In their quest to become Elden Lord, the Tarnished has slain gods and men alike, overcome fearsome challenges, and explored The Lands Between with the guidance of Grace. Now, they make a detour to the Land of Shadow, following in the footsteps of Miquella the Kind in search of answers. What does the Empyrean hope to achieve in shedding his very flesh? Find out in this expansion to the 2022 Game of the Year, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree!
Release Date: June 21st, 2024
Developed by: FromSoftware Inc.
Published by: Bandai Namco
"Beware Ahead: Spoilers Lie Within"
Promised Land
The Land of Shadow is, quite simply, enormous. "The size of Limgrave" this is not, regardless of what the director of Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki, would have us believe. You could argue he was underselling on purpose, but with hindsight (and enough map fragments) it is plain to see he was lying in that interview. The new continent we've been given to explore has a plethora of secrets and dangers, with an added touch of verticality the base game hinted at but didn't fully embrace. Shadow of the Erdtree wants - nay, demands - you explore the realm in search of power and hidden treasures, and your reward for thoroughness is to find even more of it to love.
Entire sections of the map could be found at the end of a dungeon, or hiding behind a secret wall - the Abyssal Woods, for example, requires you to notice a downward ladder tucked away in a corner of the Shadow Keep. This leads to a ruins guarded by Furnace Golems, then some precarious platforming down a waterfall further on, which ends in the Darklight Catacombs. Get through there, and, after defeating its boss, the way to the Woods will be cleared...only for another dungeon to be waiting on the other side! You can see the Abyssal Woods from atop the nearby cliffs readily enough, but that feeling of "ooh, how do I get there?" is present throughout the DLC.
Strewn about this landscape is a frankly-insane amount of stuff to collect, encompassing gear, spells, Spirits, and more. All told, you can expect to find:
- 95 Weapons, with 8 new weapon types
- 30 Armor sets
- 10 Shields
- 39 Talismans
- 14 Sorceries
- 28 Incantations
- 20 Spirit Ashes
- 25 Ashes of War
New weapon groups include: Backhand Blades, Beast Claws, Great Katanas, Hand-to-Hand Arts, Light Greatswords, Perfume Bottles, Throwing Blades, and Thrusting Shields. Each comes with new movesets, special abilities, and of course fashion. All told, with the size of the map, the numerous bosses to overcome, and the density of new equipment to play with, Shadow of the Erdtree is seemingly a full game in-of-itself! A price tag of $40 felt high originally but now that we know the full scope, it's practically a bargain, based on sheer content.
A Lowly Tarnished
Combat is basically the same as the base game, with no major shakeups beyond the Blessings. A more dangerous realm demands greater power, and by finding and upgrading your Blessings (in the form of Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes), you'll gain a percent increase to your Attack Power and Damage Mitigations. While not technically mandatory - some pros have already demonstrated successful "No Blessing" runs - they will no doubt make for a smoother path to victory. A recent patch even front-loaded this bonus, to make it easier on players just starting out in the expansion.
By the end of the DLC, I was swinging for twice as much damage, and taking about a third as much as I was in the base game...even if it only counted whilst within the Land of Shadow. Blessings exist to allow everyone to be on a similar page when entering the DLC: everyone should expect a challenge, (almost) regardless of their level!
Without the Blessings, you can expect even the lowliest of enemies to hit pretty hard. Elite foes can deal significant damage to your HP bar, while bosses will hit like a monster truck with nitro boost. This becomes much more manageable as you find the Fragments, leading back to the incentivization to explore the realm in search of them. That's not to say the Blessings automatically lead to an Easy Mode: even at a Scadutree Blessing of 19/20, regular enemies could destroy me if I was being careless. They're there to help even the odds, not play the game for you!
As for the bosses, I would say a lot of them are more creative than the base game. You still have your swordfighters and the like, but even then they can come with special twists to elevate the experience. The Twin Moon Knight Rellana, for example, begins as a dual-wielder of Light Greatswords; half-way through, she ignites her blades with magic and fire, and gains new abilities to enhance her swordsmanship. Of course, I have no imagery to provide - taking a screenshot mid-combat is hard enough, let alone one that looks nice - so you'll just have to take my word for it!
While they certainly look cool, the DLC bosses tended to be...shall we say, "combo-centric". Trading blows was generally frowned upon, given how hard they could hit you for, so a lot of the time combat resulted in dodge -> dodge -> dodge -> attack during their (brief) downtime. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, generally-speaking, but when every boss has a similar relentless flow to them, it can ultimately feel one-dimensional. The strategy becomes the same, unless you are in such a strong position that you can brute-force your way through problems. Which brings me to my next complaint: the fine-line of balancing the Blessings require.
Having a good amount of Blessings helped take the edge off immensely. You're encouraged to explore and find them, but find "too many" of them and you'll outpace the challenge. I don't mean to brag when I say this, but most of the bosses I took down in 1-3 attempts total. Did I find too many Blessings before each one? Were they not balanced against using Spirit Ashes and the various other tools at my disposal? Fighting them was by-and-large an enjoyable experience...but what I lacked, what I wanted most of all, was the feeling of satisfaction from overcoming them. And I did not get that for most of Shadow of the Erdtree.
Bereft of Grace
I'm going to pause the review for a bit and talk about the plot-revelations from the DLC - I do this not to spoil, per se, but to segue into my finer point about Shadow of the Erdtree.
Based on what I gathered regarding the rather-opaque story of Elden Ring and its expansion, "Miquella the Kind" is not who we were led to believe. In the base game, Miquella was implied to be more of a victim in the war following the Shattering, an innocent soul trapped forever in the form of a child. He sacrificed his body to create the Haligtree, in the hopes that it would eventually purge his sister Malenia of the terrible Scarlet Rot that afflicted her and her people. Before Miquella could truly finish, Mohg, Lord of Blood, snatched him away, looking to use his essence/soul to empower himself and form his great "Mohgwyn Dynasty".
Turns out, this was mostly a lie. Miquella's hidden power was the ability to charm others into being his followers; as we discover partway through Shadow of the Erdtree, when he shatters his Great Rune. The charm lifts from the Followers of Miquella, and they react in various ways as their free will is returned to them. We seemingly learn from this and other information that Mohg didn't steal Miquella away for his own ends: he was manipulated by Miquella to do that, so that Miquella could access Mohg's body. He sought to take Mohg's form and use it as a vessel for the soul of Radahn. Radahn had pledged when the two were younger to be Miquella's consort; while it can be assumed that Radahn might have moved on and grown up from this pinky-promise, Miquella never did, and conspired against everyone else to get his way.
Malenia's war against Radahn, where she drowned Caelid in Scarlet Rot and drove Radahn to madness after he was afflicted? That might very well have been Miquella's fault, pushing his sister to do that so that the otherwise unbeatable General would (eventually) be slain. He could then revive Radahn in the body of Mohg, and charm him into being his consort after all. As Miquella shed his flesh, his love, and his fears, proceeding through the Land of Shadow in an effort to become a god, he further lost his way, and in-so-doing became a master manipulator rather than "Miquella the Kind" as the other characters knew him for.
What does this have to do with my review? Well, in essence, I feel manipulated.
I feel manipulated by the marketing, creating the illusion that Messmer the Impaler was the final boss - or even a major figure at all, rather than what felt more like a roadblock to reach Miquella. I feel manipulated by the grand promise of 8 new weapon categories, when in reality most of those have only 1-3 weapons in them. While there are other Smithscript weapons you can throw, only the Smithscript Dagger is a "Throwing Blade" with the ranged basic attack as seen in the trailers. I feel manipulated by the map itself: for all its grandeur, the density of some areas is matched by the complete emptiness of others, wandering around a forest or a field only to find dangerous enemies guarding a simple Cookbook.
Most of all, I feel manipulated by FromSoftware encouraging us to find all the Blessings, deriving myself of the challenge and thus satisfaction in overcoming said encounters. This can be extrapolated further into the use of Spirit Ashes and the like, which exist to make things better for the player but can also sand off the edges of difficulty, to the point where a great debate is held in forums and elsewhere as-to the "right" way to play Elden Ring.
In my opinion, self-made challenges are fine if you want to do that, and using everything at your disposal is acceptable as well, but there exists a messy line between them wherein I find myself: looking for a challenge, but not to tie my hand behind my back just to make things sporting. Perhaps this is a side-effect of the open world nature of the game; it could be that a more tailored experience is what I seek. I did not feel this way about the base game, though, so something about the Blessings might be disrupting my enjoyment of Shadow of the Erdtree. Or perhaps my time with Elden Ring has simply run its course for now.
Conclusion
All-told, I enjoyed Shadow of the Erdtree for what it was. $40 for 50 hours of extra content is a great deal, and that's not even including the ability to go into New Game+ with all the gear and spells, further enhancing subsequent playthroughs. The bosses were cool and interesting, even if I defeated them with relative ease via being overprepared. The dungeons and catacombs were much better and more involved than the base game, as well. I have my complaints, and I wouldn't necessarily consider it "Da Best DLC Evar", but if you're a fan of Elden Ring, I can definitely recommend the purchase.
Have you played Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree? What do you think of it? Would you consider it one of the best DLCs ever? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments
Its the best dlc Ive played in terms of amount of content, and the extension of the usually obscure lore most souls games are burdened with. Fromsoftware are geniuses with dlc design, not a single one have disappointed. Its rather amazing that this dlc is easily equal to entire games like dark souls 3 etc.
But I do think there are certain elements of this dlc which I didnt particularly like;
- You can see how the storyline for Miquella would have worked if elden ring was a book and the protagonist possessing a semblance of character. The problem here is that the protagonist (which is us) doesnt actually have any character and fromsoft has deliberately made it so because the alternative is to have branching storylines like that of witcher etc. So as a result, whatever the conclusion of Miquella's storyline may be, we're simply curb stomping him and his boyfriend to the ground simply because thats the only way to progress the game. I really dont see any motivations to dethrone Miquella, especially given that the entire game we have been given the impression that Marika and the greater will are essentially corrupted.
- I really dislike this current trend of fromsoft boss designs where they always have some kind of fuck you skill that'll shave 80% of your health. And in my opinion all this stems from the fact that they are specifically designed around the spirit ashes. You can tell by how summoning npcs/real players in elden ring (some in the base game but nearly all in the dlc) is almost always a net negative. In the dlc this is particularly true. Its thematic to summon Thollier and Ansbach for the final boss, but the boss then becomes impossibly hard if you do so.
- The blessings are a mistake. I like exploration so that's not a problem to me, but souls games have always minimized the rpg aspects of their game. If you want it a little easier, then grind a bit more. In elden ring though, the rpg aspects is nearly unavoidable. You can legit be one shotted by normal creeps if you refuse to level up your blessings. In the original dark souls even a level 10 scrub can tank a hit from a black knight. In elden ring dlc, messmer's shit troops can one shot you legitimately.
At least Im done with the dlc so I can take a very welcome break from elden ring...for a moment anyway, before going back in with different builds. Great dlc, but I cant help but feel this trend of increasingly insane bosses have to take a break at some point otherwise I would seriously consider petitioning fromsoft to just insert fingerprint greatshield and antspur rapier into all their games from now onwards.
It's hard to compare it to any other DLC, because it's so massive in scope: it's almost a sequel. I haven't finished it yet (although I think I'm pretty close) and I've been playing almost daily since it came out.
By the way, I think Miyazaki said the map was larger than Limgrave, so technically that is true, even if it is misleading. You already mentioned that there are parts of the map where very little happens, which was almost never the case in the base game. It might have benefited from a slightly smaller map.
I like the verticality of the world, although maybe they went a bit too far, as it becomes quite complex to navigate at times and the top-down map isn't very useful once you have 3 layers at different heights at the same 2D location.
Overall I'm having a great time. I like how much of the story is happening now, rather than most of it having happened long ago.
What I'm not a fan of is how little breathing room there is in the fights. I like being able to look at the boss after summoning a spirit, instead of blindly rolling to the side because I know the boss will be hitting my original position half a second later. Not only is it more comfortable to play, it also makes the fight more cinematic if you have short moments of rest every now and then, when you can take in the battlefield as a whole instead of only focusing on health bars and hit boxes. I defeated Bayle by doing nothing but dodging and poking at the closest body part, paying attention only to the mechanics and never feeling like I was in an epic fight. Which is a pity, because the road there had a fantastic atmosphere.
In particular I don't understand why the NPC summoning signs were placed inside the battle arenas. They give you the opportunity to call for help, but then force you to find the sign, walk there and navigate a clumsy UI while being under constant attack. This wouldn't have been so bad if battles started slow like in the base game. Maybe technically the boss AI starts at the same time, but the DLC bosses move at a ridiculous pace and can cross the distance to the player in no time.
The Blessings system has its drawbacks, both in people hitting difficulty walls if they don't explore enough or cruising past bosses if they do explore thoroughly. However, I don't know if it is possible to design a system that equalizes DLC stats between players without ignoring their very different main game progressions; it seems like two contradicting requirements. I was probably over-blessed, as I defeated several bosses on the second try and I'm not that skilled in combat. Personally, I don't mind though, as my favorite part of the game is exploring the world and bosses can be obstacles to that. I'd rather have a boss that puts up too little of a fight than a boss I get stuck on.
The full Miyazaki quote from IGN's exclusive DLC-related interview was: "It's hard to answer without giving away too much and to a high degree of accuracy, but if you think in terms of scale or size, it's probably comparable, if not larger, than the area of Limgrave from the base game."
So I suppose we're both a tad off in our recollection, although Yes, it was rather misleading either-way.
As for NPC summon signs inside a boss arena, they're actually structured differently in terms of gameplay versus when the signs are located outside the arena. If you summon help outside the arena - either NPC or player - and then go inside to fight the boss, said threat will have much more HP than normal. You also receive slightly less Runes, as well. By having the NPC sign inside the arena, neither of these things happen: it's frustrating trying to summon Igon in the middle of dodging Bayle's attacks, but the result is that he does not contribute to a ballooning health total. This is very noticeable with a particular fight you haven't reached yet, but I won't say more.
Of course, they could've just not incorporated the health-expansion mechanic as a means to artificially inflate the experience, but I guess that's a different topic for another time.
I think for me the DLC is a 9/10 with that single missing point because of the last boss. But overall it has to be the best DLC ever made, it's the equivalent to Elden Ring 1.5. Not a full sequel but almost a whole separate game. The level deign, exploration, improvement on old formulas like catacombs, all awesome. Most bosses are amazing too, Lion Dancer is a highlight. Some are more meh like Gaius but overall more hits than misses. Even the last boss is superb spectacle, ignoring the rest. And when it comes to lore, overall it is incredible again. Shaman Village, Metyr, Messmer, the Hornsent, Bayle, all amazing. Yeah lack of some topics like Gloam Eyed Queen is sad but there was no way it could address everything. Messmer was never going to be the final or main boss, that's just how fromsoft likes things. The main game had Malenia and Godrick all over the ad campaign. "Obstacles on the way to the real boss" is the rule for their DLCs. Bloodborne DLC had Lady Maria but final boss is Orphan of Kos. Dark Souls 1 had Artorias but Manus is the final boss. Dark Souls 3 DLCs are weirder i admit, not much focus on anyone and short as hell. More like 1 DLC cut in two. But you get the idea. Sadly that's what makes the final boss disappointing for me. With the expectation something even more amazing comes after Messmer, the buildup of Godwyn and especially talks of "reviving a brother's soul"... fully expected Godwyn to be the promised consort. Radahn just feels bad, it comes out of nowhere with no foreshadowing in the main game, 0 connections between him and Miquella to even hint he's so important to the young Empyrean. It also makes Malenia and Radahn's duel confusing and a bit more lame in hindsight.
But the glimpse in Marika's origins and motivations, the jar lore, dragon civil war, Finger origins and more on the Greater Will, the Hornsent and Crucible stuff, finally details about the ancient ruins that are all over the world and seem to be the foundations upon which it is built... can't say the DLC lore is bad. The last boss is a sour taste but everything else is so sweet it balances it up for it, for me.
In terms of sheer content, Shadow of the Erdtree absolutely could be the best DLC ever made - $40 for what is practically a sequel is totally worth it. I guess the question then becomes "did I enjoy that content enough?" and while I certainly did on some level, I'm not sure if I enjoyed it the most of all DLCs I've ever played. Of course I realize that's super subjective lol.
I'm sure Elden Ring's expansion will grow on me more with time, even if I feel slightly bummed as-to how I experienced it in the here-and-now. My disappointment might be self-inflicted, but it'll still take time to overcome that first-impression regardless, you know what I mean? I can't imagine this'll be the last time I play the game haha :)
Not that anyone asked, but for my money "the Best DLC Ever" remains "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep", the final expansion for Borderlands 2. Taking the gunplay to a D&D-parody environment was super fun, and using the framework of Tina's fantasy story as a means to cope after Roland's death in the base game was inspired. The success of the DLC directly led to the fledged-out Tiny Tina's Wonderlands game, with some of the best Borderlands combat and character creation to date, as well as a full rulebook for their in-universe "Bunkers & Badasses" tabletop RPG system.
Shadow of the Erdtree is up there, though.
Have you played The Witcher 3 and its Blood and Wine DLC? If so, how would you rank it among your favorites? I've got to admit I haven't played Borderlands at all and gave up on Elden Ring after like 2 or 3 hours (my first fromsoft game, looks like that's not my cup of tea), but I did enjoy the Witcher a lot and that's why I like to use it as a point of reference to better understand your ratings.
I have played The Witcher 3, with the DLCs...on the Switch of all places lol. Great game: never played the series before my aunt bought the game on a whim, gave me Wild Hunt for my birthday a while ago.
It's been a few years now, so there is that, but it didn't stick with me as much as you might be hoping. I know for a good amount of people Blood & Wine is the best DLC ever, but beyond Dettlaff's boss theme (The Beast of Beauclair), I don't remember much about it. I'm sure I enjoyed it...just don't have any particular details lodged in my brain. I remember more about saving the soul of the immortal guy from the other DLC, racing through that maze, even if I can't remember his or the expansion's name lol.
With that in mind, if we assume Shadow of the Erdtree is #2, I can place Blood & Wine no higher than third, at the maximum :/