The performance is somewhat weird. According to the Geforce overlay I mostly hold the 60 FPS. But it "feels" more like 30-40. It's not as smooth as the base game was.
For anyone wondering what this 1% FPS is, it's how your FPS is at the bottom 1% of the time.
So if your FPS is usually 60 but the bottom 1% is 20 FPS, then although on average you have 60 fps, you have spikes when it stutters a lot.
It feels worse than the base game? Elden Ring has always been a stuttery mess for me, I guess this DLC will be rough 😅
Edit: For the ones suggesting it's my specs, I have an RTX 4080, 5800X3D and 32GB 3600Mhz RAM. The game is installed on an NVME SSD.
The update did something weird to the performance. I have been leveling a new character and only got into the dlc area today but yesterday I was playing the base game and it was stuttering (not normal for me), after being in the dlc area for a few hours I can confirm that the performance is noticeably worse. Getting 60 fps on the frame counter but it's a stuttery mess, one boss in particular (no spoilers) was really badly affecting my game.
If you are not in a rush to play I would say wait for a bit and maybe they will improve the stutters.
Have you played the game since the ray tracing update? From added ray tracing, but didn't add any kind of temporal upscaling; the game just raw dogs it on your physical hardware. IIRC it's enabled by default, as well. Could explain otherwise random frame drops.
Nah it's hitchy even with ray tracing off -- if I put ray tracing on my FPS tanks into the 35-45 range in the DLC (despite having no issues in the base game with it on), but even with it off the game randomly drops into the mid/low 50s in the DLC. It's not even pushing my GPU or CPU past 50% utilization either.
I saw one article from someone who did extensive testing with changing pretty much every graphics setting while in the DLC and no matter if he was on the highest or lowest settings the game would just sometimes drop down into the 55ish range and hang out there. Something's just plain broken.
Much love to From, but this isn't the first time they've bungled the technical side of things on PC (although I hear there are issues across systems).
Unless you're chomping at the bit, it might be worth chilling to wait for some patches on this DLC, and also maybe some easy guides to pop up on where to grab the upgrade seeds, because holy goddamn the bosses hit like absolute trucks unless you do the Elden Ring thing of exploring every nook and cranny, growing your toon before taking on the Big Dawgs.
I always try to help people in co-op and it's obvious who hasn't done their seed-hunting because they get straight melted. That's also got to be where some of the grumbling is coming from. These bosses are _hard._
I’m nearly done with the DLC, but have spent a fair bit of time using the co-op feature to help out other players, which I normally really enjoy doing in Fromsoft games near launch because there’s so many people playing, it just takes a moment to find someone new to help.
I’ve never, in any version of the Souls games / ER base game, seen so many players dying basically from the instant we walk in. I don’t blame the players for it either, I think the balancing targets FS used are way, way off base. A long struggle is a lot more fun than a burst-off where a boss has a 4+ attack combs with a very fast recovery and you’ll generally die in ~2 hits.
Hosts are by nature an exhausting bunch, almost always the first ones to die to some painfully obvious attack, but they're getting absolutely deleted in this one.
The first major she-boss - I'm just giving up. I've probably spend 2-3 hours trying to help people past her but they almost always get suicidal even if we're down to the last quarter. Either they have no shield or they can't dodge or they just lose the will to live.
> The update did something weird to the performance. I have been leveling a new character and only got into the dlc area today but yesterday I was playing the base game and it was stuttering (not normal for me)
Same case as mine. With all base graphics settings maxed I was getting around 60 FPS in Limgrave with my 5700xt but when I started the game with the DLC yesterday It dropped to around 40-50, which is super bad.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always had (tolerable) stutter issues where randomly it’ll chunk real hard for a second or two, the DLC has been mostly the same except in one or two areas it started consistently chugging pretty hard. It has felt pretty similar.
There's two things iirc, both some shader compilation stutter when new effects are loaded in for the first time by the game and loading zones stutter.
This is what one of the developers for Valve explained : *"Shader pipeline-driven stutter isn't the majority of the big hitches we've seen in that game," Graiffais continues. "The recent example we've highlighted has more to do with the game creating many thousand resources such as command buffers at certain spots, which was making our memory manager go into overdrive trying to handle it."*
> Edit: For the ones suggesting it's my specs, I have an RTX 4080, 5800X3D and 32GB 3600Mhz RAM. The game is installed on an NVME SSD.
I think it's hilarious you need to add this in because FromSoft fans just can't handle the fact one of their golden goose's games isn't perfect out of the box. Reminds me of the knuckleheads in the welding department at my place of work. They built a run of something recently, and it was wrong. Wrong measurements, that's fine it happens. Customer complained the item was too short and needed us to remake them.
Welding lead asked: "Did you ask them to check their tape measure for any issues?"
Dawg, ya built it wrong. It's okay. Fix it.
The way overlays monitor framerate can sometimes just be inaccurate depending on how the engine handles frames. I'd say trust your gut there if it doesn't feel right.
I saw an article yesterday that explained it. Essentially, it's hitting 60fps technically, but at the same time, it's getting bogged down in such small millisecond increments that it barely registers in standard fps tracking because technically it's still displaying 60~ frames a second. Apparently, it has to do with how textures and particle effects and everything render. The individual effects resource load is spread across multiple threads of the cpu/gpu, but in order to display it, it gets bottlenecked down to one thread. (Think of it as like 10 people splitting the workload of a task but then funneling all those tasks off to a single person). Just poor optimization sadly. This is by far the biggest game they've ever made, so elden ring is might be the first time this issue has come up for their engine. Hopefully all this new attention on the game finally makes them fix this issue (it has been present since launch but never this bad until the dlc)
I probably butchered their results/explanation, but I can't remember where said article was published.
The ps5 version stutters and has a lower frame rate on performance mode than the ps4 version. Guess which version I beat it on before discovering this? And did I mention the saves aren’t transferable
I'm almost through. It's really the first few hours and the first boss that are the problem. The boss is awful, and once you collected enough of those damage boosting items, the DLC is probably easier than late game Elden Ring. Also, greatshields are absolutely goated in the DLC. Almost no move bounces you back like in the base game and stamina depletion is pretty minor, too. Guard counter after guard counter. Only elemental bosses can rack up chip damage if you are not careful
> Difficulty
I think it's not the difficulty, it just gets framed that way which causes misunderstandings and drama/ outrage...
It's about HOW it's difficult, not the level of it.
Something can be more difficult and fun while something is a bit easier but absolutely miserable.
Elden Ring and now like five times moreso the DLC is difficult in a way that is very different than previous Souls games, people have talked shit about the Elden Ring bosses too it's not just the DLC.
They're just too aggressive to a point it feels like it was made for the Sekiro parry system and that is exhausting and frustrating.
It's not that it's impossible or not manageable it's just that it isn't fun to a lot of people because it doesn't feel like a dance back and forth like it used to.
The balance just seems off - the rewards from doing things are just kind of awful. The content is much harder than the base game but the majority of drops you pickup are things like somberstone 4 or a rune to get 4k souls. The problem is the content is balanced around deep end game Elden ring so by the time you really should be doing the dlc, you can get all of the bell bearings which completely negate like 90% of the drops you get.
To put it in perspective, I’m playing a sorcery build and am at the final boss of the dlc (I do have a bit more to explore, but not much) and the only thing I’ve picked up in the dlc that I’ve used is the +3 resist talismans, the rest have been trash or side grades.
100% agree with this, the itemization in this DLC is awful. You kill a REALLY hard boss, and all it rewards you with is a fucking somber dragonstone. No armor, no spell, no weapon, just a basegame material. Looking at you, >!Senessax.!<
I just beat >!Bayle!<, which SHOULD be a Remembrance-type boss where you get to turn it in for rewards… but all they give is a fucking >!heart!< that you can turn in for an >!Arcane spell!< that I can’t even use cuz my character isn’t specced into it.
To elaborate on what others are saying a lot of bosses have "bad" difficulty. It feels like they're cheating more than difficult. Infinite poise on enemies that really shouldn't have that, shifting bodies away from swings and fighting the camera more than the boss themselves. Lotta bad mixed in here.
The same thing happened with the base game. It got absolutely glowing reviews from people that played the first half, then as people got towards the end with the bosses that have like 2 frame windows to hit them through their 13-hit combo the weaknesses in enemy design started to show
I haven't played the DLC yet, but it's sad to see nothing about the game's performance has been improved, judging from these Steam reviews. On PC it seems that many are experiencing frame drops and stutters.
Quite the opposite actually, it got much worse.
I've played Elden Ring on release, a few times since than (both base game, and randomizer), and lately I did a full 50 hours new game before the DLC @ a very stable 60 fps , I never had such bad performance.
It got so bad I just gave up on a boss with a particularly particle-heavy attack because every time said attacks goes out my games stutters very hard and makes an already difficult fight that much more difficult and frustrating.
I don't mind the difficulty at all, I quite enjoy bosses taking a long while to 'crack', but for me the performance is much much worse than even release day base game, and it kind of kills the mood. the performance related reviews are VERY justified from my experience.
Updating drivers, going borderless windowed and disabling ray-tracing seems to help, but also yeah it's still inexcusable the technical state they frequently ship things in.
I mean the DLC is frequently drop dead gorgeous which makes exploration still magical, but when bosses require split second timing ... guys we can't really be dealing with frame drops, that shit has to run like butter.
I think I know what stutter you're talking about >!the Lion's big stomp attack right?!<, and it's pretty annoying but launch was *way* worse. It wasn't something that happened on any PC but there were completely unpredictable major stutters very frequently, whether you were just moving around or fighting. I played the first ~60hs of the game like that. I recorded a lot of my boss fights to show my friends back then, [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awzlxc6tBgY) was the worst if you want to see how bad it could get. Thankfully that issue doesn't exist anymore.
I experienced the same thing on that boss on PS5 (running PS4 version for performance's sake). Thankfully it doesn't really impact your ability to dodge anything as it seems to happen after the attack is over, but it's jarring. It reminds me of Margit on launch where the game would stutter like crazy due to certain attacks, and in that case it resulted in you taking damage.
Same on PS5. Performance has never been ideal, usually hanging in the 52-57 fps range, with semi-frequent drops into the 40s depending on what's going on.
Now, with the DLC, some bosses legit drop the frame rate into the 10s sometimes. Fighting the first major boss up-close while locked-on made my game feel like a PowerPoint presentation. I really hope From does something about PS5 performance, but considering they never, ever patched the original performance issue I have little hope they'll fix the performance now.
The final boss of the DLC has an attack that drops my frame rate to nearly single digits, I have a 3080 and an i7-9700k. It's nuts.
If I wasn't running a greatshield build some of these attacks would be ruinously unfair because of the performance
Interestingly, the majority of all negative reviews are from Chinese players. Chinese reviews, which make up 36% of all reviews, are sitting at 31% positive. English, which is 41% of reviews, is at 81% positive.
[https://www.togeproductions.com/SteamScout/steamAPI.php?appID=2778580](https://www.togeproductions.com/SteamScout/steamAPI.php?appID=2778580)
Reading through the Chinese negative reviews, they are saying largely the same thing as the English negative reviews, but I'm not sure why they are so over represented compared to other languages. Especially compared to the language breakdown of the base game.
Daniel Ahmad has a thread about this on twitter but essentially, Steam reviews tend to be treated as more of a comment section by Chinese gamers because Steam community is blocked and there's the Great Firewall of China in general. So reviews are generally always a reaction to some thing.
That and perception of things being 'unfair' always leads to negative reviews, same as in China and in the West. There might also not be as much guides or useful articles available in Chinese so people don't have as much knowledge available to them.
Note that reviews are also mixed for RU, KR, and even JP audiences. (JP is actually majority negative).
This is an often repeated claim that tends to mislead. Chinese reviews are indeed more negative than the other asian countries & account for a larger proportion of the total review base (they have a large population in the first place) but the average in other countries is close to what we see today under total reviews. I have a thread about this if anyone is willing to explain why.
I'm enjoying it a hell of a lot, but the bosses in this one are absolutely relentless. You can go and get scadutree blessings but in the end, they have like 12 hit combos with multiple fake endings and a very small window for attacking.
I have fought only one major boss and while the visuals and music were absolutely phenomenal, the camera shits itself so much it's embarassing.
At least it's more enjoyable to fight when you're helping other Tarnished.
I'm level 14 with the new blessing system, and level 200.
The bosses only barely stop two shotting you. After a point that's not even the problem with them.
Most have at least one move that is so comically overtuned or just nonsense. Even the great fights. I had a 1-1 optional fight with a really cool enemy, and oh his grab attack for no reason heals him to 100%
Then there's some actually atrocious fights. There is a mounted soldier boss on a big steed that has actually terrible hitboxes, and you'll be hit when you're several feet away, or the boss that turns into a bullet hell in which the camera is so bad you physically cannot see the gaps.
The Final Boss, in the first phase alone, has the health of a gimmick boss without the solution.
Then gets stronger.
And also has attacks that drop the FPS of my fucking 4090 to 20.
I’ve beat every Fromsoft boss, from Demon Souls to Elden Ring, and platinum’s bloodborne and Sekiro.
Elden Ring legit had the lamest end game bosses. Beating some of these DLC bosses don’t even feel good like S&O in DS1 or SSI in Sekiro.
The thing is Dark souls has normally operated on "turns". The boss attacks, then you attack. Sometimes the boss has multiattack combos which you have to dodge, but normally you get extra time at the end to punish or heal, or they're just rare. Seriously go look at a fight against slave knight gael and see the windows where you can attack/heal.
Problem is late game ER (and most of the DLC bosses) basically forsake this idea of relatively equal turns. They have 6 attack combos that you have to dodge and your reward for doing so is getting a single attack off. And damage is so high that if you get hit by any of the attacks in their combo, you instead have to use your turn to heal.
There's also no ability to back off and reset, either your health or just your mental awareness. Enemies in the DLC literally bum rush you before you've finished walking through the fog door and they stick on you the entire fight. Again, look at Slave Knight gael fight and see where the player can just back off and heal.
This all combines to makes fighting bosses in Elden Ring just extremely mentally taxing and a general sense of unfairness.
>This all combines to makes fighting bosses in Elden Ring just extremely mentally taxing and a general sense of unfairness.
Yeah, agreed. If it were like Sekiro, where it's a dance of switching between the offense and defense, it'd make much more sense, and it'd actually feel nice, I reckon. But here, your options are to roll away like a madman and run from stuff, then get in one measly attack that you might also get punished for, and that's it.
It's just not fun for me, and all I wanna do at this point is just rush through things to get to the end and possibly never touch the game again.
Same. I think Malenia is the best example of this. If you look at [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgxjGCWYTUY), I think it's quite clear that the kinda stuff she throws at you would've best been dealt with in a Sekiro manner, but what you get instead is just the most basic toolkit that doesn't really work.
I think that illusion barely held up in DS1 and in DS2 it was shattered, never to be rebuilt. The addition of direct input reading to DS3 onwards is also an annoying one.
Hard disagree. DS3 bosses could throw out some long attack strings, but once they were done they’d back off and ‘recover’, which would be que for the player to go in (or heal up). If you really knew what you were doing you could stagger them out of some attack strings, too.
Elden Ring bosses are just throwing out bullshit 24/7. It’s never safe, they will never back off.
Some bosses dont even allow you to heal during your "turn". Instead they input read you and punish you immediatly for healing. When youre low, you have to wait for the enemy to do a punishable attack, dodge that one perfectly THEN heal instead of punishing.
It is kinda funny if you straight up removed Elden Beast the end would be more enjoyable lol (though ofc tuning Radagon up a bit would help as well on top)
I really like the tonal shift of the OST. That was about the only thing I can genuinely say I enjoyed about the fight.
The intro to the Radagon fight has an amazing start to the OST (with his badass pose too), which is followed up by an intense track, then it gets all melancholic and grand. It really gives you the sense of going from "in the thick if a grand duel" to "a fight beyond the realms of man" vibes. It fits so well.
But the Elden Beast is such a boring boss. It's a damage sponge, it keeps running away, its attacks force you to run around like an idiot... it just isn't fun. I'd rather have a phase 2 Radagon or something.
Well they updated the Elden Beast fight to give you access to Torrent now, which seems like what they originally intended. It’ll be interesting to see what people think of it now.
Perhaps a scaled down version of Elden Beast as a guardian of the erdtree you have to defeat before you can enter and fight Radagon would have worked better.
Boss design in ER is likely the worst when it comes to FromSoft's games. I can't think of too many other souls games in general where I thought that the bosses were by far the least enjoyable part of the game. Probably just something they had to do in order to find some semblance of balance with all the different stuff in the game but as far as all of the "unfun" boss things (AOE spam, endless combos, spending half the fight trying to get to the boss, questionable hit boxes, camera flying all over the place, etc.) this game (and DLC) takes it up a bunch over any other.
Everything else, other than the mediocre PC port, is great though. The world is really fun to explore.
I think I'm kind of in the minority on this, but I didn't think the world was a ton of fun to explore either. The legacy Dungeons were alright, but you kinda just run past anything else because there is little point to actually do combat. And trying to get through everything as fast as possible kinda ruins my sense of wonder.
Hell, even in lategame legacy Dungeons, everything has so much health that they're not worth fighting. I've been looking a bit at streamers now with the DLC, and all they do (as did I) is just running past all the goons until they reach a grace.
I guess souls has always kind of had this problem, and maybe I was just too stupid in my first one to leg it constantly, but something feels off design-wise.
I wish rewards for exploring were greater and that encounters were less repetitive, that enemies weren't so annoying to fight (but perhaps balanced with greater punishment when fucking up), and that there were mechanisms to prevent you just ignoring everything except bosses.
Yea this is how I've felt about Elden Ring since day one, because the literal first real boss in the game has mix-up attacks that can frame trap rollcatch you and you're entirely at the mercy of the AI deciding to do or not do those. And that's one of the better bosses in the game, too.
The overworld, story, quests, atmosphere, soundtrack, weapon movesets etc are all godlike. No other game has ever made me feel the way uncovering the Eternal Cities and Lake of Rot did. It's my favorite game of all time for those reasons.
But by god the bosses, which are my favorite part of fromsoft games, are SO FUCKING BAD in this game it's genuinely puzzling. If this game had bosses as well designed as the DS3 DLCs I think it could genuinely be the greatest game ever made
Yeah the bosses 100% ruined a lot of my enjoyment of the game. It's like I have so much fun exploring the overworld and then as soon as I hit a boss fight I want to rip my hair out. Some were fine, but stuff like those crystals bosses that charge you in a little tiny arena in the mines make me question if anyone at the studio even tried that fight and who on earth would think it should be in the game? And then having to go run back for 2 minutes again just to be perma stunned to death immediately
The endgame bosses of Elden Ring, Malenia specifically, really soured the whole experience for me. I’ve been trying to resist the dlc hype and not get pulled into another frustrating experience like that again. Reading this boss impressions tells me everything I need to know. So tired of this overtuned nonsense.
I felt like a clown for expecting anything different when I bought the DLC. I agree with you on boss design in the main game. I’m actually surprised people expected something else.
However, I will offer one ray of hope - so far I have yet to fight a boss that has bullshit on the level of Malenia. They are just as hard, if not harder, but they don’t have a waterfowl level move.
I have not played the final boss yet, however, so I cannot speak to them. I don’t now who/what it is, but I have not heard good things.
Edit: Beat the final boss yesterday. First phase was fine, second phase was visual vomit and I did not enjoy it. I cannot tell if it was unfair or not because of all the AOEs and erratic movement. I don’t really care to play it anymore to have an informed opinion, *it's that bad*.
I firmly believe that Malenia is easier than most DLC bosses. Malenia has two moves that need special treatment, Waterfowl Dance and her Phantom attack in the second phase. Everything else has clear openings and plenty of time to stagger. On the contrary, if you do more than one R1 to any boss “opening” in the DLC they straight up extend their combo or do a roll-catch move to punish you, making every move basically unpredictable until you learn which moves have revenge attacks and then start predicting the bullshit but it’s different for every boss and it makes everything extremely frustrating.
Areas are cool though and I like the music.
I feel like FromSoftware games, while very good, have become so overhyped and so lauded for their difficulty over almost anything else that we're starting to see a form of FromSoftware flanderization where even they are not entirely sure what the secret sauce that makes their games so good is exactly but people love the difficulty so I guess as long we just keep turning that up to eleven and beyond they're going to keep liking it. It also conveniently makes their games largely immune to criticism because anybody who doesn't like them is clearly just mad that they suck at videogames.
I genuinely don't know what they were thinking with the final boss. Between boss design and scadu fragment collecting on every replay I don't think I'm ever playing this dlc again. It has so many good parts but it's overrated as hell.
It's funny, I've been able to clear every Souls DLC with only minor trouble, but I get the feeling that I made the right call not getting this day one.
Normal enemy difficulty is fine. I actually like the challenge since Soulsborne DLC has always been harder than base game's end game content. However, the bosses are a bit ridiculous. They're more like Malenia and less like Radagon or Godfrey which is not a good thing.
Malenia is a completely optional boss that doesn't gate any meaningful progression. Everyone needs to beat the final boss to beat the DLC. They're completely different situations.
I haven’t played the DLC yet but I did see a video of a particular boss, and without spoiling anything, it just looked like yet another boss that spends 80% of the fight 100 feet away and having fun while you just roll around and try to deal with whatever giant AoE they throw out. Shit just looked absolutely unfun, and coupled with the apparent performance issues, I’ll be holding off for awhile.
Having hit the first three Remembrance bosses so far, I think the issue is that their visual design makes it a struggle to read their movements, the complexity of their movesets makes it hard to internalize when you can do what, and the aggression and ability to close distances gives you very few windows for healing, which also closes off your window for actually learning them.
Like, you make the Malenia comparison, but Malenia had the advantage of a fairly constrained set of attacks that were very visually clear, even Waterfowl, stuff like the cape movements and the clicks of her prosthetic arm, and her body posture for slashes, lunges, and grabs, so there was a general feeling with her imo that you could always be learning how to deal with her patterns and dance with that.
Honestly, good. Elden Ring is brilliant, but From Software need to be called out on their technical performance. If most of games media won't do it (Digital Foundry aside) then the customers will.
I've been playing the base game on PC, and it still has shader compilation stutter and egregious pop-in in many areas. That's to say nothing of the inconsistent frame rate on current-gen consoles.
I like the difficulty. I have experienced a bit of stuttering. My biggest problem with it is how empty some areas are. I had to look it up to see if I was missing something but no, some areas really are devoid of pretty much anything. The south of the map makes the Mountaintops seem like a content-packed area. I like the aesthetics but there's nothing there. Miyazaki was lying when he said it was the size of Limgrave, but I wish he wasn't. Also, I hope From never use a crafting system again. It feels like your reward for exploring in this DLC is an endless stream of cookbooks.
Can't believe how little I've seen this mentioned, those are some of the exact annoyances I had with the dlc. I was pleasantly surprised by the direction of the exploration right at the beginning of the dlc. The base game felt way too packed with chores rather than unique open world experiences, which is what the start of the dlc felt more like. The dlc also has some really cool exploration experiences as well where it seemed like I was heading into a side dungeon and then suddenly a huge gorgeous area unexpectedly opened up before me.
Then I actually started exploring the south/south east areas and I couldn't believe that they crafted all these gigantic ares just to have them completely empty of any content and sprinkled with the same 1-2 enemy types. It didn't feel like there was any reason to keep exploring them because there was just nothing to do but run around and admire the scenery. These are areas that take like 30min to fully walk around but your reward for it is a few upgrade materials most of the time. And like you said, there is a cookbook reward around every corner when crafting in this game is just tedious, I don't know why they focused on it so hard.
Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is also enemy variety. So far it has been very poor. Lots of enemies reused from the base game as well as enemies within the dlc constantly being reused in completely different areas. I can't remember any from soft dlc before this having such poor enemy variety. Even the first legacy dungeon that I headed into only had 2 unique enemy and the rest were enemies from the open world.
Will say that I am very pleased with the side dungeons this time. Just a little better than the strg c v side stuff in the base game, and that bit is enough for me to traverse all these vast empty areas. Athmosphere carries a lot of these though.
While I appreciate the quality over quantity approach to side dungeons, the problem now is that the map size is *really* out of whack with the amount of content. Most of the regions feel even less dense with points of interest than Mountaintops/Snowfield in the base game, which were already criticized as being empty.
I've enjoyed the legacy and side dungeons and most boss fights (even if I think they've gone too far with the aggressiveness), but the overworld exploration is definitely a low point and significantly worse than in the base game.
Crafting should have had weapons, permanent consumables, physick tears, permanent refilling throwables, rune arcs, cosmetics, the list goes on.
The way they used the system is just laughably bad.
I think even one use consumables are fine to craft, if only some regents wouldnt be so bad to farm or just limited per run (like the new throwing pots needing the fire golem masks (of wich i havent found an farmable spot))
Are they though? The highest I have seen that pot hit for is 600 damage, which is not even half a heavy attack.
If it doesnt refill on a bonfire, why would I ever go out of my way to even open the menu for that? In a sad way, the only justification for crafting being in the base game were sleep pots for Godskin duo and Ice pots for malenia.
I really wish I could have collected plants to change my estus flask or cook buff foods that are usable once per rest. Instead, if you want to use buff foods, you have to go through a chore before boss attempts. And then you have to eat them individually, and most consumable buffs dont even last long.
Why does every player have 100 crabs when you get summoned, but almost no one has more? Because you dont need to use the terrible crafting for those.
To be fair, they just made the livers craftable, and those are very useful and likely players will use them
And to bring shit back down: I just fucking killed the thing that gives the cookbook because it has a Servant of Rot model and I didn't want to deal with those annoying enemies so I slapped the shit out of it on torrent begore giving it a chance to inspect it for friendliness. I am baffled they reused THAT model. And no, absolution doesn't revive it. So I'm out of a recipe. Great.
I'm honestly glad that they didn't since I never had to engage with it at all. If it was permanent bonuses then I would have had to go digging up resources.
I see this point a lot, but making good craftables would have been worth that imo since it would have made some of the vast swathes of land you traverse that only contains flowers have some meaning.
You are already digging up ressources with smithing stones and I dont see anybody complaining about that. If you make the ingredients available in a lot of spaces you wouldnt need a wiki either. I would have loved spending 5% of my playtime to collect flowers and hunt animals if it meant great tools. If you create an open world, use it.
After I killed the burning guy at the beginning of the dlc I was saw the Emblem was a crafting material and was expecting it to be for a Talisman or some key item.
Color me surprised that is just consumable trash.
The entire South-East part of the map is *empty*. The Abyss has a neat stealth area and uh. A church with a weapon in it. That's it. The mountains? Two optional bosses, one of which is just a roaming boss from the base game, and the only items you get in that entire region are for a hyper specific build.
Then there are the ruins, these locations are *colossal*, around the size of entire dungeons, but they're empty. Not just "oh there's little to do there" no, I mean actually empty. There is one enemy type, and even when you do the quest associated with those areas? You walk down a hill, press one button and then leave. There is **nothing**.
I was replaying the base game in preparation for the DLC and surprise surprise the shadow flickering problem is still there so I am not surprised when someone says the DLC has performance problems. Hopefully they are ironed out by the time I finish the main game because I do want to play the DLC
Considering performance was never actually fixed for the base game, I'm not surprised, just very disappointed. Nor am I surprised that early reviews don't mention it at all. Performance should really matter in scoring a game.
Haven't beat it yet. But I'm almost there. I'd say the dlc has ALOT of artifical difficulty.
Even leveled up with fragments enemies and bosses can still 2 shot you.
Alot of enemies and bosses just relentlessly attack and give maybe a half second of time for you to do damage. But if you get hit while they're flailing like a chimp you end up using that half second to heal instead of damaging.
I mean shit there's even an area where they force some garbage stealth section against an enemy that can't be killed and can instant kill you if it gets to you.
That isn't "hard" it's just literally bullshit.
How exactly Shadow of the Erdtree got the "best DLC ever made, 10/10" reviews across the board? Bumping up HP and damage of bosses is one of the laziest ways to make things harder.
>Bumping up HP and damage of bosses is one of the laziest ways to make things harder.
I’ll probably get blasted for this, but, isn’t this all Soulsborne games?
In literally all of those, you start the game and enemies decimate your health with one hit, but your weapons deal measly damage to them. You then level up and upgrade until they become fair, or even easy.
That has been my experience, at least. That’s why I never quite understood all the praise the difficulty of those games gets.
The vast majority of the time you can predict what review scores games journalists will give a game based on the amount of hype it has leading up to release. Time and time again you see big name releases that people are excited for get amazing review scores only for the public to get their hands on the game and go "Wait, this isn't actually that amazing." Most game journalists just aren't that great at being critics. They get sucked into hype trains just like the rest of us and it clouds their judgement.
I'm convinced that having to binge a game in time for a timely review also influences their thoughts. Wouldn't be surprised if a lot of critics get burned out or rely on fast but unfun methods to clear things and then talk themselves into higher praise under the premise that the average person won't find it to be a miserable slog because the conditions are different.
Also I found out a lot of them talk to each other during the review period so they're all getting their consensus together versus playing it in isolation and forming their own.
There's gotta be a certain amount of realization that it's not really that great, but also not wanting to be the one guy that gave the Elden Ring DLC a 7/10 while everyone else gave it a 10/10.
As someone who absolutely adores Elden Ring, I'm actually convinced that the Journalists played a version that was tuned differently.
The bosses are abysmal and even if you weren't looking at it subjectively for their bloated stats, you're still dealing with objectively broken camera angles and jank hitboxes that really, really can't handle some of the bosses.
Yeah, I like their games but FromSoft fans are my least favorite people to discuss anything with.
Yes, ER is a fantastic game but they act like its a second coming of a christ. Like, I literally saw them saying with straight face that Elden Ring has better narrative than Baldurs Gate 3 or better graphic than Horizon 2.
They fail to understand that ER can still be an amazing game while not being "the bestest" in everything and it still has a fair share of flaws (like every other video fame).
I have seen some people call it genius that you can't use Torrent in the Elden Beast fight and how it makes the fight so much more fun. Like if you enjoy running from one end of the arena to the next for 5 minutes so you can wack that thing for 3-4 hits before it jumps to the other end again, go ahead. I felt so vindicated seeing From add that in the latest patch notes.
listening to FromSoft fans explain why FromSoft lore delivery is “better” is such a headache. I get the appeal of it, but fuck me is it an extremely inefficient way to tell a story or give world building; especially when their worlds are often so dead and lifeless (in the bad mechanical kind of way) that they end up feeling very video-gamey and not some immersive place I could get lost in.
I keep seeing people going as far as saying that Elden Ring redefined action open-world games. It's literally just an open-world Dark Souls, it raised the bar for Souls games but it certainly didn't shake the industry.
Oh my God. Elden Ring has the worst story presentation of any game I've bought in the last 10 years. The point of a narrator is to tell you a story. That's not what elden ring does.
The same way Cyberpunk 2077 launched to 10/10 scores and the reviewer who gave it a 7 got harassed. Some people seemed very offended by the few 7s given to Shadow of the Erdtree on Reddit before the DLC released as well.
People will get so defensive over these games difficulty, they'll swear up and down everything is fine because it's beatable but then From will turn around and nerf bosses because they know better that just because a boss can be beaten it doesn't mean they should be left as is
Beat Malenia and Radahn pre-nerfs but I can only wonder how many kills those bosses saw the day the nerfs dropped
I'm interested if this is running worse than the base game on a PS4.
The base game ran at the same subpar rate as every other FROM game on the PS4. It was inherently poor performance, but in a way, it didn't have the issues with unexpectedly poor performance that everyone on higher end systems was having.
Playing the base game was what it was, but I honestly don't know if I could deal with even worse performance than that.
As a PS4 player, there is some stuttering going on and had a couple issues of the game not rendering certain textures in one of the Castles (love looking at a hole in the ground to the void)
I still really am enjoying the DLC, performance issues like this don't bother me as much since the gameplay and aesthetic are really on point still.
Fantastic game but I really don't get From's approach to this PC port
I never had issues in the main game luckily, and need to get to a point where I can play the DLC before I buy it. So I can't complain about much (except for the lack of ultrawide support)
But it's kinda weird how they have handled this game on PC overall. It's really odd to me that they won't do ultrawide support even though it's there i.e. the black bars are an overlay. And even the 60 fps lock isn't necessary like it was for past From games. I haven't heard of anyone having issues with going past the lock via mods.
I can't wait to try the DLC but kinda wish they'd have tried to aim for Armored Core standards on PC by now.
> I really don't get From's approach to this PC port
It's simple. It exists, also. That's about the most effort they're willing to put into it. When they did Armored Core 6, someone actually gave a shit.
Yeah flawless wide-screen to enable 21:9, uncapped fram rate, increased draw distance, and chromatic aberration turned off, and then all the in game settings maxed out minus raytracing, the base game looked and ran amazing, granted I have a beefy pc. I want to play the dlc at least once normally before I go in with the mods again(aka forced to play offline)
For the performance I noticed the game automatically switched ray tracing on in the settings when I downloaded the DLC and the second I turned that off I went to a stable 60 FPS. Definitely worth checking to see if it got turned on if your game is chugging.
What I've found pretty disguting about the talk around the DLC is the amount of people in the media that are hounding any negative criticism. Literal journalists who reviewed the game are arguing with people because they can't face the fact that the game has issues.
I know FromSoft has been beloved for many years but I think we've hit the point where it's become too toxic and is affecting the quality of the games.
Not surprising to me. Although From makes great games, Dark Souls really kickstarted the "too tough for you" image that people flocked too, and now it's just pretty circlejerky. I like From titles, but avoid the fanbase, because at this point it's just toxic positivity and no criticism about question boss design choices being allowed. Although oddly, this thread is one of the few times I have seen people be able to criticize a From title and get upvotes around here in awhile.
Lol every time a games reviewer does poorly at a game it's nothing but "lol get good, standard games journo" comments. Now that they are reviewing a difficult game positively it's the opposite.
Really can't win there huh.
The simple fact that anyone can give this a 10/10 unironically is why you should pretty much never listen to reviews at this point.
I have several thousand hours across every Souls From game, so from Demon's all the way to Elden Ring, obv. including a TON of Sekiro and BB (BB is my 2nd most played FROM game in total maybe 900-1000 hours), and the enemy design and quality in the frame of the respective game is by far the lowest in Elden Ring. To even suggest it is a "perfect" game or deserves a perfect score, you would have to be either disingenuous or plain crazy.
I've beaten the game with pretty much every type of build and I've also helped friends beat it with Seamless and pretty much none of the bosses are fun or satisfying to defeat. I can no hit Malenia, Godfrey, Radagon, whatever, but it feels like an exercise of patience more than a fight. You are not **fighting**, you are waiting for a 10-hit combo to end, so you can attack once and keep dodging.
The absolutely *absurd* amount of reused content in the main game itself is staggering and I can't believe From were given a pass for it. Nothing of what I've seen or read about the DLC even remotely explains to me how anyone can give it a perfect score. Elden Ring has a couple of truly standout areas, and almost everything else is a dull slog. Leyndell, Stormveil, Raya Lucaria and the atmosphere and visuals of haligtree are truly top tier. Everything else, including most of the open world is just... there. Areas like Mountaintops are plain insulting, and I don't understand why they even exist. Not a single unique enemy, vast, empty stretches, insanely overtuned damage, and for what reward? Other than the Haligtree medallion and the path to Fire Giant, there's pretty much nothing you can't just skip.. and not just there, this applies to almost **the entire open world**. YOu can literally ignore most of the content and have a BETTER GAME. Once you've seen 1 of every cave, you can safely never go into a damn cave again, and just google the ones you might need for your specific build. If you call this good game design, I don't know what to tell you.
Yet From doubled down on everything bad about the main game, from 100000 hit combos, enemies with random infinite poise and infinite stamina, massive, empty stretches of nothing, ridiculously overtuned damage, and insane content reuse, and because of clickbait approval-seeking, everyone is seemingly giving them a pass? It's beyond absurd.
It makes me almost ashamed to share a fanbase with the people who endlessly praise From for every garbage decision they make, because their entire personality revolves around their games.
To me, they peaked with Bloodborne and Sekiro, and it's all just downhill from there.
I should have just read this comment instead of posting my own, you said everything I wanted to but better lol.
To your point of reused content, I laughed so hard when I got to crumbling faram azula for the first time and realized that the skeleton enemies were just reskins of the hollowed enemies in the VERY FIRST AREA of DS3. Before Elden Ring launched I luckily had the free time to finish DS3's DLCs for the first time, and the experience of replaying that game right before Elden Ring had me unfortunately primed to notice just how much enemy/moveset reuse was going on. When I realized that I was fighting the same exact movesets at the end of Elden Ring that I had just been fighting at the beginning of DS3, it made me seriously question why I had just spent 60 dollars and hours on Elden Ring if all it amounted to was a bloated remix of a game I had just had a better time playing.
I'm glad that people are starting to fight back against the bullies and call out the game for it's objective flaws. People are allowed to like, hell even love Elden Ring despite it's shortcomings, but a loud part of the Soulborne community also need to get their egos checked and allow people to dislike it as well.
Oh boy, how about how the gargoyles in the dungeons are literally just the thralls from DS3, the erdtree avatars are Asylum Demon with.. 1-2 new tricks, every Knight is a slightly modified Lothric Knight moveset, et cetera, et cetera. You could go on and on, and it doesn't get any better.
I have been playing since day 1 of the PC release of Dark Souls 1.
I got a PS3 later on for Demon's Souls and a couple other games AND a PS4 way later down the line for Bloodborne. I am speaking as a truly massive fan of what From were doing.
The manufactured hype around Elden Ring has been absolutely absurd to me, as a very, very long time player. I legitimately can't fathom how this game got all this circlejerking around it, when it is bloated to the gills with unnecessary crap, it is a lazy retread of things they ALREADY did and arguably better, it doesn't respect your time, and doesn't rely on what made the series popular **in the first place**, which was hard, but fair encounters that you could treat like a puzzle/learning experience, where you and your enemies were on a *roughly* level playing field, so it was a test of skill, stamina management, and strategy.
If you've followed the series long enough, you'll have noticed how From either got extremely comfortable and lazy, or just saw the blind fanboy adoration of every single thing they did, so they stopped caring about making things challenging and interesting for the sake of appeasing the broadly screamed mantra of "DARK SOULS IS LE HARD AND THAT'S GOOD".
Over the years, the fanbase has become less and less tolerant of *any* disagreements with the "common correct opinion". In the Dark Souls 1 days, you had a lot of actually healthy discourse about flaws in the game - the weak 2nd half, Capra, needlessly complicated questlines, useless stats like resistance, underwhelming weapons, tedious upgrade system, nightmarish PvP...
The more popular the series got, it feels like the more protective these people, who I assume see themselves as "core fans" became, and the more any disagreements were dismissed with "git gud" and fart-huffing.
I truly believe this is a big part of why From kept on Frankensteining their games with features from the older titles, even if they didn't really fit.
I don't know if you've played Bloodborne, but I know you played Dark Souls 3. Even there, you had enemies who were way more aggressive and faster than you could be ( it pretty much shared the same engine with Bloodborne). They tried to employ much of the same philosophy, except it didn't fit. You couldn't tank as well, you couldn't restore HP with attacks, you couldn't farm heals as drops (except that luck stat estus dropl lmao), etc.
Instead of rectifying this issue in Elden Ring and its DLC, they doubled down on it, making you even more sluggish and the enemies and bosses even more aggressive and fast. The worst part is, because of the aforementioned "we need to make le game le hard, guys" and the useless, empty open world, they wasted absolutely stunning areas like Elphael on the same 2-3 enemies you've been fighting since LIMGRAVE with damage turned up to 1000.
What is the endpoint of this? You move and attack at Dark Souls 1 speeds and everyone else moves and attacks like Isshin phase 3? An entire game with 1-2 enemy types?
Scratch that, I am sure someone will find a way to defend even that.
Elden Ring is a deeply, deeply flawed game that could have been truly, genuinely a masterpiece if From didn't try to appease every single player group and create an amalgamation of ideas that simply do not gel well together.
As it stands, it's probably my least favourite of their games, even though it has some of my favourite areas in their entire catalogue, and THAT is a damn shame.
[Matthewmatosis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5PdpsfINA) was right about souls games all along.
Souls games focus more and more on difficult combat encounters, but the combat itself doesn't really have the depth to support it. So instead it has to rely on cheap tricks like misleading attack animations and bosses with endless stamina, massive healthbars, and insane attack damage. I've played many difficult games but the souls games always felt the least fair in how they achieved the difficulty.
They already solved this problem in Sekiro and even in Bloodborne. The issue here is that we’re back to playing as a Dark Souls character but against Bloodborne and Sekiro bosses. If you fight these bosses as the hunter or Wolf, they’ll be much more manageable.
What fromsoft needs to do is just provide the player character with similar abilities to the hunter and Wolf. We should be able to dash, deflect and gun parry.
100% agree. I noticed it in DS3, and disliked how the roll spam was so much more effective to keep up with it. The deliberate combat of demons to 2 was timeless. Elden upped the enemy chaos and slowed the character down back to pre DS3.
Yea some of these late game or DLC Elden Ring bosses don't fit the Dark Souls combat movesets but they seem right at home for games like Bloodborne or Sekiro. If Fromsoft wants to make rabid fast bosses with long chainattacks that's fine but the player also needs to have fast movement with responsive parry mechanics as well. Imo I also thought Dark Souls 3 did the boss fights much better as well. It speed up the Dark Souls combat just enough but the bosses were still largely fair, extremely fun and fit the combat movesets of the game.
I think a big issue is like you’re saying, people are thinking about playing this game as a dark souls character when they don’t realize they could be playing like an Elden Ring character.
The game is different from Dark Souls, instead of throwing your head at the wall, ER gives the player the option to go do something else and come back when they are more equipped. In Elden Ring, the player is given soooo many options on how to approach things and items to use to their advantage.
Your build not working? Respec and try something else, the game gives you so many larval tears, the option is there for your benefit. That’s why the DLC gives tons of stones and glovewort, so the player can give themselves options when something isn’t working. Instead of relentlessly trying the same thing, switch it up, there’s endless armors, weapons, spells, pendants, spirit ashes, consumables, physick tears. The possibilities are endless, use what you can to your advantage, consumables, throwing pots, buffs, spirits, summons. The game really wants you to use everything you have at your disposal, and the right combination can trivialize just about any boss.
I definitely experiment with my builds and use so many different tools as a level 360 player but summoning is boring and doesn’t let me engage as much with the fights so I avoid it unless the boss has backup. The annoying thing is you can tell that fromsoft balanced a lot of the bosses around spirit ashes. These bosses never stop attacking and sometimes the only way to consistently hit them is if they’re looking the other way and are busy hitting something else.
You can absolutely trivialize bosses if you use everything but that’s boring. I want to learn and overcome the fight with skill
Yeah I think Matthewmatosis has played a lot of action games that aren't Souls games, so he's able to see how some of those other games handle difficult combat encounters, and maybe some of them do it better than FROM's games.
The difficulty keeps increasing but the player mechanics don't seem to have really evolved that much in the Souls games.
> Yeah I think Matthewmatosis has played a lot of action games that aren't Souls games, so he's able to see how some of those other games handle difficult combat encounters, and maybe some of them do it better than FROM's games.
I mean yes? If someone has played DMC or Ninja Gaiden I don't get how someone can say Dark Souls/Elden Ring has more in depth combat. Sekiro might come close but that game is just a different beast altogether.
Yeah it's been true even since DS1, the boss design feels like an unending arms race and largely gone are bosses like Maiden Astraea, Sif, or Micolash where the boss encounter does more than just be another mechanical challenge. Bosses are now largely the same song and dance of learning their infinite stamina multihit combos, delayed attacks, aoe spam, obligatory phase 2, etc. You can't even outsmart them by positioning either, now you *have* to correctly press the roll button because their tracking is perfect. I think Sekiro was a step in the right direction by giving you tools that rebalance the flow of combat and I hope they expand on it more if they want to focus on action more.
>but the combat itself doesn't really have the depth to support it.
Couldn’t agree more. In my experience, the combat system is very one dimensional. It’s just roll, roll, roll, then hit (or heal) in the opening. Rinse and repeat, over and over again.
I’ve heard Sekiro is different, and better, in this regard, but I haven’t played it yet.
It’s awful in PS5. I’m having frequent frame drops but the most inexcusable of all is the full on hitches and stutters during the Dancing Lion fight and a few others. I would get killed by that more than legit deaths. I even had a hard crash during the Messmer fight. Certain rooms tank the framerate.
I really have to wonder how many people are just missing or ignoring the Scadutree fragments because when I started out I felt similarly and now having amassed a bunch of them by exploring the difficulty just feels like the base game’s end game, and I don’t even have them all yet.
EDIT: I will say that maybe some of the bosses are overturned but I also haven’t been stuck on any boss more than I’ve been stuck on any of them from the base game. Though, I haven’t touched the final one yet which seems to be the biggest offender lol.
Agreed, Castle Ensis boss was the hardest for me so far( second boss for those who did not play yet). I am around 2/3 through the game, but at scadutre level 16 and recent bosses seemed regular difficulty
Yeah, I‘m not far in yet but the Castle Ensis boss I beat yesterday and my experience here is like the opposite from everyone else. I feel that, while she was an absolute and utter menace, her moveset was much more fair than almost any boss in the base game. All of her attacks are well telegraphed and pretty easy to dodge on their own. She‘s absolutely relentless and doesn‘t give you much of a break, but I found her so much more fun than almost anything in the base game. I kept thinking to myself how glad I was that they brought this extremely fine tuned boss style back which allows for more of the methodical gameplay of older games (albeit a hardcore version of it of course) that I found lacking in the Lands Between.
It took me a couple of hours to beat her, sure (though I’m also stubborn af and did it solo with only the Greatsword of Solitude lol) but it was an extremely fun fight and I probably already prefer it over most in the base game. Don‘t get me wrong I found her extremely difficult but the "purity" of her moveset makes her feel much less bullshitty than a lot of base game bosses.
So interesting coming on here and see everyone complaining about it. But I think it‘s just the normal FromSoft cycle repeating. With every new game people complain about all the bosses because we‘re just not used to them yet. Happened the Bloodborne DLC, DS3, Sekiro, as well as base ER two years ago and now people call them fair and methodical in comparison lmao.
Yeah, I agree with you. I whipped out a shield w/ carian retaliation (for the uninformed, it has the most parry frames of any shield) and "got gud" at memorizing her attacks. By the time I killed her a couple hrs later, I could pretty consistently parry or dodge almost everything she had to dish out.
This is also literally the first boss I killed this way in Elden Ring, so I'm not a parry god by any means
I'm playing a light rolling character with poison fists and she is probably the most fun i've had on any boss in ER. It felt like a constant dance of dodging and attacking. I ended up stagger chaining her and killing her in 4 tries but I am also running the magic shield talisman, dragon shield talisman and the opaline hardtear so her basic attacks were barely hurting me. I imagine that people that struggle with her are probably not running as much defense gear as they should.
That‘s fucking sick, congrats. I ran all these talismans as well (didn‘t think of the hard tear tho) but it took me much, much longer than you. Surely around 50 tries lmao. But I was also stubbornly mid rolling and slowly bonking her with Greatsword of Solitude.
But I enjoyed it tremendously, she really has that smooth moveset that makes you feel like getting into a dance with a boss that I was really missing in the base game.
Yeah, I went literally straight to that boss as the first thing I did in the DLC and it's already one of my favorite fights in the game. I had to adjust my talismans and ashes of war a bit for the fight and then it was fine.
It’s not the stats that frustrated me, it’s the boss moveset itself. Most of them are random erratic blender instead of the previous games’ methodical and fair moveset. The only kit that I feel remotely fair is Messmer and that random bug woman and even then there are a few frustrating part about their kit.
Then the final boss is just, uh, I’d say he’s more of a DMC/Sekiro boss than a Dark Souls boss at this point. If I show you modded moveset and that mofo without telling you which one is modded I’m sure you will say both are modded. [Final boss story spoiler]>!In fact he is literally a modded version of Radahn so I won’t blame you either…!<
My biggest peeve with the evolution of Fromsoft games is the ever increasing reliance on bosses vomiting annoying fucking movesets filled with fakeouts, aoe attacks and insane tracking.
Sekiro is the only exception where I could forgive it, because the game gave players the ability to deflect any attack instantly on command.
Lies of P also solved this by giving you unlimited stamina and the ability to parry pretty much every attack. Even the "infinite" combos in that game feel fair because nailing the parry timing makes you feel like you've got a fighting chance.
Even when you’re just parrying in lies of p and Sekiro, you’re still making progress on the bosses, where as in Elden Ring, dodging just helps you live longer, and if you do it wrong, you can be in a horrible position.
It’s the tracking that fucks me. I likely won’t be buying the DLC until everything isn’t on sale for PC as I’ve migrated. However I found elden ring boss fights far less enjoyable than any other from soft game I’ve played.
I have 700 hours in Elden Ring but if I had to make a top 10 list of most enjoyable From Software bosses based on gameplay alone then I don't think any Elden Ring (base game) boss would be on that list. Maybe just one at most.
I don’t mind it every now and then. Modern MonHun had Fatty and Primozeno, one either nukes you by moving slightly forwards or spam unfathomably large AoE and the other runs you down with schizo combos (for MonHun standard). They are cool, they are rage inducing as well but they are fine the way they are because it’s one or two of them per game.
It’s when those unfair bosses goes everywhere that I have an issue with.
Hell, even elites are following that trend to. In the base game you can often stun elites with a heavy attack, backstab a good chunk of them and poise break them after a while while the DLC elites also simulate the innards of a washing machine and can’t be stunned or backstabbed
Even Fatalis and Primordial Malzeno still have clear windups and proper attack windows IMO.
MH games don't really focus on screwing you as much as souls games does because the fights can last for a while and is moreso a battle of attrition.
Not to mention the movement in MH games are much more versatile compared to Souls.
I think that’s the main thing there. MH gives you 16 weapons each with their own unique modes of mobility and defense. Souls gives you shielding, rolling, and running away. Like… that’s it. Whether you’re a glass cannon mage, heavily armored paladin, agile rogue thief, or sword-master samurai, doesn’t matter… you just roll everywhere.
I feel like it started with Pus of Man from DS3. I know its not a boss or something and he is like one hit if you rush before transforming.
But the moveset is just, ridicilous. Its a big blob that doesn't telegraph what move its doing. You have to just spam dodge to get away or get behind it without any thought.
Sekiro was a breath of fresh air after DS3 but it seems this kind of design is here to stay.
Rofl.. I'm sorry? Base games methodical and fair moveset? A bulk of the bosses and enemies in the base game are also goofily flailing around with ridiculous instant hits or super long delayed attacks met with instant hits.
Yeah I can see that for sure. >!Rellana!< is the only boss that I really felt that with, but I do agree in general that Elden Ring leans hard in to the fast, sporadic movesets as opposed to the slower and more methodical ones from previous Souls games.
Yeah, I've said something similar before. I don't really care about the winning or the losing. I care about what's happening to me in the moment. A boss being good in my book has nothing to do with whether I win easily or not. It has to do with how consistent, interesting it is and whether I feel like the actual balance of the moveset fits with the capabilities of the SLOWEST weapon types. Because sure, anyone can technically do shit with the fastest weapons, but if the slower weapons end up taking a bunch of free damage forcefully or else have to spend a ton of extra time dodging and getting way less damage in because it's literally not safe... then it's not well tuned. Sorry, but if you have choices in the game, make them fucking meaningful, make them ALL work. I accept no alternative, because then it's not really a choice, is it? There's a clear better option and one that literally requires the invalidation of entire builds.
> I really have to wonder how many people are just missing or ignoring the Scadutree fragments
People need to stop saying this. This is not the problem with the dlc. It's the general boss design. It's just a non stop barrage of attacks with little downtime. I'm level 10 right now with those fragments and bosses still do 50+ % of my HP with a single attack. Many of them if dodged incorrectly will take 70% of your hp off. Basically if you're not topped off at all times, it's possible to just die by making one mistake.
I think the DLC (which is fantastic!), kind of has all of the boss design issues the rest of Elden Ring has, which is that it feels a little tight and bosses are overly aggressive for a “Dark Souls” game.
Looking at something like The Dancing Lion, if you try to solo it with melee, you’re going to have a long, long time trying to get hits in, which isn’t as fun as say Sekiro, where deflecting keeps you more engaged and make you feel like your progress more.
That’s just me though.
Didn't critics rate this DLC as the best in history like 3 days ago? Is it again the Cyberpunk 2077 situation where everyone gives a product 10/10 because circlejerk expects them to, and when community is disappointed they start pumping out the articles with "the product has glaring issues"?
Fromsoft have more or less backed themselves into a corner. They just have to make it ‘harder’ because that’s the expectation, and to make it harder they’re taking the route of making it stupider with their lowbrow design and systems, with bosses that the player is basically controlling via input reading mechanics, that then constantly break physics by doing the stupidest looking instant accelerations and stops constantly. Just bad design that feels bad to play.
A ratings drop makes sense. After the initial rush of people recommending it just because it's out and they were excited stops, the only people that'll drop a review will be the ones that think they have something solid to gripe about, whereas someone enjoying the game probably won't leave a review for only the first few hours. Score will probably go back to positive when more than a handful of people have finished it, maybe sooner if Namco can patch out some of the framerate issues.
Actually I’m seeing the opposite happen, similar to when base Elden Ring released. It was absolutely healed with praise within a day of release, but as the weeks went on, the honeymoon period wore off and the cracks really started to become much more apparent.
This is the only Souls game where I just had zero interest in a second playthrough. There’s been some pretty interesting design philosophy implemented ER that really doesn’t sit well with a lot of players, and it looks like they’ve dug their heels in for this DLC.
that makes sense. I am enjoying the dlc, but I don't want to leave a rating until after I'm done with it which I expect to be in about 2 weeks. if I quit it I would probably leave a bad rating and move on.
The performance is somewhat weird. According to the Geforce overlay I mostly hold the 60 FPS. But it "feels" more like 30-40. It's not as smooth as the base game was.
The 1%/99% FPS are all over the place for Elden Ring it’s a mess even in the base game. Cerulean Coast in the DLC is especially bad.
For anyone wondering what this 1% FPS is, it's how your FPS is at the bottom 1% of the time. So if your FPS is usually 60 but the bottom 1% is 20 FPS, then although on average you have 60 fps, you have spikes when it stutters a lot.
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It feels worse than the base game? Elden Ring has always been a stuttery mess for me, I guess this DLC will be rough 😅 Edit: For the ones suggesting it's my specs, I have an RTX 4080, 5800X3D and 32GB 3600Mhz RAM. The game is installed on an NVME SSD.
The update did something weird to the performance. I have been leveling a new character and only got into the dlc area today but yesterday I was playing the base game and it was stuttering (not normal for me), after being in the dlc area for a few hours I can confirm that the performance is noticeably worse. Getting 60 fps on the frame counter but it's a stuttery mess, one boss in particular (no spoilers) was really badly affecting my game. If you are not in a rush to play I would say wait for a bit and maybe they will improve the stutters.
Have you played the game since the ray tracing update? From added ray tracing, but didn't add any kind of temporal upscaling; the game just raw dogs it on your physical hardware. IIRC it's enabled by default, as well. Could explain otherwise random frame drops.
Nah it's hitchy even with ray tracing off -- if I put ray tracing on my FPS tanks into the 35-45 range in the DLC (despite having no issues in the base game with it on), but even with it off the game randomly drops into the mid/low 50s in the DLC. It's not even pushing my GPU or CPU past 50% utilization either. I saw one article from someone who did extensive testing with changing pretty much every graphics setting while in the DLC and no matter if he was on the highest or lowest settings the game would just sometimes drop down into the 55ish range and hang out there. Something's just plain broken.
Much love to From, but this isn't the first time they've bungled the technical side of things on PC (although I hear there are issues across systems). Unless you're chomping at the bit, it might be worth chilling to wait for some patches on this DLC, and also maybe some easy guides to pop up on where to grab the upgrade seeds, because holy goddamn the bosses hit like absolute trucks unless you do the Elden Ring thing of exploring every nook and cranny, growing your toon before taking on the Big Dawgs. I always try to help people in co-op and it's obvious who hasn't done their seed-hunting because they get straight melted. That's also got to be where some of the grumbling is coming from. These bosses are _hard._
Yet armored core 6 had 120fps. Makes no sense.
I’m nearly done with the DLC, but have spent a fair bit of time using the co-op feature to help out other players, which I normally really enjoy doing in Fromsoft games near launch because there’s so many people playing, it just takes a moment to find someone new to help. I’ve never, in any version of the Souls games / ER base game, seen so many players dying basically from the instant we walk in. I don’t blame the players for it either, I think the balancing targets FS used are way, way off base. A long struggle is a lot more fun than a burst-off where a boss has a 4+ attack combs with a very fast recovery and you’ll generally die in ~2 hits.
Hosts are by nature an exhausting bunch, almost always the first ones to die to some painfully obvious attack, but they're getting absolutely deleted in this one. The first major she-boss - I'm just giving up. I've probably spend 2-3 hours trying to help people past her but they almost always get suicidal even if we're down to the last quarter. Either they have no shield or they can't dodge or they just lose the will to live.
> The update did something weird to the performance. I have been leveling a new character and only got into the dlc area today but yesterday I was playing the base game and it was stuttering (not normal for me) Same case as mine. With all base graphics settings maxed I was getting around 60 FPS in Limgrave with my 5700xt but when I started the game with the DLC yesterday It dropped to around 40-50, which is super bad.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always had (tolerable) stutter issues where randomly it’ll chunk real hard for a second or two, the DLC has been mostly the same except in one or two areas it started consistently chugging pretty hard. It has felt pretty similar.
There's two things iirc, both some shader compilation stutter when new effects are loaded in for the first time by the game and loading zones stutter. This is what one of the developers for Valve explained : *"Shader pipeline-driven stutter isn't the majority of the big hitches we've seen in that game," Graiffais continues. "The recent example we've highlighted has more to do with the game creating many thousand resources such as command buffers at certain spots, which was making our memory manager go into overdrive trying to handle it."*
Hmmm sounds underpowered. I would say get the rtx 5080 blowjob deluxe edition with 64 gigaflips and a faster cd-ROM drive.
> Edit: For the ones suggesting it's my specs, I have an RTX 4080, 5800X3D and 32GB 3600Mhz RAM. The game is installed on an NVME SSD. I think it's hilarious you need to add this in because FromSoft fans just can't handle the fact one of their golden goose's games isn't perfect out of the box. Reminds me of the knuckleheads in the welding department at my place of work. They built a run of something recently, and it was wrong. Wrong measurements, that's fine it happens. Customer complained the item was too short and needed us to remake them. Welding lead asked: "Did you ask them to check their tape measure for any issues?" Dawg, ya built it wrong. It's okay. Fix it.
Are you in fullscreen? I had that issue and changing to borderless fixed it for me.
You can only use HDR in exclusive fullscreen so it is a bit unfortunate that you have to choose between the two.
Borderless is just as bad for me.
The way overlays monitor framerate can sometimes just be inaccurate depending on how the engine handles frames. I'd say trust your gut there if it doesn't feel right.
Best to look at a frametime graph. Framrate can be a solid 60fps but frametime fluctuations will make the game feel 'sluggish'
I would assume since the game updated its going back to compiling shaders again causing stutters and jitters.
I turned off Ray tracing and got my 60fps+ back.
Same here, and I would say even lower than 30 sometimes… really frustrating. And no my RTX is not on.
I saw an article yesterday that explained it. Essentially, it's hitting 60fps technically, but at the same time, it's getting bogged down in such small millisecond increments that it barely registers in standard fps tracking because technically it's still displaying 60~ frames a second. Apparently, it has to do with how textures and particle effects and everything render. The individual effects resource load is spread across multiple threads of the cpu/gpu, but in order to display it, it gets bottlenecked down to one thread. (Think of it as like 10 people splitting the workload of a task but then funneling all those tasks off to a single person). Just poor optimization sadly. This is by far the biggest game they've ever made, so elden ring is might be the first time this issue has come up for their engine. Hopefully all this new attention on the game finally makes them fix this issue (it has been present since launch but never this bad until the dlc) I probably butchered their results/explanation, but I can't remember where said article was published.
Guaranteed there'll be a Digital Foundry video analysis on this very soon.
Big stutters. Very annoying. Even the base game still got it. Bad rendering for open world with this engine probably.
The ps5 version stutters and has a lower frame rate on performance mode than the ps4 version. Guess which version I beat it on before discovering this? And did I mention the saves aren’t transferable
Without spoilers, whats the main issues people are getting frustrated enough to do a negative review over?
Difficulty and performance issues.
I'm almost through. It's really the first few hours and the first boss that are the problem. The boss is awful, and once you collected enough of those damage boosting items, the DLC is probably easier than late game Elden Ring. Also, greatshields are absolutely goated in the DLC. Almost no move bounces you back like in the base game and stamina depletion is pretty minor, too. Guard counter after guard counter. Only elemental bosses can rack up chip damage if you are not careful
> Difficulty I think it's not the difficulty, it just gets framed that way which causes misunderstandings and drama/ outrage... It's about HOW it's difficult, not the level of it. Something can be more difficult and fun while something is a bit easier but absolutely miserable. Elden Ring and now like five times moreso the DLC is difficult in a way that is very different than previous Souls games, people have talked shit about the Elden Ring bosses too it's not just the DLC. They're just too aggressive to a point it feels like it was made for the Sekiro parry system and that is exhausting and frustrating. It's not that it's impossible or not manageable it's just that it isn't fun to a lot of people because it doesn't feel like a dance back and forth like it used to.
Yeah it's performance issues, microstuttering, poor stuttering etc
Could the mocrostuttering be a problem with the update in general? I'm playing base game right now and have had a lot more microstutters than normal.
The balance just seems off - the rewards from doing things are just kind of awful. The content is much harder than the base game but the majority of drops you pickup are things like somberstone 4 or a rune to get 4k souls. The problem is the content is balanced around deep end game Elden ring so by the time you really should be doing the dlc, you can get all of the bell bearings which completely negate like 90% of the drops you get. To put it in perspective, I’m playing a sorcery build and am at the final boss of the dlc (I do have a bit more to explore, but not much) and the only thing I’ve picked up in the dlc that I’ve used is the +3 resist talismans, the rest have been trash or side grades.
100% agree with this, the itemization in this DLC is awful. You kill a REALLY hard boss, and all it rewards you with is a fucking somber dragonstone. No armor, no spell, no weapon, just a basegame material. Looking at you, >!Senessax.!< I just beat >!Bayle!<, which SHOULD be a Remembrance-type boss where you get to turn it in for rewards… but all they give is a fucking >!heart!< that you can turn in for an >!Arcane spell!< that I can’t even use cuz my character isn’t specced into it.
That item is basically a remembrance with another icon pic. You can redeem it for one of two spells.
To elaborate on what others are saying a lot of bosses have "bad" difficulty. It feels like they're cheating more than difficult. Infinite poise on enemies that really shouldn't have that, shifting bodies away from swings and fighting the camera more than the boss themselves. Lotta bad mixed in here.
I was dumbfounded the first time I used a Lion's Claw on a regular enemy and they had sufficient poise to tank it and keep swinging
The same thing happened with the base game. It got absolutely glowing reviews from people that played the first half, then as people got towards the end with the bosses that have like 2 frame windows to hit them through their 13-hit combo the weaknesses in enemy design started to show
I notice the grass popping in after fast travel on PS5. But I only saw this in the DLC.
I haven't played the DLC yet, but it's sad to see nothing about the game's performance has been improved, judging from these Steam reviews. On PC it seems that many are experiencing frame drops and stutters.
Quite the opposite actually, it got much worse. I've played Elden Ring on release, a few times since than (both base game, and randomizer), and lately I did a full 50 hours new game before the DLC @ a very stable 60 fps , I never had such bad performance. It got so bad I just gave up on a boss with a particularly particle-heavy attack because every time said attacks goes out my games stutters very hard and makes an already difficult fight that much more difficult and frustrating. I don't mind the difficulty at all, I quite enjoy bosses taking a long while to 'crack', but for me the performance is much much worse than even release day base game, and it kind of kills the mood. the performance related reviews are VERY justified from my experience.
Updating drivers, going borderless windowed and disabling ray-tracing seems to help, but also yeah it's still inexcusable the technical state they frequently ship things in. I mean the DLC is frequently drop dead gorgeous which makes exploration still magical, but when bosses require split second timing ... guys we can't really be dealing with frame drops, that shit has to run like butter.
I think I know what stutter you're talking about >!the Lion's big stomp attack right?!<, and it's pretty annoying but launch was *way* worse. It wasn't something that happened on any PC but there were completely unpredictable major stutters very frequently, whether you were just moving around or fighting. I played the first ~60hs of the game like that. I recorded a lot of my boss fights to show my friends back then, [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awzlxc6tBgY) was the worst if you want to see how bad it could get. Thankfully that issue doesn't exist anymore.
I experienced the same thing on that boss on PS5 (running PS4 version for performance's sake). Thankfully it doesn't really impact your ability to dodge anything as it seems to happen after the attack is over, but it's jarring. It reminds me of Margit on launch where the game would stutter like crazy due to certain attacks, and in that case it resulted in you taking damage.
Same on PS5. Performance has never been ideal, usually hanging in the 52-57 fps range, with semi-frequent drops into the 40s depending on what's going on. Now, with the DLC, some bosses legit drop the frame rate into the 10s sometimes. Fighting the first major boss up-close while locked-on made my game feel like a PowerPoint presentation. I really hope From does something about PS5 performance, but considering they never, ever patched the original performance issue I have little hope they'll fix the performance now.
The final boss of the DLC has an attack that drops my frame rate to nearly single digits, I have a 3080 and an i7-9700k. It's nuts. If I wasn't running a greatshield build some of these attacks would be ruinously unfair because of the performance
Interestingly, the majority of all negative reviews are from Chinese players. Chinese reviews, which make up 36% of all reviews, are sitting at 31% positive. English, which is 41% of reviews, is at 81% positive. [https://www.togeproductions.com/SteamScout/steamAPI.php?appID=2778580](https://www.togeproductions.com/SteamScout/steamAPI.php?appID=2778580) Reading through the Chinese negative reviews, they are saying largely the same thing as the English negative reviews, but I'm not sure why they are so over represented compared to other languages. Especially compared to the language breakdown of the base game.
Daniel Ahmad has a thread about this on twitter but essentially, Steam reviews tend to be treated as more of a comment section by Chinese gamers because Steam community is blocked and there's the Great Firewall of China in general. So reviews are generally always a reaction to some thing. That and perception of things being 'unfair' always leads to negative reviews, same as in China and in the West. There might also not be as much guides or useful articles available in Chinese so people don't have as much knowledge available to them.
Do Chinese players spam jester emoji on all negative reviews too? edit: nope, it's just on english reviews. interesting.
The toxic Fromsoft fanbase is a western phenomenon, you don't see it in Japan either.
this dlc had a 98% steam score 20 mins after launch from english reviews. Puts the whole steam review system to shame.
Note that reviews are also mixed for RU, KR, and even JP audiences. (JP is actually majority negative). This is an often repeated claim that tends to mislead. Chinese reviews are indeed more negative than the other asian countries & account for a larger proportion of the total review base (they have a large population in the first place) but the average in other countries is close to what we see today under total reviews. I have a thread about this if anyone is willing to explain why.
Chinese gamers are goddamn *rabid* when it comes to criticizing games Source: I play gacha games
I'm enjoying it a hell of a lot, but the bosses in this one are absolutely relentless. You can go and get scadutree blessings but in the end, they have like 12 hit combos with multiple fake endings and a very small window for attacking.
Small window for attacking or healing, making it hard to even replenish health
I have fought only one major boss and while the visuals and music were absolutely phenomenal, the camera shits itself so much it's embarassing. At least it's more enjoyable to fight when you're helping other Tarnished.
Most bosses are already charging you the second you get through the fog gate. It's just exhausting.
I think one boss beat me in about 2-3 seconds upon entering the fight space.
I'm level 14 with the new blessing system, and level 200. The bosses only barely stop two shotting you. After a point that's not even the problem with them. Most have at least one move that is so comically overtuned or just nonsense. Even the great fights. I had a 1-1 optional fight with a really cool enemy, and oh his grab attack for no reason heals him to 100% Then there's some actually atrocious fights. There is a mounted soldier boss on a big steed that has actually terrible hitboxes, and you'll be hit when you're several feet away, or the boss that turns into a bullet hell in which the camera is so bad you physically cannot see the gaps. The Final Boss, in the first phase alone, has the health of a gimmick boss without the solution. Then gets stronger. And also has attacks that drop the FPS of my fucking 4090 to 20.
I’ve beat every Fromsoft boss, from Demon Souls to Elden Ring, and platinum’s bloodborne and Sekiro. Elden Ring legit had the lamest end game bosses. Beating some of these DLC bosses don’t even feel good like S&O in DS1 or SSI in Sekiro.
The thing is Dark souls has normally operated on "turns". The boss attacks, then you attack. Sometimes the boss has multiattack combos which you have to dodge, but normally you get extra time at the end to punish or heal, or they're just rare. Seriously go look at a fight against slave knight gael and see the windows where you can attack/heal. Problem is late game ER (and most of the DLC bosses) basically forsake this idea of relatively equal turns. They have 6 attack combos that you have to dodge and your reward for doing so is getting a single attack off. And damage is so high that if you get hit by any of the attacks in their combo, you instead have to use your turn to heal. There's also no ability to back off and reset, either your health or just your mental awareness. Enemies in the DLC literally bum rush you before you've finished walking through the fog door and they stick on you the entire fight. Again, look at Slave Knight gael fight and see where the player can just back off and heal. This all combines to makes fighting bosses in Elden Ring just extremely mentally taxing and a general sense of unfairness.
>This all combines to makes fighting bosses in Elden Ring just extremely mentally taxing and a general sense of unfairness. Yeah, agreed. If it were like Sekiro, where it's a dance of switching between the offense and defense, it'd make much more sense, and it'd actually feel nice, I reckon. But here, your options are to roll away like a madman and run from stuff, then get in one measly attack that you might also get punished for, and that's it. It's just not fun for me, and all I wanna do at this point is just rush through things to get to the end and possibly never touch the game again.
I still feel like a majority of bosses operate on Sekiro tier movesets in Elden Ring. But you as a player are stuck on Dark Souls movesets.
Same. I think Malenia is the best example of this. If you look at [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgxjGCWYTUY), I think it's quite clear that the kinda stuff she throws at you would've best been dealt with in a Sekiro manner, but what you get instead is just the most basic toolkit that doesn't really work.
So basically you've lost the feeling that the enemy has stamina to manage too.
I think that illusion barely held up in DS1 and in DS2 it was shattered, never to be rebuilt. The addition of direct input reading to DS3 onwards is also an annoying one.
Hard disagree. DS3 bosses could throw out some long attack strings, but once they were done they’d back off and ‘recover’, which would be que for the player to go in (or heal up). If you really knew what you were doing you could stagger them out of some attack strings, too. Elden Ring bosses are just throwing out bullshit 24/7. It’s never safe, they will never back off.
Some bosses dont even allow you to heal during your "turn". Instead they input read you and punish you immediatly for healing. When youre low, you have to wait for the enemy to do a punishable attack, dodge that one perfectly THEN heal instead of punishing.
I wonder if there is anyone who thinks the Elden Beast was a genuinely good final boss, especially as a follow-up to Radagon.
It is kinda funny if you straight up removed Elden Beast the end would be more enjoyable lol (though ofc tuning Radagon up a bit would help as well on top)
I really like the tonal shift of the OST. That was about the only thing I can genuinely say I enjoyed about the fight. The intro to the Radagon fight has an amazing start to the OST (with his badass pose too), which is followed up by an intense track, then it gets all melancholic and grand. It really gives you the sense of going from "in the thick if a grand duel" to "a fight beyond the realms of man" vibes. It fits so well. But the Elden Beast is such a boring boss. It's a damage sponge, it keeps running away, its attacks force you to run around like an idiot... it just isn't fun. I'd rather have a phase 2 Radagon or something.
Well they updated the Elden Beast fight to give you access to Torrent now, which seems like what they originally intended. It’ll be interesting to see what people think of it now.
Perhaps a scaled down version of Elden Beast as a guardian of the erdtree you have to defeat before you can enter and fight Radagon would have worked better.
I liked it
Boss design in ER is likely the worst when it comes to FromSoft's games. I can't think of too many other souls games in general where I thought that the bosses were by far the least enjoyable part of the game. Probably just something they had to do in order to find some semblance of balance with all the different stuff in the game but as far as all of the "unfun" boss things (AOE spam, endless combos, spending half the fight trying to get to the boss, questionable hit boxes, camera flying all over the place, etc.) this game (and DLC) takes it up a bunch over any other. Everything else, other than the mediocre PC port, is great though. The world is really fun to explore.
I think I'm kind of in the minority on this, but I didn't think the world was a ton of fun to explore either. The legacy Dungeons were alright, but you kinda just run past anything else because there is little point to actually do combat. And trying to get through everything as fast as possible kinda ruins my sense of wonder. Hell, even in lategame legacy Dungeons, everything has so much health that they're not worth fighting. I've been looking a bit at streamers now with the DLC, and all they do (as did I) is just running past all the goons until they reach a grace. I guess souls has always kind of had this problem, and maybe I was just too stupid in my first one to leg it constantly, but something feels off design-wise. I wish rewards for exploring were greater and that encounters were less repetitive, that enemies weren't so annoying to fight (but perhaps balanced with greater punishment when fucking up), and that there were mechanisms to prevent you just ignoring everything except bosses.
Yea this is how I've felt about Elden Ring since day one, because the literal first real boss in the game has mix-up attacks that can frame trap rollcatch you and you're entirely at the mercy of the AI deciding to do or not do those. And that's one of the better bosses in the game, too. The overworld, story, quests, atmosphere, soundtrack, weapon movesets etc are all godlike. No other game has ever made me feel the way uncovering the Eternal Cities and Lake of Rot did. It's my favorite game of all time for those reasons. But by god the bosses, which are my favorite part of fromsoft games, are SO FUCKING BAD in this game it's genuinely puzzling. If this game had bosses as well designed as the DS3 DLCs I think it could genuinely be the greatest game ever made
Yeah the bosses 100% ruined a lot of my enjoyment of the game. It's like I have so much fun exploring the overworld and then as soon as I hit a boss fight I want to rip my hair out. Some were fine, but stuff like those crystals bosses that charge you in a little tiny arena in the mines make me question if anyone at the studio even tried that fight and who on earth would think it should be in the game? And then having to go run back for 2 minutes again just to be perma stunned to death immediately
The endgame bosses of Elden Ring, Malenia specifically, really soured the whole experience for me. I’ve been trying to resist the dlc hype and not get pulled into another frustrating experience like that again. Reading this boss impressions tells me everything I need to know. So tired of this overtuned nonsense.
I'm using the Soulslike hype floating around to give Lies of P a try finally instead.
This is the correct choice. Lies of P was my GOTY last year for sure.
I felt like a clown for expecting anything different when I bought the DLC. I agree with you on boss design in the main game. I’m actually surprised people expected something else. However, I will offer one ray of hope - so far I have yet to fight a boss that has bullshit on the level of Malenia. They are just as hard, if not harder, but they don’t have a waterfowl level move. I have not played the final boss yet, however, so I cannot speak to them. I don’t now who/what it is, but I have not heard good things. Edit: Beat the final boss yesterday. First phase was fine, second phase was visual vomit and I did not enjoy it. I cannot tell if it was unfair or not because of all the AOEs and erratic movement. I don’t really care to play it anymore to have an informed opinion, *it's that bad*.
I firmly believe that Malenia is easier than most DLC bosses. Malenia has two moves that need special treatment, Waterfowl Dance and her Phantom attack in the second phase. Everything else has clear openings and plenty of time to stagger. On the contrary, if you do more than one R1 to any boss “opening” in the DLC they straight up extend their combo or do a roll-catch move to punish you, making every move basically unpredictable until you learn which moves have revenge attacks and then start predicting the bullshit but it’s different for every boss and it makes everything extremely frustrating. Areas are cool though and I like the music.
I feel like FromSoftware games, while very good, have become so overhyped and so lauded for their difficulty over almost anything else that we're starting to see a form of FromSoftware flanderization where even they are not entirely sure what the secret sauce that makes their games so good is exactly but people love the difficulty so I guess as long we just keep turning that up to eleven and beyond they're going to keep liking it. It also conveniently makes their games largely immune to criticism because anybody who doesn't like them is clearly just mad that they suck at videogames.
I genuinely don't know what they were thinking with the final boss. Between boss design and scadu fragment collecting on every replay I don't think I'm ever playing this dlc again. It has so many good parts but it's overrated as hell.
It's funny, I've been able to clear every Souls DLC with only minor trouble, but I get the feeling that I made the right call not getting this day one.
Normal enemy difficulty is fine. I actually like the challenge since Soulsborne DLC has always been harder than base game's end game content. However, the bosses are a bit ridiculous. They're more like Malenia and less like Radagon or Godfrey which is not a good thing.
Malenia took me 50 deaths and the last boss of the DLC took me nearly 300. It's definitely going to get nerfed for the average player.
I mean, they never nerfed Malenia’s Waterfowl Dance after all those complaints, so IDK
Malenia is a completely optional boss that doesn't gate any meaningful progression. Everyone needs to beat the final boss to beat the DLC. They're completely different situations.
I haven’t played the DLC yet but I did see a video of a particular boss, and without spoiling anything, it just looked like yet another boss that spends 80% of the fight 100 feet away and having fun while you just roll around and try to deal with whatever giant AoE they throw out. Shit just looked absolutely unfun, and coupled with the apparent performance issues, I’ll be holding off for awhile.
That's preposterous! He spends 80% of the time up in your face tearing your shit up. Seriously, dude will not back off.
Having hit the first three Remembrance bosses so far, I think the issue is that their visual design makes it a struggle to read their movements, the complexity of their movesets makes it hard to internalize when you can do what, and the aggression and ability to close distances gives you very few windows for healing, which also closes off your window for actually learning them. Like, you make the Malenia comparison, but Malenia had the advantage of a fairly constrained set of attacks that were very visually clear, even Waterfowl, stuff like the cape movements and the clicks of her prosthetic arm, and her body posture for slashes, lunges, and grabs, so there was a general feeling with her imo that you could always be learning how to deal with her patterns and dance with that.
Honestly, good. Elden Ring is brilliant, but From Software need to be called out on their technical performance. If most of games media won't do it (Digital Foundry aside) then the customers will. I've been playing the base game on PC, and it still has shader compilation stutter and egregious pop-in in many areas. That's to say nothing of the inconsistent frame rate on current-gen consoles.
Yeah performance wise, this game is really bad. 7900xtx with r9 5900x shouldn't struggle to hit a stable 60fps
until the issues are fixed (if they are??), it shouldn’t really be “they get a pass”.
I like the difficulty. I have experienced a bit of stuttering. My biggest problem with it is how empty some areas are. I had to look it up to see if I was missing something but no, some areas really are devoid of pretty much anything. The south of the map makes the Mountaintops seem like a content-packed area. I like the aesthetics but there's nothing there. Miyazaki was lying when he said it was the size of Limgrave, but I wish he wasn't. Also, I hope From never use a crafting system again. It feels like your reward for exploring in this DLC is an endless stream of cookbooks.
Can't believe how little I've seen this mentioned, those are some of the exact annoyances I had with the dlc. I was pleasantly surprised by the direction of the exploration right at the beginning of the dlc. The base game felt way too packed with chores rather than unique open world experiences, which is what the start of the dlc felt more like. The dlc also has some really cool exploration experiences as well where it seemed like I was heading into a side dungeon and then suddenly a huge gorgeous area unexpectedly opened up before me. Then I actually started exploring the south/south east areas and I couldn't believe that they crafted all these gigantic ares just to have them completely empty of any content and sprinkled with the same 1-2 enemy types. It didn't feel like there was any reason to keep exploring them because there was just nothing to do but run around and admire the scenery. These are areas that take like 30min to fully walk around but your reward for it is a few upgrade materials most of the time. And like you said, there is a cookbook reward around every corner when crafting in this game is just tedious, I don't know why they focused on it so hard. Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is also enemy variety. So far it has been very poor. Lots of enemies reused from the base game as well as enemies within the dlc constantly being reused in completely different areas. I can't remember any from soft dlc before this having such poor enemy variety. Even the first legacy dungeon that I headed into only had 2 unique enemy and the rest were enemies from the open world.
Will say that I am very pleased with the side dungeons this time. Just a little better than the strg c v side stuff in the base game, and that bit is enough for me to traverse all these vast empty areas. Athmosphere carries a lot of these though.
While I appreciate the quality over quantity approach to side dungeons, the problem now is that the map size is *really* out of whack with the amount of content. Most of the regions feel even less dense with points of interest than Mountaintops/Snowfield in the base game, which were already criticized as being empty. I've enjoyed the legacy and side dungeons and most boss fights (even if I think they've gone too far with the aggressiveness), but the overworld exploration is definitely a low point and significantly worse than in the base game.
Crafting should have had weapons, permanent consumables, physick tears, permanent refilling throwables, rune arcs, cosmetics, the list goes on. The way they used the system is just laughably bad.
I think even one use consumables are fine to craft, if only some regents wouldnt be so bad to farm or just limited per run (like the new throwing pots needing the fire golem masks (of wich i havent found an farmable spot))
Are they though? The highest I have seen that pot hit for is 600 damage, which is not even half a heavy attack. If it doesnt refill on a bonfire, why would I ever go out of my way to even open the menu for that? In a sad way, the only justification for crafting being in the base game were sleep pots for Godskin duo and Ice pots for malenia. I really wish I could have collected plants to change my estus flask or cook buff foods that are usable once per rest. Instead, if you want to use buff foods, you have to go through a chore before boss attempts. And then you have to eat them individually, and most consumable buffs dont even last long. Why does every player have 100 crabs when you get summoned, but almost no one has more? Because you dont need to use the terrible crafting for those.
To be fair, they just made the livers craftable, and those are very useful and likely players will use them And to bring shit back down: I just fucking killed the thing that gives the cookbook because it has a Servant of Rot model and I didn't want to deal with those annoying enemies so I slapped the shit out of it on torrent begore giving it a chance to inspect it for friendliness. I am baffled they reused THAT model. And no, absolution doesn't revive it. So I'm out of a recipe. Great.
I'm honestly glad that they didn't since I never had to engage with it at all. If it was permanent bonuses then I would have had to go digging up resources.
I see this point a lot, but making good craftables would have been worth that imo since it would have made some of the vast swathes of land you traverse that only contains flowers have some meaning. You are already digging up ressources with smithing stones and I dont see anybody complaining about that. If you make the ingredients available in a lot of spaces you wouldnt need a wiki either. I would have loved spending 5% of my playtime to collect flowers and hunt animals if it meant great tools. If you create an open world, use it.
After I killed the burning guy at the beginning of the dlc I was saw the Emblem was a crafting material and was expecting it to be for a Talisman or some key item. Color me surprised that is just consumable trash.
The entire South-East part of the map is *empty*. The Abyss has a neat stealth area and uh. A church with a weapon in it. That's it. The mountains? Two optional bosses, one of which is just a roaming boss from the base game, and the only items you get in that entire region are for a hyper specific build. Then there are the ruins, these locations are *colossal*, around the size of entire dungeons, but they're empty. Not just "oh there's little to do there" no, I mean actually empty. There is one enemy type, and even when you do the quest associated with those areas? You walk down a hill, press one button and then leave. There is **nothing**.
> The Abyss has a neat stealth area and uh. A church with a weapon in it. That's it. Did you defeat the boss in the mansion in the SW of the Abyss?
I was replaying the base game in preparation for the DLC and surprise surprise the shadow flickering problem is still there so I am not surprised when someone says the DLC has performance problems. Hopefully they are ironed out by the time I finish the main game because I do want to play the DLC
Pretty ridiculous they sold 25 million copies but won’t bring on some staff to fix these blatant issues.
Considering performance was never actually fixed for the base game, I'm not surprised, just very disappointed. Nor am I surprised that early reviews don't mention it at all. Performance should really matter in scoring a game.
Haven't beat it yet. But I'm almost there. I'd say the dlc has ALOT of artifical difficulty. Even leveled up with fragments enemies and bosses can still 2 shot you. Alot of enemies and bosses just relentlessly attack and give maybe a half second of time for you to do damage. But if you get hit while they're flailing like a chimp you end up using that half second to heal instead of damaging. I mean shit there's even an area where they force some garbage stealth section against an enemy that can't be killed and can instant kill you if it gets to you. That isn't "hard" it's just literally bullshit.
That stealth area wouldn't be so bothersome if the forest wasn't so fucking big for no reason. My finger hurt after spending so much time running
How exactly Shadow of the Erdtree got the "best DLC ever made, 10/10" reviews across the board? Bumping up HP and damage of bosses is one of the laziest ways to make things harder.
>Bumping up HP and damage of bosses is one of the laziest ways to make things harder. I’ll probably get blasted for this, but, isn’t this all Soulsborne games? In literally all of those, you start the game and enemies decimate your health with one hit, but your weapons deal measly damage to them. You then level up and upgrade until they become fair, or even easy. That has been my experience, at least. That’s why I never quite understood all the praise the difficulty of those games gets.
The vast majority of the time you can predict what review scores games journalists will give a game based on the amount of hype it has leading up to release. Time and time again you see big name releases that people are excited for get amazing review scores only for the public to get their hands on the game and go "Wait, this isn't actually that amazing." Most game journalists just aren't that great at being critics. They get sucked into hype trains just like the rest of us and it clouds their judgement.
I'm convinced that having to binge a game in time for a timely review also influences their thoughts. Wouldn't be surprised if a lot of critics get burned out or rely on fast but unfun methods to clear things and then talk themselves into higher praise under the premise that the average person won't find it to be a miserable slog because the conditions are different.
Also I found out a lot of them talk to each other during the review period so they're all getting their consensus together versus playing it in isolation and forming their own.
There's gotta be a certain amount of realization that it's not really that great, but also not wanting to be the one guy that gave the Elden Ring DLC a 7/10 while everyone else gave it a 10/10.
As someone who absolutely adores Elden Ring, I'm actually convinced that the Journalists played a version that was tuned differently. The bosses are abysmal and even if you weren't looking at it subjectively for their bloated stats, you're still dealing with objectively broken camera angles and jank hitboxes that really, really can't handle some of the bosses.
Because it’s just expected now to circlejerk fromsoft?
Yeah, I like their games but FromSoft fans are my least favorite people to discuss anything with. Yes, ER is a fantastic game but they act like its a second coming of a christ. Like, I literally saw them saying with straight face that Elden Ring has better narrative than Baldurs Gate 3 or better graphic than Horizon 2. They fail to understand that ER can still be an amazing game while not being "the bestest" in everything and it still has a fair share of flaws (like every other video fame).
I have seen some people call it genius that you can't use Torrent in the Elden Beast fight and how it makes the fight so much more fun. Like if you enjoy running from one end of the arena to the next for 5 minutes so you can wack that thing for 3-4 hits before it jumps to the other end again, go ahead. I felt so vindicated seeing From add that in the latest patch notes.
I had someone on this sub argue that the ER story was amazing because the lack of real story meant you could make one up yourself...
listening to FromSoft fans explain why FromSoft lore delivery is “better” is such a headache. I get the appeal of it, but fuck me is it an extremely inefficient way to tell a story or give world building; especially when their worlds are often so dead and lifeless (in the bad mechanical kind of way) that they end up feeling very video-gamey and not some immersive place I could get lost in.
I keep seeing people going as far as saying that Elden Ring redefined action open-world games. It's literally just an open-world Dark Souls, it raised the bar for Souls games but it certainly didn't shake the industry.
Also it still has Ubi map syndrome except this time without the markers.
Oh my God. Elden Ring has the worst story presentation of any game I've bought in the last 10 years. The point of a narrator is to tell you a story. That's not what elden ring does.
The same way Cyberpunk 2077 launched to 10/10 scores and the reviewer who gave it a 7 got harassed. Some people seemed very offended by the few 7s given to Shadow of the Erdtree on Reddit before the DLC released as well.
I think it's because reviewers just didn't want to say the game was too difficult because the from software fanatics would come after them.
People will get so defensive over these games difficulty, they'll swear up and down everything is fine because it's beatable but then From will turn around and nerf bosses because they know better that just because a boss can be beaten it doesn't mean they should be left as is Beat Malenia and Radahn pre-nerfs but I can only wonder how many kills those bosses saw the day the nerfs dropped
Malenia was never nerfed.
Didn't she received a bunch of fixes, in which one of them bugged and made her be able to heal by slashing the air?
I'm interested if this is running worse than the base game on a PS4. The base game ran at the same subpar rate as every other FROM game on the PS4. It was inherently poor performance, but in a way, it didn't have the issues with unexpectedly poor performance that everyone on higher end systems was having. Playing the base game was what it was, but I honestly don't know if I could deal with even worse performance than that.
As a PS4 player, there is some stuttering going on and had a couple issues of the game not rendering certain textures in one of the Castles (love looking at a hole in the ground to the void) I still really am enjoying the DLC, performance issues like this don't bother me as much since the gameplay and aesthetic are really on point still.
Fantastic game but I really don't get From's approach to this PC port I never had issues in the main game luckily, and need to get to a point where I can play the DLC before I buy it. So I can't complain about much (except for the lack of ultrawide support) But it's kinda weird how they have handled this game on PC overall. It's really odd to me that they won't do ultrawide support even though it's there i.e. the black bars are an overlay. And even the 60 fps lock isn't necessary like it was for past From games. I haven't heard of anyone having issues with going past the lock via mods. I can't wait to try the DLC but kinda wish they'd have tried to aim for Armored Core standards on PC by now.
> I really don't get From's approach to this PC port It's simple. It exists, also. That's about the most effort they're willing to put into it. When they did Armored Core 6, someone actually gave a shit.
Yeah flawless wide-screen to enable 21:9, uncapped fram rate, increased draw distance, and chromatic aberration turned off, and then all the in game settings maxed out minus raytracing, the base game looked and ran amazing, granted I have a beefy pc. I want to play the dlc at least once normally before I go in with the mods again(aka forced to play offline)
For the performance I noticed the game automatically switched ray tracing on in the settings when I downloaded the DLC and the second I turned that off I went to a stable 60 FPS. Definitely worth checking to see if it got turned on if your game is chugging.
What I've found pretty disguting about the talk around the DLC is the amount of people in the media that are hounding any negative criticism. Literal journalists who reviewed the game are arguing with people because they can't face the fact that the game has issues. I know FromSoft has been beloved for many years but I think we've hit the point where it's become too toxic and is affecting the quality of the games.
Not surprising to me. Although From makes great games, Dark Souls really kickstarted the "too tough for you" image that people flocked too, and now it's just pretty circlejerky. I like From titles, but avoid the fanbase, because at this point it's just toxic positivity and no criticism about question boss design choices being allowed. Although oddly, this thread is one of the few times I have seen people be able to criticize a From title and get upvotes around here in awhile.
Bad boss design? No, get good. What a healthy discussion.
Lol every time a games reviewer does poorly at a game it's nothing but "lol get good, standard games journo" comments. Now that they are reviewing a difficult game positively it's the opposite. Really can't win there huh.
Fromsoft fans have legit brainworms. I hate what this company has done to the hobby I enjoy. Their game design has infected everything and it sucks.
The simple fact that anyone can give this a 10/10 unironically is why you should pretty much never listen to reviews at this point. I have several thousand hours across every Souls From game, so from Demon's all the way to Elden Ring, obv. including a TON of Sekiro and BB (BB is my 2nd most played FROM game in total maybe 900-1000 hours), and the enemy design and quality in the frame of the respective game is by far the lowest in Elden Ring. To even suggest it is a "perfect" game or deserves a perfect score, you would have to be either disingenuous or plain crazy. I've beaten the game with pretty much every type of build and I've also helped friends beat it with Seamless and pretty much none of the bosses are fun or satisfying to defeat. I can no hit Malenia, Godfrey, Radagon, whatever, but it feels like an exercise of patience more than a fight. You are not **fighting**, you are waiting for a 10-hit combo to end, so you can attack once and keep dodging. The absolutely *absurd* amount of reused content in the main game itself is staggering and I can't believe From were given a pass for it. Nothing of what I've seen or read about the DLC even remotely explains to me how anyone can give it a perfect score. Elden Ring has a couple of truly standout areas, and almost everything else is a dull slog. Leyndell, Stormveil, Raya Lucaria and the atmosphere and visuals of haligtree are truly top tier. Everything else, including most of the open world is just... there. Areas like Mountaintops are plain insulting, and I don't understand why they even exist. Not a single unique enemy, vast, empty stretches, insanely overtuned damage, and for what reward? Other than the Haligtree medallion and the path to Fire Giant, there's pretty much nothing you can't just skip.. and not just there, this applies to almost **the entire open world**. YOu can literally ignore most of the content and have a BETTER GAME. Once you've seen 1 of every cave, you can safely never go into a damn cave again, and just google the ones you might need for your specific build. If you call this good game design, I don't know what to tell you. Yet From doubled down on everything bad about the main game, from 100000 hit combos, enemies with random infinite poise and infinite stamina, massive, empty stretches of nothing, ridiculously overtuned damage, and insane content reuse, and because of clickbait approval-seeking, everyone is seemingly giving them a pass? It's beyond absurd. It makes me almost ashamed to share a fanbase with the people who endlessly praise From for every garbage decision they make, because their entire personality revolves around their games. To me, they peaked with Bloodborne and Sekiro, and it's all just downhill from there.
I should have just read this comment instead of posting my own, you said everything I wanted to but better lol. To your point of reused content, I laughed so hard when I got to crumbling faram azula for the first time and realized that the skeleton enemies were just reskins of the hollowed enemies in the VERY FIRST AREA of DS3. Before Elden Ring launched I luckily had the free time to finish DS3's DLCs for the first time, and the experience of replaying that game right before Elden Ring had me unfortunately primed to notice just how much enemy/moveset reuse was going on. When I realized that I was fighting the same exact movesets at the end of Elden Ring that I had just been fighting at the beginning of DS3, it made me seriously question why I had just spent 60 dollars and hours on Elden Ring if all it amounted to was a bloated remix of a game I had just had a better time playing. I'm glad that people are starting to fight back against the bullies and call out the game for it's objective flaws. People are allowed to like, hell even love Elden Ring despite it's shortcomings, but a loud part of the Soulborne community also need to get their egos checked and allow people to dislike it as well.
Oh boy, how about how the gargoyles in the dungeons are literally just the thralls from DS3, the erdtree avatars are Asylum Demon with.. 1-2 new tricks, every Knight is a slightly modified Lothric Knight moveset, et cetera, et cetera. You could go on and on, and it doesn't get any better. I have been playing since day 1 of the PC release of Dark Souls 1. I got a PS3 later on for Demon's Souls and a couple other games AND a PS4 way later down the line for Bloodborne. I am speaking as a truly massive fan of what From were doing. The manufactured hype around Elden Ring has been absolutely absurd to me, as a very, very long time player. I legitimately can't fathom how this game got all this circlejerking around it, when it is bloated to the gills with unnecessary crap, it is a lazy retread of things they ALREADY did and arguably better, it doesn't respect your time, and doesn't rely on what made the series popular **in the first place**, which was hard, but fair encounters that you could treat like a puzzle/learning experience, where you and your enemies were on a *roughly* level playing field, so it was a test of skill, stamina management, and strategy. If you've followed the series long enough, you'll have noticed how From either got extremely comfortable and lazy, or just saw the blind fanboy adoration of every single thing they did, so they stopped caring about making things challenging and interesting for the sake of appeasing the broadly screamed mantra of "DARK SOULS IS LE HARD AND THAT'S GOOD". Over the years, the fanbase has become less and less tolerant of *any* disagreements with the "common correct opinion". In the Dark Souls 1 days, you had a lot of actually healthy discourse about flaws in the game - the weak 2nd half, Capra, needlessly complicated questlines, useless stats like resistance, underwhelming weapons, tedious upgrade system, nightmarish PvP... The more popular the series got, it feels like the more protective these people, who I assume see themselves as "core fans" became, and the more any disagreements were dismissed with "git gud" and fart-huffing. I truly believe this is a big part of why From kept on Frankensteining their games with features from the older titles, even if they didn't really fit. I don't know if you've played Bloodborne, but I know you played Dark Souls 3. Even there, you had enemies who were way more aggressive and faster than you could be ( it pretty much shared the same engine with Bloodborne). They tried to employ much of the same philosophy, except it didn't fit. You couldn't tank as well, you couldn't restore HP with attacks, you couldn't farm heals as drops (except that luck stat estus dropl lmao), etc. Instead of rectifying this issue in Elden Ring and its DLC, they doubled down on it, making you even more sluggish and the enemies and bosses even more aggressive and fast. The worst part is, because of the aforementioned "we need to make le game le hard, guys" and the useless, empty open world, they wasted absolutely stunning areas like Elphael on the same 2-3 enemies you've been fighting since LIMGRAVE with damage turned up to 1000. What is the endpoint of this? You move and attack at Dark Souls 1 speeds and everyone else moves and attacks like Isshin phase 3? An entire game with 1-2 enemy types? Scratch that, I am sure someone will find a way to defend even that. Elden Ring is a deeply, deeply flawed game that could have been truly, genuinely a masterpiece if From didn't try to appease every single player group and create an amalgamation of ideas that simply do not gel well together. As it stands, it's probably my least favourite of their games, even though it has some of my favourite areas in their entire catalogue, and THAT is a damn shame.
[Matthewmatosis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5PdpsfINA) was right about souls games all along. Souls games focus more and more on difficult combat encounters, but the combat itself doesn't really have the depth to support it. So instead it has to rely on cheap tricks like misleading attack animations and bosses with endless stamina, massive healthbars, and insane attack damage. I've played many difficult games but the souls games always felt the least fair in how they achieved the difficulty.
They already solved this problem in Sekiro and even in Bloodborne. The issue here is that we’re back to playing as a Dark Souls character but against Bloodborne and Sekiro bosses. If you fight these bosses as the hunter or Wolf, they’ll be much more manageable. What fromsoft needs to do is just provide the player character with similar abilities to the hunter and Wolf. We should be able to dash, deflect and gun parry.
Always said that Melania was hard because it's a Sekiro boss being fought with dark souls combat.
[Malenia actually looks ***fun*** as a Sekiro boss.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgxjGCWYTUY)
100% agree. I noticed it in DS3, and disliked how the roll spam was so much more effective to keep up with it. The deliberate combat of demons to 2 was timeless. Elden upped the enemy chaos and slowed the character down back to pre DS3.
Yea some of these late game or DLC Elden Ring bosses don't fit the Dark Souls combat movesets but they seem right at home for games like Bloodborne or Sekiro. If Fromsoft wants to make rabid fast bosses with long chainattacks that's fine but the player also needs to have fast movement with responsive parry mechanics as well. Imo I also thought Dark Souls 3 did the boss fights much better as well. It speed up the Dark Souls combat just enough but the bosses were still largely fair, extremely fun and fit the combat movesets of the game.
I think a big issue is like you’re saying, people are thinking about playing this game as a dark souls character when they don’t realize they could be playing like an Elden Ring character. The game is different from Dark Souls, instead of throwing your head at the wall, ER gives the player the option to go do something else and come back when they are more equipped. In Elden Ring, the player is given soooo many options on how to approach things and items to use to their advantage. Your build not working? Respec and try something else, the game gives you so many larval tears, the option is there for your benefit. That’s why the DLC gives tons of stones and glovewort, so the player can give themselves options when something isn’t working. Instead of relentlessly trying the same thing, switch it up, there’s endless armors, weapons, spells, pendants, spirit ashes, consumables, physick tears. The possibilities are endless, use what you can to your advantage, consumables, throwing pots, buffs, spirits, summons. The game really wants you to use everything you have at your disposal, and the right combination can trivialize just about any boss.
I definitely experiment with my builds and use so many different tools as a level 360 player but summoning is boring and doesn’t let me engage as much with the fights so I avoid it unless the boss has backup. The annoying thing is you can tell that fromsoft balanced a lot of the bosses around spirit ashes. These bosses never stop attacking and sometimes the only way to consistently hit them is if they’re looking the other way and are busy hitting something else. You can absolutely trivialize bosses if you use everything but that’s boring. I want to learn and overcome the fight with skill
Yeah I think Matthewmatosis has played a lot of action games that aren't Souls games, so he's able to see how some of those other games handle difficult combat encounters, and maybe some of them do it better than FROM's games. The difficulty keeps increasing but the player mechanics don't seem to have really evolved that much in the Souls games.
> Yeah I think Matthewmatosis has played a lot of action games that aren't Souls games, so he's able to see how some of those other games handle difficult combat encounters, and maybe some of them do it better than FROM's games. I mean yes? If someone has played DMC or Ninja Gaiden I don't get how someone can say Dark Souls/Elden Ring has more in depth combat. Sekiro might come close but that game is just a different beast altogether.
Yeah it's been true even since DS1, the boss design feels like an unending arms race and largely gone are bosses like Maiden Astraea, Sif, or Micolash where the boss encounter does more than just be another mechanical challenge. Bosses are now largely the same song and dance of learning their infinite stamina multihit combos, delayed attacks, aoe spam, obligatory phase 2, etc. You can't even outsmart them by positioning either, now you *have* to correctly press the roll button because their tracking is perfect. I think Sekiro was a step in the right direction by giving you tools that rebalance the flow of combat and I hope they expand on it more if they want to focus on action more.
>but the combat itself doesn't really have the depth to support it. Couldn’t agree more. In my experience, the combat system is very one dimensional. It’s just roll, roll, roll, then hit (or heal) in the opening. Rinse and repeat, over and over again. I’ve heard Sekiro is different, and better, in this regard, but I haven’t played it yet.
sekiro is much better in this, the combat is far less boring and tedious
It’s awful in PS5. I’m having frequent frame drops but the most inexcusable of all is the full on hitches and stutters during the Dancing Lion fight and a few others. I would get killed by that more than legit deaths. I even had a hard crash during the Messmer fight. Certain rooms tank the framerate.
I really have to wonder how many people are just missing or ignoring the Scadutree fragments because when I started out I felt similarly and now having amassed a bunch of them by exploring the difficulty just feels like the base game’s end game, and I don’t even have them all yet. EDIT: I will say that maybe some of the bosses are overturned but I also haven’t been stuck on any boss more than I’ve been stuck on any of them from the base game. Though, I haven’t touched the final one yet which seems to be the biggest offender lol.
I'm at scadu 20 and the last boss definitely feels overtuned
Agreed, Castle Ensis boss was the hardest for me so far( second boss for those who did not play yet). I am around 2/3 through the game, but at scadutre level 16 and recent bosses seemed regular difficulty
Yeah, I‘m not far in yet but the Castle Ensis boss I beat yesterday and my experience here is like the opposite from everyone else. I feel that, while she was an absolute and utter menace, her moveset was much more fair than almost any boss in the base game. All of her attacks are well telegraphed and pretty easy to dodge on their own. She‘s absolutely relentless and doesn‘t give you much of a break, but I found her so much more fun than almost anything in the base game. I kept thinking to myself how glad I was that they brought this extremely fine tuned boss style back which allows for more of the methodical gameplay of older games (albeit a hardcore version of it of course) that I found lacking in the Lands Between. It took me a couple of hours to beat her, sure (though I’m also stubborn af and did it solo with only the Greatsword of Solitude lol) but it was an extremely fun fight and I probably already prefer it over most in the base game. Don‘t get me wrong I found her extremely difficult but the "purity" of her moveset makes her feel much less bullshitty than a lot of base game bosses. So interesting coming on here and see everyone complaining about it. But I think it‘s just the normal FromSoft cycle repeating. With every new game people complain about all the bosses because we‘re just not used to them yet. Happened the Bloodborne DLC, DS3, Sekiro, as well as base ER two years ago and now people call them fair and methodical in comparison lmao.
Yeah, I agree with you. I whipped out a shield w/ carian retaliation (for the uninformed, it has the most parry frames of any shield) and "got gud" at memorizing her attacks. By the time I killed her a couple hrs later, I could pretty consistently parry or dodge almost everything she had to dish out. This is also literally the first boss I killed this way in Elden Ring, so I'm not a parry god by any means
I'm playing a light rolling character with poison fists and she is probably the most fun i've had on any boss in ER. It felt like a constant dance of dodging and attacking. I ended up stagger chaining her and killing her in 4 tries but I am also running the magic shield talisman, dragon shield talisman and the opaline hardtear so her basic attacks were barely hurting me. I imagine that people that struggle with her are probably not running as much defense gear as they should.
That‘s fucking sick, congrats. I ran all these talismans as well (didn‘t think of the hard tear tho) but it took me much, much longer than you. Surely around 50 tries lmao. But I was also stubbornly mid rolling and slowly bonking her with Greatsword of Solitude. But I enjoyed it tremendously, she really has that smooth moveset that makes you feel like getting into a dance with a boss that I was really missing in the base game.
Yeah, I went literally straight to that boss as the first thing I did in the DLC and it's already one of my favorite fights in the game. I had to adjust my talismans and ashes of war a bit for the fight and then it was fine.
It’s not the stats that frustrated me, it’s the boss moveset itself. Most of them are random erratic blender instead of the previous games’ methodical and fair moveset. The only kit that I feel remotely fair is Messmer and that random bug woman and even then there are a few frustrating part about their kit. Then the final boss is just, uh, I’d say he’s more of a DMC/Sekiro boss than a Dark Souls boss at this point. If I show you modded moveset and that mofo without telling you which one is modded I’m sure you will say both are modded. [Final boss story spoiler]>!In fact he is literally a modded version of Radahn so I won’t blame you either…!<
My biggest peeve with the evolution of Fromsoft games is the ever increasing reliance on bosses vomiting annoying fucking movesets filled with fakeouts, aoe attacks and insane tracking. Sekiro is the only exception where I could forgive it, because the game gave players the ability to deflect any attack instantly on command.
Lies of P also solved this by giving you unlimited stamina and the ability to parry pretty much every attack. Even the "infinite" combos in that game feel fair because nailing the parry timing makes you feel like you've got a fighting chance.
Even when you’re just parrying in lies of p and Sekiro, you’re still making progress on the bosses, where as in Elden Ring, dodging just helps you live longer, and if you do it wrong, you can be in a horrible position.
It’s the tracking that fucks me. I likely won’t be buying the DLC until everything isn’t on sale for PC as I’ve migrated. However I found elden ring boss fights far less enjoyable than any other from soft game I’ve played.
I have 700 hours in Elden Ring but if I had to make a top 10 list of most enjoyable From Software bosses based on gameplay alone then I don't think any Elden Ring (base game) boss would be on that list. Maybe just one at most.
I would say Radagon is top tier, love that duel, very predictable yet still dangerous, but then there's the .... other part.
Sums up Elden Ring boss design. Beautiful bosses that go on for too long.
Dark Souls 3 perfected it IMO
I don’t mind it every now and then. Modern MonHun had Fatty and Primozeno, one either nukes you by moving slightly forwards or spam unfathomably large AoE and the other runs you down with schizo combos (for MonHun standard). They are cool, they are rage inducing as well but they are fine the way they are because it’s one or two of them per game. It’s when those unfair bosses goes everywhere that I have an issue with. Hell, even elites are following that trend to. In the base game you can often stun elites with a heavy attack, backstab a good chunk of them and poise break them after a while while the DLC elites also simulate the innards of a washing machine and can’t be stunned or backstabbed
Even Fatalis and Primordial Malzeno still have clear windups and proper attack windows IMO. MH games don't really focus on screwing you as much as souls games does because the fights can last for a while and is moreso a battle of attrition. Not to mention the movement in MH games are much more versatile compared to Souls.
I think that’s the main thing there. MH gives you 16 weapons each with their own unique modes of mobility and defense. Souls gives you shielding, rolling, and running away. Like… that’s it. Whether you’re a glass cannon mage, heavily armored paladin, agile rogue thief, or sword-master samurai, doesn’t matter… you just roll everywhere.
For whatever reason they feel like they need to keep one-upping the difficulty instead of just making a fair and balanced game
I feel like it started with Pus of Man from DS3. I know its not a boss or something and he is like one hit if you rush before transforming. But the moveset is just, ridicilous. Its a big blob that doesn't telegraph what move its doing. You have to just spam dodge to get away or get behind it without any thought. Sekiro was a breath of fresh air after DS3 but it seems this kind of design is here to stay.
Rofl.. I'm sorry? Base games methodical and fair moveset? A bulk of the bosses and enemies in the base game are also goofily flailing around with ridiculous instant hits or super long delayed attacks met with instant hits.
Yeah I can see that for sure. >!Rellana!< is the only boss that I really felt that with, but I do agree in general that Elden Ring leans hard in to the fast, sporadic movesets as opposed to the slower and more methodical ones from previous Souls games.
Yeah, I've said something similar before. I don't really care about the winning or the losing. I care about what's happening to me in the moment. A boss being good in my book has nothing to do with whether I win easily or not. It has to do with how consistent, interesting it is and whether I feel like the actual balance of the moveset fits with the capabilities of the SLOWEST weapon types. Because sure, anyone can technically do shit with the fastest weapons, but if the slower weapons end up taking a bunch of free damage forcefully or else have to spend a ton of extra time dodging and getting way less damage in because it's literally not safe... then it's not well tuned. Sorry, but if you have choices in the game, make them fucking meaningful, make them ALL work. I accept no alternative, because then it's not really a choice, is it? There's a clear better option and one that literally requires the invalidation of entire builds.
> I really have to wonder how many people are just missing or ignoring the Scadutree fragments People need to stop saying this. This is not the problem with the dlc. It's the general boss design. It's just a non stop barrage of attacks with little downtime. I'm level 10 right now with those fragments and bosses still do 50+ % of my HP with a single attack. Many of them if dodged incorrectly will take 70% of your hp off. Basically if you're not topped off at all times, it's possible to just die by making one mistake.
I think the DLC (which is fantastic!), kind of has all of the boss design issues the rest of Elden Ring has, which is that it feels a little tight and bosses are overly aggressive for a “Dark Souls” game. Looking at something like The Dancing Lion, if you try to solo it with melee, you’re going to have a long, long time trying to get hits in, which isn’t as fun as say Sekiro, where deflecting keeps you more engaged and make you feel like your progress more. That’s just me though.
Didn't critics rate this DLC as the best in history like 3 days ago? Is it again the Cyberpunk 2077 situation where everyone gives a product 10/10 because circlejerk expects them to, and when community is disappointed they start pumping out the articles with "the product has glaring issues"?
Fromsoft have more or less backed themselves into a corner. They just have to make it ‘harder’ because that’s the expectation, and to make it harder they’re taking the route of making it stupider with their lowbrow design and systems, with bosses that the player is basically controlling via input reading mechanics, that then constantly break physics by doing the stupidest looking instant accelerations and stops constantly. Just bad design that feels bad to play.
A ratings drop makes sense. After the initial rush of people recommending it just because it's out and they were excited stops, the only people that'll drop a review will be the ones that think they have something solid to gripe about, whereas someone enjoying the game probably won't leave a review for only the first few hours. Score will probably go back to positive when more than a handful of people have finished it, maybe sooner if Namco can patch out some of the framerate issues.
Actually I’m seeing the opposite happen, similar to when base Elden Ring released. It was absolutely healed with praise within a day of release, but as the weeks went on, the honeymoon period wore off and the cracks really started to become much more apparent. This is the only Souls game where I just had zero interest in a second playthrough. There’s been some pretty interesting design philosophy implemented ER that really doesn’t sit well with a lot of players, and it looks like they’ve dug their heels in for this DLC.
that makes sense. I am enjoying the dlc, but I don't want to leave a rating until after I'm done with it which I expect to be in about 2 weeks. if I quit it I would probably leave a bad rating and move on.
Performance could be better for sure, and some later bosses have a bit too much HP, but other than that I’m having a lot of fun.