The long-awaited Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is finally here, and boy, it sure isn’t afraid to put you in your place.
Even its first miniboss is bullying players new to the Land of Shadow, and as I wrote in my review, the battles and bosses spread throughout the expansion are some of the toughest encounters FromSoftware has ever made.
While I can’t really speak to the performance side of things — Elden Ring runs fine for me on an RTX 3070/i5-12600K rig save for a rare stutter here or there, but your mileage may definitely vary — I have to say that I strongly disagree with criticisms that Shadow of the Erdtree is unfairly difficult.
Most Shadow of the Erdtree bosses are designed to punish passive play; if you roll away from their combos, you’ll have to waste time you could have spent slashing them with your greatsword just to get close to them again.
These don’t make enough of a difference that they trivialize fights, but you’ll definitely feel the improvements to your attributes, and will be able to both survive previously lethal attacks and end boss battles quicker.
Some players claim they’ve already maxed out their Scadutree Fragments, but I highly doubt that unless they’ve been speedrunning through the Land of Shadow (which you shouldn’t do, by the way, because it’s full of amazing places to explore and treasures to loot).
The original article contains 804 words, the summary contains 236 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The long-awaited Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is finally here, and boy, it sure isn’t afraid to put you in your place.
Even its first miniboss is bullying players new to the Land of Shadow, and as I wrote in my review, the battles and bosses spread throughout the expansion are some of the toughest encounters FromSoftware has ever made.
While I can’t really speak to the performance side of things — Elden Ring runs fine for me on an RTX 3070/i5-12600K rig save for a rare stutter here or there, but your mileage may definitely vary — I have to say that I strongly disagree with criticisms that Shadow of the Erdtree is unfairly difficult.
Most Shadow of the Erdtree bosses are designed to punish passive play; if you roll away from their combos, you’ll have to waste time you could have spent slashing them with your greatsword just to get close to them again.
These don’t make enough of a difference that they trivialize fights, but you’ll definitely feel the improvements to your attributes, and will be able to both survive previously lethal attacks and end boss battles quicker.
Some players claim they’ve already maxed out their Scadutree Fragments, but I highly doubt that unless they’ve been speedrunning through the Land of Shadow (which you shouldn’t do, by the way, because it’s full of amazing places to explore and treasures to loot).
The original article contains 804 words, the summary contains 236 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!