Continuing the Shadows of the Erdtree pain train, I'm settling on this finally breaking the trend of Fromsoft being the frontrunners of quality DLC. And it came when I noticed quite a noticeable disparity between the open world and the legacy dungeons: the latter is still Fromsoft at the top of their game with interesting level design, visuals, enemies and encounters. The former is mostly a barren, empty void that does not come even close to justifying its size. It feels like it's big because Fromsoft can show off a big map, but there's literally nothing in for huge swathes of it. Where are the enemy encampments? The hidden dungeons? Treasure chests to discover? Literally anything to see, do or interact with? This became impossible to ignore when I went throught the Ancient Ruins of Rauh. It's a combination of verdant open areas and gigantic tunnels and it looks great, but there's nothing there. I kept running around for minutes on end down dark hallways waiting for something interesting to pop up, some switchup in the level design, and it never came. This honestly feels baffling considering ER was already criticized for its open world being a bit too big and lacking interesting content especially towards the endgame.
The other element I'm conflicted on is the Shadow Blessing system. It's basically a new way of leveling up, akin to Sekiro's Memory system: you find Scadutree fragments around the world and can spend them at a bonfire for increases in health, damage, damage resistance, scaling and the like. This is also new for Fromsoft DLC: previously they've been endgame content, and as such leveling up hasn't made a huge difference in them, or even been strictly necessary. In Shadows of the Erdtree the difference between fighting bosses at Shadow Blessing 0 and Shadow Blessing 10 is night and day. A boss I'd died to honestly like 50 times folded like wet toilet paper when I'd reached Blessing level 10. Whereas previously I could sustain like 3 hits with my lvl 180+, VGR 50+ heavy armor build, all of a sudden I could take double that amount.
On one hand I understand that because Elden Ring is so much bigger and more open-ended than previous games, you can't really scale it the same way as more linear DLC. It's also open world, so you want to incentivize players exploring the new environments. But on the other hand the difference they make makes finding them basically mandatory, which just feels cheap. It's essentially restarting the players at level 0 no matter how carefully crafted or honed in their build, and only letting them back to the groove once they've collected enough fragments. Which also means that in repeat playthroughs there's always going to be at least half an hour of setup as you just run around the world collecting the fragments, much like how Golden Seeds and the Physick Flask are in the main game. Which I doubt is gonna be much fun, considering how huge and thinly spread the DLC map is.
My prevailing sense of the DLC right now is that of resounding mediocrity. The legacy dungeons are fantastic, but they're balanced out by a dull, empty open world and some truly questionable design decisions. We'll see if my feelings change when I actually finish it.
