Shadow of the Erdtree Critique

So prepare to roll again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again when Matthew mosis released his lost soul Arts of demon souls video Elden ring didn't exist hell Seco wasn't even out with the added context of these two games it's a pretty apt prognostication on the series future the outlined trajectory of fromsoft boss fights becoming ever more Shonen anime has held true and we can see them Straining more and more and more against the limitations of their own combat systems meanwhile the other parts of the Soul's experience the

things outside of their combat that make them special continue to atrophy with no end in sight to what can be lost shadow of the earth tree is the rubber band finally snapping so to speak the combat systems have been pushed to their absolute limit and it's started to really reflect in the played experience I don't like shadow of the Earth tree it's probably the most unpleasant gaming experience I've ever had certainly the most unpleasant I can call to memory right now I'm certain I've played worse games but none quite so unenjoyable to me what I'm

going to do here is try to explain that perspective and all I ask is that you hear me out I think the identity of the souls series is confused at this point pulled in a multitude of directions that are Each mutually harmful to one another and that are defined by their Mass Appeal not their cohesion the result is a DLC with multiple Ambitions caged within an unsuitable formula that can't allow any of of them to be properly manifested I won't bore you with the full history of Souls and the shift in Focus through each installment

you can watch Matthew matosis lost soul Arts video for that instead I'm just going to focus on how that shift is depriving These games of any sort of value that is not exceeded in some other title and how things have really begun to fall apart with the mismatch between the Ambitions and the central framework Dark Souls and Demon Souls were quite minimalist games low to the ground in terms of presentation and narrative styling a lot of systems were built with this in mind the camera is bad but realistically it doesn't have a huge amount to

track its Badness is less Often problematic than it might be in a more hectic game its closer view is a bit more personal in a way that could serve to enhance immersive quality but that perspective and the way the camera interacts with the world and with its lock on functions is not exactly great for Action combat not to say they intentionally built a bad camera they just built one that suited their needs and thus had certain Weaknesses shadow of the earth tree is extremely distant from this idea of minimalism everything within it is constructed in

a maximalist way focused on more revolving primarily around Challenge and spectacle and Splendor rather than any sense of groundedness there's always one more swing in the combo one more ambient damage effect following the swing Arc one more explosion after the slam and one more hit in the over-the-top anime super move Uniformly unlocked at around half Health in the service of leveraging weak combat systems for a greater Challenge and a greater set piece there's always something more and there always has to be something more and it's created by using systems that were built around a very

different sort of experience this excess is straining the core systems of souls far past their breaking point they were never made to cope with or to allow the player to cope with so much stuff These are not the core systems of an action game they are the core systems of an immersive action RPG this is clearer nowhere than with the camera itself as I said prior the camera in Souls games has always sucked let's be clear on this lock on breaks when enemies move in incredibly basic ways the lock on will Center your camera if

pressed without the game finding a valid Target and it's very prone to getting stuck on walls or in the floor As it can't go through these surfaces it's also naturally quite low to the ground and somewhat close which makes it easy for it to get pulled into level or enemy geometry in a way that obstructs the player's sight everyone's had the experience of trying to fight a larger enemy in a corner and being able to see nothing but a faceful of their character's back and maybe some flailing textures locking off doesn't really help matters either

as it leaves the player To babysit the camera using the digit they press the roll button with meaning that you're sometimes defenseless or at least slower to defend yourself as you try to get the camera to give you any sort of visual that might inform gameplay decisions it's a sort of wrestling with one's equipment that players really ought not to be forced to go through as it's serving no real purpose here not to mention you don't know when the camera is going to start Causing problems and by the time a boss movement has pulled it

to a useless angle or flattened it into a wall it's already too late for unlocking to be of any real use unless that is you've already committed to memory everything that is about to happen based on the initial Telegraph all this to say the camera has always been bad but shadow of the earth tree pushes it to its absolute Breaking Point shadow of the urry bosses have a love of several things spinning Frantic movement being in the air and leaving lingering effects with after or around their attacks this creates a huge amount of visual clutter

alongside the already flashy design of Boss moves and it really [ __ ] with the camera and the camera's ability to tell you things take the Divine Beast dancing lion for example this thing has probably the worst camera I've experienced in the Souls boss because it's playing into so many things that make the camera awful It both has a high lock on point and can fly thus pulling the camera down to point it up at the enemy which lowers visibility due to the character obscuring more of the screen and the floor being less visible and

it's constantly surrounded by particle effect stuff the lock on point being so far up its body also places it on the part of the boss that moves the most which is bound to create numerous moments of wildly swinging the camera around this Is only made worse by Phase 2 particularly the lightning phase where the camera starts causing significant problems even Beyond its usual fair when in its light lightning mode the dancing line will spawn array lightning strikes in semi-deterministic patterns that go off after its attack lands as well as introducing some additional visual clutter alongside

the mess of wind and lightning and hair and cloth and Rain effects the camera is Pulled up so the location of these strikes are extremely hard to actually ascertain and that's at the best of times when you aren't in a corner when the camera isn't frantically snapping from one side of the dancing lon's head to the other as the Beast thrashes about attacking you when the camera isn't rammed tight against a wall or stuck halfway up the staircase that from for some reason put in the Boss Arena at its absolute best in the fight The

camera is making it extremely difficult to discern necessary information or to read what the boss is doing and it's usually performing much worse than that the reason this is so offensive is that fromsoft have been working with this exact camera all but unchanged for over 10 years now they know how it works they know its limitations and its weaknesses and its deficiencies and yet still somehow they design bosses like the dancing lion that Seem almost custombuilt to bring out every single last bad feature and exacerbate them to the end's degree if they want to keep

making fights as ostentatious as the dancing lion or radan or Bale the camera needs to improve else the player finds themselves rolling blindly through an incomprehensible mass of effects and colors and lights succeeding only if they already simply know what is happening and when and where I can't React to lightning I can't see I can't know that if I walk backwards I'll walk into a radial effect that the boss put there until it has happened to me because the information is literally not made available by the camera and I can't even know I'm supposed to

be babysitting my camera in some of the sections like this until I have been hit by such an effect take Bale's big lightning breath fire AOE Giga move in Phase 2 he flies high up into the air which again pulls The camera up harming visibility of the ground that he's currently breathing fire across that I need to jump my ability to perceive along the ground gets total and so I'm in trouble by the time I even realize that I need to unlock and that's all assuming I somehow have an exact intuitive understanding of what the

boss will do when it flies up into the air and understanding that in Shadow of the earth tree I absolutely do not Have let's talk in comprehensibility in order to respond to something I have to on some level understand what's happening when I see an enemy bring their sword back with the tip pointing at me my intuitive expectation is that they mean to stab me I'll the first time respond as such with a fuzzy guess as to when the stab will actually come informed by the boss's motions as they Telegraph and their General sense of

weight and speed Derived from their appearance and their other movements it's a tossup as to whether or not I'll get it right the first time of course because no one can determine everything that's coming from a Telegraph and we're generally slower to react when we haven't seen something before nor should one necessarily be able to react to everything on the first time seeing it without knowing what you're looking for you won't pick out the important parts of the animation That signal when the attack will come assuming there are any in particular but broadly I'd want

to believe it's uncontroversial that a telegraph ought to provide some visual information regarding what's about to happen without full knowledge of what that something entails this isn't the case in Elder ring and especially not in Shadow of the earth tree during my time with this game I found myself completely giving up on the notion that what I see an enemy Doing will in any way inform me of how to respond hell half the time during an attack string or particular move there is so much visual clutter that I needed to see the move at least

three times before I even knew what was going on my half-baked Solutions there to being a matter of purist [ __ ] around and finding out some attacks I still don't fully understand in either case something became apparent my interactions with Bosses and indeed many regular enemies too were a matter of rote memorization of their move set across run after to run of throwing myself at them with no real intent to win just to see more of the fight and to train my responses against any challenge any complex foe a degree of this is always

going to be necessary learning how to properly respond to things you're faced with is sort of fundamental but I've never experienced such obtuseness in Terms of figuring out how to respond at face value in Shadow of the earth tree nobody behaves in ways that even approach conventional this is the start of the issue from software in their design to challenge players who already know how to roll through attacks and have been doing so for several games have resulted to messing with the ways enemies Telegraph their attacks through delays deception and differing kinds of Animation once

the attack finally comes some swing extremely slowly others very fast others in a sort of spring-loaded manner sometimes all within the exact same enemy using the exact same weapons from is trying to make it harder to evade when your means of doing so is a role that provides a hefty amount of invulnerability at the cost of a bit of animation commitment in doing so the entire point of telegraphing has been undercut in That it is no longer possible to get any sort of reasonable assessment of what might be about to happen without having seen it

already attacks can come out with such a varied sense of weight and motion with such variance in when or if there will be a random pause in the animation designed to roll catch that there's no real link between the way a fo telegraphs and how to respond to that Telegraph anymore take this attack string from the dancing lion the start Is relatively intuitive it started flying it's probably going to fly at me there's a bit of deceptive Motion in here to disguise when the first lunge will actually come but the follow-through is slow enough that

there's usually going to be enough time to pass the actual motion and respond appropriately but then for the second attack visually speaking it's just sort of hovering in your face if it's ended up close there's little to no indication As to what it's going to do next just a tangle of fur and cloth and horns in your screen and even if you do manage to Guess that one you'd best be ready for the ground shock wave it emits by pulling its face out of the floor straight after at a much quicker timing and then make

sure you're ready to dodge the spinning Vape cannon that closes out the string for a lot of what's going on here you can't know that it's something to be ready for until it's happened this Is forgivable to an extent of course especially in the latter parts of strings of attacks but it makes no sense whatsoever from any perspective for the dancing line to ca an AOE by lifting its head from the ground and it makes even less sense when it's spins on the spot head supposedly buried in the ground to track you for the shock

wave these potentialities are not signposted in any way at all really and neither is the breath attack you can't Really estimate or Intuit it that they'll happen you just need to have seen it already as I played through this DLC again and again I found myself saying the same thing you just have to know when the boss does a ground slam will the inevitable ground explosion shock wave that follows be immediate or delayed will they hover in the air for a moment key framing their jump or will they come down straight away how fast Will

they descend when they do and how long will they hang in the air will there be any visual indication of this transition point in the animation how am I to know that when the horned Warriors begin to Telegraph their shoulder tackle that they will in fact be able to slide along the floor in order to reach Striking Distance how do I to it how far they can slide the answer is I just have to know I'm not expecting a full and detailed prognosis of what's coming Anytime an enemy so much as twitches I am however

lamenting that I can't really determine anything about when or how I should respond until I'm already pretty familiar with exactly what I'm seeing and the effect of this is far beyond just throwing me off for a particular attack at this point boss animation design has pushed so far in the direction of peculiar timing in the name of throwing off the player's Rhythm that it no longer adheres even Loosely To any consistent sense of motional physics even within the same enemy rana's swords seem to change weight depending on the swing and swings are sometimes held so

long that any sense of wind up has long since departed especially when the follow-through is sometimes just as slow movements and Elder ring no longer seem to be grounded in any physical reality not our reality per se but one that uses the principles of Animation to breathe life and weight And power into a variety of different movements principles like telegraphing don't just serve to give the player a visual indication of what's going to happen but also to lend Force to whatever that attack might be this weight is deeply undercut when the swings are so jarringly

slow or hold on the anticipation for an extra few beats or conversely when after such moves the enemy moves as if it's twice as light but with no real difference in the Damage it deals it's unintuitive in a word forcing the player to wrestle against Perfectly Natural responses in a way that stops you from trusting them which just leads to further damage when the boss swings at a fast Cadence I can stop Panic rolling when I see the enemy brandish their weapon and begin to Telegraph but then I'll be caught by a attacks with a

more normal or faster sense of motion or spring-loaded attacks that snap through their active frames in The blink of an eye with little visual information if any as to when the attack will go active the player is put in a position of having to fight against their reflexes in order to learn such that it's extremely difficult to enter any sort of Flow State until a very high degree of familiarity is attained through memorization and all of this is when the telegraph isn't explicitly designed to deceive you the cases where they're just Jarring and unusual rather

than straight up deliberately visually deceptive in order to roll catch charitably assuming of course that the majority of delays aren't designed for this purpose anyway which in fact they probably are but you never know regardless sometimes bosses will start up a motion and then add something to either the telegraph or the follow through an extra little motion an extra pause or pivoting into an entirely different sort of attack as a means of Throwing you off take mesma this spear thrust attack entails him bringing his spear back back and then dragging it across the ground before

snapping forward into active frames at the precise roll catch timing that little part of the animation exists solely for the purpose of jarringly delaying the attack such that it can strike after the player tries to roll despite this motion being one that should deprive the spear thrust of its force and this isn't just Mesma this sort of design is everywhere in every boss in almost every regular enemy and it's had a KnockOn effect of exacerbating the aggressive input buffering issue Souls games have always always been plagued by like the camera this is a problem that

gets more and more severe the further the souls games move in an action combat Direction not that it wasn't a problem before but when every enemy is stuffed to the gills with behavior intended to roll catch it Causes you to take unavoidable additional damage far more often than is reasonable to tolerate my mistimed role on the first swing storing long enough to come out as soon as I leave hit stun causes me to get unavoidably hit a second time adding the punishment of a second failed roll to the punishment for failing the first one for

no other reason than the game's insistence on holding inputs this can't really be called a Panic roll in any justifiable sense the roll catch move isn't testing or punishing anything in this instance it's just causing extra damage you might think from would notice this issue after seven games or so but here we are and it's still happening and with every game getting faster more hectic and more absorbed with roll catching the frequency of this sort of frustrating occurrence keeps on increasing overzealous input buffering is hard to See the value of in the first place but

when it creates so much ambiguity as to what my character is going to do once they finish an animation or leave hits done it just makes it harder to play with Precision even with precise inputs it's rather inexcusable that issues like this have gone unfixed for so long while the souls games have remained fairly stagnant in terms of formula they're not evolving and they're not refining either instead that energy has gone to Concocting the sort of enemy Behavior I was outlining prior and disseminating it through every opposing entity with a health bar that can be

depleted to try and prove that I'm going to go through a bunch of the major bosses roughly in order I've already been over a lot of what's wrong with the dancing lion but let's reiterate it's extremely difficult to tell what it's actually doing in its flying combo especially for the second hit then the following two attacks both Require simple knowledge that they exist as they are more or less untra it also has a charge that snaps from a short Telegraph pose into extremely fast motion with little to no transition Point numerous nonsens Ally delayed roll

catches and in all of its Phase 2 modes applies particle effects to itself that make the already bad camera issues intolerable especially when two of these modes contain ambient damage effects Around some of its attacks that demand precise identification of their location and positioning to avoid this is all assuming of course that you are allowed to position around them as larger Souls bosses have a habit of pushing the player around with their movements making positioning even harder to assess and even harder to maintain and the third mode the wind mode has a move where the

lineon flies around generating emissive wind Particles all over itself to then fire a circular emissive wind projectile that is visually almost identical to the wind or surrounding it telling the two apart is no easy task this seems so intuitively bad as a choice for an attack that I wonder how it even made it in in order to dodge the move I need to be able to judge its trajectory and distance which is made far harder than it needs to be by the lack of clarity in the Visuals everything about this boss seems almost tailor made

to bring out the worst behaviors in the camera and to give the player the least comprehensible learning experience possible in terms of figuring out what's happening and how they ought to respond Rana is one of the better bosses in the DLC save for the rotten core premise of shadow of the urry bosses and some annoying Behavior the way she moves her swords has a completely incoherent Sense of motion and weight to it one time when she does a double spinning overhead slice it comes out pretty fast another time in an extremely similar maneuver the swords

are held for an egregiously long time despite the swing coming just as fast and just as hard another move she has is an alternative motion from her both swords overhead posture in which she holds for a beat long enough to potentially deceive a player into trying to roll into the Incoming dashing cross and then delivers a quick slash followed by a comically long spinning twirling motion before a heavily delayed thrust why would a person ever behave this way in combat I understand this isn't the goal standard to hold all combat animations to but when matters

get this egregious it just ends up confusing is she drunk she stumbles around in a full slow circle with sword overhead what am I supposed to think she's trying to Do this is a lot of what's wrong with her movement she moves with extremely fast and snappy motions a lot of the time but frequently also throws in bizarre jarring delayed motions that distort her aesthetic profile and read visually in ways that raise questions of why on Earth she would do this if she's trying to fight and kill you the reason is that it makes her

harder to read and more likely to catch the player unawares as the player is put in a position where They can't trust their reflexive responses to motion a possible response I can foresee to criticism of Boss Motions like this is that they're fainting deliberately moving in longer deceptive ways to bait out a response from the player before striking to some this makes it feel more like a real fight in that the opponent is a being that will consciously act in ways that will give it an edge the problem with this Viewpoint though is That the

behavior these bosses Express are not really faint if you hold your weapon overhead for 3 seconds in a real fight you're going to get pummeled the majority of the time furthermore fainting is generally about disguising one's intentions not telegraphing them loudly and then following through at an off-kilter Pace this is rarely going to be useful in an actual fight certainly not at such delays as Elden ring enemies Use fainting motions in reality are fast because you have to be quick in order to generate a response and then to capitalize in a different manner than the

one you telegraphed the bosses frequently leave themselves open to hits while fainting in this manner and then release at a particular timing that never changes with the player's response which sort of defeats the point entirely Fury implements a boss with the capability of fainting by giving him two Versions of many of his attacks a regular version and a fainted version where he pauses the motion for a second to throw you off before following through a moment later not only does this read much more intu ly as a faint its presence as altered versions of the

same moves keeps the player in a position of having to closely watch the attacks that can be fainted long after they've already learned the Timings whereas in Elden ring once I know it I know it Fury also has a much clearer audiovisual environment for the player to pass information lacking sprawling monstrosity bosses and the sort of visual clutter that can make subtle Motions like this much harder to pick up in simple terms the motion is much more overtly deceptive but the player is much more equipped to understand and deal with it and the boss's own

movements Aren't strangely built around the timing of the player's defensive ability which brings me to a meta concern how does the boss know that I'm going to defend myself by Rolling in the first place how do they know this and behave this way even if I never once rolled to evade their damage say I walk in with a great Shield tank build for instance for most of these bosses they've never even seen you before let alone have this intimate understanding Of how you fight contrary to supporting immersion this is harmful to it as it further

exposes the reality that bosses are not in fact entities of their own but are sequences of code designed to challenge you and designed in later games to respond to player Behavior not character Behavior Rana doesn't learn me in any way certainly not one that resembles how I learn her and once I do learn her her faints accomplish nothing outside of getting her hit and she's Never going to stop doing them and she's never going to stop getting hit for them looking back through through the series you can see Behavior like this getting more and more

rampant shadow of the earth Tre is not special in this capacity just a continuation of a trend getting more and more severe anyways once you have her borked sense of movement committed to memory through rot ice pick attempts she's not too bad of a boss you can get into a Decent flow and she's got some good complexity but there's a huge barrier to that flow in the form of all the homework you have to do and for some the sheer time you have to wait for your turn in phase two especially she can go on

for a es and then end her combo with a phase two extension that ends in her jumping away and firing a projectile at you denying you a punish window it's not impossible to get your hits in far from it of course but sometimes you're just Left to dodge and Dodge and Dodge and Dodge and then for all of your work you get nothing I think I have a fairly high tolerance for biding my time between opportunities to strike but I can understand how this can be very frustrating the intense time between opportunities to attack even

once coupled with the lack of value on each individual strike due to the boss's inflated Health pools was a bit grating Even for me oh by the way Rana also has an input read heal punish this is nothing new Elder ring was rampant with enemies coded to initiate a particular attack when they see you healing in neutral stuff like the God skins lobbing a fireball at you the Split Second you hit the Estus button it's there to stop you from healing safely as these attacks are designed to pretty much always land if they're used for

Rana it's her Magic wave except except it isn't her Magic Wave is usually slower she has a faster version of the move that she can use out of neutral specifically for the purposes of heal punishing the thing is though she only uses it once in a blue moon it's an incredibly rare attack but I don't know that moves of this kind need to exist at all getting off a heel without getting clipped is already pretty difficult in its own right especially in a game with bosses as Relentless as Elden Rings they don't really need a

button that says you cannot heal at range because there is a substantial chance that I will do a hardcoded attack that is guaranteed to hit you out of it the last thing worth mentioning was Rana is the way she slides along the floor when she uses her x/ Dash move thingy nothing about the way the move is telegraphed indicates her ability to roll Escape forward along the ground in order to reach Striking Distance moves can have forward momentum without needing this sort of behavior there's no anticipation in the lower part of rana's posture that indicates

her intent to Dash she's standing straight up with her feet mostly together and her legs extended for the majority of the telegraph it's fine for her to have forward momentum in fact that's probably expected but the way she slides forward and the distance she achieves come more or less out of Nowhere relative to her posture this sort of sliding is present in a lot of shadow of the urgery in both obvious and less obvious cases combine it with the upward tilt of the camera against most bosses once again causing problems for judging distance and positioning

as a facet of soul combat is hanging by a thread in terms of mattering at all onto our next boss the golden hippo the hippo was a Mistake sometimes it moves with jarring speed that does a total Injustice to its incredibly bulky frame and other times it's holding the second bite in its bite combo for 3 and A2 seconds or holding its headbutt for a beat in order to roll catch apparently even animals have heard that the tarnished loves rolling and have planned accordingly or on a different note take the head slam attack the hippo

winds up for a good while for the first one and Lurches forward into the motion but then executes a second slam because there must always be a further followup at a much faster Pace with the same damage and the same implication of weight on impact combin that with a lunge attack similar in nature to the dancing lion where there is a very brief Telegraph that doesn't translate to the degree of acceleration this enormous Beast is about to achieve and we have a boss that's extremely frustrating to read Nothing about its motions sells a consist sense

of physicality as its movements are built around the player's role not the creature's own physical presence and that's of course when the camera isn't causing its own problems which it frequently is as always the lock on point is high up the hippo's body towards its head a part of its body that it likes to raise into the air a lot pulling the camera to the floor it's also very big moves its head a lot and The arena has walls that can be reached without too much effort so to say the camera is once again a

problem here in ways that fromsoft should be well aware of by this point and yet they insist on continually designing areas and fights that are prone to causing camera issues without offering compensatory changes to it they pull the camera back ever so slightly but that's nowhere even close to enough they're also very restrained with when they employ this and how far They're willing to pull back a higher camera angle like you see in Monster Hunter could go a long way making it so that the ground stays more cleanly in view even when the opponent is

doing things at higher elevations this would be immensely helpful for ground AOE effects like the dancing Lion's lightning and for reducing the amount that the camera gets pushed around by enemy geometry and just like the dancing lion The hippo also has a phase two that sends all Notions of visual readability packing in short order the hippo becomes a porcupine covered in garish golden spines that take up a lot of its body and thus the screen while fighting it they also glow have their own physics and shoot out spikes and are used for yet more spin

attacks from a giant lumbering hippo it twists its body against the ground in a way that I still really can't tell Where the hits are and where the spines shoot out this is a recurrent issue with many of these big flashy moves there's so much extraneous motion and spinning and Flash and Splendor that it obis skates when those motions are actually relevant to the fight while the hippo is thrashing on the floor I don't know when it's actually doing damage by doing so and when the motion is benign even as I make contact with it

yet further damaging my Impression that I'm fighting a real entity to round off the Beast himself the hippo also has a big rly poly that does exactly what you'd expect to the camera all of these delays and Camera eating motions and inconsistent senses of weight make for an extremely unpleasant gameplay experience in which your hardpressed to determine what is actually happening to you and half the things you do find are deliberately and Jarringly delayed in order to catch you or lack a sense of timing or aftermath in the action that would do justice to the

weight being thrown around or the force behind a motion because these things just aren't important to fromsoft what's important is how many times they can catch you after the hippo the next boss you're likely to fight is the big man himself the poster boy mesma and frankly he's actually quite good I enjoyed fighting Him quite a lot however he's good in spite of the rot inherent to being a boss in this DLC not because of it he still represents many of the negative design Trends he has plenty of delays he has several moves with a

lot of visual clutter over the the top anime stuff you know how it is first off there's the spear thrust I mentioned earlier it is incredibly deceptively delayed adding a motion to the attack that makes no sense Whatsoever and harms the eventual follow through while also jarring with the players's understanding of when they're going to get poked it's extremely unintuitive and it takes a lot of Brute Force memorization to finally force your brain to abandon its intuitive understanding of motion the same goes for the little spin he can do that leads into the move he

holds the pose for a beat in order to roll catch even though doing so loses The momentum from the spinning motion and thus it takes active effort of running up against the attack again and again and again in order to force yourself to adjust and to fix your memorization and to force you to engage with the move in this manner we come to the issue of tracking Elden ring has an enormous tracking issue and it's heavily tied to the delays I think see the problem with a lot of these incredibly delayed moves is that if

a player just Moves they would without Inc rly severe tracking stand absolutely no chance of ever hitting anything this big delayed stab it would never hit me if I could just strafe left around him melania's jumping stab would never connect if I could strafe so she needs to be able to spin on a dime to any angle in order to ensure that the player has to interact with the attack rana's strings operate similarly she needs to be able to flip her facing 180° for some of her Finishers or she'd launch off to nania while attacking

absolutely nothing a partial alternative would be the boss having to actually turn around before beginning attacks targeting you which would essentially increase punish Windows which from doesn't seem to want beyond just looking very silly the KnockOn effect this has is that positioning is nearer relevant as a consideration in Souls it matters in so far as you roll Certain attacks in a particular direction but where you stand doesn't really mean anything for your ability to work around the fo's move set certainly not in any consistency sense so what we have here is a negative design Orab

borus death spiral delays come at least partially from the lack of levers in the combat system to adjust difficulty and to make sure these attacks stand any chance of hitting anything at all they need to track to a Degree here to for unheard of a second problem is introduced to deal with the design ramifications of the first problematic practice it's like trying a program of preemptive chemotherapy it seems that fromsoft really really doesn't want you spacing around attacks or finding ways to avoid them that don't entail strictly a use of a defensive measure a roll

a block or a Parry it's possible sometimes even with moves like mesma stab but boy does it Look ridiculous when you manage to pull it off and it certainly isn't consistent for the vast majority of moves on a different sort of note I want to have another brief chat about the wo of judging distance mesma has a big anime combo move in which he spins into the air then does a lunge followed by a rush of spear stabs then a slam down which is delayed and because this is Elden ring is Then followed by an

eruption of Spears from the ground about One roll beat afterward this is all a bit much for my personal aesthetic sensibilities but that's beside the point I want to focus on the second attack the spear Rush all of the stuff going on the big particles on each stab the fact that he's up in the air the speed with which they come out makes it really hard to tell what your correct response should be I landed on sprinting away to outspace that part of the move before rolling the slam and Spear burst to then get my

punish the problem I ran into was the last spear thrust usually catching me naturally I attributed this to distance he was ending up too close so I wasn't able to make enough space it took me taking an attempt at a greater distance to find that no he just snaps forward an enormous amount of distance on that last stab meaning that outs spacing it essentially isn't possible you have to roll it and you have to just know that You have to roll it the problem here is of many kinds first the boss teleporting across the screen

on the last swing of a move while Airborne secondly the fact that due to the amount of stuff going on on my screen I can't even see him when he does that all I can see is a bunch of stab visual effects it's a gratuitous combo that disguises very relevant information regarding what's happening with flashy over-the-top Visuals I couldn't even really tell what he was doing in the first move of the string behind all the flashy flaming Twirls I wasn't sure what in the those motions was an actual hit and as such when I should

respond and the only way to learn was rote memorization naturally there's the alternative solution of rolling under him but this is far from intuitive either I can hardly see where and when His hits are let alone know how hard they're going to track and if Elden ring is any indication I assumed they would track quite a lot I'd like to reiterate mesma is the best fight in the DLC and it's not even close he has almost no competition a lot of his other weapon swings are well telegraphed some of his fire launching swings can create

some visual clutter if you choose to roll backwards but that's clearly discouraged and Beyond this We're mostly fine he has a lot of attacks with intuitive motion some intricate long modular strings to introduce some complexity plenty of punish Windows of varying length and phase two provides him with some combo extensions that throw a small wrench in Phase One strategies the snake attacks in Phase 2 come out extremely fast for creatures their size they graphing really just showing that they exist for the most part rather than indicating What they're going to do but their timing is

not such that they take a long while to force oneself to learn the ultimate snake combo thing is a bit gratuitous and hard to read even though it's on the karma side of big ultimate boss super moves the only remaining complaint I have is that on one of the snake combos in Phase 2 the third snake strike interacts very strangely with the arena as it zooms around making it difficult to ascertain What it's even doing let alone when it's going to strike add this to the positioning disorientation from its spinning and you then end up

able to roll back into its attack path getting Roll caught in its lingering hit box as it raises upward it's very hard to determine what's going wrong when this happens or what ought to be done to stop it from happening the visual information is just not clear enough to make that determination Certainly not after a small number of times seeing the move either way maybe it's a testament to something going on at fromsoft that Mesmer is as fun to fight as he is despite all of the the design rot bringing him down so much of

the design philosophy of this DLC is working against combat being in any way Pleasant so it's quite nice that at least one fight came out good despite it I'm not going to go through every Boss or every remembrance some of them I want to save but more importantly I think the point has been made this sort of stuff is everywhere every boss and a large number of the basic enemies too it's a rampant pervasive design ethos that poisons even the best encounters the DLC can muster and makes its worst reaches even more unpleasant to face

more than that though I want to point out that it was once upon a time something worth remarking upon if a boss Had infinite stamina or nonsensical tracking or disco slide move assist these things weren't appreciated or at the very least were noteworthy in any capacity whatsoever this isn't the case anymore in Shadow of the earth tree every boss has at least some of these behaviors and usually expresses all of them the infamous infinite stamina combo monster pontiff Sullivan would fit in as a basic enemy type in Shadow of the earthree he gets heavily upstaged

by the Likes of no more than the horned Warriors I think it's worth remarking on the long attack string High uptime infinite combo side of the matter a bit more this isn't implicitly bad in fact it can be a pretty good thing I like high up time in boss fights I don't like it when bosses like Rana repeatedly disengage to cast a move that makes it a bad idea for me to engage and then stand around doing nothing I prefer fights like morgot or mesma where I can be in The Fray near constantly however despite

my preference for that pace of play there is something lost in the utter unrelenting of enemy and boss Behavior stamina as a concept in Souls games is vaguely representative of Well Physical stamina I guess one's energy to do things a resource that is in fact depleted by action I can't speak for anyone else but the length of strings and the nature of boss's recovery times sort of grounded enemy And bosses in this notion as well in the prior games that physical beings in this world can only go on so long without a break this idea

is heavily strained by how incredibly active the bosses are without any sort of pause leaving minuscule breaks between their strings or between attacks in strings for the player to get their hits in they don't feel as well realized from this perspective because alongside the lopsided Notions of weight and Physicality in many of their attack strings they've lost most of their implication of physical presence very few bosses vocalize or make sounds of any kind let alone sounds that can be heard over the D of hit effects and particles and lightning to say nothing of the soundtrack

it serves to weaken the illusion that I'm combating anything more than a wall of code within the framework of this Series as I said at the start Souls games used to be quite grounded in their styling animation commitment the overe exaggerated manners in which your characters swing their weapons and the heaviness of your role in the stamina system itself they all existed to bring the high fantasy down to the ground to make it heavier weightier more rugged and less empowering you're not that special and the world around you is heavily decayed and very dangerous hence

Why the games are so punishing this punishing nature is used to get across that danger as an example of sensibilities like this being lost look no further than Bale Bale The Dread the huge lumbering brutish looking Dragon maimed and heavily wounded from its battle with plad usacs it's a cool visual design he's missing his leg and his wings are tattered to the point that he can use one of them as a bone stake that's the Move I want to talk about primarily though he rears up brandishing his stake Wing as it crackles with lightning clearly

telegraphing and using from still strong presentational styling to convey all sorts of power behind this attack as he drives the wingbone into the ground this weight is then done an incredible Injustice as he just slides his wing free after ramming it several meters into the Rock of his Arena this is done in service of increasing his Uptime as he can follow this move with a bizarrely fast Wing swipe combo with his other Wing limiting the player's punish window it's fast enough that it looks like a fairly explicit animation cancel and it's not the only one

the dancing lion can cancel its head slam recovery into its grab midra can cancel his phase transition nukes recovery into a couple of things radan can cancel a whole bunch of his recovery animations into Quick short moves and gas can cancel multiple Moves into his charge the list goes on I don't mind my punish window being limited I got my R1 on Bale's face I'm happy I mind the loss of weight behind the attack as its force is not done Justice by the speed with which he recovers from it big attacks with lots of power

behind them don't tend to be easily recovered from when you throw the entire weight of your body behind some motion you don't pick yourself up that quickly in animation this aftermath Helps to communicate the power behind a strike power that is compromised when the recovery is sped up borderline canceled out of bosses have a tendency to snap to poses while appearing to recover further breaking down any notion that they are physical beings that exist in the same world that I do with my rules of Animation commitment granted those rules are breaking down on my side

too every new fancy weapon art that inexplicably allows me to fly and wave Dash around like a [ __ ] Falco breaks this impression down player side too not that such overly showy moves are of any use whatsoever in boss fights or even regular enemy combat most of the time they're typically pretty useless and that's where all of these sorts of systems are leading to a total breakdown of the immersive quality of the game My mode of Engagement has changed gears so to speak such that I'm remed only in the challenge presented to Me and

no other aspect of it beyond that challenge the enemy has ceased to be a real presence in a world I'm engaging with and has become an isolated step in a sequence of isolated steps with no relation to one another or to the cohesive hole that the game is trying to manifest all that's left for me in terms of Engagement is the combat as every other aspect has peeled away in the face of that combat it's hard for me to be invested in gas as a real entity when I'm incentivized to dodge roll directly through his

bore in order to dodge the charge and that combat it Bears reiterating is pretty unremarkable it's incredibly simple with very little wiggle room for skill expression unlike many other heavily combat focused games it might be compared to boss fights especially are a mere calculus of rolls jumps and the correct attack button during the punish the choice of which makes almost no difference outside of Damage and stagger which is itself a means to more damage nothing about my offense really synergizes with itself in ways I can take advantage of no matter what tools I have at

my disposal I can't combine them to create something transformative of the capabilities of either nor is there much of a positional aspect due to the incredible move assist and tracking it crops up here and there in vestigal form but it's clearly not a staple anymore compare across to Monster Hunter where I choose to stand when I fight a monster has a lot of bearing on my relative safety especially because I can't as reliably roll through just about any attack that comes my way you often avoid attacks by simply not being where they hit or using

your role to physically get out of the way of attacks rather than using its invulnerability frames you can use eye frames and frequently do with things like Superman Dives and certain weapon abilities but They're by no means your primary and only means of defense like I said much more of your defense is positional you'll notice I'm spending a lot of my time sprinting in proximity to the monster to evade its attacks and find my way in which by the way so happens to also put a lot of pressure on my stamina in this fight your

offense is more complicated too weapons have much larger move sets than Souls Weapons do and the difference between monster hunter weapon Types as compared to Souls weapon types is much larger in Monster Hunter weapons have capabilities that no other weapons do they're capable of mechanics that no other weapon has access to or otherwise play in ways that dramatically alter how you can fight a monster in glaive is the only weapon that has ready access to the air for evasion and safe attacking long sword has best access to counters alongside very high up time as its

entire move set Can essentially form a closed loop ask a chargeblade player and a switch ax player their experience with a tempered Diablos and you'll get very different answers even simply optimizing a punish window on a particular weapon requires a level of understanding of the weapon in order to optimize your strings to each given opening the design pillar of Animation commitment works with the large move set and the need to attack more than a Single time typically to create an environment in which there's a lot to learn regarding how to appropriately work through your move

set in any given window go even further a field out to stylish action with things like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta and it's even more Stark watch two good Dante players play and they will do things you never knew were possible differently by manipulating different bits of the moov set in a variety of ways their gameplay Will be completely different within the exact same set of tools meanwhile after I beat Redan I went to look up some gameplay of him I watched Friends fight him I watched challenge Runners fight him I watched streamers fight him

and what I saw each and every time was essentially just my gameplay my gameplay but more refined and well executed and that's sort of the fundamental issue I have there's not much skill expression in Souls games due To their lack of depth the skill expression is relegated almost entirely to the discovery of and interaction with punish windows in other words finding the times you can hit and how hard you can hit I know it probably sounds like all combat systems can be boiled down this way and that is to an extent true the difference though

is in how much boiling you have to do with Elden ring it's really not very much with monster hunter it's quite a lot more with Devil May Cry you're going to be there for quite a while what I mean by this is that when I'm looking to play a game for its combat I'm running low on reasons to choose Elden ring over a game with better combat there is satisfaction in learning complex boss move sets but as they become less and less and less readable I find myself having to fight my own reflexes more and

more in order to Attain Mastery over the fight and that Mastery is in fact over one fight past a certain point meaning Baseline familiarity and fluency with the mechanics learning is no longer generalized in Souls because the name of the game is in the memorization of specific boss patterns what is gained from learning one boss doesn't really apply out outside of that boss maybe some things do perhaps particular game trends like learning about every jumping Ground Slam in Elden ring having a delayed explosion but nothing really Beyond basic terms that don't actually improve your gameplay

just your savviness to Trends I can't even learn that I should expect delays because attacks are not consistently delayed across all fights and many foes even those with plentiful delays will have plenty of quicker attacks too I can't really know if an attack will be delayed before it's released and I can't know How delayed it will be just from watching it's something that has to just be figured out against the impulse to respond to incoming danger by simply seeing what happens over and over and over because of this visual mistrust and because of the incredibly

strong role of memorization and because of the incredibly low execution barrier for aspects of the game that do not directly pertain to pressing circle at the correct timing my proficiency at a boss Doesn't translate to proficiency at another boss beating the dancing line made me in no way better at the game to prepare me for Rana and beating Rana made me know better at the game to prepare me for mesma and so on and so on and so on even now after the hardest thing fromsoft have ever put out in the form of radan I

think if I was sent to start the DLC again no memory of the lion it would take me a pretty similar amount of attempts as it did the first Time because really I haven't picked up anything in terms of transferable skills between fights I just have the fights that the game offers committed to memory and my intricate understanding of ran means nothing to mess strings because they're memorized completely differently in another better action game I might get a greater understanding of fundamental game Concepts I might better learn how to position or how best to navigate

my weapons move set to string Together an offense I might learn transferable strategies to safely deal damage and optimize attack strings to increase the damage I get during windows for a game like Devil May Cry much of this can reach incredible Heights of difficulty the things the people at the top levels of the game cook up are immense expressions of skill that pertain almost solely to the capabilities of the player character when you then put skill expressive space Like this up against a roster of varied enemies and bosses you then find out that a huge

amount is possible you can burn hours upon hours in the game and not even come close to reaching what might be the skill ceiling and frankly I'd rather spend my time exploring that space rather than on trying to execute on rolling through boss patterns a bit better I can understand the appeal of the linear challenge but the design of that Challenge and its unreadability has ceased to be something that I'm really interested in I'd like to explore more skills than just memorization of and rolling through attack patterns the memorization part of this process has ceased

to be something that I'm interested in when I feel like I'm unable to put any real trust in the visual information I'm receiving to tell me anything about the enemy's intentions I just won't know until I've Seen it already and sometimes I'll need to spend many subsequent attempts with that attack fighting my natural response to telegraphs that I've become aware of are designed specifically to deceive me it's uninteresting as a perspective challenge to me as the skill resides almost solely within my memorization of attack timings and it's also deeply harmful to any sense of immersion

I might have on multiple levels enemies seem to have come into being in this World with a pre-existing knowledge of the capabilities and behavioral habits of the tarnished such that they are aware when the tarnished walks through their door that they need to be deceptive in their motions in order to bait the tarnished into rolling before the strike a role that in many cases it makes little sense actually protects you from danger at all again I'm incentivized to roll directly through gas's oncoming Bore I think at this point it's time to address the elephant in

the room that horrid Boogeyman word that becomes the focal point of every single from software release difficulty I can imagine a non-trivial number of you watching are already responding to what I've said prior with some iteration upon get good or more charitably put interpretations of similar sentiments the idea being that if I were to improve at the game these issues I have would be Less pronounced or not present at all in that they are literal skill issues and it is true to an extent that my problems are being exacerbated by the difficulty of the DLC

dying as rapidly as one does in the DLC to expansive boss move sets the telegraphs for which I no longer really trust is in fact a source of my frustration the level of damage being put out means I have to do so much more treading back through things I already know or just walking back from bonfires In order to see the things I've not seen enough times in order to commit them to Memory or to forcibly shift my intuitive responses to much of my experience of radan was completing Phase One near flawlessly then getting killed

almost immediately in Phase 2 due to an inability to tell what was happening through all the visual clutter and then I'd have to do phase one again a phase I'd already attained more than sufficient Mastery over to pass through I'm not no hitting it every time but I am no hitting it sometimes which is pretty incredible considering I'm not yet capable of beating the boss into total and I'm doing it all just to get another look at what's happening in Phase 2 for another attempt at visually passing it not even really another attempt at success

the point here is not that phase one should be skippable it's to show how difficulty is exacerbating tedium difficulty isn't to blame it's Only enhancing frustration and tedium that is caused by other factors that went into the creation of that difficulty so the tuning of the DLC is certainly playing a role I personally wouldn't have given every enemy boss as incredible damage as they have but this is a problem much less systemic and much easier to fix and it's something I could tolerate and might even really like if the played experience was more enjoyable I

don't really like running Over bosses my base game experience of morgot was ruined by barreling through him without really learning anything about him when I went back to him in a second playthrough with the ambition of killing him without taking damage he became probably my favorite Souls boss mechanically speaking assuming of course you can get a good fight out of him without overleveling so thanks for that open world design anyway as I said prior I don't like beating a boss on my first Attempt and when I do I don't feel like I understand them well

so to say making these experiences too easy would be problematic as well I begrudge the way the DLC was made difficult there's a greater degree of complexity which is good and appreciated but it's brought with it the issues of readability tracking and occasional UNP punishability that I've discussed prior these things aren't problems because they make bosses harder they're problems Because they make the play experience worse and those problems are then exacerbated by to me at least overly aggressive difficulty tuning you certainly won't catch me complaining about the health bars of Gail or midia or orphan

of C there's a vague synchronicity between the size of their health bars and the amount of Engagement their move sets can support but maybe now you think I'm being stubbon I'm refusing to use Certain tools that the game has given me to make my way through the challenges it presents tools that the developers clearly had in mind and so I am essentially causing my own suffering By ignoring perhaps you think I ought to run out into the world and find more stacks of the Shadow tree fragments I did after all only end the game with

13 stacks of a possible 20 on my first run and 15 on my second perhaps you think I should be utilizing Spirit ashes such as Mimic tier to alleviate the pressure boss has put on and to give myself more windows to heal or deal damage perhaps you think that my refusal to do so means that the quality of my experience lies solely in my own hands rather than in those of from software I'm going to tackle these two responses primarily as I think it's probably quite intuitive to imagine why a player me in this case

might not want to change up their build in order to overcome a challenge not That such a thing is even necessary in the first place so first off Shadow tree fragments Shadow tree fragments are collectibles found across the land of shadow that can be spent in steadily incrementing amounts to gain a percentile boost to attack and defense while in the land of Shadow only so to say it's DLC specific scaling this system likely exists due to the fact that Elden Ring's open world nature makes it very hard to have a singular Accurate estimate as to

the player's level going into the DLC a reasonable concern and a good one to preempt DLC specific scaling is probably overall a heads up call for fromsoft to have made given this issue the nature of that scaling though leaves something to be desired and it's had wider reaching consequences for the RPG mechanics Shadow tree fragments are mostly found scattered around the game's Overworld some of them are by micha's crosses and As such are easily found but many more are hidden away not behind any particular task just lying around in awkward places a few are contained

within miniaturized copy pasted hippos they take the place of runes as extra incentive to explore exploration yields strict statistical benefits much the same way exploring for runes does I can't speak for anyone else but in games containing an explor ation aspect I like to explore as takes my fancy I don't Compulsively map comb or feel it necessary to delve into every last Cavern and cacom or every last corner of the map world I'll go to the places I'm interested to go and go down the main path when that interests me more Elden ring has a

fairly strong design pillar of player freedom and as such behaviors like this should be within its parameters Elden ring if it values player Freedom needs to be able to handle players exploring thoroughly Exploring not at all and everything in between so I don't find the argument that I ought to get back out there and explore more than I want to particularly compelling player Freedom goes for me in my decision to beat all encounters with just my weapon no summons or fancy magic and as much Shadow tree blessing as I found along the way just as

much as it goes for you and whatever gameplay decisions informed your playthrough be It map combing going back to explore after meeting a tough challenge or whatever else it might be I have my beliefs as to what makes a more compelling play experience but that's frankly Irrelevant in the eyes of Elden ring both ought to be just as valid the fragments also put the player in a frustrating position of having to modulate their own difficulty difficulty they can't really know they're going to have a problem with until running into a Boss the player is made

to do the work of the developer in terms of curating their own experience but the player unlike the developer has no pre-existing context for how hard something should be or what level they will most enjoy or even how many Shadow tree fragments will allow them to reach an approximately correct difficulty level I can't imagine the experience of thinking okay that's enough exploring I'd like to progress a bit now and then having the door shut in Your face by excessive damage is all that fulfilling to players unwilling to bash their head against the wall furthermore for

my part I just can't find the prospect of running around the map on a scavenger hunt for particular items that could be anywhere all that appealing I prefer exploration to find whatever might be there not to find specific things if that makes sense I don't really care for the Overworld content either I find that the open World damages a lot of what makes the Soul's formula Strong by rendering encounter design totally moot through torren and often lacking much in the way of interesting level design that is pertinent to the play experience rather than the Vista

I find the dungeons in Elden ring pretty uniformly boring and I find the ruins a bit worse so I'm not exactly into the idea of having to go out looking for fragments I'd be replacing the lack of Fun I'm having learning a boss whose design I find frustrating with the lack of fun I have walking aimlessly around an open world whose design I'm not infused by looking for pickups on the ground all in the name of a minor reduction in my frustration with the boss in the form of a reduction in attempts taken which essentially

Nets me time time that I spent instead looking around the open world for fragments given this Choice I'll generally opt to Grind out attempts on the Boss Next I've received a pretty substantial sentiment that I'm ignoring a lot of tools to deal with damage or ways to avoid damage other than rolling I'm unduly concluding that rolling is the only option when in fact there's many several ashes of War act as evasive tools jumping exists Shields exist some spells even provide defensive benefits in the face of all of this how can I reasonably say that rolling

is almost The sole defensive maneuver and stick to that in my own gameplay it seems almost intentionally obtuse the problem with this line of argumentation is that it is one that again simply pertains to difficulty and difficulty isn't the problem High difficulty simply serves to exacerbate what is already present equipping blood hound step or some damage negation spell or what have you would simply serve to make things easier rather than delete the design decisions That are causing me to Come Away with negative opinions I don't think it's fair to say that bosses are designed around

these techniques either it would rather fly in the face of the players freedom of choice in terms of their engagement and approach which is a core design pillar if the intended solution to boss fights was to replace whatever Ash of War you have and like with essentially a better Dodge this all assuming you're using a weapon with the Swappable in the first place I spent most of my first run using the godslayer Greatsword and you can't put blood hound step on that nor would I want to if I could frankly because my role was perfectly

sufficient to deal with all the encounters I ran up against bar two blood hound step meanwhile overly trivializes most boss patterns I gain ease of access at the cost of my already diminished interest in engagement there's a point at which I'd prefer not To bother at all and using blood hound step or some other roll plus Ash of War passes that point which leaves us with shields as the other alternative damage avoidance method I did actually use a shield in my first playthrough but only for radan and only because he has an attack that I

couldn't identify a strategy to consistently Dodge and at the time neither could anyone else I'm not sure if it is now been determined to be consistently rollable but the Strategy I saw employed entailed no armor no punishing a huge number of potential windows and sprinting left for half a second after just about every single action in the fight just in case he did it it's this three hit string it would without Picture Perfect positioning in the terrain that you can't consistently dictate always roll catch me on the second hit I couldn't roll through both the

first two hits in any consistent manner the hit boxes on His swords are large enough and his tracking strong enough that he will almost always catch you even if you try to go under the second strike so yeah I did use a shield once I was presented with an attack that I literally could not consistently evade when the game essentially gave me no other choice on my second playthrough I messed around with the deflect tier a bit instead as you've probably been noticing and Bootlegged Securo is okay I guess certainly the game is strictly improved

if the deflect tier is simply a baseline mechanic but a lot of what I'm annoyed with persists regardless of whether this is the case or not beyond the absolute extreme of the radan attack I mentioned before Shields occupy the same space they always have in Souls games it's easier to execute on blocking than it is on rolling through attacks but more or less strictly worse to do so blocking Will unless you heavily invest into building around it and sometimes even then consistently eat more of your stamina than the equivalent weight in rolls required to dodge

through the same set of attacks on top of this blocking opens you up to dangers that are not there if you roll you can get guard broken if you run out of stamina you can get Block stunned into follow-up attacks or lingering damage effects the latter of which almost always deal damage types That will cause chip damage through your block and many regular swings in the DLC have similar extra damage Types on them with the same effect to make a long story short blocking puts me in positions where I'm worse off coming out of an

attack string than I would have been had I learned to roll it and as we've already established my contention isn't difficulty and I prefer interaction with the boss move set such that I attain Mastery over it in a way That precludes blocking in its current design hell blocking instead of rolling even often costs me access to the consistent best attack of most weapons move sets being the rolling R1 rolling r1's are fast especially for colossal swords it's a very good move that lets you weave in damage between strings or between attacks in a string in

a way that is much more wieldy than a guard counter even if the guard counter has higher reward so yeah I don't really Want to block and outside of the things in the game that are literally undodgeable or close enough to that point I'm going to stick to dodging for the most part blocking does nothing for me that I want as opposed to Rolling all I get is ease which is not something I care about if Shields presented more in terms terms of legitimate trade-off against just eye framing through everything I may feel differently currently

that trade-off is non-play Style transformative I Chang the inputs but the output is pretty much identical but with some numbers shifted if from wants me to stop rolling they need to stop making it work so reliably for the overwhelming majority of their games the last possible thing on the docket is Spirit ashes Spirit ashes are summons essentially just summoning in an NPC Ally rather than another player they don't improve the boss's statistics when Used the way a regular summon does but they cost you some FP or in one case Health to summon I've seen it

said quite a lot that Elden ring and this DLC especially are balanced around ashes and as such to not use them is to place an unnecessary difficulty burden on the player or not using the tools the game gives you or something to that effect it's an option in the game and it would make matters easier which would mean less time spent on frustrating content So why not because because put simply I think they make the play experience worse they definitely make things easier but this isn't always good and the way they make things easier is

by no means a good thing they're a part of the game absolutely but the game doesn't really account for them well in terms of balancing especially not the likes of mimic tier or black knife teich the reality of the matter for all of them though is that Souls bosses don't do Well against multiple opponents their attacks are designed almost exclusively around interactions with a single opponent that behaves in the way a Dark Souls player character does you can see this with how incredibly open they leave themselves to threats from other directions when they're executing a

string on a Target ashes buy you some unbelievable punish windows in these games and this is then compounded by them putting out their own damage with Little to no regard for their own well-being that's a lot more damage with a lot less having to care about what the boss is doing they're so capable in this capacity that I can't imagine the play experience was designed with them in mind they have an immensely trivializing effect on encounters with a level of grandiosity in their presentation and a degree of mechanical difficulty in their design and their tuning

that it would be extremely strange if from were perfectly Fine with them getting trivialized and barely interacted with I mean I've seen T and mimic tier borderline solo boss fights while the player sits back and spectates there's nothing in the boss design of these DLCs that indicates they're being designed around ashes their combos are still incredibly single entity focused their health and stance tuning is not such that they're able to tolerate two entities wailing on them and their AI is easily manipulated to Spend the bulk of its attention beating up the summon and if they

are intended then I'm forced to conclude that fr's intentions are that the play experience be worse which is hardly compelling for my part my preference both with these games and Beyond is that I want to beat the challenges presented to me on their own terms I want to play ball with the encounter so to speak I want to know how to effectively deal with anything they can do do rather than put myself in a Position where I don't care about any of their game actions I don't just care about winning even if the encounter is

something I don't enjoy I find this valuable because I want to have a stronger understanding of what's going on in the encounter positive or negative so that I can draw stronger conclusions about my experience with it I also just find it more satisfying to win this way so no I'm not going to use ashes and I'm going to continue not to use ashes right Up until I no longer believe that they make the play experience worse I'm not really interested in tools that allow me to bypass a boss's move set rather than engage with it

and I'm not really interested in having an experience that I don't like for reasons that are only passingly related to difficulty be made trivial and still unpleasant as opposed to difficult and unpleasant the long and short of it being the only problem ashes could solve is lowering the amount of Time I spend with a boss which comes at the cost of knowing less about that boss in this sense I think you could say I value my understanding and my rules of play more than my time with which leaves us with the conclusion that ashes wouldn't

actually improve my opinion of any of the content and I wouldn't know what I'm talking about as I'd have to engage far less deeply with enemy move sets there's a lot of things I've noted in this video that I may not have even Picked up on if I'd used ashes and if I reached a point where I wanted to use ashes essentially the whole point of my interest is defeated I'd rather just play something else which is a sentence I found myself saying quite a lot with respect to souls as of late and especially with

respect to this DL DC I'd rather just play something else if I'm looking for a combat challenge I'd rather play a game that's more mechanically rewarding along That axis and I have many that I've played and many more that I haven't to choose from even along the memorization linear challenge axis I have Seco right over there with its boss select Superior combat and vastly Superior bosses a bit further a field than I could go back to the hollow night pantheons Elden ring and especially shadow of the earth Tree Bank hard on combat and specifically boss

combat as a focal point but the fundamentally thin Mechanics of souls have been stretched far too thin which has rendered the whole Affair deeply unsatisfying to me there's only so much pure memorization I can find engaging before I head off to play Simon Says instead and the other reasons I had to play Souls games have atrophied even further in this DLC the Legacy dungeons level design encounter design atmosphere and experiential aspects of the series have been rendered vestigal by this Point the open world is a slightly different kettle of fish in that I think fromsoft

have made some genuine progress in One Direction at the cost of compromising other aspects of the design but I'm going to hold off on that until after the parts of the game that are more clearly and distinctly breaking down starting with the Legacy dungeons I was really disappointed with the design of the Legacy dungeons in Shadow of the earth tree level design has been on a General downward trend for a while in Souls games with any positive developments rendered more or less less irrelevant by the prevalence of warping which shadow of the urgery takes to

the Absurd an degree Elden ring already had an issue with warping trivializing the nature of the world as you don't even go from checkpoint to checkpoint anymore anytime you're outside of a catacomb and out of combat you can go wherever you want to any Grace you have unlocked with The Press of a button we'll be coming back to this once we talk about the open world but even for the Legacy dungeons it has this effect of neutralizing their sense of place your engagement with them is extremely non-committal in that you can leave any time you

can come back any time and retain your progress warping isn't even the real issue here though it's the design of the Legacy Dungeons and the profusion of Graces within them I was persistently Shocked by how little I was facing in the way of resistance before hitting the next Grace it was very very rare for me to run out of Estus between Graces and if I did I can almost guarantee you it was to particular larger mini boss type enemies rather than to the nature of the encounters present so to say the health loss was more

brought about by a single difficult enemy and much less frequently by more curated encounters where the nature of the enemies and the Environment works together to pose a greater threat seemingly the best that fromsoft can muster in this capacity anymore is having enemies hidden round corners a technique that they abuse comically frequently at this point there's a stretch in bellat in which there is an enemy hidden around a corner in a Tish Alleyway leading round to an enemy with their back turned and an enemy hidden around the corner next to him past that Is a

larger enemy sitting up against a wall and would you believe it another enemy waiting around the corner The Playbook has waren extremely thin the way that a jump scare might be novel and pay off atmospheric tension the first time but become obnoxious in immersion harming the tents this particular trick is especially harmful from my perspective because it's once again So Meta it's fine in moderation but its overuse gives the impression that the Entire enemy roster is aware of the existence of exactly the tarnished being on their way sometime in the near future maybe they're aware

of the progression paast too and where The Graces are and the paths between them in any case it's rather an easily avoided trick and it's very very played out by this point basically the only other encounter design concept they still utilize Beyond this is placing a ranged enemy in an unreachable location to be Accounted for while you deal with whatever's in your way to them this is in principle a good way of adding something interesting to make an encounter more than the sum of its parts enemy composition and enemy placement can be leveraged to great

effect to present a challenge in a different sort of manner to the way each enemy could be utilized in isolation the problem is that when every projectile is both homing and relatively fast it eliminates The positional consideration from the combat and we're right back to the roll Fest in a context in which enemy attacks will unreliably overlap in manners that make it impossible to not be caught if you try to engage this doesn't make the encounter impossible far from it and we retain the possibility of bringing the main combatants to areas out of the line

of sight of the shooter but this is in itself limiting to encounter design we need a place to break line of sight from The shooter the alternative fighting the enemies while the ranged enemy is doing their thing involves either Brute Force tanking or a frustrating amount of waiting and baiting to take pokes not to mention it is once again the same thing every time compare back to the prior games in which the exact same sort of setup is used there's a span of Undead Berg where you're faced with a few armored Hollows and some more

throwing firebombs from a rooftop that's Unreachable for the moment the difference between a firebomb and a homing spell is that the former doesn't track me in anywhere near the same capacity and so I can use my movement to remain safe something that throws a wrench in my fighting of the melee enemies but rarely if ever threatens me with hit confirm overlapping combos you'll probably also notice that the terrain is playing a pretty important role here the narrow bridge Makes it difficult to maneuver and the enemies behind plus the pressure from the firebombs Corral the player

forward into a fairly small room with two more enemies and a third about to burst through the door each of the elements at play here is working to create a particular sort of challenge with a variety of different approaches testing the player's decision-making and response to pressure just as much as their ability to roll around and stab Basic Hollows or maybe compare with the Channeler and the barque knight in the undead Parish it's a big pretty tough enemy with a Caster watching from an opening above the channel is spell casts are are usually granted very

distinctly audio telegraphed as a sort of counterweight to the Spell's sheer travel speed you can hear the Channeler performing his incantation and then the release of the spell giving you plenty to respond to even if you can't directly Keep him in frame I don't want to come across like I'm laying down strict rules for how Encounters of this sort ought to be designed rather my intention is to show that decisions made in terms of enemy placement and the capabilities given to enemies and in what combination have consequences on the way the encounter plays out a

trivially true statement sure but one that's important to remember in the context of a game like Elden ring the way encounters are in Shadow of the earth tree and Elden ring more generally seems to discourage looking for positional Solutions and encourage rolling the environment is rarely leveraged for or against the player as most fights take place on fairly open flat ground indoors or outdoors with the potential inclusion of inaccessible ranged element there are basic combat challenges in which I'm incentivized to either roll my way to Victory or run on by since the next Grace is

likely just around the corner anyway we're back once again in combat land with all of the problems that come with Souls combat but without the complexity and engagement of a boss encounter we're losing out in terms of encounter design to the prior games which were more thoughtful in their assembly and curation of Encounters in a level and we're gaining really not much in return with many of the same problems That those games had still being present like the fact that I can run past enemies at all this is a difficult thing to stop but it

isn't very good for level design that I can just run past every enemy in a level to the next Grace returning to the overabundance of Graces I want to make clear why this is such a problem for the game Graces are checkpoints they save your progress allowing you to start from a later point in the level should you die you can see Each span between each Grace as a leg of the Journey to the End of the level and in that manner each leg tasks you with making it through the challenges it presents in one

piece die and you'll be reset back losing your collected souls to your blood stain and risking their total loss if you don't manage to recover them before you die again it's a very basic kind of checkpoint corpse run system but one that can be leveraged to very effectively Define moments of Tension and relief through the careful curation of when those checkpoints are given I'm sure anyone watching familiar with any game of this sort of setup has experienced the feeling of being out of resources and low on health and desperate to find a new bonfire or

Grace or Lantern or whatever else in order to refresh and keep the progress that they've made and to spend their souls so that they're not at risk of losing them it's something that doesn't in itself Feel good but that helps to define the reward structure of the games it's present in in such a manner that it defines a lot of memorable experiences and higher highs when the checkpoint is found the ranges within this system the depths of the lows and the peaks of the highs are infringed upon when that point point of tension is rarely

if ever reached when there's not enough between checkpoints to meaningfully deplete my resources before I arrive at the next One I end up contending with any given stretch of the game far less than I might otherwise and I'm asked to attain a much lower level of familiarity with it or Mastery over it before due to warping I never have to see it again this profusion of Graces is part of why Legacy dungeons in Shadow of the earth tree feel so small you're barely faced with anything on your track between checkpoints and the time s in

which you are are generally just big Singular mini boss enemy encounters the horned Warriors in bellat and everywhere else now that I think about it those horned murakumo dual simitar Warriors make up a startlingly large number of these encounters but even when they show up it's rare that you have to deal with much after or before them before another checkpoint is thrown at you this gets bad enough that in the first leg of the final area all that Waits between the First two Graces is literally one guy just one bird night fellow on a staircase

defeat him and you're at the next Grace this startling frequency has a heavily diminishing effect on the positive sense that comes from finding a Grace most of the time when I ran into a Grace in Shadow of the earth tree I had this feeling of really already rather than anything approaching relief the only times the levels posed any real threat was when they threw mini boss Tier enemies at me which has the feeling of Boss grinding rather than level progression but the boss in this instance has very little health and can simply be run past

most of the time and it once again puts us in a position of the game's only real moments of challenge or engagement coming from straightup combat encounters against singular intricate foes in relatively open flat ground I've been over this sort of stuff a few times now so I won't Belabor it any further suffice it to say I think this is not what Souls games were ever particularly good at and I think they're done a disservice by focusing on it the overabundance of Grace's further atrophy level design in that it makes whatever shortcuts may exist or

whatever complex layout may actually be present almost totally irrelevant take the first leg of midra mans from the first Grace you head through a few rooms once again facing Down almost wholly unthreatening enemies and pretty uncompelling layouts that do nothing to amplify their danger eventually finding your way up a ladder and across a few still unthreatening vertical sections and to the next Grace for me long before I ran out of resources you then take a ladder down from here open a door behind you and a door in that room and Bam your back back at

the first Grace an impressive display of Interconnectivity which is nice and all but why do both of these Graces exist the first one with the shortcut covers every possible reason I might have to use the second one or vice versa the double Graces make the shortcut bizarre rather than satisfying while also depriving it of its utility if the upstairs bonfire continues to be used and the reverse insinuation is almost more insulting that fromsoft and the team really thought that that brief Span is all the player could take before needing a new checkpoint everything in the

design of the levels is so deprived of tension rotted and atrophied and lited with the true focus of the level design providing a sequence of Arenas in which you can fight singular complex enemies you almost never get worn down over a sequence of encounters anymore you either die in a singular combat challenge or make your way through and Find another Grace in short order regardless of your current resources the only one that comes anywhere close to escaping this sort of design is shadow keep though Shadow keep itself is not even particularly remarkable and is infested

with the incredibly obnoxious Fire Knight The Great Sword variants are quite fun but the dagger and Mage ones are a tornado of unreadability huge damage unceasing strings and Magic Spam outside of enemies though Shadow keep makes some decent use of verticality with a relatively complex layout that makes some use of the vertical space within the rafter sections it's nothing fromsoft hasn't done before see the research Hall and Cathedral of the deep which is a bit dis hardening but it's got some design to it it's used as a hub that connects several areas which is one

of the rare positive results from overlapping Souls design With open world design having a particular level act as a hub in this manner gives it a better sense of place and provides branching sprawling Parts within the dungeon itself to properly connect it to all of these places this is all somewhat undercut by warping but at the very least you have to go through it the first time and it's praiseworthy enough in that respect my main problems with shadowkeep outside of its major enemy types being obnoxious is that its Two separate sections the flooded area and

the for lack of a better term main area could be more connected I think this is a missed opportunity to make what would still be mostly a pair of levels feel like one much larger place it would also contribute in terms of replay value and variety because it would provide a different total experience of the levels between entering from One path and entering from another it seems relatively proven that Nonlinearity of this sort is satisfying and it's something that open worlds can be quite good at especially when the concern of progression gating is gone due

to the DLC specific progression of the Shadow tree blessing there was the opportunity to do something great here but instead we did something just okay and done several times before Cathedral of the deep but again and worse conjoined to New Londo but again and worse the only real Connection between them is the ability to hop down to the main section of the specimen Storehouse from the upper levels which are access through the church District this is a pretty neat connection allowing the player to skip over a lot of the outer part of Shadow keep and

bypass the hippo entirely you even get one of the only somewhat long stretches in the game from backtracking to play the level in reverse a decision no player would realistically ever Actually make or need to but a decision nonetheless the far more common experience even if you do find this skip would be to warp back out and then enter Shadow keep keep through the front door by killing the hippo and the level design in no way accounts for this backwards approach the shortcut into its room can't be opened as the door can't be interacted with

at all all which is one of the things that makes the stretch of the level somewhat longer and you Can't even attempt the hippo more than once from this direction as once the fog wall is in place the one leading up into Shadow keep can't be interacted with for subsequent attempts there's a lot of potential in an open world souls game for varied sorts of experiences of the exact same level but it's a potential that shadow of the earth tree is completely uninterested in just about every Legacy dungeon is a straight line from start to

finish littered with Graces to make progression completely without tension and annihilate the purpose of shortcuts giving off the impression that every level has been built precisely with the player in mind and homogenizing them into near identical flat Hollow experiences so if not for the combat if not for the curated more designed levels what else is there to play for the answer should be fairly obvious we're left with the open world pretty much Exclusively to shadow of the earth tre's credit I wouldn't strictly say that it made the open world worse than in the base game

damning with faint praise I know but I imagine you've already picked up that I wasn't the most fond of the idea of making an open world souls game to begin with to my mind a lot of what makes Souls games interesting to play in the momentto moment levels is the encounter design the curated and careful use of space and the enemies within it To present particular sequences that challenge the player in ways that no single part of the encounter does by itself it's like the souls games in general the use of the parts in a

way that makes them more than their sum this is is as you can probably imagine quite hard to do in an open world space you have so much space to account for and some of it almost by necessity is going to be wide open this is fine to an extent we don't necessarily need every Facet of the level to be this intricate Undead Berg style Affair but the problem is that so much of the space is wide open in a way that neuters the game's ability to do anything interesting with the enemies and layouts at

its disposal and this is long before torrent gets involved single-handedly Rend ing almost every single hostile entity in the Overworld entirely unthreatening due to their inability to keep up with him the game literally cannot present encounters To me when I can speed past them it can't threaten me or provide me with any cause for tension in my exploration of the open world I mean it even dos out extra Estus charges for free usually long before you're in any position to need them and Grace saturation is not sparse enough to justify the extra pickme UPS in

order to create an open world the size of Rings capable of delivering the sorts of tightly designed sequences that make Souls levels what They are fromsoft would either have to get really really creative or essentially have infinite time and money to pour over every last scrap of space in the game because the simple fact is the more space that exists the less time the developers have to give to any particular part of that space this is all base game stuff though stuff that applies to shadow of the urry as well but I'll try not to

bang on for too long about it suffice it to say I Don't think Elden ring does very well at combining the concept of an open world with Soul's design sensibilities and I think both sides are suffering for it the souls side suffers from a loss of care and attention and the open world suffers from a lack of variety in gameplay Styles or possible things to do as all the souls formula can really offer is combat and exploration the latter of which being somewhat reliant on novelty which open world design Sensibilities tend to damage in Shadow

of the urry itself there is actually some give and take in terms of the way the world is put together I had baned in the base game that exploration was overcrowded with copy pasted dungeons with uninteresting layouts and irrelevant rewards and Shadow of the earth tree cuts down heavily on dungeon saturation and those dungeons that are present have a bit more going on in terms of structure and Differentiation I'd maybe even be willing to Hazard the opinion that some of them like the bellat jail or the forges are better designed than the Legacy dungeons still

terrible boss quality at the end and encounter design isn't exactly greatly improved but we'll take what we can get the biggest loss is that there's no dungeons quite like ruin stwn precipice which effectively gets across the sense of progression visually and serves the gameplay function of Connecting Altus and Leonia ignoring of course that warping makes this mostly moot past the first run in its stead there are more in between level spaces like the route down to Abyssal Woods or all of raal a positive development to be sure as this use of space gives the zones

a bit of ident entity back in terms of structure as compared to everything else but it comes with the encounterd designed deal breaker of enabling torrent these connecting paths Despite the Damage Done to them by torrent and their General disinterest in encounter design present parts of the world that are somewhat memorable in their own right both due to their connective quality and their differentiated visuals as a result this is in principle good in the absence of anything to do but discover or fight it provides a reward for exploration on the Discovery side of things and

allows for a sense of progression in the nature of The spaces you go through that helps convey the journey and the scope of the world there seems to have been a greater degree of thought put into how to put the world together even if some amount of it strains against making diagetic sense to me the way to the shadow tree altar being so out of the way for example I think it would be very much worth from soft wild to make the ways these spaces connect make more sense if only to help bind the world

together in Ways that don't raise puzzling questions about why the only way to some huge expansive land is through one small cave hidden off in a corner at the same time though the presence of less obvious connections and more hidden away sub areas gives the player all the more reason to be excited to interact with the open world in any case the DLC through shadowkeep and raow manages to take a step closer towards playing with the combination of more Traditional open spaces and more closed off salsy areas to decent effect some interconnectedness would be appreciated

alongside perhaps some more root variety to create it as not every Zone can be reached from from more than one angle but it's certainly a start and it's certainly an improvement it's a shame then that those saly areas are so lacking and that the open sections are so without tension or consequence there aren't really many Moments I can recall that I had while exploring because nothing in the world is fast enough to catch me if I just run past it and the geography's role is hamstrung by the presence of warping and the lack of opposition

in non-combat forms even the good old poison swamp barely means anything anymore as it can't poison you while you're on torrent I understand that on the whole this is a difficult set of problems to solve but it's a set of considerations that need a Lot of attention if the games want to take this direction as opposed to the difficult boss pattern path as it stands traversal and tension in the open world are arranged in an egregiously convenient manner free warping anytime you're out of combat a horse fast enough to escape any sort of threat with

a double jump for platforming and little beyond that in terms of mechanics dedicated to traversal there's even a free stake of America outside of any Field bosses convenience like this doesn't lend itself well to much Beyond zone out junk food style gaming in terms of the experience it provides just wandering around for however long to burn time with no particular sense of the specific game you're playing and the experience it's presenting it's not that the game needs to be death stranding souls or something similarly outlandish but it certainly Needs to be able to offer me

more than familiar enemies in familiar sorts of Arrangements in flashy looking but but weakly experientially designed zones that I more or less only interact with by utilizing lukewarm combat mechanics to really excel in the combination of souls with open world we need to do a bit better than a Souls level but without the threat of enemies and with the desperate parts of it stretched across more surface area it's worth Disclaiming though that broadly speaking I'm just not fond of open worlds I tend to think that they in their current conventional nature at least are fairly

opposed to game design practices that I find compelling I'm not really one over by large quantities of content if the quality of that content is diminished by its volume there being lots to find isn't interesting when most of it is just another barely differentiated weapon or Another armor piece that doesn't particularly do anything different from any other or God forbid another Spirit Ash or upgrade to do with Spirit ashes especially when the content these rewards are contained in are haphazard collections of enemies standing in open space with perhaps a mediocre to bad boss fight which

in this DLC is is all too often an NPC and outside of the boss fight or chest or what have you that marks the End it's hardly ever even those things it's crafting materials to help prop up the incredibly Superfluous crafting system whose only purpose in life seems to be polluting the loop pool with things the player will never see or care about again I sure I'm happy I picked up more thin Beast bones and I can't wait to use them to never even a single time need or want to craft an arrow of any

kind in these games when Explorations reward is discovered such as the lift Down to the underground sections in the base game or the pathways through the side areas in the DLC that's something I'm more able to get behind which is why finding more bad loot than interesting set pieces like this makes me less interested in going looking it's the issue I raised earlier where the volume of content needed in an open world game diminishes its ability to present novelty with so much space to account For it's unfortunately somewhat inevitable in a game less interested in

presenting itself as a combat challenge Gauntlet these sorts of systems might be more enticing though they would still need less half-baked integration and more robustly designed encounters to apply them to instead of a mere sandbox a Sandbox is put to good use by extremely varied kinds of interaction typically the sort of thing that Elden ring just doesn't Offer and Shadow tree fragments only make this worse as I said there's 50 of them littered around the game world with many just lying around and many more hidden in very obscure or hard-to-reach locations very few hidden behind

an actual challenge of any kind and certainly not anything unique as I explained prior I'm not really interested in an aimless scavenger hunt for strict statistical progression that overpowers my regular statistical Progression I'm not sure if this sounds strange but to try and demonstrate imagine if in the base game instead of Dungeons and catacombs and heroes Graves and whatnot with their desperate rewards you found items ltered around the floor periodically these item pickups would have within them a huge stockpile of upgrade materials and enough Lord souls to give you several levels I can't speak for

anyone else but this consolidation of the reward of exploring in such a way That overpowers the old form being runes and thus levels makes the whole Affair feel very flat it Waters down the RPG mechanics to the point of near relevance in a game that already struggles with the relevance of its RPG mechanics I rarely if ever have to make noteworthy tradeoffs to set up a build as stamina is plentiful even with little to no investment mind is a luxury at best for most builds that aren't pure majors and health eats a mandatory 60 levels

per Playthrough with how damage scales in Elden ring and the lack of pressing need to put points anywhere else there's really no point in being a glass Cannon so when many of your stat increases go to your relevant damage stats anyway it puts a bit of a damper on things to see how little they matter as opposed to finding more Shadow tree fragments sure you're doing both but one of the two Shadow tree blessing versus levels from runes is going to have a much much Larger impact on your immediate power I think this is a

fairly poor stop gap for the unpredictability of player power coming from the base game due to Elden Ring's open world nature for my own part I would prefer in the first case that the player be asked to do anything at all for their Shadow tree fragments and secondly that instead of hiding them in hard to- reach places something more interesting might be hidden away instead something with some lore Insight or some Particularity to it in any way whatsoever because what I want from the world is the discovery of Novel interesting parts of it rather than

my SEO prayer beads that supplant the importance of my levels hell SEO even has the good sense to hide its attack power increases behind major boss kills as a means of curating the player's power at any given stage shadow of the earth tree tries this to an extent but also allows you to collect 34 of a Possible 50 fragments without a single boss kill in an RPG I would like it if the build decisions I make have ramifications Beyond some of the weapons I get access to in Shadow of the earth tree that's basic basically

it everyone I send in there is going to have 60 Vigor with remaining points divied up between the damage stats for my weapons with maybe a few stamina and mind levels and they will all be wearing whatever armor it is that I can find as the Distinction in power between armors is pretty minuscule their capabilities don't meaningfully differ beyond my faith character having access to the I no longer wish to play setup of the Blasphemous Blade with talismans to restore FP I could play a pure Mage but I don't really enjoy pure mage gameplay in

souls and I don't think it's very welld designed I think the enemies account for It poorly and even still I'm going to be the same character but with a stick in my hand instead of a sword and some more mind my boss gameplay is fundamentally going to pan out in a similar way putting Square pegs in square holes so to speak in terms of finding the right spell for each punish window and I'll also have less Estus due to the need for blue Esters to keep hitting one of the only legitimate trade-offs a player makes

when choosing character Capabilities the RPG mechanics are almost entirely worthless in Elden ring and Shadow of the earth tree seems to agree committing to all but replacing them with a more action game style of General statistical enhancement necessitated as a form of progression due to combat not being something you can even meaningfully improve at past a certain point all told though while I think the open world could stand to improve in a lot of ways with the Curation of its content its connection to itself and the variation in the content within it it's the most

understandable thing I can see to like about the game and and especially the DLC the sense of Discovery is hampered for me when the majority of what there is to discover is loot or combat encounters but I can understand it it's like Skyrim you boot it up to bumble around for a bit and have relaxing fun times I don't think this speaks Positively to its design but it certainly speaks to the appeal the problem here is that Elder ring is a game caught between two different kinds of appeal certainly the people valuing it as a

combat Challenge and praising its boss design would not be satisfied with the conclusion that it's Skyrim but with somewhat more robust combat mechanics there is this perception in some parts of the communities around it that it is more than that in some sense Souls games have some degree of prestige to them some communal perception that they are more serious Artistry than something like Skyrim might be certainly Once Upon a Time these games seem to be trying to achieve something a bit greater than a world to turn your brain off and unwind in even Elden ring

with its intense and incessant combat Focus falls into this camp if you're looking for open world Shenanigans games Elden ring seems to contain a sizable design Focus on things you're not necessarily there for so what we're left with is a game that excels at nothing that it does it emphasizes combat but is outshot easily by more combat focused titles even ones as close by as Seco it presents an open world but one with deeply limited forms of Engagement and exploration that often fails to present anything new at all a nonzero percentage of the time in

Shadow of the earth tree your re wward for exploring is a boss Some percentage of that amount it's a repeat boss sometimes an NPC boss or just an NPC Invasion all of which are combat focused trials with little going on outside of the combat aspect your loot for these fights is frequently uninteresting and just as frequently useless it seems to me that a player looking for an open world also has a large number of better options for that sort of experience we're left with a generic Blob of a game enjoyed by everyone but loved by

no one clearly the loved by no one part of Matt's Point here has not come to pass seeing as shadow of the urry is widely beloved and Elden ring even more so but I think he's on the money about the homogenization of the game just about every reason I might have to play a Souls game over another sort of game is gone with shadow of the earth tree any sense of groundedness has long since vanished the combat design is No longer anything I'm interested in I find the narrative elements inscrutable and unsatisfying as compared to

the more thematically cohesive prior games the level design is weaker the atmosphere is weaker the majority of the immersive quality is gone for any given thing that I could play shadow of the earth tree to get I can get it better elsewhere and rather than being more than the sum of its parts Elden Ring's Parts either do not support one another or actively Conflict the open world causes problems for the combat through the RPG mechanics with the DLC solving this by smothering the RPG mechanics through the shadow tree fragments that due to the dlc's difficulty

will mandate exploration for some if they're unwilling to keep bashing their head against the wall forcing the player to modulate their own difficulty in a way they're not at all equipped to informly do while violating that player's freedom of approach and Its exploration in a sense of running around and picking things up as opposed to finding content to engage with and the narrative obfuscation of Elden ring has reached a point that it's difficult to contextualize the meaning of your actions in any way while the game simultaneously refuses to manifest any form of consequence for your

actions all this then to come around to a point where the combat can be trivialized through statistical Progression without even really meaning to it feels more and more like fromsoft would be happier making straightup action games to do that though it's far past the time for the systems to evolve because in thinking about boss design in thinking about how inscrutable enemy attacks and behavior are and how simple the mechanics are I've come to the conclusion that if there is a need to constantly escalate challenge as informed by the old guard who have Conquered everything prior

a lot of these measures are somewhat inevitable outside of systemic Improvement if you have to make ever harder bosses they have to get more complicated they have to have less downtime and Tighter punish Windows they have to demand more precise rolling and timing and maybe they even have to start subverting conventional design behaviors or the laws of motion and physics or even just sensible behavior in a fight to match up to the Player's unbelievably powerful rooll button the souls framework lacks combat design space there aren't many levers you can turn and we've been at this

for six or seven games now depending on how far you count SEO something was always going to break at some point the combat needs non-trivial adjustments the inclusion of mechanics like guard counters or customizable ashes of War of which many are uselessly slow boss super moves or throwing weapons that eat Unbelievable amounts of stamina for no reward over a regular swing or a stance breake mechanic that's essentially a watered down version of seco's posture or a jump button that functions near identically to a role in terms of combat and is obtuse in when and how

it should be used doesn't change that fundamentally the core pieces can't hack it combat Clarity suffers due to the power of the role and by token of its similarity the jump the invulnerability Is so strong and so disconnected from what is visually happening that determining a proper response becomes even harder invulnerability frames are the single most powerful way a player can defend themselves in a game their sparing use can make that power felt in in a limited way while their overuse crowds out all defensive options that are not invulnerable in nature with significant effect on

how enemies can be designed even now you can clearly see How enemy attacks are overwhelmingly built with the Cadence of the player's role in mind multiple swings within your roles in vulnerability period to force stricter timing the proliferation of roll catches attacks built to force you to roll in a particular direction at the right timing so on and so on and so forth to help with the monotony from even invented a system of varied responses in SEO with perilous attacks a system with its issues but one that Fundamentally created a need for a variety of

responses play as side clearly if you just parried all game long through every last threat the game would eventually get boring right it had become a mere matter of repetition this sort of dynamic is between not present and obscure in Elden ring reliant on guesswork to determine if the game would like you to jump as opposed to roll with little in the way of clear visual indication one or the other or why one Would work over the other because of the obscurity of the mechanics Seido gives you a warning then leaves you to read the

animation of the enemy to figure out what to do Elden ring just leaves you to figure it out thus relegating the Jump's intuitive use to its most blatant cases the visual design of which do the game's immersive quality no favors whatsoever and on the offense side attacks with no distinction in properties means that only the best Attack that fits within the punish window gets used with other moves relegated to near non-existent roles jumping R1 almost never does anything I'm interested in as compared to Jumping R2 regular uncharged r2s are useful only for their increased stance

damage rather than anything about the nature of the move and charged r2s are widely impractical outside of particular boss attacks given that their only real reward is even more stance damage Statuses don't mean much when they're all fundamentally a means to more damage damage in a burst damage over time more Dam damage over time or the other damage in a burst it's little wonder that the two damage burst statuses bleed and frost are the most powerful strong enough to be a Balan concern even once again I understand that you can boil many things down this

way what do I get from juggling an enemy and Devil May Cry or toppling a monster and Monster Hunter If not more damage but the difference is in the amount of boiling it takes simply turning on the heat to reach this conclusion about status effect none of the TOS in my Arsenal and Elder ring have any implication on each other none of their use cases have any implications on what I am to do next or what I can do next poultry attempts at this have been made in the form of weapons like the light Greatsword

with its r2s and r1s linking up in different ways to give the Weapon a sense of flow but it's as if from is rediscovering the wheel here real action games have understood this idea for literal decades at this point we're back to pretty covered ground at this point though and the idea is clear souls used to offer something that was harder to find elsewhere through the sum of its parts and less conventional presentation more and more of that is being lost to the insatiable focus on Complex combat encounters with ever more conventional presentation while the

mechanics behind those encounters remain all but unchanged and a few ham-handed Dianes into the sphere of open worlds can't pick up the slack almost entirely gone are those unique sorts of experiences I can get with the soul series but not really anywhere else the most enjoyable part of the DLC for me wasn't mesma and it wasn't some Dungeon or some open world Vista it wasn't some cut scene or some botched NPC fight with a totally mismatched sense of tragedy it was the shaman Village the reminder that America for all of her godhood and all of

her grand designs was a person a person with a history and a home a few notes from the start of the game's main theme and a fairly humble little Vista with a golden tree and two items with a bit to read into It's a quiet poignant little place and it's the sort of thing that you oh so rarely see in these games anymore these moments have been lost traded for a few more lightning bolts for the dancing lion and for me the rubber band of tolerance for this sort of gameplay has snapped it's another gradient

in the same direction but this is the first one to be for me unambiguously too far next installment or the one after that it might be too far for you Too thank thanks for watching this was a much longer project than any of my prior work completed or otherwise and I'd like to say a quick thanks to all of the people who helped make it possible Shandy and metal for allowing me the use of some footage and all of the friends who helped me test investigate and refine the script the help was invaluable and so

were the messages I received from people interested to hear my perspective laid out in full and Thank you again for sticking through the whole thing whether or not you found the video convincing I can't say it's too likely I do much more talking about souls between lost soul arts and this basically everything I have left to say about the series is out there in the world Beyond specifics that may come up in particular subjects I suppose we'll have to see what the future holds though