight. Every time I got him to half health, he would change phases so many times and get really up in the face to where I literally couldn't see anything. And locking off doesn't help either cis he moves around so fast. I just gave up on solo and summoned Freyja and mimic to end it.
@@anonisnoone6125 the wind form is alright at least, lightning is the worst with random lightning strikes all round. Frost form has a problem where if you arent a proper distance away from them when they start a combo you are guaranteed to get hit over and over usually till death.
This is right although I’d say there’s still enough new content to keep all kinds of fans happy. Readability is the problem boss wise, final boss is definitely the worst offender. Hair physics, lights on every swing, full screen and half arena effects. The same but lesser for the player. One of the original visions of the souls series was a weak character having a trial by fire against a depressed world. Every aspect of the design was geared towards this, -movesets looked like if a random dude picked up a weapon and was guessing form wise. -bosses were often very former glory and often had sad backgrounds reflected in the fight -gear was kept simple, a lot of it had some kind of real world analogue Elden ring Definatley took a new direction but it’s a little jarring seeing your ‘lowly tarnished’ brandish a sword infused with death perform 3 front flips while singing and launching 2 big beams. Atleast to me the series was never about becoming infinitely powerful and all knowing, it was about struggle.
I've been saying so many of these exact same things regarding the fights, and it's always dismissed with "skill issue." I'm not good enough to no-hit the game, but I can confidently say I'm an above average player. So it's nice to hear these criticisms be brought up by someone at your level.
It means that everyone has a limit. Now, this guy's limit has been reached, so he needs to complain about the game being "flawed." Just like people did with Maliketh. Going for the most practical way to win is natural for all bosses in every game made, unless people want to impose limitations upon themselves. Suddenly, it's a problem that such a "most practical way" exists.
@Thirteen13551355 What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I find my self looking at the consorts fog wall and think “ am I having fun right now?” “ is this fulfilling?” I have found that elden ring has given me a sense of relief when I beat bosses, not a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment like every other from soft game.
Yea, when I beat bosses in ds3 I felt like "man that was fun, I want to fight them again". In ER I beat a boss and think, "Glad they didn't hit me with a one-shot attack this time"
It’s insane how few cutscenes there are in this. And the ones we get aren’t really base game tier either. The post final boss cutscene is one of the laziest things I’ve ever seen and made me feel like I did something wrong.
I think the problem lies in the fact that Fromsoft really wants these insane spectacle bossfights that are crazy hard but we as the players dont really have the tools to deal with all the spam and 20 hit combos. In Sekiro when a boss does a massive string of attacks it was a good thing (if you were good) because that was your way to massively build up their posture bar. Now obviously Elden Ring has tons of ways to make things easier. There are summons, cheesey builds etc. but I would argue if the players feel the need to cheese these bosses or use their overpowered summons then thats probably not the best design? Elden Ring feels like its trying so hard to be hard but they forgot that in order for it to be enjoyable it also needs to be fair and right now with the controls we have it just is not fair. The bosses can fly all over the arena and do 20 hit combos and all we have as a reliable answer is dodge roll?
@@Yharims exactly man. I dont know how they regressed so hard on bossfights. Even Lies of P has really good boss fights and that was that developers first attempt at a souls game lol
59:56 Genuinely such an L take. Armored Core VI was in development since 2018, with passionate people who had a love for the Mecha Genre and FromSoft's early history on board, alongside getting together Mecha Giants like the original artist behind AC, and artists from other huge franchises like Evangelion and Gundam, to push out the one of the best mech games in recent memory. Comparing that to a freaking 360 Demo or calling it "Very Little Effort" kinda spits on the 5 years of work that went into reviving their original Breadwinner (around only a year less than Elden Ring was in the oven) It's an achievement that they brought back Armored Core so utterly hard while also making Elden Ring. AC isn't a Golden Egg, its their retired old Goose that kept them alive before Souls was a thing. Which, at the moment is due for either an Expansion or a New Generation if reports from Miyazaki are anything to go off.
Wow, i couldn't even handle going throught the "replayability" section but hearing that just makes me think this guy is just a genuine piece of shit instead of someone that actually want to love fromsoft's product at its core.
Worst part is, I actually find that AC6 has better graphics than ER lol. Now don't get me wrong ER's artistic direction is unmatched, I'm only talking about graphics, but still... it's clearly not even a "mid" game!
Great info, I bought AC about 2 months after it came out, I just haven't made the time to play it yet but I plan to. I wouldn't take this guys opinion to seriously. He's gotten a lot of things objectively wrong about the DLC. Example: My build med rolls using the Great Mace and I can dodge roll all of Radahn's melee attacks w/ np while still squeezing in an attack here and there. I find what he said about the s hilarious bc he's using a much faster wep and is light rolling, lol. The problem he never figured out is you need to stay in the pocket of Radahn's attacks and not on the outside. This guy just seems to have had such different expectations from what he got from the DLC that he's just flat out salty about it. The DLC does have issues for sure as I most certainly have my criticisms of it but it's hardly a failure as he's painting it out to be. Kratos : Keep your expectations low boy, and you'll never be disappointed.
@@heyguyslolGAMING I say this as someone who dislikes the DLC so far: Rellana was way more fun when I realized I'm supposed to be smacking her mid-combo with the giant sword. When it clicked that it wasn't about "waiting for a turn" but finding an opening for a crouch poke, R1, Charged R2, or Giant Hunt, not only did it become *easier* but a lot more FUN.
Yeah, what the Hell was he talking about actually. Some of the people for the DLC were working on Armored Core?? Duh. Conspiracy shit man. I don't even like the DLC, but I despise that narrative. That somehow, Armored Core 6, a genuinely excellent experience doing its one thing extremely well, is to blame. Insane.
??? It's the literal opposite - the moves are meant to catch panic roll defaulters so you actually have to learn the timings of the dodge. See this is primarily why I think so many people are crying in the short term as they havent even learned the bosses yet - like every other souls game it starts with people complaining how bad the bosses/lore are, and give it a few months to a year and it will eventually settle with general appreciation. 5 stages of grief
@@ChiefLeef My point was that their design philosophy has been getting stale for a while now, not that you're *supposed to spam* dodge rolls, dude. There are MANY other ways to design bosses, but FromSoftware just *refuses* to change. EVERY fight is the same mechanic: long combos and delayed attacks; memorize when to them, and that's it. I find it amusing that everytime someone writes a comment criticizing FromSoftware, there is a fanboy on the other side reading it, absolutely _salivating_ with the prospect of responding with some variant of the ol' "git gud" adage. Well, I don't have to, since i've already soloed the last boss (twice - heck, i actually enjoyed the game), yet my opinion didn't change: we need something new, it's been obvious for a while that Miyazaki is running out of tricks 🙄
@@fernandofaria2872 I agree, sometimes when I'm fighting bosses and look at their moves I'm like damn that's cool wish I could do that, but then I realise anytime you try anything different from the roll, attack, roll pattern you get punished
@@fernandofaria2872you dont have to roll every attack, you can strafe them, jump over them, duck underneath them with the recovery of a jump attack, space them out etc. If you're strictly only rolling against bosses you're limiting yourself, like as if you were to do a no prosthetics run of sekiro
I love the fact that after rubbing out the map and just leaving Messmer and Bayle it resembled a snake. Definitely unintentional. But an awesome coincidence.
There's some theories about how the God of the Hornsent was some sort of serpent. They're mostly based on the skin Marika pulls the golden threads from in the trailer looking (according to some) like a snake's head, along with the shed skin in the forest next to Bonny Village.
@@anthonypedraza3017lol the entirety of the writing in this game is a “theory” 😂 this way of story telling is so fucking lazy by now, “we’ll just let the players come up with whatever bullshit headcanon and call it a day” lol
@HHTwice A theory, huh? You do realize there's a very clear storyline and timeline of events with only a bit of vagueness for the sake of mystery, right? The story is only nonsensical because people like you refuse to use your eyes and either engage with the environmental storytelling or read. Forget lore videos, the story of Elden Ring is simple: Long ago the Greater Will came to the world and either seeded life upon it or simply uplifted the natives by granting them intelligence. Many Outer Gods vied for control of the world but in the end the Greater Will won. It desires order, civilization and structure, regardless of its specifics. The dragons were either it's first or one of it's earliest chosen people, followed by humanity. Marika became mankind's God after she communed with the Greater Will atop of the Bellurat Tower and then began launching holy war after holy war in an attempt to purge anyone who had wronged her, opposed her or could be a potential threat in the future. On the now empty slate she built her own civilization where Death and Rot were outlawed, creating an odd world where living creatures adapted to eternal life. Humans who grew old or whose bodies were too damaged to function were fed to the Erdtree, the living embodiment of Marika's Golden Order whilst animals and even dung, which never rots in the Lands Between is either left where it falls or is eaten by others. Like the Greater Will, Marika was now a God, but one suborned to the former. And like the Greater Will, she needed an agent to carry out her own will. She took Godfrey as her first husband and Elden Lord and after he killed the last of her enemies she exiled him. She'd either never trusted the Greater Will to begin with, had slowly begun to realize she was expendable or she found out that the Greater Will actually wasn't even communicating with them anymore through Metyr. When Ranni, chafing under the stifling control of Marika and the Two Fingers enacted the Night of Black Knives and killed Godwyn the Golden, Marika snapped. Whether she did it as part of some twisted master plan to free herself of the Greater Will's control, out of grief for losing her favorite child, or both, Marika shattered the Elden Ring and began the Shattering, an apocalyptic civil war. Whether she'd planned for her following punishment and crucifixion is unknown, but when the Game starts the player is one of Godfrey's exiled clan, (many of whom she raised from the dead) a Tarnished that Marika banished just so she could have a trump card in case she ever needed a literal army's worth of muscle. You then go through the Lands Between and eventually make your way to her, and what happens next depends on what quests you did and which ending you picked. The story is simple AF. Everything else in it is just icing and extra detail on this game-shaped cake. It's a great and well-crafted narrative, you just don't get to see every last plot point because mystery keeps people hooked more than just telling them the answers to some of the more obscure lore.
@@anthonypedraza3017 Exactly. Some people read way too deep into some of this stuff like it's some huge mystery full of secrets to discover. Lore isn't story
16:16 man I agree with most of what you said, but saying elden ring doesnt have camera issues is WILD. Idk maybe ur talking about remembrance or main bosses, but Jesus ER has dogshit camera all over the fkin place. Especially when they stuff a 50m2 room with a 40m2 boss
The camera for divine beast was atrocious. They haven't fixed their fucking camera issues in 10 years. Just like other bullshit they refuse to fix (grab attacks that don't even have to visibly touch your character to work, for example). But why should they bother fixing anything when their sycophantic fan base thinks they are infallible and lambasts anyone who doesn't agree.
fighting all huge bosses is always the same problem; the camera sucks. The base game already has Fire Giant to prove that the camera in this game is bad but somehow the devs really insist on making huge bosses like Divine Beast, Golden Hippo, all kinds of dragons, etc. The camera should just be zoomed out when fighting huge enemies
It doest help that the examples he gave with radhan were extremely precise, well thought out camera angles at the boss. Alot of the video is good, alot morenis skewed
As much as i loved the DLC, something felt off from the minute i finished Belurat. I couldnt put my finger on what it quite was, until a very specific instance where i killed a bunch of imps in a room in a catacomb, which looked heavily guarded. Turns out the item they were guarding was a Somber Smithing Stone 2. One other place where things felt really off was Abyssal Woods. Way too empty. The fear that the atmosphere tried to induce fell flat the moment you realized the woods were empty with one repetitive enemy type. Assassins Approach trivialized the whole thing. I really have no compains with the bosses. The level design is DS1 levels of good, but the rewards undermined everything significantly. I felt the sense that they tried to mesh DS1 within Elden Ring, but were forced to artifically increase the map size to cater to expectations from the success of the previous open world.
We had the literal exact same experience man. I was loving the DLC but always had that lingering feeling that something was off. I thought Rellana's fight was fun, but realized mostly because she showed me a spectacle at the end. Have I also been charmed by Miquella that I couldn't see the inherent flaws of the DLC? Where's Melina? Or Godwyn?
Someone said they felt like the DLC was AI generated and while that's a bit of an extreme description, the DLC just felt like it lacked heart and they tried to cram as much random things in the DLC as they could. They could have shrunk/cut a lot of the areas and focused more on other things, idk.
@@chopsandtoots I think a lot of it was because they tried to merge multiple themes in a single experience. 2 fleshed out DLCs covering what we got + Godwyn, and areas with more thought out rewards and a meaningful open world would have been a better experience. Maybe 1 themed on Marika's past / Messmer and 1 themed on Miquella ascension to Godhood. The Jagged Peak, Finger ruins and Abyssal Woods are basically map fillers within the current context of the story. They could've been split into the 2 dlcs arbitrarily really.
The DLC is great but the itemization sucks! Why is there like no loot or even bosses in the far corners of the “fingers” section ? Makes NO sense that they could not drop like 5 items in each section that includes spells and some weps !
I won't argue on the fact that some exploration zones are empty, but having a bunch of mobs guarding mushrooms or lvl 1 stones are littering the base game
This whole video encompasses my entire feelings for the DLC. The DLC felt like wasted potential all the way through. Everywhere I've explored ended up with me asking if that's it. The finger ruins was my biggest disappointment. A giant spot on the map, but it's only there to look pretty since there's only 1 thing in the middle. The questlines were complete barebones. The boss lore was nearly non existent. The bosses themselves were terrible except Messmer and Midra. Everything felt completely sudden too. The introduction to Messmer's fight felt right of left field. I didn't even know I was about to fight him, and I also thought he was the final boss, so it just didn't feel right. The DLC also just ends abruptly after the cutscene. It felt like a joke. The worst part though is how the DLC has next to no tie in to the base game. No continuations to unfinished stories, Miquella's needle doesn't do anything in the DLC even though it says it's unfinished and can prevent someone becoming a lord of frenzy flame like Midra, and hell, I don't think any NPC in the base game mentions anything about the land of shadow or your actions there. I would've expected Gideon to be completely enthralled by you finding the land of shadow and Miquella. Melina also would've had something to say about Messmer and Marika's home too. I honestly felt like I wasted $40 for a fan mod.
Bro check my comment I said the SAME THING! I couldn’t believe I walked into Messmer’s room. You would’ve thought he would be sitting underneath the scadutree with armed forces and 62 configurations stopping you. I thought this man would blow the roof off the castle and transform into a dragon for a 3rd phase or fully turn into a serpent and instead they gave him 2 extra incantations and no extra health or status effects UGHHHH! The man can resurrect the dead, cure poison, create weapons and spirits from thin air and basically has two distinct powers one of which he had never even unleashed before and he can’t get so much as a proper send off or a decent amount of exposition from the side characters. And what’s the point of having St Trina, Melina and Miquella beefing with the frenzy flame if no one was going to care that I showed up post lord of frenzy flame ending with my dumbass Vyke war spear looking like a GOOF!
Miquella is almost ditzy in his boss fight, ALOOF! Radagon is practically dead (or actually dead when you fight him) so we get why he has no personality but outside of this DLC what base Demi-God or outer God do you see get treated like this? In the base game 17 characters will talk your ear off just speculating about what a Demi gods jock strap smells like after a battle. But in this game where I’m meeting someone who’s as strong as I SHOULD BE… had the game allowed us to go in as the lords that we already are and I get 3 lines of dialogue from Miquella, Radahn doesn’t speak, Mohg obviously doesn’t speak but yes let’s remember that we technically fought and wasted the potential of THREE Demi gods at the same time. Shout out to Godwyn and Midra for staying a consistent disappointment as well. Hell BAYLE had more buildup than those two combined. You know why? Cause I had to scale a GODDAMN MOUNTAIN just to get to him! It didn’t feel like an accident or random when I met him, it felt like I was about to go fight Godzilla with Bayle even having his number one hater in my ear hyping up my accomplishment. Outside of Ansbach, St. Trina, and Freyja where were these interactions??? What’s the excuse? Where are the random merchants hiding in libraries. Everyone just dies after 3 conversations
Bayle and Romina were terrible? Rellana too? Shadow keep is a mid game area and it's explicitly clear that's where Messmer resides, what in the absolute hell made you think he was going to be the final boss? Especially when the poster boys of from soft DLCs are rarely the final bosses of their DLCs. There is literally a summon sign and a site of grace right outside his room, to say his fight came out of left field is insane. Miquellas needle description explicitly tells you it only works in Farum Azula, tf were you expecting it to do in Midras Manse???? The other complaints like lack of connection to the base game and empty areas are all valid, shame it's marred by some of the completely ludicrous youve said
@@Username-wj8pzTrailers and other announcements suggested that you need to find Miquella. They also suggested that Messmer is responsible for everything bad that happens in Shadowland. It's strange how unconnected their plots are, if not burning of Sealed Tree behind Romina Messmer would be completely optional- especially that he is not guarding his kindling because he is opposed to Miquella's plan of something, he is just chilling in his castle and you kill him (I am not sure if he even noticed that Miquella is Shadowland)
pretty sure the significance of midra’s boss room is it being the place he housed the three fingers before he went crazy. it’s why the bonfire is called “discussion chamber” or something like that
@@raiden3013 Don't try to argue with them, they just call anything that isn't hating the game "being fanboys" even if you have personal problems with it, they aren't worth your time.
The reason Torrent was never unphased by anything we went through in the base game is because he's just a spirit -- he doesn't really "die" per se. He was afraid of the Madness Forest because the Flame of Frenzy can kill spirits, hence why he didn't want to be summoned I still think it's bullshit though. You can see in the trailer Torrent riding towards Midra's Manse. They definitely cut a bunch of content which is a shame
@@Idontevenknowman779 As the other person commented it, it's most likely a much much weaker version of the flame. Midra is a Lord, and if the power scaling is the same as ours in that ending, he would be capable of burning away all forms of life
@@Idontevenknowman779 the Abyssal Forest is quite literally tainted by Frenzy. But sadly its a disappointment, there were only 3 winterlanterns over all and mostly a vast empty landscape full of sheep, rats, and worshippers. And thats it, I really expected a crap ton of the winterlanterns, and maybe the water inflicting frenzy because Shabriri and the Frenzied eyes are actually an inspiration from the real life disease that causes one to go blind after bathing in an infected river. Its also inspired by a jewish demon, Shabriri, the demon of blindness.
I think its just the Flame of Frenzy or the Woods has some supernature shit that mess with people mind or animals are actually more vulnerable to madness like those rats ... yea it still sounds bullshit
The one thing I never thought would happen in a FROM game happened while fighting Radahn. I felt bored. It has never happened during any of their other previous games, or even when I was going for the plat in the base game, but holy hell when I made it to the end I just felt burnt out and couldn't continue.
I thought Malenia was an outlier, and they would make bosses that resembled something more fair like DS3 to show they can make tight, excellently paced bosses. Turns out they doubled down on Malenia level bullshit and most bosses felt more relieving to defeat instead of actually enjoying the experience.
@@chan_martinlooking back I don’t mind Malenia much, but I think she would’ve been more of a blast to play against in sekiro. In this dlc I wasn’t even banging my head against the wall with radahn for long, I was just over it and felt bored fighting him. Meanwhile is DS3 I would actively join co-op just to replay bosses over and over again that were so much fun to fight
@@spiznasty Overall yes I agree Malenia would mostly be fine besides Waterfowl. It makes sense knowing that Sekiro and Elden Ring were being made in the same period of time. It’s a shame they couldn’t borrow more from what Sekiro innovated on and ended up with what felt like Dark Souls but not nearly as tight as anything from DS3.
@@chan_martin sekiro has the best combat I’ve ever played in a soulslike that even if they never make a sequel to it I hope they use the deflection system in another game. It’s just too good to shelve after 1 game
@@spiznasty True that gameplay is so satisfying and I hope they continue innovating on that. I could see them doing a Sekiro sequel or something similar. I mean people forget it won GOTY in 2019. It’s beloved and there’s still plenty of that world to explore.
The DLC was actually made from cut content, and that's proven by the low level of smithing stones if anyone's paying attention. They simply jacked up the HP and damage numbers of everything.
@@atlantic_love I dont really see how that follows. The DLC took 2 years to make, I doubt it was mostly stuff they already had ready to go (even though a lot of stuff in there is even recycled from the main game
Yeah. I don't get how people ignore these issues in the main game. Maybe they've started to feel blind nostalgia for it already. Even seen people unironically say things like: "the main game had actually fair and great bosses like Malenia and the DLC has strayed off that" 😆. Give me a break. The DLC only doubled down on the issues the main game had.
@@ennayanne You can google about the cut content. The smithing stones is a BIG CLUE as to where the content for the DLC originally fit in. They simply ramped up the health and damage of enemies, and forgot about scaling other parts of the DLC.
Some of the quest made no sense either. It just felt like homework, and the quests don't branch out or have any versatility what so ever. Example: When Leda asks you who we should eliminate, we either suggest Thiollier, Hornsent, or say I don't know. I find it kind of pathetic that it doesn't matter at ALL what you choose, because it's going to result in the same way.. Leda going after the Hornsent. I was really hoping there was a way to CONVINCE Leda, or shift her focus towards Thiollier/St. Trina after we tell her St. Trina's words. I think that would've open up a WHOLE new opportunity or change in narrative to story if Leda were to take no risks, and kill St. Trina or something.
I mean after you talk to her and make a choice you can chose whether to be summoned to aid Leda or be summoned to help the person she's trying to kill (whoever you chose at the time). She chooses hornsent if you fight messmer before making a choice iirc. Outcome being that it can change who appears in the battle with Leda and her allies.
@@Phot0n0she always chooses hornset, if you help Hornsent she sometimes* goes after ansbach. She doesn’t care about any of the choices you make outside of help her kill or don’t help her kill. If you kill her in the invasions it accomplishes nothing in the narrative, she’s still there at the gank fight unphasedby what you’ve done previous. Which is weak, and a change of pace in the fromsoft quest design that works poorly.
@@SecretMarsupial crestfallen knight does a complete character 180 off of player choices, solaire can go hollow or replace Gwyn, Anri can become your spouse in DS3 or just another casualty. Millicent either dies and fulfills Gowrys wishes if the player kills her, or dies on her own terms as her own person. Yes if you kill Leda with hornset you get swift slash AOW. Fantastic besides that the choice is meaningless, you summon hornset for mesmar and the voice actors has a bit of fun, but you still have to kill hornset and nothing else changes. Compared to the quest lines we used to get this shit is garbage. Virtually every quest line in the DLC feels like this. I’ll give shout outs to thiolier and Yimir/Jolan at the very least.
You're one of the few people I've ever heard actually talk about the intendedness in how to dodge waterfowl, and yeah Radahn's triple slash is just an extension of the same problem. It's like in the language of their games, all of the ways to really avoid it are exploits, or just block it, which isn't really avoiding it and also build dependent, or simply run, which is probably the most intended thing, but that's also a bit stupid and doesn't always work either. Radahn's triple slash is so sloppy and amateurish, are they even trying anymore. The move that cuts s is the downward slash. It's supposed to cut s because the downslash can hit you while you're knocked up in the air, the problem is, if you stand on a rock or something, you become elevated, and it becomes impossible to roll through anymore. I'm glad I'm not just being gaslighted and someone recognizes that Messmer is by far the best designed fight in this DLC. He and to a lesser extent midra just make me wish for a boss rush.
@@poiumty This is a feature that already exists in sekiro without the introduction of any mods, the fact that it is completely absent from elden ring is baffling to me. People shouldn't be forced to install mods to play a game mode that they have already successfully implemented in previous entries.
I would love to hear an interview from Miyazaki of him saying "Yeah I rolled waterfowl no problem. It was easy." It honestly feels like the intended way to deal with it is just eat some damage and hope you survive. I doubt the playtesters found out how to dodge waterfowl.
@@Nudderbols To force the player to adapt into a build that can survive taking an overpowered hit is a legit answer though; Elden ring is full of things that reduce damage taken, isn't making such elements irrelevant for boss encounters even more sloppy? Fundamental issue I see in a lot of amateur criticism pieces like this is the way that they fail to understand that a developer's vision has to be somewhat pluralistic whereas a reviewer/player's perspective is typically singular in a perspective sense. As soon as a critic starts saying "the game is intended to be played x way" in the context of a RPG title where the system offers multiple approaches, I know they simply don't get the designer's perspective.
@@inxe8 There's an intended window to play the game. That window is somewhere in between bosses having undodgeable attacks and using a bleed build with flame grant me strength to kill everything in 15 seconds. Neither side of the spectrum is fun. Somewhere in the middle is.
The white elephant is the gameplay, but you also touched a point not many comment and it is the lack of storytelling and build up for these remembrance bosses. Only Messmer, Miquella and Bayle get this treatment. The rest are just flashy but random encounters. Almost not cutscenes, no dialogue, no one that tells their deeds, and almost no items that bring lore beyond their remembrance rewards. What happened? Couldn't they make Miquella's followers to at least give info about any of the other remembrance bosses?
I'd argue Dancing Lion and Midra also have proper buildup/lore. Those also happen to be the other 2 fights with cutscenes Metyr IMO is almost there, since the questline serves as decent build up. The rest are honestly more akin to mini bosses
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 Well, I would concede the Dancing Lion. Besides the cutscene, there is a single NPC that talks about them (although I completly missed her in my playthrough). Midra on the other hand only has the cutscene and the torch to give some lore before the fight (or so I think). For such a cool boss, I think he needed NPCs' dialogue, more items or something else to make him known before actually facing him.
@@danield.1605 for the lion, I mostly like how it's part of hornsent culture. It's this "divine" spirit that possessed 2 warriors specifically trained for this. It was a festival/religion thingy before being turned to a weapon. The other horned warriors, curseblades and divine warriors are all part of this cultural identity that elevates the fight to me. Midra admittedly piggybacks a lot on the frenzied flame lore of the base game. But I did enjoy what little he has. With the torch implying that he was manipulated into this position by Nanaya, and the absurd amount of hornsent inquisitors showing how much they feared the flame (and I just love that cutscene and overall aesthetics, definitely biased)
That's not really unique to the DLC. A decent chunk of remembrance bosses in the base game have no cutscenes or build up. Base game has: Ancestor Spirit, Astel, Fortisaxx, Plasidusax, and Fire Giant. And the DLC has: Rellana, Gaius, Romina, Scadu Avatar, and Putrecent Knight. So they're dead even.
@joaoluizkfsantos8392 yeah, it's not all about cutscenes and item descriptions. The environment tells the story. Just the mansion... The paintings showing a happy man and his wife. The rows on rows of bookshelves. The books mouldering onthe floor in knee deep piles. The atmosphere of sickness and decline. The jaundiced light. The row of decapitated servants.
The new DLC weapons are on pre patch 1.7, you can see this in their poise damages and hit-stun values for pvp, which leads me to believe there are even more oversights and rushed parts in this DLC and as it is now is not what they set out to make. Also before the DLC released for the public, Radahns frametrap full combo'd into the cross swing, just thought I'd let you know that.
I for one hated the new lore about Miquella and Radahn. The pre-DLC lore was just fine: The Blade of Miquella challenges The Starscourge, unleashes an eldritch rot-nuke to end in a stalemate, now a magic zombie giant is pinning the stars in place. Radahn's story was tragic, but complete. Bringing him back as Radahn Prime was just fanservice, it felt fake. Mogh was just fine being super-duper evil. He was mistreated as an omen, and that drove him to worship an outer god of blood and pain. The Golden Order creating it's own enemies was a fine enough theme. Hell, I was even expecting him to have been charmed, but in a creepy yandere way and Miquella couldn't turn it off. Him just being a pawn seemed both needlessly cruel and cheapened him as a character. It also undermines Malenia's inherent tragedy, being so devoted to her brother (who made it his life's work to cure her rot) only to be absent when he needed her most. At least this explains why we couldn't reason with Malenia beforehand, but again damages her character because that just means she was just sitting on her ass for however long, rotting out her brother's tree. And Miquella! God forbid we have just one morally pure demigod in the family, now he's a creepy cult leader lopping off pieces of himself, brainwashing people with magic instead of some super-charisma. There's pretty much nothing furthering the Rot/Abundance dichotomy between him and his sister, and we couldn't interact with him at all in a way that didn't involve violence. This whole story reads like fanfiction, and not the fun trashy kind.
Well, with your bit about Miquella, it was always implied that he had the ability to charm people using an external ability, we see that in the description for the 'Bewitching Branch'. To quote the item description, "The Empyrean Miquella is loved by many people. Indeed, he has learned very well how to compel such affection. " Although I do agree with you, we should have had far more interaction with Miquella during the DLC, if for any reason then to at least make him sympathetic.
I actually kinda like the new plotline with Radahn as it implies why hes holding the stars in place. Which always seemed kind of random. But doesn't want to be the consort, and the only way to prevent it from happening is to not die. And some mechanism of holding back the stars/fate prevents this. Hes not a crazed warrior too powerful to die, hes actively holding out as long as possible because staying alive at any cost is the only way to hold the stars in place and avoid the fate forced on him by Miquella. It also leads to some other questions, like if he ever was really trying to cure Malenia.
@huttyblue I actually saw a very interesting idea in the comments of this video. While I can't find it, I'll paraphrase it. Effectly what this idea stated was that Miquella's curse of never growing doesn't just apply to his body but also his fate. We see examples of this throughout the lore, two notable examples being his attempt to cure Malenia and his attempt to bring in a new age of compassion, both of which were stomped out before they could reach fruition.
ikr!? his charisma influencing people is way more interesting than just mind control "cause he says so" they really made him in base game like a beacon of light for a dark time for people regardless if he was good or evil, he had what people wanted and would give their all for him to make it so, with his gifted understanding of life, the fact gawry being enamored by the golden needle who is most likely like shibiri a spokesperson or embodiment of the rot goddess itself finding admiration for a person he never met was such a good way to set up a character as being believable that he could sway the hearts of people by his realistic abilities to bring salvation to them. and instead of being jesus like in dlc where he just magically cures the redmane chick's scarlet rot with a touch, he was using his actual talents to craft items that could nullify outer God's abilities. he really was made into a caricature like someone unrelated to the base game read about him and wrote the dlc plot.
i remember being so flabbergasted when i first fought radahn in the dlc. it was hard to put in words how bad the fight is. but you put it nicely. whole fight is just meta build time, be it completely naked light weight ash of war stuff, or just full heavy greatshield. same thoughts with madness woods. i was so confused why that whole area even exists, its just empty.
@@Stanzbey69the fact you can even beat radahn with shitty brainless tactics like that shows the game requires 0 fucking skill, and that's the problem. Elden ring doesn't reward having skill, it rewards having no skill
@@Stanzbey69 I can tell you haven't even fought Radahn to say those words. It's such an unfun boss fight, people either use a no skill build to kill him or do the most meta shit ever to cheese him. Legit fun builds don't work well against Radahn that's a huge problem.
I feel like Elden Ring is too big and too unfocused. The rabbit hole that is the frenzy status effect, insight changing game mechanics all the way to the 2nd half of Bloodborne, the emergence of winter lanterns, hidden areas it's secret bosses, chalice dungeons and DLC have so much more depth to it than Elden Ring. Because Elden Ring has like a million things you can look into but it all stops short. Gloam-eyed Queen Godwynn The Shattering Radagon's roots Frenzied Flame roots how the TEMU winter lanterns came to be Difference between Messmer's fire and Fell God's fire Melina What did Morgott think of Miquella The list goes on forever But it doesnt get deep. Ive seen videos of people yapping about the implications of a single chalice dungeon in Bloodborne because of the designs on the walls for like 2-3 hours. And it reads like a fun audio book while you play and immerse yourself in it. What am I supposed to immerse myself into in Elden Ring? Catacombs? With Death roots that lead to Godwynn's body that has a bunch of missing lore? All the catacombs are the same, what are the implications between them all. Oh some of them have death roots because the tree has roots. That's it. Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle. Go back to tight, linear well crafted stories.
The most disappointing part about the DLC is all the recycled enemies and bosses from base game. The new enemies are almost all reserved for legacy dungeons. In the overworld there are very few. A lot of reskins of enemies like red roaches, shadow dogs, etc., but those are just reskins, not new enemies. Huge areas with nothing in them comes close second, it just wasn't fun to explore. Blue flower area is just Limgrave, it even has a similar huge hole like the one after fighting Radahn. For a 40€ DLC I expected more DLC and way less base game.
Half of the enemies in TOH are reused ones or reskinned. And yet, for people its the best DLC FS made. Its not a bad thing, and its not a factor for calling DLC "bad". There is still a lot of unique enemies, that shine better then the main game ones (Like.. Fire knights, Black knights, Divine Beasts, those Horned dancers, Messmer Soldier's, Horned warriors and more.) That beach is really nothing like limgrave. Atleast where's castles? Where's big forest? Ruins? You could've brought up the dragon fight close to water, but nah.. Big hole with legacy dungeon? Yeaah..
@@Coeaxe Welp, unless you're actually willing to inevitably trade an hit or two with him, then yeah he has plenty of openings to get him with an heavy weapon. It's a true shame tho that the little "trading" you're getting into will most likely result in a mosquito bite for Radahn and a good 65% of damage dealt to you, and all of this with the physical negation flask, talismans and the armor set of Moore. Even worse if you're a spellcaster build, as he has been specifically designed to nullify ranged builds lmao
@@jador9641 I had to basically respec for Radahn, he fucked me up real good, he has even crazy AI that basically ignores any spirit ashes, even mimic with the aggro talisman couldn't hold him for more then 5 seconds, he instantly aggros on you even if you dont attack him, bear in mind I just wanted mimic there to only keep his attention to apply my buffs, nope didnt work. And people say that spellcaster builds are OP, idk what are people smoking but spells suck dick in DLC, and especially the ones you find in the DLC, most new spells take too long to cast and dont do enough damage, the timing windows of even charging some spells like comet or night comet is too long for some DLC bosses, since by the time you cast your charged spell you're already at 30% bcs surprise surprise the boss you're fighting was fed crack cocaine and wont even let you breath. I've beaten him with frost bleed build in 60 seconds while resetting frostbite with fire damage and it was super frustrating to be honest not being able to play the game my way and being forced out of my certain playstyle I cant even fucking imagine the pain trying to fight him with collosal weapons, fuck me honestly.
If the people who uncritically accept absolutely anything that From puts out aren't willing to accept the very valid criticisms that are being made on a daily basis under the excuse of "git gud" they should at least listen to someone with over a 100 runs, including no hit runs.... right?...... right?
I'm not gonna listen to somebody that calls a Demi god with the body of a child a "sexy femboy". He just sounds jaded. The DLC is far from perfect but it's a great addition and it's damn fun
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 Yes! I enjoyed the fight so much, I think it’s one of FromSoft’s best bosses, just that the moveset felt like a Dark Souls 3 boss for the most part, roll roll swing, not much positioning, no spacing, you can’t punish in the middle of most attack strings like how you could do with Margit/Morgott/Maliketh/Godfrey/Malenia/Radagon, those bosses had plenty of punish windows that can be extracted, also Radahn, just requires too much perfection of roll directions which is fair but not the best for me as a boss design philosophy, he also has combos that he does without recovery animations which is weird, you have to wait for ANOTHER combo just so you can have a real window to get your hit in. Still, it’ll be an S-tier boss for me IF FromSoft fixed the hitboxes, that almost unavoidable attack, increase recovery animations of that one combo & degrade the AOE effects, the music, spectacle, the big attack animations & the arena are a 10/10 all-timer stuff. ❤️⭐️
If they gave the dlc boss arenas any personality then there would be too much terrain/architecture getting in the way of the boss’ spinny bs aoe moves lol 10/10 design, working as intended
@@WhySoSeriousSenpai oddly enough I’m fine with that boss and its arena, his speed and attack patterns are consistent with his size and they give you enough room to attack and retreat without the camera getting in your way
You pretty much summed up my exact opinion about the bosses in this DLC. When I got to the Dancing Lion, the very first boss I fought in the DLC, I was legit baffled. For the first time since I played DS2, I was not having fun fighting a boss in a Souls game. Then I fought almost every other boss in the DLC and had pretty much the same feeling. At first I thought it was just cuz I didnt have many Scadtree fragment yet, but even after collecting a ton of them and trying the bosses again I was still not having fun and just wanted to end the fight already. It is extremely rare that a Souls boss makes me wanna spam the most OP weapon or spell I got to quickly get their fight over it, and somehow this DLC had so many bosses like that. In the base Elden Ring, only Malenia and Elden Beast made me feel like that. Mostly Elden Beast cuz Malenia only pissed me off with her water dance attack. I would actually bet money that Miyazaki saw how players were using summons like Mimic Tear and spamming that Rivers of Blood skill to breeze through base bosses and decided that DLC bosses would not just have way more HP and attack damage, but also they would be way more offensive to deal with summons. All the while completely ignoring players like me who always solo bosses and play a melee build... Anyway, when it comes to the exploration of the DLC map, I actually liked it. It wasnt perfect, as I think some areas are extremely empty and we could have had more varied environment, but as a big new area I was okay with it. Optional dungeons were mostly fine I guess. The main ones could have been bigger, maybe more unique looking as well, with more secret walls to find. And lorewise...I am not surprised at all for the lack of it. I am used to Miyazaki barely giving us anything concrete and just leaving us to guess wtf is going on. But anyway, all in all, I did not hate the DLC, but I do feel it shouldnt have been 30 bucks. That is too expensive for the mixed feelings I have after playing it. Like half of the bosses REALLY let me down in a way that reminds me of Dark Souls 2. At times this DLC unironically made me ponder if I am too old for Souls games now. Bosses that make me feel like I am wasting my time playing the game should not exist in a Souls game.
I haven't finished SotE, but the thing that struck me the most was how empty the open world is. It's almost as if they decided to re-purpose the open world from a place of wondrous discoveries and treasures to a traversal puzzle, aka how do I get down from this cliff. I think though, Elden Ring has to be understood for what it was designed to be. Sekiro is about improving yourself as a player more than improving your in game character. DS3 is somewhere in the middle , you have to improve both yourself and the character. Elden Ring is on the opposite end of that, improving your in game character more than improving yourself. What matters most is what items you have, your rune level, your tools, your weapon upgrades, your spirit ashes, your scadutree frags. The game is about counteracting challenges by finding, equipping, and using the correct tools, not about git gud. That is also why you get a lot more respecs than you would Dark Souls. Trying to approach Elden Ring bosses with a Dark Souls mindset , looking for that "dance" with the bosses is setting yourself up for disapointment - as a huge fan of Sekiro, Bloodborne and the Souls series, I found that out the hard way.
On your second point, I completely blame that as a fault of the open world design that Fromsoft tried to tackle and half failed on. The ebb and flow of progression you saw in the older games through mechanical improvement and knowledge checks could be entirely bypass by an much more easily accesible stat check (with the exception of a few bosses) compared to the previous titles. That completely dilutes the content for me personally and I hope that in the future they do not attempt open world again, if they do then I hope they at least learned from the failures of Elden Ring which I find to be less likely now due to how they handled DLC content.
it's fucking hilarious how empty some areas are. and some areas are just filled with base game bosses. and the best part is, if you criticise this miyazaki fanboys will call you bad at exploring
@@pringle239 hinterland just has 2 tree sentinels and a falling star beast, the red area just has a deathbirrd and tibia mariner,finger places have literaklly nothing lmao, same goes for the abyssal woods. they force you off torrent and force you to walk through an empty area with copy pasted rats from the base game to get to a good boss
16:23 WHAT WHAT WHAT LMAO "Elden Ring base game had basically 0 camera issues" Surely you're joking, right? Ulcerated Tree Spirit, Falling Star Beast (esp. the one in Sellia Crystal Tunnel), Fire Giant, Red Wolf of Radagon, Magma Wyrms, Maliketh, literally *ANY* dragon... do I need to go on? Let's stick with the truth please.
@@atlantic_lovein sekiro you actually have to get good. That’s why you can’t make your own character. You’re experiencing someone else’s story and they have a specific way of doing things.
Thank you so much for summarizing your thoughts about Radahn! Its exactly how I feel and its a shame that the last content for my favorite game ends that way :(
The idea of Shadow of the erdtree being a sequel wouldve been so good in hindsight. Especially with how different the dlc is with its progression compared to the main game, why wasnt this just a sequel? I wouldve definitely waited longer and wouldve been more excited to find out that due to the contents of the dlc it would instead be turned into a sequel. What i mainly dont like about the dlc is that it left me feeling… empty by the end of it.
Miazaki dosen't like to do sequels. Shadow of the erdtree does function as a dlc quite well. You can also make the argument that the old hunters is also really disconected from Bloodborne as the only thing that changes in the main game is the doll getting like 3 new lines of dialoge
Because if a hypothetical Elden Ring 2 ended with fighting fucking Radahn like in this DLC, the people who actually care about this shit would be 1000x more annoyed at how lame that is than we already are.
The AC6 slander isn't really justified. Armored Core games have always been pretty simple and straightforward, and the gameplay is more fun and coherent than what you find in SoTE. I think the issue with SoTE is that too much was cut, and what was left wasn't fleshed out and refined enough, which might just come down to a time/money thing, plus the expansion of the team creating a dip in quality.
i agree with you, but as an armored core player at heart I can see how the way it was advertised to the fromsoft community and how it actually played were pretty different leaving a lot disappointes. i know people who stopped playing before they got to baltaus cause they were bored but were super excited to play it when it was advertised.
On Radahn's -ignoring move: I think it's some kind of fuckery regarding framerate. For many attempts I gaslighted myself into thinking I was rolling at the wrong time until I took footage and went frame by frame until I could see clear as day that my char would still be halfway through a roll when the HP bar would take the hit. I think it may have something to do with the fact that normally being displaced or knocked down by a boss attack gives you temporary s but the first swipe is supposed to combo into the downslam so it checks to see if the first attack hit then ignores your s if so, but some spaghetti code lets it do that normally maybe. Weirdly enough, I had this issue when I was locking Elden Ring to 30fps and when I turned that off the attack worked as intended 100% of the time.
It seems to be a problem they have with "juggling" attacks specifically. My understanding from what I've seen others say who've analysed the hitboxes is that the first half the first half of that swing has ignoring hitboxes. The first half of the swing ignores s it seems so that it can hit you out of the air when he "juggles" you.
The Radahn fight is an example of a developer trying as hard as they can to make a boss "uncheeseable." They added so much weird cheesy stuff (in terms of souls-like mecahnics) that you can obtain and use in these fights. I just dont understand why they seem to have gotten so angry at people using the games mechanics as they're presented. Everything from his reach to his moveset to his behvavior screams, "You must play this how WE want you to." Artificial difficulty in games has been a problem for a while now, but this fight shows the pinnacle of it.
@@kylew7180 So because you can do a very limited way of "ignoring" his mehcanics he's not SUPPOSED to be an uncheesable boss? Standing there and building a characters specifically so you can take all his hits with a shield is hardly cheese. How is parrying cheesing? You have to do it 3 times to get the stagger and hit. Its a skill shot. Most builds will not be able to just ignore shit with his fight.
@@kylew7180 I'm not going to lie, the fact that most of these FS hardcore fanboys hardly knows what does the terminology "Role Play Game" even means is lowkey discouraging. It's just beyond sad to see people defending with both claws and fangs such a disgusting boss design like The Promised Simp which have been blatantly studied to literally nullify the "Role play" component in this game for the sake of "Challenge over fun".
@amilcarcampbell2405 Absolutely not true, every single person I have seen beat Radahn has beaten them in a different way using completely different builds and gear.
You sound like an elitist prick and your comment tells me why you play these games. You play them as some sort of badge of honor, which is pathetic to be honest. The difficulty has reached a point where there are zero fun or engaging mechanics to deal with all the nonsense from bosses and enemies. There are ways around it but it turns into hiding behind a great shield or either a rolling simulator. You probably can’t comprehend that tho because all you see is “hard=good”.
And how did he get “filtered” if he beat the DLC? You just trying to skill-check someone. Go tell mommy and daddy you beat the DLC, I bet they’d be so proud of their little boy.
@@zachtaylor5312I agree with you but for me it’s not even that it’s too hard, it just lacks any substance. Nothing was rememberable about it and I wasn’t invested in any of the characters/bosses. The areas looked good but that’s it. Worst fromsoft dlc to date by far but all the Elden ring fanboys just started playing fromsoft games 2 years ago so maybe when they actually play the other games they’ll know what we are saying.
I agreed with much of this. The first thing that irked me was just the camera and trying to read tells of the animal bosses, but then their faces would become transparent thus removing the tells of their attacks. I found phase 2 of many bosses to severely limit player interactions. The "undodge-able" attacks became an issue after commander gaius. ever time i struggled to dodge something I would just think "it must by some frame perfect garbage. Metyr's swooping beam attack cannot be dodged. There is a way to med roll radahn's triple swipe, but you have to be moving around his right side before the attack has started, to be able to clear it. But this attack just stopped me from completing the DLC. In phase 2 it would just catch me and stun lock me into death (50 vigor and 17 levels of fragments). I went into the DLC with a venomous fang build and there's just a stretch where everything was immune to poison. the ghostflame dragons, petulance knight, Death Bird, and the furnace golems. The furnace golem i enjoyed the first one as a better fire giant, but then the spamming fireball attack and having to kill 8 of them became such a massive chore. I changed my build so many times just trying to adapt to the bosses. I can enjoy a spectacle, but from a technical side in regards to the combat I just felt it lacking.
This is unrelated to your review save for at the end, but I do think your view on Armored Core is pretty ridiculous. The franchise overall is really fun, and 6 is amazing (despite some issues with the multiplayer, but if anything those issues arose due to various Souls mechanics being implemented into the game). I'm unsure if you've beaten it or not, but if you haven't I recommend playing through it. It's a genuinely amazing game with plenty of great weapons and AC parts to try, and although it offers a very different experience when compared to Elden Ring, I would not agree that it is a "B-team" game in the sense of quality. Cheaper to make compared to ER's gargantuan map size, perhaps, but certainly not B-team in terms of quality. In fact, there are various aspects of the game that I actually PREFER when compared to Elden Ring. Just a nitpick on that last tangent, I'm not sure if I agree with your overall review as I'm still thinking on the DLC myself, but I do think you do AC a disservice here and at the very least it'd be nice to hear your thoughts on it (especially if you really did just buy it as a show of support and have yet to play it).
imo AC6 was a more complete and polished experience than both Elden Ring and SOTE. All the bosses were great and the NG+ additions gave the game replay value like no other Fromsoft game.
22:46 1. Music is great 2. Design and idea are creative and unexpected. I like his twitching too 3. Gimmick with changing phases according to time of the fight is something new 4. He is not so oppressive when you understood that many of his attacks are just visual cluster Overall my third favorite remembrance boss from DLC
I'm so fucking done with From pulling in stuff I'd actually want but like a game later than they should. Deflecting hard tear, giving the fucking back step i-frames, just make these main mechanics. It's absolutely insane that the back step has remained USELESS for like 5 games and only NOW are they bothered to do anything about it. And maybe if we/they stop jerking off to the laser light show boss fights we can get a better experience as a whole. Might I also add armor set bonuses STILL don't make any sense because it's so arbitrary. Spellblade set gets full bonus for full set. Alberich's trousers don't count but the rest of it does, and only Ranni's hat counts, what the actual fuck.
I pretty much agree with about 80% of your video. FromSoft fanboys and new fans who feel like they've discovered a pile of gold with Elden Ring are either blind or coping when they call this DLC a 10/10.
I enjoyed the DLC. I don't think it's a 10/10, but I thoroughly enjoyed learning and beating the bosses. All my friends did too and from the looks of it a lot of the UA-cam community did as well, looking at polls, rankings etc. Guess I'm wrong, blind and am just coping.
@@anonymous01201 How did you get that out of my statement? I clearly said that the people who think it's a 10/10 are blind and coping. I enjoyed it too. But it also disappointed me. It is objectively not a perfect DLC or anywhere close to perfect. And I think that the people who insist it is are coping or blind.
As someone who has damaged reflexes cause of years of substance abuse and a neurological disability, im so glad there are people willing to criticize this dlc despite the vitriol of the "get gud" mob. I suck at these games, no shame in it, but i do love them. Beat er, and bloodborne, moving to the rest next. But man, these games are so far from perfect. I use hella cheesy builds to enjoy the game, and thats fun for me. But when even 1 shot players, people who live and die by the most challenging way to engage these fights, have genuine critiques of these enemies, there is most certainly something amiss with the design. Fantasic video.
I'm not in the same boat... but sortof am? I know my reactions aren't what they used to be. I'm finding it much harder to dodge roll in this game than when I played ds3 a couple years ago. I, too, am glad a high level player is not only NOT git gud and acknowledged that lesser players should be able to enjoy this also, but that even he's got a litany of complaints when he can easily skill his way thru it with little problem.
SOTE definitely feels like a standalone project. Something you play through fully once and never touch again unless you want a specific item or fight. I wonder if fromsoft decided to cater to newer players who never had the opportunity to play the game on release.
“Some normie sh*t”, Elden ring sold over 25 million copies. The point of Elden ring and in turn Fromsoft being some normie sh*t has long since been crossed.
Pretty damn good video. When I first step into the land of shadow I was at awe of the visual it has (sadly no cutscene but alr), looked around and seeing how they design the map verticality as the other areas was "hidden" below the cliff made me really want to go there, literally couldn't fathom the danger and monstrosities those area must have. Now that I have completed the DLC there was alot more copypaste mob than I wanted, though I enjoyed my time (Bayle was best fight), the criticism you made was very valid -There was this emptiness around the map that seem things was missing compared to the base game, giant open field that doesnt lead to anything much, not much things tuck around the corner, you would usually always find caves or catacomb in the base game, but now its just more wild animals that runs around in the DLC -I loved the starter area of Gravesite plain, almost every corner you tryna peek into have something to do (Churchs, Abandoned Village, Ruins, Dungeons) or finding new pathways up or down to new area, rest of the game was meh for me especially with copypasted enemies again, Ellac River was definitely the worst since there's no new boss down there after you take quite some time to ran to the end of it (they put an Ulcerated Tree Spirits, it was so bad), I did enjoy the Rivermouth Cave -Before that there was the poison swamp area which doesnt even have a boss guarding the entrance to the Ellac River, I expect there to be a Poison Crab boss or something lol, even that would be nice -Abandoned Ailing Village really hyped me up that there might be a legacy dungeon filled with these bloodborne inspired (in my opinion) enemies with even scarier monsters and mini-boss, but nah they remained the same and just scattered around the map, which for me I think the Abyssal Wood should have been the deathblight swamp that everyone initally thought and the origin of these bugs things, being the main enemies of the area with a legacy dungeon -Night time only mini-boss got completely abandoned for the DLC, so that sad, literally one of the reason that encourage you to re explore area, now its just for getting Larval Tear and some non combat things that happened at night time. They should've just put the Ghost Flame Dragons as night time only enemies - There was some interconnectivity and its decent (Shadowkeep was nice, liked going from Church District back to Storehouse again), would love it if I could go from Abyssal Wood and somehow ended up to Cruelan Coast, Finger Ruins (since midra have fingers egg store in the manor), talkin bout Finger Ruins, what a disappointment, hella spectacle but man was it empty as hell -Bosses are hit or miss I guess, my progression went alright,Renella as my first boss really took some time but was decent to learn, Radahn took less tries for me but pretty bothersome, Golden Hippo definitely the worst, Furnance Golems was boring, Romina I did in first try, best fight was Death knight, Messmer, Bayle. I feel like Scadu Tree Avatar should've been a field boss and using torrent would be cool as hell for it.
@@Slavic_Snake I am an average gamer and I did not need a guide. Also everything in DLC is technically optional so you don't have to finish it. The boss is not perfect but it teaches you about positioning and patience.
"I played Elden Ring 100 times through and never got bored" that is absolutely wild. The sheer tedium of having to traverse that giant map back and fourth just to get some items for my build or to fight one late game boss was an absolute nightmare. And the weapons were not unique enough for me to justify dozens of hours with their simple movesets. Many grips people have with the dlc were flaws I saw already with the base game but people just didn't notice them or care. In the end I truly hope Miyazaki is DONE with the souls formula and done with open world and gives us either Bloodborne 2 or Sekiro 2 or something entirely new and different. If his next game is just Elden Ring 2 or dark souls 4 I'm done. Lies of P DLC has me far more hyped than shadow of the erdtree ever did tbh
Yep, the open world nature of ER puts it way below the other fromsoft games for me - Sekiro was their best game and they should iterate on that combat. I enjoyed Lies of P way more than ER as well, crazy good combat and a narrative that doesn't require hours of 3rd party youtube lore videos to understand.
bloodborne 2 wont happen unless sony contracts fromsoft with some fat prerequisites from them, they got tired of them after demon souls, thats why they created dark souls, as a successor, after bloodborne released they were fucked over again, after that they havent contracted with sony since, this is the reason there is only 1 demon souls, and 1 bloodborne
36:00 Okay, I had this on in the background and chuckled when I heard this. I had to rewind the video to make sure I wasn’t tripping. On a serious note though, you’re absolutely right. It should feel like an epic dual.
Great video. Probably my favorite Elden Ring video to date. I don't even have all that much to say, because it was just spot-on from beginning to end. Your explanation that the Waterfowl Dance doesn't have an "intended solution" is a perfect phrasing of my problems with it, which I was never quite able to articulate. This DLC was a very upsetting and depressing disappointment, but it's really cathartic to hear some sane commentary on it for a change. Thanks, man.
@@MakioGoHardio I don't agree that Feebl's video was rage bait. As I said in my comment on that video (which you also replied to), I do disagree with some of his explanations for what was wrong with the bosses. But a lot the time I agree with the spirit of what he's trying to say. Jester's video is more precise and accurate, which is probably why it was received better than Feeble's (75% likes vs 40%). But Feebl's video was still good.
Thank u for saying it. All of it. Im tired of all the dual kitana mimic tear git gud redditors excusing bad design choices. I love this game, but im not blind. And i agree, mesmmer is the only reason to play the dlc despite how beautiful the land of shadow is
Just starting this video, but I want to say that you have a really good commentary. I think by the end of this video, I will respect your opinion, but I enjoyed it myself. I at least hope you enjoyed this more than Lords of The Fallen.
As an old souls vet, I miss the days when From tried to make unique encounters out of every boss fight, and I feel like I've been chased out of my own community by a new generation of thrill seekers who just want more generic spectacle and shark jumps I missed the days when the final boss was a complete anti climax making you reflect on why you climbed the top of the mountain in the first place. I miss the days when the arena was just as much a factor in the boss fight as much as the boss itself, now everything is just generic flat featureless arena's with the occasion drop off edges that serve only as a hazard for the player I miss the days when a beast didnt get an anime style desperation power up when on the brink of death, and instead limped towards you making you realize the tragedy behind your actions I miss the days when you would walk through a boss fog and the boss would just passively ask you to leave instead of rushing you down with some inexplicable violent bloodlust for anything and everything that moves. I miss the days when Fromsoft was genuinely innovative with their online systems, instead of sanding them down to a level of self parody. I miss the days when every action felt deliberate, when a bad dodge roll gave you time to really soak in the mistake you just made, instead of being bombarded with so much stimulus that you'd have to analyze a frame by frame play back just to figure out what the hell you did wrong. And I hate the fact that as someone who DID enjoy bloodborne I still never asked for its design philosophy to bleed into literally EVERY game going forward. That this design mentality has been over served for nearly ten years while the other has been left to starve, yeah its easy to say "You can still enjoy the old games" when you are the one with a feast on your table and the rest of us are wallowing in famine.
Radahn is the most embarrassing case of difficulty over fun. I’ve no hit the boss multiple times, and he’s definitively trash imo. 3 swing frame trap that no average player or even advanced player will figure out how to dodge without a guide. The most egregious thing about him is his second phase which blinds you with a visual diarrhea light show and constant AOE’s that do massive damage. The shadow clones are just so bad, they could’ve just made the telegraphing clear but instead we get visual diarrhea. He also actively punishes slow weapon users, he has 120 poise health and regens it as fast as Malania which is 6 seconds and he has no mid combo openings for colossals so you can’t reset his poise health , so good luck trying to break his poise with a colossal without hit trading. He also constantly flies away regenerating his entire poise bar, he also has his annoying roar attack that slows down the pace of combat to crawl when you roll it he just starts edge walking resetting his entire poise bar. Fighting Radahn with a colossal weapon is fkn miserable, he feels like he was only tuned for fast weapons which is bad design.
Sasaki is preaching facts, can totally relate on every point. Yet we get called gatekeepers or dissed for saying it. When anything goes mainstream it gets ruined.
Subjective unpopular opinion, disconnected from reality. Elden Ring is 96 metascore, GOTY with most awards won and is regarded as Top 3 best game in history, unlike any other Fromsoft game. Shadow of the Erdtree has 95 metacritic score, making it the best DLC in history. These are raw undeniable facts, not some subjective opinions like yours. Keep hating Elden Ring, the game, it's success and the huge fanbase that loves the game with all their heart, couldn't care less about you crying
@@aliceinwonderland4395 you cared enough to respond. Also, funny how your first reaction to my comment is getting emotional lol, pretty much sums up all of Elden Ring haters, people who's ego is deeply hurt for multiple of reasons. Are you actually an intelligent person, can you oppose the facts I aforementioned, instead of getting triggered?
@@Vengeance_I_m yeah, I guess we both are just glazers... Thankfully fromsoft makes games that fit their glazers tastes, so we can keep on going like this and ignore the, admittedly very vocal, minority
Could never quite put my finger on why after completing this dlc I felt...disappointed. You answered that question for me and then some. Cant say I disagreed with a single point you made, fantastic video! 👍
I am assuming what happened is that fromsoftware weren't planning on doing a dlc from the beginning only after the success of elden ring reached a certain point that they decided to make a dlc which explains why it was announced a whole year later after release and only with an art picture because they only just started working on it, that means that the whole map and it's content was made in one year and 3 months, cut that time down because they were also focusing on armored core 6, so basically shadow of the erdtree was made in 9 months it was too large of a scope and was rushed simply because they never planned to make ahead of time
That also my theory there’s so many new weapon classes that just have one weapon in it or are so bad there’s no reason to use it (smithscript hammer) (smithscript dagger) and also there’s barely any spells, cutscene dialogue, and incantations
@@ItsjustmeAlone I also remember back in 2022 there were some leaks that fromsoftware weren't in the process of making any dlc for elden ring, I think that's true because I refuse to believe they only made that in 2 years and a half, they made much better things in less time
Sorry to say it, but this is stupid conspiratory thinking without any basis in reality. If they truly took this little time we would be getting a modern pokemon game, not a 10/10 scoring product from most reviews. Mr Zaki also wasn't the director for AC6 for most of its development. Do you think he just stayed there licking his tumb? No, fromsoft has around 300 employees and enough experience to handle multiple projects at once, obviously the dlc was being worked on alongside AC6. The third point is how Zaki mentioned that part of the story (and the lore written by George) wasn't going to fit the main game, so they decided to leave it for the dlc. This tells me that the dlc was a thing in their minds since close to the end of the development of ER. You can think he was lying, but that's just a conspiracy at that point.
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 well first you can't trust review scores, they are all either payed by Bandai namko or just too afraid to criticise fromsoftware because of its fanbase, second when Mr Zaki said there's a lot of lore that couldn't fit in the base game he wasn't referring to dlc specifically but more to a possibile sequel, third 300 employees isn't that many for a project the size of elden ring so not all of them working on it is a bad thing, lastly Mr Zaki did lie about many things before like the size of the dlc being similar to limgrave or that it's gonna be more densely packed these are lies You are the being delusional if you think fromsoftware delivered full product in this dlc, this so called conspiracy theory is more likely than saying fromsoftware intended all of this
"well first you can't trust review scores", see what I mean people? Conspiracy thinking at its finest. Do anyone truly thinks all positive reviews were either bought or given out of fear? Where was the fear in Eurogamer's 6/10 review? I obviously disagree with their take, but they have the right to give the score they gave, as do any other reviewer. Or is it only an untrustworthy review if you disagree with the score? For the record, my favorite reviewer for this kind of games is Rurikhan, and you can see the joy in his eyes while he was playing. Can't fake that shit, his "10/10" is fully justified by his experiences. Funny you should call me delusional while believing something of this scope is even remotely doable in 9 months. And while you can say that 300 ppl isn't that much, I can say that it is, none of us can prove either way because none works at fromsoft. What we can't debate over, however, is that the studio is much bigger than it was before, and other big studios can develop multiple projects together, so why can't they? On the topic of lies, I just chose to assume he wasn't lying, since he never gave me reason to doubt before. Even the Limgrave thing no one thought was gonna be 100% accurate, giving his tendency to undersell and be humble about his own projects. End of the day, I know it'll be impossible to convince you otherwise, you came up with this rabbit hole yourself, so you must be the one to claw out now. I just hope any poor sod that comes here and is tempted to agree with this line of thinking can see this and turn back.
Didn't finish the video yet but you didn't mention the deflecting hardtear for the final boss's bs attack. Not defending the attack or anything, but the deflecting hardtear actually made me enjoy the final boss.
I do like that addition but I find it baffling that it’s a temporary buff that you can use once per rest. Blows my mind that they didn’t just put it on a talisman. If a boss is going to fight at the speed of Sekiro anyway, just give us back the deflection system for it 🤷🏻♂️
I'm going to argue that Elden Ring being a massive project was a huge reason as to why it has it's issues carrying over to SOTET. And hearing that Fromsoft is going back to more smaller condensed projects is actually a good thing imo. Linearity and more focus is what made past games so good because they were able to hammer out the smaller details and deficiencies. And most importantly it gave them time to fine tune the player combat to boss encounters which I believe is getting far too unbalanced to sustain itself after ER/SOTET.
True. Sekiro for example is a much better built game, but the trade off is it has much less replay value. It's only single player after all too which makes it easier to design.
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 In that same vein I think that ER's massive scale also ruins it's replay value. I've completed only 1 playthrough on ER and the DLC in a separate file and while I do enjoy the game up until Leyndell and Morgott the 2nd half just drags out too long for me to bother to finish it.
I've got nothing substantial or constructive to say. But I'll admit that I deadass laughed at the line "Getting hypnotised by a sexy femboy? I can understand that." good on you sir, good on you
One of my main gripes is how open and barren some of these areas in the dlc are. I mean, the finger ruins serve one questline purpose. Otherwise, they are quite literally pointless. Also, dont get me started on the loot in this dlc. Why would anyone want a smithing stone 5 in an end-game late dlc area?
@@boshwa20 that’s an option I totally was unaware of. Thanks helper!! lol I find it so mindless that you’d comment that publicly. My point was to say if you’re in late dlc and re-evaluating your build or just curious to try something else a smithing 5 could come in handy.
@@Crewkabanger I will say that the overabundance of the smithing stones in the DLC (get multiple from a single enemy) is quite nice. Go through a dungeon or forge or two, find a new weapon, and hey! You already have a bunch of upgrade materials for it so you can just pump your stones into it next time you go back to the roundtable. Sure, you can spend the runes on them too if you've got the bell bearings, but if you don't happen to have the bell bearings (and you can miss one or two of them if you're not careful) it's a nice alternative. Overall though saturating the world with smithing stones doesn't remove other, better loot from the game. There's a ton of more viable loot available even if it's kind of a letdown to get a smithing stone you've already got a bunch of. I went through the DLC on NG though, and not NG+, and my current NG+ run of the DLC is definitely a lesser experience since I've already got a ton of things upgraded to max. I figure anyone who went into it on NG+ would definitely have the issues you outline.
agree with most of this but i don’t think the comments about ACVI are fair. the game is incredibly well crafted and going back to fromsoft’s roots with armored core shows to me that they care about something other than souls
Yeah, game was awesome and anyone who’s so committed to souls games to skip it on the difference of genre alone is just depriving themselves of some of fromsofts best boss fights since ds3 and sekiro
For torrent being scared in the forest. Frenzy is the only thing in lore that can kill him, as seen in the frenzied lord w/ melina ending. Other than that great vid🙏
1:00:42 I think I would genuinely just quit gaming at that point. Fromsoft so far is the only Developer I know that makes good games. To see the DLC as a warning that someday they'll be announcing that YOU HAVE A DOG NOW in their game and boast about the features the dog has, I would just... depression.
They make the most incomplete game out there wtf u talking about. And yes there are many worse gaming studios from smite to wow but lets not pretend elden ring is a complete game in any form
@@GamingDualities I didnt say anything like that bruh, despite the lackings of Elden Ring I personally still found it enjoyable, not perfect but definitely pretty close. You may disagree but I will so as well, I don't care about Elden Ring's flaws as they are usually outshone by the good. I'm talking how Fromsoft usually deliver in making their games, but with me actually being able to notice ER's flaws I'm scared at some point they really are just gonna become like Ubisoft or Bethesda washed up game developers who put no love into their games whatsoever. So when that happens, I'm asking if does anyone know another studio that is like Fromsoft?
It honestly boggles my mind how people can seriously call this peak fromsoft. This isnt even their best DLC let alone better than anything in the Elden ring base game. Either people have lowered their standards extremely, or theyre fanboys.
@@bigsmall2842 >everything from first step to leyndell is peak design rose tinted glasses. liurnia lake is a barren wasteland with absolutely nothing of note in it. weeping peninsula? siofra river other than the big reveal? the game in general is barren and too big for its own good. acting like the dlc is worse is incredibly disingenuous. it's simply just as shit
@@bigsmall2842 off the top of my head the lake itself has: a copy pasted ruin with a revenant (laskyar ruins), a copy pasted church for varre to sit in and nothing else (rose church), a copy pasted rise with a copy pasted puzzle, a waygate that simply takes you to the other side of the lake, and a miserable little shack for bogart to sit in. the only relevant enemy is the... copy pasted dragon that guards the academy key... I agree on limgrave and caelid (mostly), but the early game is littered with the same problems as the late game, and the dlc to a lesser extent. people simply got sick of it and started noticing by the time they got to the mountaintops, but the problems were always there
A lot of people who say that are just casuals that are regurgitating whatever favorite streamer/youtubers review said, elden ring really brought in a a lot of casuals unfortunately so you'll see a rise of cringe opinions. Best DLC was definitely old hunters in bloodborne
@@_lalapopok i gotta disagree, the open world is pretty good, with interesting open landscapes and good pois, it doesnt need a packed area 24/7 its dar from ass, its a phenomenal open world, however the main issue with the dlc wasnt the lack of enemies, it was the lack of variety, look pools were the same, and enemies were too familiar, its pretty bad in repeat runs when you have to run through big areas, but for a first experience its phenomenal, which is all that really matters
I agree on some surprisingly empty zones, some surprisingly bad designed bosses, but I got the feeling that everyone is loosing sight on the fact that it shares many flaws with the base game (sometime artificial difficulty, gimmick bosses, some zones clearly below the others) and the overral quality of this DLC remains unusual in the game industry (unmatched atmosphere, esthetics, level design, weapons/talismans that deepens the mechanics etc)
This guy played the base game 100 times, he's memory holed all the cheap and artificial stuff, of which there was quite a bit. And it's pretty obvious that he favors boss fights over pretty much anything else, with seemingly very little understanding that some players simply like to roam the incredible environments to which the treasure lying around is just a bonus, whether it's usable or not. I do agree with a lot of his statements but given how much he obviously invested in this DLC in terms of time and energy, it ends up being mostly a sad rather than insightful essay.
I fully believe that making the dlc just another zone to explore and conquer was a huge mistake. I understand that it has been the tradition of FromSoftware to release additional content in this format, but honestly it was a bad call. We should have gotten an expansion of the base game content such as new NPCs, questlines, endings and even legacy dungeons. Theres plenty of space in the OPEN WORLD for FS to easily slip in a few new legacy dungeons. In fact, they literally already have a lore explanation for why the dlc zone is separate from the main game so idk why they felt compelled to increase their workload by having to create a whole ass zone. They could've used that exact same reason to just say that some dungeons were obscured by powerful magics. Way more labor intensive for content we really didnt need, the map is big enough as is anyhow. Also, given what we have in reality and not my hypothetical version of what the dlc could be, theres no reason why the dlc should have remained isolated from the rest of the game upon defeating the dlc final boss. There should have been a means of reuniting the two world maps together, which would have at least been a dramatic conclusion to cap off the final fight. So many missed opportunities with what they tried, and what they tried was misguided to begin with. I'm glad the dlc is sitting at mixed in Steam because at the very least it shows that the FS fanbase isn't blinded by nostalgia like Bethesda's fans were. I don't want the souls franchise to devolve into the FS equivalent of Starfield so I applaud your willingness to be critical of the what we got despite the fanbois. Edit: typos and formatting Edit 2: im so glad you made the off hand comment near the end of the video basically outlining what i wish would have happened. The bit about Shadow Keep being found in Mt Gelmir is exactly the sort of thing inwas asking for in a dlc. Fill the damn world you already built, FS!
the most depressing thing is that fromsoft will probably never hear critiques like this, because its completely drowned out by the overwhelming blind support from fanboys + the git gud crowd. this game and DLC sold extremely well, and thats all that matters. At least i have KC:D 2 to look forward to.
Honestly I am not losing sleep because I didn't get answers for Melina or Godwin. I found the story for Elden Ring to be a mixed bag, and it didn't even come close to Dark Souls lore or Bloodborne lore. And for the most part I enjoyed the bosses except the last one. The most egregious part of the dlc in my opinion was the quests and exploration in general. I don't mind if this is the last we see of Elden Ring. It had it's moment to shine. I am ready for a new story.
Dark souls did a great job at having understandable themes at a surface level while also rewarding players for digging deeper into the lore. Elden ring just gives you a ton of facts about the world’s history without giving you any connection between events. Almost every idea that the player generates is a crack pot theory with no backing.
Honestly, at this point I’m glad that this DLC didn’t become a sequel. I don’t want to wait 5 years to get anything remotely like that as a full fromsoftware game. Shadow of the Erdtree world feels very dull, I’m already tired of looking at it. The base game areas are still very pleasant to play through
Nailed this tbh. Love the gameplay footage. No dispute your criticisms have nothing to do with needing to get good. Very well thought out critique. Clearly comes from a true love of the base game.
I’m not the greatest player but I did beat the entire DLC as a naked dragon using dual great katanas which doesn’t really have that great of a move set over using just one. But when I got to radahn I felt forced to switch to asmongolds shield poke build and it trivialized the fight. After spending an entire night trying the boss just to beat it in two attempts with a great shield was pretty underwhelming but other than that I really enjoyed my time with the dlc. Of course I abuse the wiki so getting my scadu fragments wasn’t an issue but I know other people won’t do that and some of these fragments were not intuitive to get. The most egregious had to be the glowing giant pot mobs who can drop many different things and I didn’t realize they even dropped fragments until I got to radahn and went on my hunt just to in the end respec into a great shield build anyway
The glowing pot heads was such a bad mechanic implemented. Why not have us fight something cool or tough to get those fragments? We 1 shot those potheads and there is no feeling of success or accomplishment. Just ok I got the Damn thing wheres the next glowing pothead. They weren't even guarded by anything remotely tough. Most times by other non pot heads who also get 1 shot. Terrible design IMO
@@hudrigu I guess you're right. Only bosses that block game progression or that drop items that help with game progression. Hopefully something they implement in future games. The souls format doesn't work with open world format so I hope they go back to Dark Souls and Bloodborne world format.
I decided to play the DLC without looking at any guides or walkthroughs so I went in blind and immediately stumbled my way into the dancing Lions village which confused me because of how close it was to the start point but I was like “Oh sure! They give us a little freebie just to get us started” I then met with Miquella’s followers who told me to go kill Messmer and once I got past Rellana and saw how little dialogue there was I felt something was wrong. Then I fight through the Messmer’s castle (which I think is really underrated) before stumbling into his layer and triggering his boss fight… which confused me because there wasn’t a whole lot of build up. So I die intentionally and take a step back and explore for a whole day just to catch everything I missed (which was a lot!) except none of the exposition actually related to Messmer beyond seeing him as a tool for Miquella’s dumb plot line. Then it turns out he doesn’t even have a third phase or anything unique in his abyssal form. He’s got 3 incantations which end up working by similar narratively to the Frenzy Flame I.E. “A waste of potential” how is it… that there are 3 flames in the whole game that are capable of burning down Erdtree’s. 2 of which can resurrect people from the dead and cure poison and scarlet rot and all 3 are tied to amazing storylines and yet the DLC went absolutely nowhere with any of them… never mind Godwyn and the Gloam Eyed Queen cause that’s low hanging fruit. Why are people in the DLC acting like Messmer doesn’t exist as perhaps the greatest threat the world has ever seen? Killing Radahn canonically takes the best of his army, killing the fire Giant means having two great runes and Alexander being SUPERJAR! There is nothing impressive about the little chumps that we should be bullying in this dlc if it weren’t for bloated health pools and poor camera angles. WHY IS MESSMER DYING SO DAMN FAST! And why are the abyssal woods empty? And why would you name it the abyssal woods if the abyss is supposed to be the Snake inside of Messmer??? Who put this together so haphazardly? It feels like it’s made for twitch streamers. Everything’s just a straight line to Miquella just so we can be told what we knew already (unless you were drinking kool-aid). The fact that my character allows himself to be used as a pawn (and that I’m not allowed to be the lord of frenzy flame while playing the dlc despite going up against an outer god) who is forced to kill Messmer just so that I can arguably race straight for Miquella and kill him rather than any other option is just so shallow and such bad story telling. What the hell happened? We got robbed and no one seems to care. There’s no way it was supposed to go down like this, no achievements, no final send off, it’s a prequel with one ending that feels like we just finished a regular Demi god boss fight rather than an Elden Beast level enemy. And how is this supposed to make sense for the main game? So we killed Miquella and then what just returned to the capital to go fight Morgott? GTFOH! I should’ve been named king of the shadow lands or something. Not a single difference was made in this DLC. There’s no progression at all and I KNEW IT the second that they said the ending wouldn’t affect the main game. This was just straight BS
I definitely agree that Messmer not being talked about more between the NPCs or having a greater story part (seriously why did they remove his line where he mentions that Miquella told him about the Tarnished) in the DLC. Aside from that, the issue with his boss fight can be fixed by just making his phase progression similar to Melanias. Finish one health bar and then second phase begins with a whole new health bar
Just thought I’d leave a comment out of support. After so many video essays, I can only say that you and one other earn a job in writing of some sort, because your entire channel is wonderfully written.
14:07 oh my fucking god, it's just like the DS3 Soul of Cinder juggle slashes that outright ignore your s so you can be hit in the air where you have s to do the juggles. This attack juggles you too, but after 8 years they didn't bother to fix it I guess.
It escalated to areas no Souls fan wants to be. We have too many OP weapons and builds so the bosses need to use cheap/cheating tactics to still be on par on top of us. To me the games that restrict us are far superior, like BB and Sekiro. From Software should focus on this instead of trying to cramp more and more into one game.
@@HansDampf1911 Every boss can be no hit as a RL1 naked wretch with club +0. If you're using OP weapons, simply restrict yourself as BB and Sekiro do. Of course, Elden Ring, being an open world game, won't restrict the player, that completely ruins the open world aspect of the game.
@@Vengeance_I_mHowever, that's also a symptom of open world design. You can't anticipate what build, and lvl a player will encounter a boss, so it feels like From fixed this by making the bosses too aggressive, fast, and with so much particle effects, to make all of them hard. To the point of being a frustrating spectacle, rather than a dance of combat. Also, you can Rl1 no hit any boss, doesn't mean most people will have FUN trying to do learn that. I know I can use a mimic, summon NPC's, and spam blasphemous blade to BEAT a boss. I want to have FUN while doing so....
@@rogalcorn734 and you can have fun doing those things, like millions of other people do. Most people play Elden Ring using summons and OP builds looked up through guides, there's nothing wrong with that. With those things Elden Ring is like a roller coaster, where you have this back n forth with bosses and you play as a team with summons, it's really fun. But that requires very little skill, it's essentially an easy mode of the game. You can play regularly against bosses and all bosses are fair imo, since you can consistently avoid their attacks. You simply choose whether to make the game a really fun, easy roller coaster or whether you want calculated high skill gameplay to hone your skills, doing fights solo and making up your build by yourself, not relying on guides. Both are very viable. However, I agree that Elden Ring's learning curve can be quite irritating to some players. Because the game has zero handholding, just like OG Dark Souls 1, you have to figure out everything on your own. If you can't quite do that, yes Elden Ring can be very unenjoyable
@@Vengeance_I_m I know there's nothing wrong with that. But I was more saying that I personally, wouldn't enjoy that playstyle. And apparently from the looks of this video, millions of people share that sentiment as well. Like I said, it's not about the difficulty, it's about how the difficulty is so frustrating , it's pushing people to resort to play styles they're just not interested in. And that's not even considering the plethora of aging technical designs (input buffering, camera issues)
@@rogalcorn734 All good points, but do you have any evidence to support the notion that "millions" of people have problems with Elden Ring's combat system? Because as far as I know Elden Ring's combat is praised by millions (according to polls on different platforms, where vast majority of people pick Elden Ring as the best Fromsoft game). And as far as I'm aware, Elden Ring has small minority of loud haters who despise and criticise the game, according to my observations, there's around few thousand of those loud minority groups. So again, can you provide evidence that there are actually millions of people having problems with the game's combat mechanics
The base game had many of the same geographic disorganization/rapid attacks/no countermeasures/aesthetic problems that you mention for the DLC, not to mention a lack of immersion! The forge dungeons not having bosses FINALLY displays some variety in dungeon structure and I don't understand why you are so addicted to fighting bosses when there are more than 200+ in the base game alone.
because all they want is bosses that they can beat easily by being overlevelled lmao. now that they actually had to try hard. they're trying to psyche themselves to hating it.
About the question at the end, gameplay seems like it's designed by a B-team because From Software is B-tier when it comes to mechanical design. They are extremely good at creating cool worlds and spectacles, but their mechanical decisions have been very inconsistent since DeS. Also most of the problems you mention were problems in the main game. They've been trending towards normie sh*t from the start of DS3.
does anybody here remember when the radahn leak came out and everybody thought it looked so unbelievably shit that it was fake
That actually happened? That's hilarious
it got spoiled for me and i had already bought the dlc. It wouldnt have touched the dlc if I had known this was the final boss. Its a shit boss. They have been throwing everything and the kitchen sink in with their bosses and its gotten old. Elden Ring it got old really quickly
@@v1l1am95 it was crazy everybody was coping saying it was impossible for it to be that bad. they said the moveset was just godfrey + pontiff, that the arena was a blank map made in an hour by a modder, that the skybox was just limgrave, that the music was phase 1 starscourge
at first I also thought it was fake
@@buckiemohawk3643 not a shit boss though. u just ass i guess and cant adapt. sorry trading hits and outhealing didnt work for you :(( finally a boss where you had to try again
@@_lalapopWelp, I don't know what I spent like 50 hours playing but it ain't the game you described
From "I wanna do that again!" To "Thank God I don't have to do that again"
wow... the most accurate way to describe it
Despite what he said about Malenia, she is a boss I always miss after killing her. Maliketh kicked my butt in multiple playthroughs but I always look forward to fighting him in another playthrough. My biggest sadness in ER is I can never fight Margit for the first time ever again.
All these feeling, I cannot find them in the DLC. I can start a new playthrough, and go through Gaius and Radahn again. But I kinda don't wanna.
@@hedition9346 margit, morgott, radahon, mohg, radagon, are abse game ones i like
as for the dlc, i was hyped as fuck. And i did divine beast whcih i hated, and rellana which i liked the flow of. and i havnt touched it since
I love how literally 99% of the community loves the DLC and then a couple of people hate it and you guys all think YOU are right and EVERYONE ELSE is wrong.
@@mikeyswift2010 I don't base my opinions on the opinions of others, regardless of how many or how few there are.
I think this dlc showed that the basic dark souls combat system has been streched to the point of breaking. They have to finally let go of it, or accept that they hit the limit of difficulty in their games and focus on something else.
or they could go back to when it was fun and methodical like in the first few games
Such a bad take
Yeah fully agree. Feels like they've been in an arms race with the veteran players in making the game difficult enough, and now that's hit it's end state. Feels like they've started delving into making things difficult just for the sake of difficulty and not in any fun or interesting way
@@ennayanne Going back to DS1/DS2 combat would actually make the game way worse imo. It's dated and far too easy to anyone who's played the later Souls games.
@@Invisibleguy-kn7bd it's not dated, it actually holds up perfectly because it's not stretching it past its limit. I'm talking about DS1, not 2. 2 always had problems with its combat. More difficult =/= better combat
I really wish rune arcs were common in the DLC
Loot and exploration did feel pretty hollow. Rune Arcs are so stupidly rare in base game (assuming you play offline mostly), they're the only item in the game that is still valuable to the player regardless of level.
Instead of rune arcs, which become so boring to reapply every time you die that I forget to use them, I wish they added some way to make great runes remain active permanently.
If they added one of those for each great rune, that's an easy 6 major rewards to give us
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392or in other words.. actual progression for our character. We make no impact, retain nothing of value, don’t get to go into the DLC as our full power lords, don’t carry over any effect from Miquella, have the same hard caps… we’re the same guy. The content isn’t made for the sake of replay-ability, character optimization, or true lore expansion. Nothing that mattered was answered other than “Where is Miquella” like holy hell
It’s really annoying farming rune arcs from rats. Have to reload 5-6 times with 200 discovery just to find 1. So I just gave up on them mostly and only use the Rykard one if I’m exploring instead of using them on bosses where I die more.
@@DNYLNY you get rune arcs by killing a boss in co-op. Activate a few summoning pools and do that instead of killing rats.
@@DNYLNYjust help people on co op
@45:50 fun joke, but lore-wise Torrent is spooked because Flame of Frenzy is able to kill not only physical beings but also spirits, that´s why he´s noping out.
He also literally dies in the frenzy ending...
But for some reason he still helps you once you accept the frenzied flame.
Lore explanations just feel so half-assed.
If Torrent was allowed, people would be theorizing about how Torrent is willing to die for the Tarnished or something.
No matter what they do there will always be some way to justify it afterwards, just like how Mohg's shackle doesn't work on Radahn.
If it did work the response would be "Wow look at the attention to detail!" But since it doesn't, people say "Well maybe the Shackle only works on Mohg's soul, or maybe Radahn is just too strong".
There is no way to distinguish between an intended design choice or a genuine oversight.
@@FrigidOven "There is no way to distinguish between an intended design choice or a genuine oversight."
I am with you there in regards to Radahn. I am not a fan of his, ...., uuuh.... "extended" lore.
However, in the frenzied flame ending you see Melina picking up torrent´s whistle which is disintegrating, symbolyzing his death. So that one is established since the base game.
@@FrigidOvento add to svens point, a lot of those "fill in the gaps" elements of lore are one of the appeals of the games, specifically under Miyazaki. Im sure youve heard the story of him as a kid not knowing all the words in the books he read.
While yes, it can be a convienent copout, to assume thats the only reason it happens is to assume the worst. I havent had a reason for that to be my immediate assumption after all these years.
You give a good example, both of those things are true. It, realistically, doesnt work because the fight is supposed to be hard, no doubt. But its easy enough to logic whatever bs that it wouldnt.
If it did, it also would be a great detail.
If you want to critique, the quest is why doesnt he have an auto counter attack when you try to use it and destroy it from your inventory. Now *that* would be peak.
I absolutely love the aesthetic of the Abyssal Woods, so seeing the area so utterly wasted just makes me really sad.
Spooky areas in non-spooky games are often the peak but here... even the void has probably more things in it. An idea that I even used in a D&D session was such spooky woods but there was a giant monstrosity with big yellow glowing eyes that wanders around and if it spots you you get stacks of madness. The more madness you had the more weird shit you saw till they defeated the sorcerer in the woods and the whole thing vanished leaving everyone in disturbing silence. My group noped pretty quick out of there.
I entered this video thinking the DLC was OK, like a solid 8. But as the video kept going I realized how much better it could have been. You were so real with the map critique.
honestly 8 is insane. If we compare it to the base game this is actually a 4/10 and a year and a half of development time for a map full of cookbooks and bosses from the base game is actually unacceptable. I think u need higher standards for a company like fromsoft because so many of their games are regarded as masterpieces and SOTE has higher completion time and isn’t anywhere near as good as those games.
@Krispyyaheard idk man i loved the dlc. Im disappointed by things, such as the lack of good items to be found via exploration, undercooked locations (red and blue flower areas severely underutilized, the abyss not really being scary or hard at all) and while i had a good time with the bosses i do think they should have done some smarter design. Still, i really loved it. It could have and should have been better, but thats literally every game
The most annoying part of the DLC is simply visiblity, it feels like Im fighting the particle effects rather than the boss which I think is the fault of fromsoftware's shift towards appealing to an audience that appreciates spectacle rather than actual sound design.
A lot of exploration also seems like wasted space, especially the abyssal woods and a lot of middle of the map in general. They vast amounts of recycled enemies dont really help with this issue either. The side content just doesnt really warrant the size of the map. If the game was more similar to the older games with each area consisting of more condensed but uniquely designed zones them it would be a lot more bearable. Instead I have to waste hours traversing the map to even get to the stuff I want to fight.
It isn't just the particle effects, now boss attacks are almost always put under several layers of variable combos and other overcomplications. You are dying more to new shit blindsiding you than to actually hard to avoid attacks. It's super contrived and cheap, they arent actually making the bosses harder, just the learning experience an unenjoyable mess.
Finally someone who has a correct take
That's y I gave up on the Dancing Lion fight. Every time I got him to half health, he would change phases so many times and get really up in the face to where I literally couldn't see anything. And locking off doesn't help either cis he moves around so fast. I just gave up on solo and summoned Freyja and mimic to end it.
@@anonisnoone6125 the wind form is alright at least, lightning is the worst with random lightning strikes all round. Frost form has a problem where if you arent a proper distance away from them when they start a combo you are guaranteed to get hit over and over usually till death.
This is right although I’d say there’s still enough new content to keep all kinds of fans happy.
Readability is the problem boss wise, final boss is definitely the worst offender. Hair physics, lights on every swing, full screen and half arena effects. The same but lesser for the player.
One of the original visions of the souls series was a weak character having a trial by fire against a depressed world. Every aspect of the design was geared towards this,
-movesets looked like if a random dude picked up a weapon and was guessing form wise.
-bosses were often very former glory and often had sad backgrounds reflected in the fight
-gear was kept simple, a lot of it had some kind of real world analogue
Elden ring Definatley took a new direction but it’s a little jarring seeing your ‘lowly tarnished’ brandish a sword infused with death perform 3 front flips while singing and launching 2 big beams. Atleast to me the series was never about becoming infinitely powerful and all knowing, it was about struggle.
I've been saying so many of these exact same things regarding the fights, and it's always dismissed with "skill issue." I'm not good enough to no-hit the game, but I can confidently say I'm an above average player. So it's nice to hear these criticisms be brought up by someone at your level.
Some people are no-hit running these bosses.
@joevaghn457 There's also people speedrunning the base game in under 15 minutes. Does that mean the game is too short?
It means that everyone has a limit. Now, this guy's limit has been reached, so he needs to complain about the game being "flawed." Just like people did with Maliketh. Going for the most practical way to win is natural for all bosses in every game made, unless people want to impose limitations upon themselves. Suddenly, it's a problem that such a "most practical way" exists.
@Thirteen13551355 What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
@@Thirteen13551355way to miss the point of the video man
I find my self looking at the consorts fog wall and think “ am I having fun right now?” “ is this fulfilling?” I have found that elden ring has given me a sense of relief when I beat bosses, not a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment like every other from soft game.
Yea, when I beat bosses in ds3 I felt like "man that was fun, I want to fight them again". In ER I beat a boss and think, "Glad they didn't hit me with a one-shot attack this time"
yeah this is it, when playing ds3 i felt like damn, that was good, some of these bosses like the fucking sunflower was not fun
I feel like I get more fulfillment then satisfaction
@@skinnytimmy1how much vigor do you have?
there's rarely anything that one shots me, usually two shots if it's strong
I'm still there, I went back to other stuff I found fun cause I just didn't find that last fight fun at all
It’s insane how few cutscenes there are in this. And the ones we get aren’t really base game tier either. The post final boss cutscene is one of the laziest things I’ve ever seen and made me feel like I did something wrong.
Only cutscene I think is great is the lord of frenzied flame boss
@@elbottioboth of Messmer’s are fantastic wdym + the Radahn cutscene is gas, gets you hyped
@@Coeaxe actually fair enough on the messmer one and the radahn one is fine
@@Sam-lo8yj i forgot about them
Measles cutscenes are amazing what do you mean?
I think the problem lies in the fact that Fromsoft really wants these insane spectacle bossfights that are crazy hard but we as the players dont really have the tools to deal with all the spam and 20 hit combos. In Sekiro when a boss does a massive string of attacks it was a good thing (if you were good) because that was your way to massively build up their posture bar. Now obviously Elden Ring has tons of ways to make things easier. There are summons, cheesey builds etc. but I would argue if the players feel the need to cheese these bosses or use their overpowered summons then thats probably not the best design? Elden Ring feels like its trying so hard to be hard but they forgot that in order for it to be enjoyable it also needs to be fair and right now with the controls we have it just is not fair. The bosses can fly all over the arena and do 20 hit combos and all we have as a reliable answer is dodge roll?
Gael and Midir prove you can have spectacle without sacrificing gameplay, guess they just, forgot how to design bosses?
@@Yharims exactly man. I dont know how they regressed so hard on bossfights. Even Lies of P has really good boss fights and that was that developers first attempt at a souls game lol
@@Yharims midir is nothing more than a boring endurance fight once you know his moves. Bayle offers something more
59:56 Genuinely such an L take.
Armored Core VI was in development since 2018, with passionate people who had a love for the Mecha Genre and FromSoft's early history on board, alongside getting together Mecha Giants like the original artist behind AC, and artists from other huge franchises like Evangelion and Gundam, to push out the one of the best mech games in recent memory.
Comparing that to a freaking 360 Demo or calling it "Very Little Effort" kinda spits on the 5 years of work that went into reviving their original Breadwinner (around only a year less than Elden Ring was in the oven)
It's an achievement that they brought back Armored Core so utterly hard while also making Elden Ring.
AC isn't a Golden Egg, its their retired old Goose that kept them alive before Souls was a thing.
Which, at the moment is due for either an Expansion or a New Generation if reports from Miyazaki are anything to go off.
Wow, i couldn't even handle going throught the "replayability" section but hearing that just makes me think this guy is just a genuine piece of shit instead of someone that actually want to love fromsoft's product at its core.
Worst part is, I actually find that AC6 has better graphics than ER lol.
Now don't get me wrong ER's artistic direction is unmatched, I'm only talking about graphics, but still... it's clearly not even a "mid" game!
Great info, I bought AC about 2 months after it came out, I just haven't made the time to play it yet but I plan to. I wouldn't take this guys opinion to seriously. He's gotten a lot of things objectively wrong about the DLC.
Example: My build med rolls using the Great Mace and I can dodge roll all of Radahn's melee attacks w/ np while still squeezing in an attack here and there. I find what he said about the s hilarious bc he's using a much faster wep and is light rolling, lol. The problem he never figured out is you need to stay in the pocket of Radahn's attacks and not on the outside.
This guy just seems to have had such different expectations from what he got from the DLC that he's just flat out salty about it. The DLC does have issues for sure as I most certainly have my criticisms of it but it's hardly a failure as he's painting it out to be.
Kratos : Keep your expectations low boy, and you'll never be disappointed.
@@heyguyslolGAMING I say this as someone who dislikes the DLC so far: Rellana was way more fun when I realized I'm supposed to be smacking her mid-combo with the giant sword. When it clicked that it wasn't about "waiting for a turn" but finding an opening for a crouch poke, R1, Charged R2, or Giant Hunt, not only did it become *easier* but a lot more FUN.
Yeah, what the Hell was he talking about actually. Some of the people for the DLC were working on Armored Core?? Duh. Conspiracy shit man.
I don't even like the DLC, but I despise that narrative. That somehow, Armored Core 6, a genuinely excellent experience doing its one thing extremely well, is to blame. Insane.
From's obsession in designing every boss around spamming dodge rolls makes build variety matter less and less. And that is just boring.
??? It's the literal opposite - the moves are meant to catch panic roll defaulters so you actually have to learn the timings of the dodge.
See this is primarily why I think so many people are crying in the short term as they havent even learned the bosses yet - like every other souls game it starts with people complaining how bad the bosses/lore are, and give it a few months to a year and it will eventually settle with general appreciation. 5 stages of grief
@@ChiefLeef My point was that their design philosophy has been getting stale for a while now, not that you're *supposed to spam* dodge rolls, dude. There are MANY other ways to design bosses, but FromSoftware just *refuses* to change. EVERY fight is the same mechanic: long combos and delayed attacks; memorize when to them, and that's it.
I find it amusing that everytime someone writes a comment criticizing FromSoftware, there is a fanboy on the other side reading it, absolutely _salivating_ with the prospect of responding with some variant of the ol' "git gud" adage. Well, I don't have to, since i've already soloed the last boss (twice - heck, i actually enjoyed the game), yet my opinion didn't change: we need something new, it's been obvious for a while that Miyazaki is running out of tricks 🙄
@@fernandofaria2872 I agree, sometimes when I'm fighting bosses and look at their moves I'm like damn that's cool wish I could do that, but then I realise anytime you try anything different from the roll, attack, roll pattern you get punished
@@fernandofaria2872you dont have to roll every attack, you can strafe them, jump over them, duck underneath them with the recovery of a jump attack, space them out etc.
If you're strictly only rolling against bosses you're limiting yourself, like as if you were to do a no prosthetics run of sekiro
@@squiggles9612 Please carefully read my reply above.
I love the fact that after rubbing out the map and just leaving Messmer and Bayle it resembled a snake. Definitely unintentional. But an awesome coincidence.
There's some theories about how the God of the Hornsent was some sort of serpent. They're mostly based on the skin Marika pulls the golden threads from in the trailer looking (according to some) like a snake's head, along with the shed skin in the forest next to Bonny Village.
@@anthonypedraza3017lol the entirety of the writing in this game is a “theory” 😂 this way of story telling is so fucking lazy by now, “we’ll just let the players come up with whatever bullshit headcanon and call it a day” lol
@HHTwice A theory, huh? You do realize there's a very clear storyline and timeline of events with only a bit of vagueness for the sake of mystery, right? The story is only nonsensical because people like you refuse to use your eyes and either engage with the environmental storytelling or read.
Forget lore videos, the story of Elden Ring is simple: Long ago the Greater Will came to the world and either seeded life upon it or simply uplifted the natives by granting them intelligence. Many Outer Gods vied for control of the world but in the end the Greater Will won. It desires order, civilization and structure, regardless of its specifics.
The dragons were either it's first or one of it's earliest chosen people, followed by humanity. Marika became mankind's God after she communed with the Greater Will atop of the Bellurat Tower and then began launching holy war after holy war in an attempt to purge anyone who had wronged her, opposed her or could be a potential threat in the future.
On the now empty slate she built her own civilization where Death and Rot were outlawed, creating an odd world where living creatures adapted to eternal life. Humans who grew old or whose bodies were too damaged to function were fed to the Erdtree, the living embodiment of Marika's Golden Order whilst animals and even dung, which never rots in the Lands Between is either left where it falls or is eaten by others.
Like the Greater Will, Marika was now a God, but one suborned to the former. And like the Greater Will, she needed an agent to carry out her own will. She took Godfrey as her first husband and Elden Lord and after he killed the last of her enemies she exiled him. She'd either never trusted the Greater Will to begin with, had slowly begun to realize she was expendable or she found out that the Greater Will actually wasn't even communicating with them anymore through Metyr.
When Ranni, chafing under the stifling control of Marika and the Two Fingers enacted the Night of Black Knives and killed Godwyn the Golden, Marika snapped. Whether she did it as part of some twisted master plan to free herself of the Greater Will's control, out of grief for losing her favorite child, or both, Marika shattered the Elden Ring and began the Shattering, an apocalyptic civil war.
Whether she'd planned for her following punishment and crucifixion is unknown, but when the Game starts the player is one of Godfrey's exiled clan, (many of whom she raised from the dead) a Tarnished that Marika banished just so she could have a trump card in case she ever needed a literal army's worth of muscle. You then go through the Lands Between and eventually make your way to her, and what happens next depends on what quests you did and which ending you picked.
The story is simple AF. Everything else in it is just icing and extra detail on this game-shaped cake. It's a great and well-crafted narrative, you just don't get to see every last plot point because mystery keeps people hooked more than just telling them the answers to some of the more obscure lore.
@@anthonypedraza3017 Exactly. Some people read way too deep into some of this stuff like it's some huge mystery full of secrets to discover. Lore isn't story
"rubbing out the map"? I've never heard that before, lol. What does it mean?
16:16 man I agree with most of what you said, but saying elden ring doesnt have camera issues is WILD. Idk maybe ur talking about remembrance or main bosses, but Jesus ER has dogshit camera all over the fkin place. Especially when they stuff a 50m2 room with a 40m2 boss
That Fire Giant crotch is really nice looking lol, love staring at it all fight
The camera for divine beast was atrocious. They haven't fixed their fucking camera issues in 10 years. Just like other bullshit they refuse to fix (grab attacks that don't even have to visibly touch your character to work, for example). But why should they bother fixing anything when their sycophantic fan base thinks they are infallible and lambasts anyone who doesn't agree.
fighting all huge bosses is always the same problem; the camera sucks. The base game already has Fire Giant to prove that the camera in this game is bad but somehow the devs really insist on making huge bosses like Divine Beast, Golden Hippo, all kinds of dragons, etc. The camera should just be zoomed out when fighting huge enemies
@@samuel.jpg.1080pTo be fair, Fire Giant has good tells by audio, which I'm pretty sure they did to remedy the camera problem
It doest help that the examples he gave with radhan were extremely precise, well thought out camera angles at the boss. Alot of the video is good, alot morenis skewed
As much as i loved the DLC, something felt off from the minute i finished Belurat. I couldnt put my finger on what it quite was, until a very specific instance where i killed a bunch of imps in a room in a catacomb, which looked heavily guarded. Turns out the item they were guarding was a Somber Smithing Stone 2.
One other place where things felt really off was Abyssal Woods. Way too empty. The fear that the atmosphere tried to induce fell flat the moment you realized the woods were empty with one repetitive enemy type. Assassins Approach trivialized the whole thing.
I really have no compains with the bosses. The level design is DS1 levels of good, but the rewards undermined everything significantly.
I felt the sense that they tried to mesh DS1 within Elden Ring, but were forced to artifically increase the map size to cater to expectations from the success of the previous open world.
We had the literal exact same experience man. I was loving the DLC but always had that lingering feeling that something was off. I thought Rellana's fight was fun, but realized mostly because she showed me a spectacle at the end. Have I also been charmed by Miquella that I couldn't see the inherent flaws of the DLC? Where's Melina? Or Godwyn?
Someone said they felt like the DLC was AI generated and while that's a bit of an extreme description, the DLC just felt like it lacked heart and they tried to cram as much random things in the DLC as they could. They could have shrunk/cut a lot of the areas and focused more on other things, idk.
@@chopsandtoots I think a lot of it was because they tried to merge multiple themes in a single experience. 2 fleshed out DLCs covering what we got + Godwyn, and areas with more thought out rewards and a meaningful open world would have been a better experience.
Maybe 1 themed on Marika's past / Messmer and 1 themed on Miquella ascension to Godhood. The Jagged Peak, Finger ruins and Abyssal Woods are basically map fillers within the current context of the story. They could've been split into the 2 dlcs arbitrarily really.
The DLC is great but the itemization sucks! Why is there like no loot or even bosses in the far corners of the “fingers” section ? Makes NO sense that they could not drop like 5 items in each section that includes spells and some weps !
I won't argue on the fact that some exploration zones are empty, but having a bunch of mobs guarding mushrooms or lvl 1 stones are littering the base game
This whole video encompasses my entire feelings for the DLC. The DLC felt like wasted potential all the way through. Everywhere I've explored ended up with me asking if that's it. The finger ruins was my biggest disappointment. A giant spot on the map, but it's only there to look pretty since there's only 1 thing in the middle. The questlines were complete barebones. The boss lore was nearly non existent. The bosses themselves were terrible except Messmer and Midra. Everything felt completely sudden too. The introduction to Messmer's fight felt right of left field. I didn't even know I was about to fight him, and I also thought he was the final boss, so it just didn't feel right. The DLC also just ends abruptly after the cutscene. It felt like a joke. The worst part though is how the DLC has next to no tie in to the base game. No continuations to unfinished stories, Miquella's needle doesn't do anything in the DLC even though it says it's unfinished and can prevent someone becoming a lord of frenzy flame like Midra, and hell, I don't think any NPC in the base game mentions anything about the land of shadow or your actions there. I would've expected Gideon to be completely enthralled by you finding the land of shadow and Miquella. Melina also would've had something to say about Messmer and Marika's home too. I honestly felt like I wasted $40 for a fan mod.
Bro check my comment I said the SAME THING! I couldn’t believe I walked into Messmer’s room. You would’ve thought he would be sitting underneath the scadutree with armed forces and 62 configurations stopping you. I thought this man would blow the roof off the castle and transform into a dragon for a 3rd phase or fully turn into a serpent and instead they gave him 2 extra incantations and no extra health or status effects UGHHHH! The man can resurrect the dead, cure poison, create weapons and spirits from thin air and basically has two distinct powers one of which he had never even unleashed before and he can’t get so much as a proper send off or a decent amount of exposition from the side characters. And what’s the point of having St Trina, Melina and Miquella beefing with the frenzy flame if no one was going to care that I showed up post lord of frenzy flame ending with my dumbass Vyke war spear looking like a GOOF!
Miquella is almost ditzy in his boss fight, ALOOF! Radagon is practically dead (or actually dead when you fight him) so we get why he has no personality but outside of this DLC what base Demi-God or outer God do you see get treated like this? In the base game 17 characters will talk your ear off just speculating about what a Demi gods jock strap smells like after a battle. But in this game where I’m meeting someone who’s as strong as I SHOULD BE… had the game allowed us to go in as the lords that we already are and I get 3 lines of dialogue from Miquella, Radahn doesn’t speak, Mohg obviously doesn’t speak but yes let’s remember that we technically fought and wasted the potential of THREE Demi gods at the same time. Shout out to Godwyn and Midra for staying a consistent disappointment as well. Hell BAYLE had more buildup than those two combined. You know why? Cause I had to scale a GODDAMN MOUNTAIN just to get to him! It didn’t feel like an accident or random when I met him, it felt like I was about to go fight Godzilla with Bayle even having his number one hater in my ear hyping up my accomplishment. Outside of Ansbach, St. Trina, and Freyja where were these interactions??? What’s the excuse? Where are the random merchants hiding in libraries. Everyone just dies after 3 conversations
Bayle and Romina were terrible? Rellana too?
Shadow keep is a mid game area and it's explicitly clear that's where Messmer resides, what in the absolute hell made you think he was going to be the final boss? Especially when the poster boys of from soft DLCs are rarely the final bosses of their DLCs.
There is literally a summon sign and a site of grace right outside his room, to say his fight came out of left field is insane.
Miquellas needle description explicitly tells you it only works in Farum Azula, tf were you expecting it to do in Midras Manse????
The other complaints like lack of connection to the base game and empty areas are all valid, shame it's marred by some of the completely ludicrous youve said
@@Username-wj8pzTrailers and other announcements suggested that you need to find Miquella. They also suggested that Messmer is responsible for everything bad that happens in Shadowland. It's strange how unconnected their plots are, if not burning of Sealed Tree behind Romina Messmer would be completely optional- especially that he is not guarding his kindling because he is opposed to Miquella's plan of something, he is just chilling in his castle and you kill him (I am not sure if he even noticed that Miquella is Shadowland)
pretty sure the significance of midra’s boss room is it being the place he housed the three fingers before he went crazy. it’s why the bonfire is called “discussion chamber” or something like that
@@yikso5549 a significant room that’s an empty barren uncharacterized rectangle? lol from bots love to reach with head canon
@@ricardolopes615 no need to name call
@@ricardolopes615 isn’t that what the 3 fingers in the subteranen shunning ground also in when you find them?
@@raiden3013 Don't try to argue with them, they just call anything that isn't hating the game "being fanboys" even if you have personal problems with it, they aren't worth your time.
@@rayzu4380fair enough. I’ve learned my lesson haha
The reason Torrent was never unphased by anything we went through in the base game is because he's just a spirit -- he doesn't really "die" per se. He was afraid of the Madness Forest because the Flame of Frenzy can kill spirits, hence why he didn't want to be summoned
I still think it's bullshit though. You can see in the trailer Torrent riding towards Midra's Manse. They definitely cut a bunch of content which is a shame
Then why isn’t he scared of Eye of Saulron?
@@Idontevenknowman779 probably because it was a bunch of villager trash mob bums that were summoning it.
@@Idontevenknowman779 As the other person commented it, it's most likely a much much weaker version of the flame. Midra is a Lord, and if the power scaling is the same as ours in that ending, he would be capable of burning away all forms of life
@@Idontevenknowman779 the Abyssal Forest is quite literally tainted by Frenzy. But sadly its a disappointment, there were only 3 winterlanterns over all and mostly a vast empty landscape full of sheep, rats, and worshippers. And thats it, I really expected a crap ton of the winterlanterns, and maybe the water inflicting frenzy because Shabriri and the Frenzied eyes are actually an inspiration from the real life disease that causes one to go blind after bathing in an infected river. Its also inspired by a jewish demon, Shabriri, the demon of blindness.
I think its just the Flame of Frenzy or the Woods has some supernature shit that mess with people mind or animals are actually more vulnerable to madness like those rats ... yea it still sounds bullshit
The one thing I never thought would happen in a FROM game happened while fighting Radahn. I felt bored. It has never happened during any of their other previous games, or even when I was going for the plat in the base game, but holy hell when I made it to the end I just felt burnt out and couldn't continue.
I thought Malenia was an outlier, and they would make bosses that resembled something more fair like DS3 to show they can make tight, excellently paced bosses. Turns out they doubled down on Malenia level bullshit and most bosses felt more relieving to defeat instead of actually enjoying the experience.
@@chan_martinlooking back I don’t mind Malenia much, but I think she would’ve been more of a blast to play against in sekiro. In this dlc I wasn’t even banging my head against the wall with radahn for long, I was just over it and felt bored fighting him. Meanwhile is DS3 I would actively join co-op just to replay bosses over and over again that were so much fun to fight
@@spiznasty Overall yes I agree Malenia would mostly be fine besides Waterfowl. It makes sense knowing that Sekiro and Elden Ring were being made in the same period of time. It’s a shame they couldn’t borrow more from what Sekiro innovated on and ended up with what felt like Dark Souls but not nearly as tight as anything from DS3.
@@chan_martin sekiro has the best combat I’ve ever played in a soulslike that even if they never make a sequel to it I hope they use the deflection system in another game. It’s just too good to shelve after 1 game
@@spiznasty True that gameplay is so satisfying and I hope they continue innovating on that. I could see them doing a Sekiro sequel or something similar. I mean people forget it won GOTY in 2019. It’s beloved and there’s still plenty of that world to explore.
no this IS elden ring. the exact same issues that plague the main game are here in the DLC too
The DLC was actually made from cut content, and that's proven by the low level of smithing stones if anyone's paying attention. They simply jacked up the HP and damage numbers of everything.
@@atlantic_love I dont really see how that follows. The DLC took 2 years to make, I doubt it was mostly stuff they already had ready to go (even though a lot of stuff in there is even recycled from the main game
Yeah. I don't get how people ignore these issues in the main game. Maybe they've started to feel blind nostalgia for it already. Even seen people unironically say things like: "the main game had actually fair and great bosses like Malenia and the DLC has strayed off that" 😆. Give me a break. The DLC only doubled down on the issues the main game had.
@@ennayanne You can google about the cut content. The smithing stones is a BIG CLUE as to where the content for the DLC originally fit in. They simply ramped up the health and damage of enemies, and forgot about scaling other parts of the DLC.
@@atlantic_love So are you saying the entire shadow realm map was part of the lands between that got cut?
Some of the quest made no sense either. It just felt like homework, and the quests don't branch out or have any versatility what so ever. Example: When Leda asks you who we should eliminate, we either suggest Thiollier, Hornsent, or say I don't know. I find it kind of pathetic that it doesn't matter at ALL what you choose, because it's going to result in the same way.. Leda going after the Hornsent. I was really hoping there was a way to CONVINCE Leda, or shift her focus towards Thiollier/St. Trina after we tell her St. Trina's words. I think that would've open up a WHOLE new opportunity or change in narrative to story if Leda were to take no risks, and kill St. Trina or something.
I mean after you talk to her and make a choice you can chose whether to be summoned to aid Leda or be summoned to help the person she's trying to kill (whoever you chose at the time). She chooses hornsent if you fight messmer before making a choice iirc.
Outcome being that it can change who appears in the battle with Leda and her allies.
@@Phot0n0she always chooses hornset, if you help Hornsent she sometimes* goes after ansbach. She doesn’t care about any of the choices you make outside of help her kill or don’t help her kill. If you kill her in the invasions it accomplishes nothing in the narrative, she’s still there at the gank fight unphasedby what you’ve done previous. Which is weak, and a change of pace in the fromsoft quest design that works poorly.
It changes the quest rewards depending on other factors so saying it doesnt matter isnt real.
@@SecretMarsupial crestfallen knight does a complete character 180 off of player choices, solaire can go hollow or replace Gwyn, Anri can become your spouse in DS3 or just another casualty. Millicent either dies and fulfills Gowrys wishes if the player kills her, or dies on her own terms as her own person. Yes if you kill Leda with hornset you get swift slash AOW. Fantastic besides that the choice is meaningless, you summon hornset for mesmar and the voice actors has a bit of fun, but you still have to kill hornset and nothing else changes. Compared to the quest lines we used to get this shit is garbage. Virtually every quest line in the DLC feels like this. I’ll give shout outs to thiolier and Yimir/Jolan at the very least.
Fromsoft couldn’t write a decent side quest if their entire company depended on it
You're one of the few people I've ever heard actually talk about the intendedness in how to dodge waterfowl, and yeah Radahn's triple slash is just an extension of the same problem. It's like in the language of their games, all of the ways to really avoid it are exploits, or just block it, which isn't really avoiding it and also build dependent, or simply run, which is probably the most intended thing, but that's also a bit stupid and doesn't always work either. Radahn's triple slash is so sloppy and amateurish, are they even trying anymore.
The move that cuts s is the downward slash. It's supposed to cut s because the downslash can hit you while you're knocked up in the air, the problem is, if you stand on a rock or something, you become elevated, and it becomes impossible to roll through anymore.
I'm glad I'm not just being gaslighted and someone recognizes that Messmer is by far the best designed fight in this DLC. He and to a lesser extent midra just make me wish for a boss rush.
You can download the Boss Resurrection mod if you're on PC and refight the bosses with no hassle. Of course, you can't subtract scadutree blessings.
@@poiumty This is a feature that already exists in sekiro without the introduction of any mods, the fact that it is completely absent from elden ring is baffling to me. People shouldn't be forced to install mods to play a game mode that they have already successfully implemented in previous entries.
I would love to hear an interview from Miyazaki of him saying "Yeah I rolled waterfowl no problem. It was easy." It honestly feels like the intended way to deal with it is just eat some damage and hope you survive. I doubt the playtesters found out how to dodge waterfowl.
@@Nudderbols To force the player to adapt into a build that can survive taking an overpowered hit is a legit answer though; Elden ring is full of things that reduce damage taken, isn't making such elements irrelevant for boss encounters even more sloppy?
Fundamental issue I see in a lot of amateur criticism pieces like this is the way that they fail to understand that a developer's vision has to be somewhat pluralistic whereas a reviewer/player's perspective is typically singular in a perspective sense. As soon as a critic starts saying "the game is intended to be played x way" in the context of a RPG title where the system offers multiple approaches, I know they simply don't get the designer's perspective.
@@inxe8 There's an intended window to play the game. That window is somewhere in between bosses having undodgeable attacks and using a bleed build with flame grant me strength to kill everything in 15 seconds. Neither side of the spectrum is fun. Somewhere in the middle is.
The white elephant is the gameplay, but you also touched a point not many comment and it is the lack of storytelling and build up for these remembrance bosses. Only Messmer, Miquella and Bayle get this treatment. The rest are just flashy but random encounters. Almost not cutscenes, no dialogue, no one that tells their deeds, and almost no items that bring lore beyond their remembrance rewards. What happened? Couldn't they make Miquella's followers to at least give info about any of the other remembrance bosses?
I'd argue Dancing Lion and Midra also have proper buildup/lore. Those also happen to be the other 2 fights with cutscenes
Metyr IMO is almost there, since the questline serves as decent build up. The rest are honestly more akin to mini bosses
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 Well, I would concede the Dancing Lion. Besides the cutscene, there is a single NPC that talks about them (although I completly missed her in my playthrough).
Midra on the other hand only has the cutscene and the torch to give some lore before the fight (or so I think). For such a cool boss, I think he needed NPCs' dialogue, more items or something else to make him known before actually facing him.
@@danield.1605 for the lion, I mostly like how it's part of hornsent culture. It's this "divine" spirit that possessed 2 warriors specifically trained for this. It was a festival/religion thingy before being turned to a weapon. The other horned warriors, curseblades and divine warriors are all part of this cultural identity that elevates the fight to me.
Midra admittedly piggybacks a lot on the frenzied flame lore of the base game. But I did enjoy what little he has. With the torch implying that he was manipulated into this position by Nanaya, and the absurd amount of hornsent inquisitors showing how much they feared the flame (and I just love that cutscene and overall aesthetics, definitely biased)
That's not really unique to the DLC. A decent chunk of remembrance bosses in the base game have no cutscenes or build up.
Base game has: Ancestor Spirit, Astel, Fortisaxx, Plasidusax, and Fire Giant.
And the DLC has: Rellana, Gaius, Romina, Scadu Avatar, and Putrecent Knight. So they're dead even.
@joaoluizkfsantos8392 yeah, it's not all about cutscenes and item descriptions. The environment tells the story. Just the mansion... The paintings showing a happy man and his wife. The rows on rows of bookshelves. The books mouldering onthe floor in knee deep piles. The atmosphere of sickness and decline. The jaundiced light. The row of decapitated servants.
The new DLC weapons are on pre patch 1.7, you can see this in their poise damages and hit-stun values for pvp, which leads me to believe there are even more oversights and rushed parts in this DLC and as it is now is not what they set out to make. Also before the DLC released for the public, Radahns frametrap full combo'd into the cross swing, just thought I'd let you know that.
The schizo voices in my head tell me that all the fixes that patched out Bandai's other big game: Tekken 8 got transferred over to Elden Ring's DLC.
I for one hated the new lore about Miquella and Radahn. The pre-DLC lore was just fine: The Blade of Miquella challenges The Starscourge, unleashes an eldritch rot-nuke to end in a stalemate, now a magic zombie giant is pinning the stars in place. Radahn's story was tragic, but complete. Bringing him back as Radahn Prime was just fanservice, it felt fake.
Mogh was just fine being super-duper evil. He was mistreated as an omen, and that drove him to worship an outer god of blood and pain. The Golden Order creating it's own enemies was a fine enough theme. Hell, I was even expecting him to have been charmed, but in a creepy yandere way and Miquella couldn't turn it off. Him just being a pawn seemed both needlessly cruel and cheapened him as a character. It also undermines Malenia's inherent tragedy, being so devoted to her brother (who made it his life's work to cure her rot) only to be absent when he needed her most. At least this explains why we couldn't reason with Malenia beforehand, but again damages her character because that just means she was just sitting on her ass for however long, rotting out her brother's tree.
And Miquella! God forbid we have just one morally pure demigod in the family, now he's a creepy cult leader lopping off pieces of himself, brainwashing people with magic instead of some super-charisma. There's pretty much nothing furthering the Rot/Abundance dichotomy between him and his sister, and we couldn't interact with him at all in a way that didn't involve violence. This whole story reads like fanfiction, and not the fun trashy kind.
Well, with your bit about Miquella, it was always implied that he had the ability to charm people using an external ability, we see that in the description for the 'Bewitching Branch'. To quote the item description, "The Empyrean Miquella is loved by many people. Indeed, he has learned very well how to compel such affection. " Although I do agree with you, we should have had far more interaction with Miquella during the DLC, if for any reason then to at least make him sympathetic.
I actually kinda like the new plotline with Radahn as it implies why hes holding the stars in place. Which always seemed kind of random.
But doesn't want to be the consort, and the only way to prevent it from happening is to not die.
And some mechanism of holding back the stars/fate prevents this. Hes not a crazed warrior too powerful to die, hes actively holding out as long as possible because staying alive at any cost is the only way to hold the stars in place and avoid the fate forced on him by Miquella.
It also leads to some other questions, like if he ever was really trying to cure Malenia.
@huttyblue I actually saw a very interesting idea in the comments of this video. While I can't find it, I'll paraphrase it. Effectly what this idea stated was that Miquella's curse of never growing doesn't just apply to his body but also his fate. We see examples of this throughout the lore, two notable examples being his attempt to cure Malenia and his attempt to bring in a new age of compassion, both of which were stomped out before they could reach fruition.
God, I agree fully.
ikr!? his charisma influencing people is way more interesting than just mind control "cause he says so" they really made him in base game like a beacon of light for a dark time for people regardless if he was good or evil, he had what people wanted and would give their all for him to make it so, with his gifted understanding of life, the fact gawry being enamored by the golden needle who is most likely like shibiri a spokesperson or embodiment of the rot goddess itself finding admiration for a person he never met was such a good way to set up a character as being believable that he could sway the hearts of people by his realistic abilities to bring salvation to them. and instead of being jesus like in dlc where he just magically cures the redmane chick's scarlet rot with a touch,
he was using his actual talents to craft items that could nullify outer God's abilities. he really was made into a caricature like someone unrelated to the base game read about him and wrote the dlc plot.
i remember being so flabbergasted when i first fought radahn in the dlc. it was hard to put in words how bad the fight is. but you put it nicely.
whole fight is just meta build time, be it completely naked light weight ash of war stuff, or just full heavy greatshield.
same thoughts with madness woods. i was so confused why that whole area even exists, its just empty.
If you need that for radahn, it’s a skill issue.
@@Stanzbey69 actually it's a "fun design" issue
@@Stanzbey69the fact you can even beat radahn with shitty brainless tactics like that shows the game requires 0 fucking skill, and that's the problem. Elden ring doesn't reward having skill, it rewards having no skill
@@Stanzbey69 I can tell you haven't even fought Radahn to say those words. It's such an unfun boss fight, people either use a no skill build to kill him or do the most meta shit ever to cheese him. Legit fun builds don't work well against Radahn that's a huge problem.
Duuuude, you literally explained everything i felt perfectly and detailed. Great video.
I feel like Elden Ring is too big and too unfocused.
The rabbit hole that is the frenzy status effect, insight changing game mechanics all the way to the 2nd half of Bloodborne, the emergence of winter lanterns, hidden areas it's secret bosses, chalice dungeons and DLC have so much more depth to it than Elden Ring.
Because Elden Ring has like a million things you can look into but it all stops short.
Gloam-eyed Queen
Godwynn
The Shattering
Radagon's roots
Frenzied Flame roots how the TEMU winter lanterns came to be
Difference between Messmer's fire and Fell God's fire
Melina
What did Morgott think of Miquella
The list goes on forever
But it doesnt get deep.
Ive seen videos of people yapping about the implications of a single chalice dungeon in Bloodborne because of the designs on the walls for like 2-3 hours. And it reads like a fun audio book while you play and immerse yourself in it.
What am I supposed to immerse myself into in Elden Ring? Catacombs? With Death roots that lead to Godwynn's body that has a bunch of missing lore? All the catacombs are the same, what are the implications between them all.
Oh some of them have death roots because the tree has roots. That's it.
Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle.
Go back to tight, linear well crafted stories.
The most disappointing part about the DLC is all the recycled enemies and bosses from base game. The new enemies are almost all reserved for legacy dungeons. In the overworld there are very few. A lot of reskins of enemies like red roaches, shadow dogs, etc., but those are just reskins, not new enemies. Huge areas with nothing in them comes close second, it just wasn't fun to explore. Blue flower area is just Limgrave, it even has a similar huge hole like the one after fighting Radahn. For a 40€ DLC I expected more DLC and way less base game.
Half of the enemies in TOH are reused ones or reskinned. And yet, for people its the best DLC FS made. Its not a bad thing, and its not a factor for calling DLC "bad". There is still a lot of unique enemies, that shine better then the main game ones (Like.. Fire knights, Black knights, Divine Beasts, those Horned dancers, Messmer Soldier's, Horned warriors and more.)
That beach is really nothing like limgrave. Atleast where's castles? Where's big forest? Ruins? You could've brought up the dragon fight close to water, but nah.. Big hole with legacy dungeon? Yeaah..
When I first saw the Radahn fight,I was like,whens my turn to attack?
probably during his punish windows (he has many)
Beat him twice and I still feel the same way.
@@Coeaxe Welp, unless you're actually willing to inevitably trade an hit or two with him, then yeah he has plenty of openings to get him with an heavy weapon.
It's a true shame tho that the little "trading" you're getting into will most likely result in a mosquito bite for Radahn and a good 65% of damage dealt to you, and all of this with the physical negation flask, talismans and the armor set of Moore.
Even worse if you're a spellcaster build, as he has been specifically designed to nullify ranged builds lmao
@@jador9641 I had to basically respec for Radahn, he fucked me up real good, he has even crazy AI that basically ignores any spirit ashes, even mimic with the aggro talisman couldn't hold him for more then 5 seconds, he instantly aggros on you even if you dont attack him, bear in mind I just wanted mimic there to only keep his attention to apply my buffs, nope didnt work. And people say that spellcaster builds are OP, idk what are people smoking but spells suck dick in DLC, and especially the ones you find in the DLC, most new spells take too long to cast and dont do enough damage, the timing windows of even charging some spells like comet or night comet is too long for some DLC bosses, since by the time you cast your charged spell you're already at 30% bcs surprise surprise the boss you're fighting was fed crack cocaine and wont even let you breath. I've beaten him with frost bleed build in 60 seconds while resetting frostbite with fire damage and it was super frustrating to be honest not being able to play the game my way and being forced out of my certain playstyle I cant even fucking imagine the pain trying to fight him with collosal weapons, fuck me honestly.
@@jador9641a lack of punish windows is like the least of problems for radahn, he has a lot of punish windows.
If the people who uncritically accept absolutely anything that From puts out aren't willing to accept the very valid criticisms that are being made on a daily basis under the excuse of "git gud" they should at least listen to someone with over a 100 runs, including no hit runs.... right?...... right?
I've seen some get gud and skill issue comments, by people who definitely didn't solo the bosses. Let alone no hit run them 😂
@@based-ys9umthey don't get the games anyway. It's not jzst about getting good, it's about the message they portray and the philosophical themes etc.
They won't. They are in the comment section rn 😂
I'm not gonna listen to somebody that calls a Demi god with the body of a child a "sexy femboy". He just sounds jaded. The DLC is far from perfect but it's a great addition and it's damn fun
@@ethanhinojosa5274 I'm not gonna listen to somebody that complains about someone saying that
I’m so glad someone talked about that terrible move from radahn
Everyone and their mothers have talked about it, it is a terrible move that should be fixed.
It's the one complaint everyone, even the ppl who enjoyed the fight, can agree on
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 Yes! I enjoyed the fight so much, I think it’s one of FromSoft’s best bosses, just that the moveset felt like a Dark Souls 3 boss for the most part, roll roll swing, not much positioning, no spacing, you can’t punish in the middle of most attack strings like how you could do with Margit/Morgott/Maliketh/Godfrey/Malenia/Radagon, those bosses had plenty of punish windows that can be extracted, also Radahn, just requires too much perfection of roll directions which is fair but not the best for me as a boss design philosophy, he also has combos that he does without recovery animations which is weird, you have to wait for ANOTHER combo just so you can have a real window to get your hit in.
Still, it’ll be an S-tier boss for me IF FromSoft fixed the hitboxes, that almost unavoidable attack, increase recovery animations of that one combo & degrade the AOE effects, the music, spectacle, the big attack animations & the arena are a 10/10 all-timer stuff. ❤️⭐️
@@HeyTarnished preach, I hold basically the same opinion
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 Thank you, rarely do I see people like you with understandable & constructive comments/opinions.
If they gave the dlc boss arenas any personality then there would be too much terrain/architecture getting in the way of the boss’ spinny bs aoe moves lol 10/10 design, working as intended
Just look at the fire giant and it’s trash map
@@WhySoSeriousSenpai oddly enough I’m fine with that boss and its arena, his speed and attack patterns are consistent with his size and they give you enough room to attack and retreat without the camera getting in your way
You pretty much summed up my exact opinion about the bosses in this DLC. When I got to the Dancing Lion, the very first boss I fought in the DLC, I was legit baffled. For the first time since I played DS2, I was not having fun fighting a boss in a Souls game. Then I fought almost every other boss in the DLC and had pretty much the same feeling. At first I thought it was just cuz I didnt have many Scadtree fragment yet, but even after collecting a ton of them and trying the bosses again I was still not having fun and just wanted to end the fight already.
It is extremely rare that a Souls boss makes me wanna spam the most OP weapon or spell I got to quickly get their fight over it, and somehow this DLC had so many bosses like that. In the base Elden Ring, only Malenia and Elden Beast made me feel like that. Mostly Elden Beast cuz Malenia only pissed me off with her water dance attack. I would actually bet money that Miyazaki saw how players were using summons like Mimic Tear and spamming that Rivers of Blood skill to breeze through base bosses and decided that DLC bosses would not just have way more HP and attack damage, but also they would be way more offensive to deal with summons. All the while completely ignoring players like me who always solo bosses and play a melee build...
Anyway, when it comes to the exploration of the DLC map, I actually liked it. It wasnt perfect, as I think some areas are extremely empty and we could have had more varied environment, but as a big new area I was okay with it. Optional dungeons were mostly fine I guess. The main ones could have been bigger, maybe more unique looking as well, with more secret walls to find.
And lorewise...I am not surprised at all for the lack of it. I am used to Miyazaki barely giving us anything concrete and just leaving us to guess wtf is going on.
But anyway, all in all, I did not hate the DLC, but I do feel it shouldnt have been 30 bucks. That is too expensive for the mixed feelings I have after playing it. Like half of the bosses REALLY let me down in a way that reminds me of Dark Souls 2. At times this DLC unironically made me ponder if I am too old for Souls games now. Bosses that make me feel like I am wasting my time playing the game should not exist in a Souls game.
I haven't finished SotE, but the thing that struck me the most was how empty the open world is. It's almost as if they decided to re-purpose the open world from a place of wondrous discoveries and treasures to a traversal puzzle, aka how do I get down from this cliff.
I think though, Elden Ring has to be understood for what it was designed to be. Sekiro is about improving yourself as a player more than improving your in game character. DS3 is somewhere in the middle , you have to improve both yourself and the character. Elden Ring is on the opposite end of that, improving your in game character more than improving yourself. What matters most is what items you have, your rune level, your tools, your weapon upgrades, your spirit ashes, your scadutree frags. The game is about counteracting challenges by finding, equipping, and using the correct tools, not about git gud. That is also why you get a lot more respecs than you would Dark Souls. Trying to approach Elden Ring bosses with a Dark Souls mindset , looking for that "dance" with the bosses is setting yourself up for disapointment - as a huge fan of Sekiro, Bloodborne and the Souls series, I found that out the hard way.
On your second point, I completely blame that as a fault of the open world design that Fromsoft tried to tackle and half failed on. The ebb and flow of progression you saw in the older games through mechanical improvement and knowledge checks could be entirely bypass by an much more easily accesible stat check (with the exception of a few bosses) compared to the previous titles.
That completely dilutes the content for me personally and I hope that in the future they do not attempt open world again, if they do then I hope they at least learned from the failures of Elden Ring which I find to be less likely now due to how they handled DLC content.
On the first point I gotta say you are objectively wrong, if you got past he first open field the world is far more dense than the base game
it's fucking hilarious how empty some areas are. and some areas are just filled with base game bosses. and the best part is, if you criticise this miyazaki fanboys will call you bad at exploring
@@Yive. I can think of 1, the part of the cerulean coast with the semi human queen.
Please name another?
@@pringle239 hinterland just has 2 tree sentinels and a falling star beast, the red area just has a deathbirrd and tibia mariner,finger places have literaklly nothing lmao, same goes for the abyssal woods. they force you off torrent and force you to walk through an empty area with copy pasted rats from the base game to get to a good boss
16:23 WHAT WHAT WHAT LMAO
"Elden Ring base game had basically 0 camera issues"
Surely you're joking, right? Ulcerated Tree Spirit, Falling Star Beast (esp. the one in Sellia Crystal Tunnel), Fire Giant, Red Wolf of Radagon, Magma Wyrms, Maliketh, literally *ANY* dragon... do I need to go on? Let's stick with the truth please.
This one line made this entire critique questionable.
I just want a sekiro 2
Sekiro is one of the most boring, drab and bland games I've played in 47 years of video gaming.
@@atlantic_loveYour rage is felt through your comment
@@atlantic_love Bro became an actual filthy casual! but hey its just a opinion!
@@atlantic_lovein sekiro you actually have to get good. That’s why you can’t make your own character. You’re experiencing someone else’s story and they have a specific way of doing things.
@@r68saga31 I didn't say anything about the character creation. Read it again.
Thank you so much for summarizing your thoughts about Radahn! Its exactly how I feel and its a shame that the last content for my favorite game ends that way :(
The idea of Shadow of the erdtree being a sequel wouldve been so good in hindsight. Especially with how different the dlc is with its progression compared to the main game, why wasnt this just a sequel? I wouldve definitely waited longer and wouldve been more excited to find out that due to the contents of the dlc it would instead be turned into a sequel.
What i mainly dont like about the dlc is that it left me feeling… empty by the end of it.
Miazaki dosen't like to do sequels. Shadow of the erdtree does function as a dlc quite well. You can also make the argument that the old hunters is also really disconected from Bloodborne as the only thing that changes in the main game is the doll getting like 3 new lines of dialoge
When we look at the dialogue, it appears as if the DLC is a sequel. Several characters make clear that we're the Elden Lord.
@@debater452😂😂😂he's been making the same game since demons souls with one exception 😂
@@based-ys9um Do you play DS3 the same as you play Demon souls
Because if a hypothetical Elden Ring 2 ended with fighting fucking Radahn like in this DLC, the people who actually care about this shit would be 1000x more annoyed at how lame that is than we already are.
The AC6 slander isn't really justified. Armored Core games have always been pretty simple and straightforward, and the gameplay is more fun and coherent than what you find in SoTE. I think the issue with SoTE is that too much was cut, and what was left wasn't fleshed out and refined enough, which might just come down to a time/money thing, plus the expansion of the team creating a dip in quality.
i agree with you, but as an armored core player at heart I can see how the way it was advertised to the fromsoft community and how it actually played were pretty different leaving a lot disappointes. i know people who stopped playing before they got to baltaus cause they were bored but were super excited to play it when it was advertised.
It was beyond uncalled for lol
On Radahn's -ignoring move: I think it's some kind of fuckery regarding framerate. For many attempts I gaslighted myself into thinking I was rolling at the wrong time until I took footage and went frame by frame until I could see clear as day that my char would still be halfway through a roll when the HP bar would take the hit.
I think it may have something to do with the fact that normally being displaced or knocked down by a boss attack gives you temporary s but the first swipe is supposed to combo into the downslam so it checks to see if the first attack hit then ignores your s if so, but some spaghetti code lets it do that normally maybe. Weirdly enough, I had this issue when I was locking Elden Ring to 30fps and when I turned that off the attack worked as intended 100% of the time.
It seems to be a problem they have with "juggling" attacks specifically. My understanding from what I've seen others say who've analysed the hitboxes is that the first half the first half of that swing has ignoring hitboxes. The first half of the swing ignores s it seems so that it can hit you out of the air when he "juggles" you.
What's fun Is that even the mods that are supposed to make bosses more difficult still made the cross slash easier to Dodge
That move Just sucked
The Radahn fight is an example of a developer trying as hard as they can to make a boss "uncheeseable." They added so much weird cheesy stuff (in terms of souls-like mecahnics) that you can obtain and use in these fights. I just dont understand why they seem to have gotten so angry at people using the games mechanics as they're presented. Everything from his reach to his moveset to his behvavior screams, "You must play this how WE want you to." Artificial difficulty in games has been a problem for a while now, but this fight shows the pinnacle of it.
You can literally Parry 90% of what Radahn does. You can also cheese him right back with a shield.
@@kylew7180 So because you can do a very limited way of "ignoring" his mehcanics he's not SUPPOSED to be an uncheesable boss? Standing there and building a characters specifically so you can take all his hits with a shield is hardly cheese. How is parrying cheesing? You have to do it 3 times to get the stagger and hit. Its a skill shot. Most builds will not be able to just ignore shit with his fight.
@@kylew7180 I'm not going to lie, the fact that most of these FS hardcore fanboys hardly knows what does the terminology "Role Play Game" even means is lowkey discouraging.
It's just beyond sad to see people defending with both claws and fangs such a disgusting boss design like The Promised Simp which have been blatantly studied to literally nullify the "Role play" component in this game for the sake of "Challenge over fun".
@amilcarcampbell2405 Absolutely not true, every single person I have seen beat Radahn has beaten them in a different way using completely different builds and gear.
@@jador9641 Stop talking out of your ass please.
Hahahahaha it's been months and it's so fun seeing people get filtered by the dlc.
You sound like an elitist prick and your comment tells me why you play these games. You play them as some sort of badge of honor, which is pathetic to be honest. The difficulty has reached a point where there are zero fun or engaging mechanics to deal with all the nonsense from bosses and enemies. There are ways around it but it turns into hiding behind a great shield or either a rolling simulator. You probably can’t comprehend that tho because all you see is “hard=good”.
And how did he get “filtered” if he beat the DLC? You just trying to skill-check someone. Go tell mommy and daddy you beat the DLC, I bet they’d be so proud of their little boy.
@@zachtaylor5312I agree with you but for me it’s not even that it’s too hard, it just lacks any substance. Nothing was rememberable about it and I wasn’t invested in any of the characters/bosses. The areas looked good but that’s it. Worst fromsoft dlc to date by far but all the Elden ring fanboys just started playing fromsoft games 2 years ago so maybe when they actually play the other games they’ll know what we are saying.
I agreed with much of this. The first thing that irked me was just the camera and trying to read tells of the animal bosses, but then their faces would become transparent thus removing the tells of their attacks. I found phase 2 of many bosses to severely limit player interactions.
The "undodge-able" attacks became an issue after commander gaius. ever time i struggled to dodge something I would just think "it must by some frame perfect garbage. Metyr's swooping beam attack cannot be dodged. There is a way to med roll radahn's triple swipe, but you have to be moving around his right side before the attack has started, to be able to clear it. But this attack just stopped me from completing the DLC. In phase 2 it would just catch me and stun lock me into death (50 vigor and 17 levels of fragments). I went into the DLC with a venomous fang build and there's just a stretch where everything was immune to poison. the ghostflame dragons, petulance knight, Death Bird, and the furnace golems. The furnace golem i enjoyed the first one as a better fire giant, but then the spamming fireball attack and having to kill 8 of them became such a massive chore. I changed my build so many times just trying to adapt to the bosses.
I can enjoy a spectacle, but from a technical side in regards to the combat I just felt it lacking.
This is unrelated to your review save for at the end, but I do think your view on Armored Core is pretty ridiculous. The franchise overall is really fun, and 6 is amazing (despite some issues with the multiplayer, but if anything those issues arose due to various Souls mechanics being implemented into the game).
I'm unsure if you've beaten it or not, but if you haven't I recommend playing through it. It's a genuinely amazing game with plenty of great weapons and AC parts to try, and although it offers a very different experience when compared to Elden Ring, I would not agree that it is a "B-team" game in the sense of quality. Cheaper to make compared to ER's gargantuan map size, perhaps, but certainly not B-team in terms of quality. In fact, there are various aspects of the game that I actually PREFER when compared to Elden Ring.
Just a nitpick on that last tangent, I'm not sure if I agree with your overall review as I'm still thinking on the DLC myself, but I do think you do AC a disservice here and at the very least it'd be nice to hear your thoughts on it (especially if you really did just buy it as a show of support and have yet to play it).
imo AC6 was a more complete and polished experience than both Elden Ring and SOTE. All the bosses were great and the NG+ additions gave the game replay value like no other Fromsoft game.
22:46
1. Music is great
2. Design and idea are creative and unexpected. I like his twitching too
3. Gimmick with changing phases according to time of the fight is something new
4. He is not so oppressive when you understood that many of his attacks are just visual cluster
Overall my third favorite remembrance boss from DLC
I'm so fucking done with From pulling in stuff I'd actually want but like a game later than they should. Deflecting hard tear, giving the fucking back step i-frames, just make these main mechanics. It's absolutely insane that the back step has remained USELESS for like 5 games and only NOW are they bothered to do anything about it. And maybe if we/they stop jerking off to the laser light show boss fights we can get a better experience as a whole. Might I also add armor set bonuses STILL don't make any sense because it's so arbitrary. Spellblade set gets full bonus for full set. Alberich's trousers don't count but the rest of it does, and only Ranni's hat counts, what the actual fuck.
Omg WHY DOESN'T THE BACKSTEP HAVE I-FRAMES?! It's FUCKING USELESS
Backstep isn't useless at all it has one use: to let the host know you're not in a menu any more and are ready to proceed with the boss.
@@RyanWilson-qy7kb Fair point, I redact my statement entirely 🤣
i see you have never played Dark souls 2 as in it backstepping did have plenty of i frames and was balanced option to use.
@@danteangelo9412no one plays d2
I pretty much agree with about 80% of your video. FromSoft fanboys and new fans who feel like they've discovered a pile of gold with Elden Ring are either blind or coping when they call this DLC a 10/10.
it was so disappointing. I still cant believe the dlc was so tr@sh
@@SweartoSpivak I wouldn't call it trash. I like a lot of things about it. I am also disappointed by a lot of things. Just a mixed bag for me.
I enjoyed the DLC. I don't think it's a 10/10, but I thoroughly enjoyed learning and beating the bosses. All my friends did too and from the looks of it a lot of the UA-cam community did as well, looking at polls, rankings etc. Guess I'm wrong, blind and am just coping.
@@anonymous01201 How did you get that out of my statement? I clearly said that the people who think it's a 10/10 are blind and coping. I enjoyed it too. But it also disappointed me. It is objectively not a perfect DLC or anywhere close to perfect. And I think that the people who insist it is are coping or blind.
Its mostlly promotional bot accounts really or people that lack gaming experien s. Every japanese gaming studio has these issues
As someone who has damaged reflexes cause of years of substance abuse and a neurological disability, im so glad there are people willing to criticize this dlc despite the vitriol of the "get gud" mob. I suck at these games, no shame in it, but i do love them. Beat er, and bloodborne, moving to the rest next. But man, these games are so far from perfect. I use hella cheesy builds to enjoy the game, and thats fun for me. But when even 1 shot players, people who live and die by the most challenging way to engage these fights, have genuine critiques of these enemies, there is most certainly something amiss with the design. Fantasic video.
I'm not in the same boat... but sortof am? I know my reactions aren't what they used to be. I'm finding it much harder to dodge roll in this game than when I played ds3 a couple years ago.
I, too, am glad a high level player is not only NOT git gud and acknowledged that lesser players should be able to enjoy this also, but that even he's got a litany of complaints when he can easily skill his way thru it with little problem.
SOTE definitely feels like a standalone project. Something you play through fully once and never touch again unless you want a specific item or fight. I wonder if fromsoft decided to cater to newer players who never had the opportunity to play the game on release.
Maybe I'm just getting too old. I dont have time to die 40 times to consort radahn 🤣 I have to make money to feed a family
This right here
“Some normie sh*t”, Elden ring sold over 25 million copies. The point of Elden ring and in turn Fromsoft being some normie sh*t has long since been crossed.
Sad to see
Pretty damn good video. When I first step into the land of shadow I was at awe of the visual it has (sadly no cutscene but alr), looked around and seeing how they design the map verticality as the other areas was "hidden" below the cliff made me really want to go there, literally couldn't fathom the danger and monstrosities those area must have. Now that I have completed the DLC there was alot more copypaste mob than I wanted, though I enjoyed my time (Bayle was best fight), the criticism you made was very valid
-There was this emptiness around the map that seem things was missing compared to the base game, giant open field that doesnt lead to anything much, not much things tuck around the corner, you would usually always find caves or catacomb in the base game, but now its just more wild animals that runs around in the DLC
-I loved the starter area of Gravesite plain, almost every corner you tryna peek into have something to do (Churchs, Abandoned Village, Ruins, Dungeons) or finding new pathways up or down to new area, rest of the game was meh for me especially with copypasted enemies again, Ellac River was definitely the worst since there's no new boss down there after you take quite some time to ran to the end of it (they put an Ulcerated Tree Spirits, it was so bad), I did enjoy the Rivermouth Cave
-Before that there was the poison swamp area which doesnt even have a boss guarding the entrance to the Ellac River, I expect there to be a Poison Crab boss or something lol, even that would be nice
-Abandoned Ailing Village really hyped me up that there might be a legacy dungeon filled with these bloodborne inspired (in my opinion) enemies with even scarier monsters and mini-boss, but nah they remained the same and just scattered around the map, which for me I think the Abyssal Wood should have been the deathblight swamp that everyone initally thought and the origin of these bugs things, being the main enemies of the area with a legacy dungeon
-Night time only mini-boss got completely abandoned for the DLC, so that sad, literally one of the reason that encourage you to re explore area, now its just for getting Larval Tear and some non combat things that happened at night time. They should've just put the Ghost Flame Dragons as night time only enemies
- There was some interconnectivity and its decent (Shadowkeep was nice, liked going from Church District back to Storehouse again), would love it if I could go from Abyssal Wood and somehow ended up to Cruelan Coast, Finger Ruins (since midra have fingers egg store in the manor), talkin bout Finger Ruins, what a disappointment, hella spectacle but man was it empty as hell
-Bosses are hit or miss I guess, my progression went alright,Renella as my first boss really took some time but was decent to learn, Radahn took less tries for me but pretty bothersome, Golden Hippo definitely the worst, Furnance Golems was boring, Romina I did in first try, best fight was Death knight, Messmer, Bayle. I feel like Scadu Tree Avatar should've been a field boss and using torrent would be cool as hell for it.
The best difficulty review available! On top of that from the no-hit runner's point of view, so that nobody can criticize that it's a skill issue.
no skill issue yet still whines like he has
@@CrossXM do you like bed of chaos
No hit runners are the biggest whiners of all. The game is for the average gamer not fpr some challenge runner...
@@GoshoLosho-ld3xh no average gamer can beat the final boss without looking up a fucking youtube guide, and that's bad boss design
@@Slavic_Snake I am an average gamer and I did not need a guide. Also everything in DLC is technically optional so you don't have to finish it. The boss is not perfect but it teaches you about positioning and patience.
"I played Elden Ring 100 times through and never got bored" that is absolutely wild. The sheer tedium of having to traverse that giant map back and fourth just to get some items for my build or to fight one late game boss was an absolute nightmare.
And the weapons were not unique enough for me to justify dozens of hours with their simple movesets.
Many grips people have with the dlc were flaws I saw already with the base game but people just didn't notice them or care.
In the end I truly hope Miyazaki is DONE with the souls formula and done with open world and gives us either Bloodborne 2 or Sekiro 2 or something entirely new and different.
If his next game is just Elden Ring 2 or dark souls 4 I'm done. Lies of P DLC has me far more hyped than shadow of the erdtree ever did tbh
Is the Lies of P dlc confirmed I didn't hear about it
Yep, the open world nature of ER puts it way below the other fromsoft games for me - Sekiro was their best game and they should iterate on that combat. I enjoyed Lies of P way more than ER as well, crazy good combat and a narrative that doesn't require hours of 3rd party youtube lore videos to understand.
bloodborne 2 wont happen unless sony contracts fromsoft with some fat prerequisites from them, they got tired of them after demon souls, thats why they created dark souls, as a successor, after bloodborne released they were fucked over again, after that they havent contracted with sony since, this is the reason there is only 1 demon souls, and 1 bloodborne
36:00 Okay, I had this on in the background and chuckled when I heard this. I had to rewind the video to make sure I wasn’t tripping. On a serious note though, you’re absolutely right. It should feel like an epic dual.
What a banger of a video
Great video. Probably my favorite Elden Ring video to date. I don't even have all that much to say, because it was just spot-on from beginning to end.
Your explanation that the Waterfowl Dance doesn't have an "intended solution" is a perfect phrasing of my problems with it, which I was never quite able to articulate.
This DLC was a very upsetting and depressing disappointment, but it's really cathartic to hear some sane commentary on it for a change. Thanks, man.
Way better than feeble kings rage bait.
@@MakioGoHardio I don't agree that Feebl's video was rage bait. As I said in my comment on that video (which you also replied to), I do disagree with some of his explanations for what was wrong with the bosses. But a lot the time I agree with the spirit of what he's trying to say. Jester's video is more precise and accurate, which is probably why it was received better than Feeble's (75% likes vs 40%). But Feebl's video was still good.
@@radioJimfeeble kings video isn’t what I’d consider “good” but to each their own ig.
@@MakioGoHardio Judging by your previous two comments, I never would have guessed!
@@radioJim shocking right
Thank u for saying it. All of it. Im tired of all the dual kitana mimic tear git gud redditors excusing bad design choices. I love this game, but im not blind. And i agree, mesmmer is the only reason to play the dlc despite how beautiful the land of shadow is
Just starting this video, but I want to say that you have a really good commentary. I think by the end of this video, I will respect your opinion, but I enjoyed it myself. I at least hope you enjoyed this more than Lords of The Fallen.
I'll at least admit I enjoyed it more than lords of the fallen lol Thanks for the kind words!
@@jesterofjuice5132Messmer alone is better then the entirety of LOTF lol
Promised Consort is the result of us praising FromSoft from leaving the roots of Demon’s Souls and pursuing spectacle. It was inevitable.
These days bosses are praised and known mostly for being hard. In demon souls bosses were known for their uniqueness and thought provocation.
As an old souls vet, I miss the days when From tried to make unique encounters out of every boss fight, and I feel like I've been chased out of my own community by a new generation of thrill seekers who just want more generic spectacle and shark jumps
I missed the days when the final boss was a complete anti climax making you reflect on why you climbed the top of the mountain in the first place.
I miss the days when the arena was just as much a factor in the boss fight as much as the boss itself, now everything is just generic flat featureless arena's with the occasion drop off edges that serve only as a hazard for the player
I miss the days when a beast didnt get an anime style desperation power up when on the brink of death, and instead limped towards you making you realize the tragedy behind your actions
I miss the days when you would walk through a boss fog and the boss would just passively ask you to leave instead of rushing you down with some inexplicable violent bloodlust for anything and everything that moves.
I miss the days when Fromsoft was genuinely innovative with their online systems, instead of sanding them down to a level of self parody.
I miss the days when every action felt deliberate, when a bad dodge roll gave you time to really soak in the mistake you just made, instead of being bombarded with so much stimulus that you'd have to analyze a frame by frame play back just to figure out what the hell you did wrong.
And I hate the fact that as someone who DID enjoy bloodborne I still never asked for its design philosophy to bleed into literally EVERY game going forward. That this design mentality has been over served for nearly ten years while the other has been left to starve, yeah its easy to say "You can still enjoy the old games" when you are the one with a feast on your table and the rest of us are wallowing in famine.
Radahn is the most embarrassing case of difficulty over fun.
I’ve no hit the boss multiple times, and he’s definitively trash imo.
3 swing frame trap that no average player or even advanced player will figure out how to dodge without a guide.
The most egregious thing about him is his second phase which blinds you with a visual diarrhea light show and constant AOE’s that do massive damage.
The shadow clones are just so bad, they could’ve just made the telegraphing clear but instead we get visual diarrhea.
He also actively punishes slow weapon users, he has 120 poise health and regens it as fast as Malania which is 6 seconds and he has no mid combo openings for colossals so you can’t reset his poise health , so good luck trying to break his poise with a colossal without hit trading.
He also constantly flies away regenerating his entire poise bar, he also has his annoying roar attack that slows down the pace of combat to crawl when you roll it he just starts edge walking resetting his entire poise bar.
Fighting Radahn with a colossal weapon is fkn miserable, he feels like he was only tuned for fast weapons which is bad design.
Sasaki is preaching facts, can totally relate on every point. Yet we get called gatekeepers or dissed for saying it. When anything goes mainstream it gets ruined.
@@sasaki999pro "I feel like I've been chased out of my own community" is exactly how I feel. What happened to hard but fair being a selling point?
unironically the most agreeable souls youtuber for me
Don’t mind these glazers bro. W opinion
Subjective unpopular opinion, disconnected from reality. Elden Ring is 96 metascore, GOTY with most awards won and is regarded as Top 3 best game in history, unlike any other Fromsoft game. Shadow of the Erdtree has 95 metacritic score, making it the best DLC in history. These are raw undeniable facts, not some subjective opinions like yours. Keep hating Elden Ring, the game, it's success and the huge fanbase that loves the game with all their heart, couldn't care less about you crying
@@Vengeance_I_m NO ONE CARES.
@@aliceinwonderland4395 you cared enough to respond. Also, funny how your first reaction to my comment is getting emotional lol, pretty much sums up all of Elden Ring haters, people who's ego is deeply hurt for multiple of reasons. Are you actually an intelligent person, can you oppose the facts I aforementioned, instead of getting triggered?
@aliceinwonderland4395 You're right. Nobody cares about you. Keep coping Mr. 5% minority.
@@Vengeance_I_m yeah, I guess we both are just glazers... Thankfully fromsoft makes games that fit their glazers tastes, so we can keep on going like this and ignore the, admittedly very vocal, minority
You just summerized most of my issues with the dlc
Could never quite put my finger on why after completing this dlc I felt...disappointed. You answered that question for me and then some. Cant say I disagreed with a single point you made, fantastic video! 👍
I am assuming what happened is that fromsoftware weren't planning on doing a dlc from the beginning only after the success of elden ring reached a certain point that they decided to make a dlc which explains why it was announced a whole year later after release and only with an art picture because they only just started working on it, that means that the whole map and it's content was made in one year and 3 months, cut that time down because they were also focusing on armored core 6, so basically shadow of the erdtree was made in 9 months it was too large of a scope and was rushed simply because they never planned to make ahead of time
That also my theory there’s so many new weapon classes that just have one weapon in it or are so bad there’s no reason to use it (smithscript hammer) (smithscript dagger) and also there’s barely any spells, cutscene dialogue, and incantations
@@ItsjustmeAlone I also remember back in 2022 there were some leaks that fromsoftware weren't in the process of making any dlc for elden ring, I think that's true because I refuse to believe they only made that in 2 years and a half, they made much better things in less time
Sorry to say it, but this is stupid conspiratory thinking without any basis in reality.
If they truly took this little time we would be getting a modern pokemon game, not a 10/10 scoring product from most reviews.
Mr Zaki also wasn't the director for AC6 for most of its development. Do you think he just stayed there licking his tumb?
No, fromsoft has around 300 employees and enough experience to handle multiple projects at once, obviously the dlc was being worked on alongside AC6.
The third point is how Zaki mentioned that part of the story (and the lore written by George) wasn't going to fit the main game, so they decided to leave it for the dlc. This tells me that the dlc was a thing in their minds since close to the end of the development of ER. You can think he was lying, but that's just a conspiracy at that point.
@@joaoluizkfsantos8392 well first you can't trust review scores, they are all either payed by Bandai namko or just too afraid to criticise fromsoftware because of its fanbase, second when Mr Zaki said there's a lot of lore that couldn't fit in the base game he wasn't referring to dlc specifically but more to a possibile sequel, third 300 employees isn't that many for a project the size of elden ring so not all of them working on it is a bad thing, lastly Mr Zaki did lie about many things before like the size of the dlc being similar to limgrave or that it's gonna be more densely packed these are lies
You are the being delusional if you think fromsoftware delivered full product in this dlc, this so called conspiracy theory is more likely than saying fromsoftware intended all of this
"well first you can't trust review scores", see what I mean people? Conspiracy thinking at its finest.
Do anyone truly thinks all positive reviews were either bought or given out of fear?
Where was the fear in Eurogamer's 6/10 review? I obviously disagree with their take, but they have the right to give the score they gave, as do any other reviewer.
Or is it only an untrustworthy review if you disagree with the score?
For the record, my favorite reviewer for this kind of games is Rurikhan, and you can see the joy in his eyes while he was playing. Can't fake that shit, his "10/10" is fully justified by his experiences.
Funny you should call me delusional while believing something of this scope is even remotely doable in 9 months. And while you can say that 300 ppl isn't that much, I can say that it is, none of us can prove either way because none works at fromsoft. What we can't debate over, however, is that the studio is much bigger than it was before, and other big studios can develop multiple projects together, so why can't they?
On the topic of lies, I just chose to assume he wasn't lying, since he never gave me reason to doubt before. Even the Limgrave thing no one thought was gonna be 100% accurate, giving his tendency to undersell and be humble about his own projects.
End of the day, I know it'll be impossible to convince you otherwise, you came up with this rabbit hole yourself, so you must be the one to claw out now. I just hope any poor sod that comes here and is tempted to agree with this line of thinking can see this and turn back.
You hit it on the nail when you said it feels like the developers were fans of the mod community.
I love your style of commentary as well as your well thought-out video, hope you drop more like these.
Didn't finish the video yet but you didn't mention the deflecting hardtear for the final boss's bs attack. Not defending the attack or anything, but the deflecting hardtear actually made me enjoy the final boss.
Good point. I guess I was only considering options on how to no hit the move, but that's definitely an option, my bad
@@jesterofjuice5132I only used it after googling a no hit run to see how to dodge that move lol
@@jesterofjuice5132when you deflect you take 0 physical damage even with a 1% physical block shield/weapon. So it does count as a no hit!
I do like that addition but I find it baffling that it’s a temporary buff that you can use once per rest. Blows my mind that they didn’t just put it on a talisman. If a boss is going to fight at the speed of Sekiro anyway, just give us back the deflection system for it 🤷🏻♂️
@@Iqdeficientbruh it lasts 5 minutes no boss should take longer
This guy really just said Armored Core 6 is low-effort trash. One of the dumbest takes I've ever heard.
I'm going to argue that Elden Ring being a massive project was a huge reason as to why it has it's issues carrying over to SOTET. And hearing that Fromsoft is going back to more smaller condensed projects is actually a good thing imo. Linearity and more focus is what made past games so good because they were able to hammer out the smaller details and deficiencies. And most importantly it gave them time to fine tune the player combat to boss encounters which I believe is getting far too unbalanced to sustain itself after ER/SOTET.
True. Sekiro for example is a much better built game, but the trade off is it has much less replay value. It's only single player after all too which makes it easier to design.
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 In that same vein I think that ER's massive scale also ruins it's replay value. I've completed only 1 playthrough on ER and the DLC in a separate file and while I do enjoy the game up until Leyndell and Morgott the 2nd half just drags out too long for me to bother to finish it.
I've got nothing substantial or constructive to say. But I'll admit that I deadass laughed at the line "Getting hypnotised by a sexy femboy? I can understand that." good on you sir, good on you
Same I laughed pretty good at that. Elden Ring is like the movie fight Club except the main characters are transsexuals
How you feel about this DLC is how I felt about Elden Ring itself.
yeah I was really confused by the intro to this video, like how do you love this game so much these problems are loaded throughout the base game
@@ennayanne I really liked the base game, but was hoping the dlc would improve on its flaws. Instead, I feel like they're worse
Skill issue
@@melomet3789 I've forgotten more games than you've ever played. Relax.
@@melomet3789Found the brainless drone guys
"Not because the twink on his back is trying to hit you with the power of Christ" 😂😂😂😂
One of my main gripes is how open and barren some of these areas in the dlc are. I mean, the finger ruins serve one questline purpose. Otherwise, they are quite literally pointless. Also, dont get me started on the loot in this dlc. Why would anyone want a smithing stone 5 in an end-game late dlc area?
Maybe someone would want to level up a different weapon to use against late area enemies and bosses and they need some 5’s
@@Crewkabanger Then find the appropriate bell and buy it off the finger maidens
@@boshwa20 that’s an option I totally was unaware of. Thanks helper!! lol I find it so mindless that you’d comment that publicly. My point was to say if you’re in late dlc and re-evaluating your build or just curious to try something else a smithing 5 could come in handy.
@@boshwa20 I never said that was your only option to level up. Hasty boi
@@Crewkabanger I will say that the overabundance of the smithing stones in the DLC (get multiple from a single enemy) is quite nice. Go through a dungeon or forge or two, find a new weapon, and hey! You already have a bunch of upgrade materials for it so you can just pump your stones into it next time you go back to the roundtable.
Sure, you can spend the runes on them too if you've got the bell bearings, but if you don't happen to have the bell bearings (and you can miss one or two of them if you're not careful) it's a nice alternative. Overall though saturating the world with smithing stones doesn't remove other, better loot from the game. There's a ton of more viable loot available even if it's kind of a letdown to get a smithing stone you've already got a bunch of.
I went through the DLC on NG though, and not NG+, and my current NG+ run of the DLC is definitely a lesser experience since I've already got a ton of things upgraded to max. I figure anyone who went into it on NG+ would definitely have the issues you outline.
agree with most of this but i don’t think the comments about ACVI are fair. the game is incredibly well crafted and going back to fromsoft’s roots with armored core shows to me that they care about something other than souls
Yeah, game was awesome and anyone who’s so committed to souls games to skip it on the difference of genre alone is just depriving themselves of some of fromsofts best boss fights since ds3 and sekiro
For torrent being scared in the forest. Frenzy is the only thing in lore that can kill him, as seen in the frenzied lord w/ melina ending. Other than that great vid🙏
1:00:42 I think I would genuinely just quit gaming at that point. Fromsoft so far is the only Developer I know that makes good games. To see the DLC as a warning that someday they'll be announcing that YOU HAVE A DOG NOW in their game and boast about the features the dog has, I would just... depression.
Recycled talking point ripped straight from a vasty superior content creator DJ peach cobbler
They make the most incomplete game out there wtf u talking about. And yes there are many worse gaming studios from smite to wow but lets not pretend elden ring is a complete game in any form
@@stuffedpizzaroll5422 yes and?
@@GamingDualities I didnt say anything like that bruh, despite the lackings of Elden Ring I personally still found it enjoyable, not perfect but definitely pretty close. You may disagree but I will so as well, I don't care about Elden Ring's flaws as they are usually outshone by the good. I'm talking how Fromsoft usually deliver in making their games, but with me actually being able to notice ER's flaws I'm scared at some point they really are just gonna become like Ubisoft or Bethesda washed up game developers who put no love into their games whatsoever. So when that happens, I'm asking if does anyone know another studio that is like Fromsoft?
It honestly boggles my mind how people can seriously call this peak fromsoft. This isnt even their best DLC let alone better than anything in the Elden ring base game. Either people have lowered their standards extremely, or theyre fanboys.
@@bigsmall2842 >everything from first step to leyndell is peak design
rose tinted glasses. liurnia lake is a barren wasteland with absolutely nothing of note in it. weeping peninsula? siofra river other than the big reveal?
the game in general is barren and too big for its own good. acting like the dlc is worse is incredibly disingenuous. it's simply just as shit
@@bigsmall2842 off the top of my head the lake itself has: a copy pasted ruin with a revenant (laskyar ruins), a copy pasted church for varre to sit in and nothing else (rose church), a copy pasted rise with a copy pasted puzzle, a waygate that simply takes you to the other side of the lake, and a miserable little shack for bogart to sit in. the only relevant enemy is the... copy pasted dragon that guards the academy key...
I agree on limgrave and caelid (mostly), but the early game is littered with the same problems as the late game, and the dlc to a lesser extent. people simply got sick of it and started noticing by the time they got to the mountaintops, but the problems were always there
A lot of people who say that are just casuals that are regurgitating whatever favorite streamer/youtubers review said, elden ring really brought in a a lot of casuals unfortunately so you'll see a rise of cringe opinions. Best DLC was definitely old hunters in bloodborne
It’s definitely both
@@_lalapopok i gotta disagree, the open world is pretty good, with interesting open landscapes and good pois, it doesnt need a packed area 24/7 its dar from ass, its a phenomenal open world, however the main issue with the dlc wasnt the lack of enemies, it was the lack of variety, look pools were the same, and enemies were too familiar, its pretty bad in repeat runs when you have to run through big areas, but for a first experience its phenomenal, which is all that really matters
I agree on some surprisingly empty zones, some surprisingly bad designed bosses, but I got the feeling that everyone is loosing sight on the fact that it shares many flaws with the base game (sometime artificial difficulty, gimmick bosses, some zones clearly below the others) and the overral quality of this DLC remains unusual in the game industry (unmatched atmosphere, esthetics, level design, weapons/talismans that deepens the mechanics etc)
This guy played the base game 100 times, he's memory holed all the cheap and artificial stuff, of which there was quite a bit. And it's pretty obvious that he favors boss fights over pretty much anything else, with seemingly very little understanding that some players simply like to roam the incredible environments to which the treasure lying around is just a bonus, whether it's usable or not. I do agree with a lot of his statements but given how much he obviously invested in this DLC in terms of time and energy, it ends up being mostly a sad rather than insightful essay.
I can sign under every word spilled in here, but most importantly: "I'm a sucker for a redemption ark"
Shame that FromSoft has nothing to redeem themselves from. So there is no arc to complete
I fully believe that making the dlc just another zone to explore and conquer was a huge mistake. I understand that it has been the tradition of FromSoftware to release additional content in this format, but honestly it was a bad call. We should have gotten an expansion of the base game content such as new NPCs, questlines, endings and even legacy dungeons. Theres plenty of space in the OPEN WORLD for FS to easily slip in a few new legacy dungeons. In fact, they literally already have a lore explanation for why the dlc zone is separate from the main game so idk why they felt compelled to increase their workload by having to create a whole ass zone. They could've used that exact same reason to just say that some dungeons were obscured by powerful magics. Way more labor intensive for content we really didnt need, the map is big enough as is anyhow.
Also, given what we have in reality and not my hypothetical version of what the dlc could be, theres no reason why the dlc should have remained isolated from the rest of the game upon defeating the dlc final boss. There should have been a means of reuniting the two world maps together, which would have at least been a dramatic conclusion to cap off the final fight.
So many missed opportunities with what they tried, and what they tried was misguided to begin with. I'm glad the dlc is sitting at mixed in Steam because at the very least it shows that the FS fanbase isn't blinded by nostalgia like Bethesda's fans were. I don't want the souls franchise to devolve into the FS equivalent of Starfield so I applaud your willingness to be critical of the what we got despite the fanbois.
Edit: typos and formatting
Edit 2: im so glad you made the off hand comment near the end of the video basically outlining what i wish would have happened. The bit about Shadow Keep being found in Mt Gelmir is exactly the sort of thing inwas asking for in a dlc. Fill the damn world you already built, FS!
Good insight
the most depressing thing is that fromsoft will probably never hear critiques like this, because its completely drowned out by the overwhelming blind support from fanboys + the git gud crowd. this game and DLC sold extremely well, and thats all that matters. At least i have KC:D 2 to look forward to.
And then the fans will be like "what happened to this series? Those games used to be so good!"
you glazed too hard, too long.
Honestly I am not losing sleep because I didn't get answers for Melina or Godwin. I found the story for Elden Ring to be a mixed bag, and it didn't even come close to Dark Souls lore or Bloodborne lore. And for the most part I enjoyed the bosses except the last one. The most egregious part of the dlc in my opinion was the quests and exploration in general. I don't mind if this is the last we see of Elden Ring. It had it's moment to shine. I am ready for a new story.
Dark souls did a great job at having understandable themes at a surface level while also rewarding players for digging deeper into the lore. Elden ring just gives you a ton of facts about the world’s history without giving you any connection between events. Almost every idea that the player generates is a crack pot theory with no backing.
Well done. From gas to be aware of the laziness and yea souls can’t go down like this.
Honestly, at this point I’m glad that this DLC didn’t become a sequel. I don’t want to wait 5 years to get anything remotely like that as a full fromsoftware game. Shadow of the Erdtree world feels very dull, I’m already tired of looking at it. The base game areas are still very pleasant to play through
Nailed this tbh. Love the gameplay footage. No dispute your criticisms have nothing to do with needing to get good. Very well thought out critique. Clearly comes from a true love of the base game.
What a fantastic idea to have smaller pieces of content more frequently for a higher total price. You’re right
I’m not the greatest player but I did beat the entire DLC as a naked dragon using dual great katanas which doesn’t really have that great of a move set over using just one. But when I got to radahn I felt forced to switch to asmongolds shield poke build and it trivialized the fight. After spending an entire night trying the boss just to beat it in two attempts with a great shield was pretty underwhelming but other than that I really enjoyed my time with the dlc. Of course I abuse the wiki so getting my scadu fragments wasn’t an issue but I know other people won’t do that and some of these fragments were not intuitive to get. The most egregious had to be the glowing giant pot mobs who can drop many different things and I didn’t realize they even dropped fragments until I got to radahn and went on my hunt just to in the end respec into a great shield build anyway
The glowing pot heads was such a bad mechanic implemented. Why not have us fight something cool or tough to get those fragments? We 1 shot those potheads and there is no feeling of success or accomplishment. Just ok I got the Damn thing wheres the next glowing pothead. They weren't even guarded by anything remotely tough. Most times by other non pot heads who also get 1 shot. Terrible design IMO
@@jaketinsley1987 they would never lock progression items in their most popular game behind challenges.
@@hudrigu I guess you're right. Only bosses that block game progression or that drop items that help with game progression. Hopefully something they implement in future games. The souls format doesn't work with open world format so I hope they go back to Dark Souls and Bloodborne world format.
Shield poke isn't necessary, I beat him pretty easily and I'm no master at it. No cheese, just practice and some luck.
Blasphemous blade is king no matt how hard fromsoft tries to nerf it it still help me detroy radahn which had to be the worst boss ive ever fought
Bayle SHOULD HAVE been a rememberance fight that also drops a heart! I really really wanted a flame lightning spell.
I love this DLC in every way honestly but at the same time after hearing you out I get your point
I decided to play the DLC without looking at any guides or walkthroughs so I went in blind and immediately stumbled my way into the dancing Lions village which confused me because of how close it was to the start point but I was like “Oh sure! They give us a little freebie just to get us started”
I then met with Miquella’s followers who told me to go kill Messmer and once I got past Rellana and saw how little dialogue there was I felt something was wrong. Then I fight through the Messmer’s castle (which I think is really underrated) before stumbling into his layer and triggering his boss fight… which confused me because there wasn’t a whole lot of build up. So I die intentionally and take a step back and explore for a whole day just to catch everything I missed (which was a lot!) except none of the exposition actually related to Messmer beyond seeing him as a tool for Miquella’s dumb plot line.
Then it turns out he doesn’t even have a third phase or anything unique in his abyssal form. He’s got 3 incantations which end up working by similar narratively to the Frenzy Flame I.E. “A waste of potential” how is it… that there are 3 flames in the whole game that are capable of burning down Erdtree’s. 2 of which can resurrect people from the dead and cure poison and scarlet rot and all 3 are tied to amazing storylines and yet the DLC went absolutely nowhere with any of them… never mind Godwyn and the Gloam Eyed Queen cause that’s low hanging fruit. Why are people in the DLC acting like Messmer doesn’t exist as perhaps the greatest threat the world has ever seen? Killing Radahn canonically takes the best of his army, killing the fire Giant means having two great runes and Alexander being SUPERJAR! There is nothing impressive about the little chumps that we should be bullying in this dlc if it weren’t for bloated health pools and poor camera angles. WHY IS MESSMER DYING SO DAMN FAST! And why are the abyssal woods empty? And why would you name it the abyssal woods if the abyss is supposed to be the Snake inside of Messmer??? Who put this together so haphazardly? It feels like it’s made for twitch streamers. Everything’s just a straight line to Miquella just so we can be told what we knew already (unless you were drinking kool-aid).
The fact that my character allows himself to be used as a pawn (and that I’m not allowed to be the lord of frenzy flame while playing the dlc despite going up against an outer god) who is forced to kill Messmer just so that I can arguably race straight for Miquella and kill him rather than any other option is just so shallow and such bad story telling. What the hell happened? We got robbed and no one seems to care. There’s no way it was supposed to go down like this, no achievements, no final send off, it’s a prequel with one ending that feels like we just finished a regular Demi god boss fight rather than an Elden Beast level enemy. And how is this supposed to make sense for the main game? So we killed Miquella and then what just returned to the capital to go fight Morgott? GTFOH! I should’ve been named king of the shadow lands or something. Not a single difference was made in this DLC. There’s no progression at all and I KNEW IT the second that they said the ending wouldn’t affect the main game. This was just straight BS
I definitely agree that Messmer not being talked about more between the NPCs or having a greater story part (seriously why did they remove his line where he mentions that Miquella told him about the Tarnished) in the DLC. Aside from that, the issue with his boss fight can be fixed by just making his phase progression similar to Melanias. Finish one health bar and then second phase begins with a whole new health bar
I love seeing these videos. Both because no game is above criticism, and the frothing cultists can't git gud at handling different opinions.
Just thought I’d leave a comment out of support. After so many video essays, I can only say that you and one other earn a job in writing of some sort, because your entire channel is wonderfully written.
14:07 oh my fucking god, it's just like the DS3 Soul of Cinder juggle slashes that outright ignore your s so you can be hit in the air where you have s to do the juggles. This attack juggles you too, but after 8 years they didn't bother to fix it I guess.
It escalated to areas no Souls fan wants to be. We have too many OP weapons and builds so the bosses need to use cheap/cheating tactics to still be on par on top of us. To me the games that restrict us are far superior, like BB and Sekiro. From Software should focus on this instead of trying to cramp more and more into one game.
@@HansDampf1911 Every boss can be no hit as a RL1 naked wretch with club +0. If you're using OP weapons, simply restrict yourself as BB and Sekiro do. Of course, Elden Ring, being an open world game, won't restrict the player, that completely ruins the open world aspect of the game.
@@Vengeance_I_mHowever, that's also a symptom of open world design. You can't anticipate what build, and lvl a player will encounter a boss, so it feels like From fixed this by making the bosses too aggressive, fast, and with so much particle effects, to make all of them hard. To the point of being a frustrating spectacle, rather than a dance of combat. Also, you can Rl1 no hit any boss, doesn't mean most people will have FUN trying to do learn that. I know I can use a mimic, summon NPC's, and spam blasphemous blade to BEAT a boss. I want to have FUN while doing so....
@@rogalcorn734 and you can have fun doing those things, like millions of other people do. Most people play Elden Ring using summons and OP builds looked up through guides, there's nothing wrong with that. With those things Elden Ring is like a roller coaster, where you have this back n forth with bosses and you play as a team with summons, it's really fun. But that requires very little skill, it's essentially an easy mode of the game. You can play regularly against bosses and all bosses are fair imo, since you can consistently avoid their attacks. You simply choose whether to make the game a really fun, easy roller coaster or whether you want calculated high skill gameplay to hone your skills, doing fights solo and making up your build by yourself, not relying on guides. Both are very viable. However, I agree that Elden Ring's learning curve can be quite irritating to some players. Because the game has zero handholding, just like OG Dark Souls 1, you have to figure out everything on your own. If you can't quite do that, yes Elden Ring can be very unenjoyable
@@Vengeance_I_m I know there's nothing wrong with that. But I was more saying that I personally, wouldn't enjoy that playstyle. And apparently from the looks of this video, millions of people share that sentiment as well. Like I said, it's not about the difficulty, it's about how the difficulty is so frustrating , it's pushing people to resort to play styles they're just not interested in. And that's not even considering the plethora of aging technical designs (input buffering, camera issues)
@@rogalcorn734 All good points, but do you have any evidence to support the notion that "millions" of people have problems with Elden Ring's combat system? Because as far as I know Elden Ring's combat is praised by millions (according to polls on different platforms, where vast majority of people pick Elden Ring as the best Fromsoft game). And as far as I'm aware, Elden Ring has small minority of loud haters who despise and criticise the game, according to my observations, there's around few thousand of those loud minority groups. So again, can you provide evidence that there are actually millions of people having problems with the game's combat mechanics
i dont agree i had fun
The base game had many of the same geographic disorganization/rapid attacks/no countermeasures/aesthetic problems that you mention for the DLC, not to mention a lack of immersion! The forge dungeons not having bosses FINALLY displays some variety in dungeon structure and I don't understand why you are so addicted to fighting bosses when there are more than 200+ in the base game alone.
because all they want is bosses that they can beat easily by being overlevelled lmao. now that they actually had to try hard. they're trying to psyche themselves to hating it.
About the question at the end, gameplay seems like it's designed by a B-team because From Software is B-tier when it comes to mechanical design. They are extremely good at creating cool worlds and spectacles, but their mechanical decisions have been very inconsistent since DeS.
Also most of the problems you mention were problems in the main game. They've been trending towards normie sh*t from the start of DS3.
Idk most AC games (clunky of-the-time controls of the early titles aside) are pretty mechanically sound but I get what you're saying