Just as Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree unceremoniously thrusts you right into the new DLC, so too shall this review thrust you all straight into what I think of the only expansion for my 2022 game of the year. I do not think that Shadow of the Erdtree is a perfect piece of content. It pales in comparison to the base Elden Ring experience, but not by much. The exploration and sense of discovery do carry over from the main game but most of the boss fights leave a lot to be desired. Specifically, the final boss fight in Shadow of the Erdtree is FromSoftware at its absolute worst.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree dumps the player straight into the new area of The Lands Between called Land of Shadow. There is no cutscene to set the stage. There is merely an NPC near where you access the DLC that offers some brief dialogue and then one load screen later your character is just standing there and awaiting your input. Who cares about how you got there when there is this big new area to explore?
The disappointment at a lack of introductory cutscene was quickly pushed aside once I got my first look at The Lands Between. Before you stretch open fields full of ghostly grave stones and swaying tall grass. In the distance are the ruins of a scorched town. Even further ahead you see a towering, walking pyre. Its head ablaze with swirling fire. The view extends even further beyond, offering a distant glimpse at castles, forests, cliffs, and valleys that you will get to explore for perhaps 30 or more hours. The centerpiece of this view is none other than the Erdtree itself, once again towering over everything, though this time with a cloth veil draped over top. It is a gorgeous sight and one that rivals the initial opening to the base game when you emerge from the tutorial section and step into Limgrave for the first time.
Despite the cold open, Shadow of the Erdtree still manages to quickly suck you back into the world of Elden Ring through these spectacular views. The expansion touches upon story and lore elements left dangling in the base game while also introducing its own narrative mysteries that, for the most part, are given satisfying conclusions. Those who did not enjoy Elden Ring certainly will not find anything new in Shadow of the Erdtree that will change their opinion. It really is more of the same, a whole lot more. If you aim to take on every main boss in this DLC, you can expect to put in perhaps 20 hours or more on your first blind playthrough, which seems to be more than enough to justify Erdtree's $40 price tag.
Even those that largely enjoyed Elden Ring may not fully enjoy what Shadow of the Erdtree brings to the table. It is a challenging piece of content, complete with boss encounters that barely give you any room to breathe. I am not sure what happened at FromSoft that they decided to hyper tune almost every boss encounter for this DLC. While bosses in the base game provided many opportunities to attack, heal, and perhaps even breathe, Erdtree bosses offer no such luxuries. Often you will find that you are stuck in repeating patterns of dodge roll after dodge roll as the boss unleashes yet another string of attacks in rapid succession. Their high mobility and long series of attacks mean you may get just one, brief opportunity to attack after one combo ends and the next begins. Of course, if you got hit at any point in their combo your tiny window to attack is instead taken up by having to chug your heal. When I beat some of the more challenging bosses in the expansion, I felt only a sense of relief from the knowledge that I won't have to fight them ever again.
Returning to the base game almost felt like an entirely different game. The base game boss encounters, even most of the late game ones, feel calm and passive in comparison to bosses in the Erdtree expansion. Even Malenia, an extremely difficult boss encounter from the base game, doesn't even come close to the difficulty of the DLC bosses. The difficulty in the boss encounters also has very little to do with how upgrades, stats, and scaling are handled in Shadow of the Erdtree. Instead, it is just a fundamental problem with their mechanics where FromSoftware made the content hard purely by having these bosses throw everything at you in rapid succession.
I freely admit that I began my adventure in Shadow of the Erdtree with the same sorcerer build that I used throughout almost the entirety of Elden Ring. After struggling through two boss encounters as said sorcerer, I opted to completely overhaul my build to focus on strength, bleed attacks, better armor, and general survivability. Now, instead of going down in just a couple of hits I was at least able to survive a bit and keep the fights going for longer. I could have ridden the sorcerer struggle bus throughout the entirety of Shadow of the Erdtree but to me it just felt like I was just handicapping myself in content that is already difficult enough on its own. It truly felt like Shadow of the Erdtree was giving me very firm nudges to build out my character in a way I had never planned to nor needed to in the base game.
Adding to the frustrations of these already difficult encounters is the fact that Shadow of the Erdtree has several performance woes. Playing on the same hardware that I played the base game on, Shadow of the Erdtree exhibited far, far more hitches and framerate issues than anything I ever encountered in the base game. I know Elden Ring caught a lot of flak from several media outlets and fans for its lackluster performance and I'm sad to say that those issues seem to be even more present in this expansion. While I did have a few minor performance issues in the base game, they were never severe enough to really bother me. In Shadow of the Erdtree the hitches and framerate issues were far more frequent and far more severe. Impossible to ignore at times, I lowered a few settings to try to help with the problem but nothing could really overcome random, repeatable hitches. Those that manifested during a few specific boss fights raised my general frustration to actual anger.
Nowhere are these performance issues more noticeable than in the final boss fight of the game. While the fight was miraculously free of hitching, the framerate suffered tremendously during a specific attack the boss does starting in the second phase of the fight. My average framerate during that attack went from 60 FPS (Elden Ring caps out at 60) to anywhere from 20 to 40 FPS. It happened every single time and without fail. I also need to make clear here that FromSoftware attributes the performance issues players are encountering on raytracing supposedly being automatically enabled at Shadow of the Erdtree's release. I am running an Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti still, which does not support raytracing. The option was not enabled for me and I still experienced degraded performance when compared to the base game.
That final boss fight has so many issues outside of the performance woes though. There are moves that, when the boss decides to string them together, feel nearly impossible to avoid. The actual area where you fight has issues where a rough section of the terrain alters the size and shape of one of the attacks, leaving it purely up to luck on if you get hit or not while dodging. There is also an issue of general visibility where long golden locks of hair can sometimes obscure your view on what the boss is doing. That final boss encounter made for a miserable experience and is, without even a hint of hesitation, the worst boss encounter I have ever experienced in a FromSoft title.
From a narrative standpoint, Shadow of the Erdtree is far more upfront with some elements of its story and lore. NPCs in Shadow of the Erdtree, and there are several, seem more than willing to share their stories and motivations. This is a bit of a departure from Elden Ring and certainly a big departure from the Souls titles where most everything was tucked away behind contextual clues and item descriptions. Hell, we are even given some very "in your face" lore about what the deal is with all those walking pots.
While many main narrative threads are more obvious, there are still plenty of mysteries that theory crafters will have to piece together on their own. Of all the new NPC additions in Shadow, my favorite is Igon. Despite Igon's brief showing in the DLC his vocal performance during a certain boss fight is one for the ages.
Over the course of the game, players will learn a great deal about Miquella the Kind. You will learn and see how Miquella stripped himself of all things that once defined who he was, from his flesh, his fate, and even his lineage. Players will learn about how Miquella and his actions tied into the stories of base game characters such as Mohg, Radahn, and Malenia. In stark contrast to Miquella, very little seems to be shared throughout the story for Messmer the Impaler. I found this a bit odd given how much Messmer was featured in the pre-release marketing for this expansion. Even the game's physical Collector's Edition included an 18-inch-tall statuette of Messmer.
While you could stick to the main story beats for Shadow of the Erdtree, very few people will ever do that, especially on their first playthrough. Those that opt to explore will find that there is plenty to see and secrets to discover. One area in particular, Shadow Keep, is this huge legacy dungeon that will probably take you several hours to fully complete. It offers no fewer than three main areas to explore, about a dozen Sites of Grace, several different floors, secret passages that grant access to entirely new areas of the DLC, and a couple of bosses. Another area, one that many players may end up never encountering due to how it's hidden, leans heavily into horror elements, with ominous messages left scattered about by the devs. There are several diverse sections within the Land of Shadow, each beautiful and awe-inspiring in their own ways. The overall world map in smaller than the base game but it offers far more verticality. Depending on how thorough you are, your first playthrough could range anywhere from 20 to 40 hours. I was very impressed at how this expansion offered as many (or more) hours of gameplay as full game releases.
Though I did not intend to do so at the start, I ended up defeating every Remembrance boss in Shadow of the Erdtree. That accomplishment, coupled with a 100% achievement completion for the base game, means I am now well and truly finished with Elden Ring. The base game still holds up wonderfully and the expansion offers what is essentially much more of the same sort of experience with a few caveats. Performance woes and overly difficult boss encounters aside, Shadow of the Erdtree should be a must-buy for anybody that enjoyed the base game experience who craves more. Even at $40, you will certainly get your money's worth here.
Score
Additional Information
- Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
- Developed by: FromSoftware
- Published by: Bandai Namco
- Price: Starting at $39.99 (USD)
- Platform reviewed on: PC via Steam (Also available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S)
- Release Date: June 21, 2024
- ESRB: M for Mature 17+ (Blood and gore, language, suggestive themes, violence)
- This game was provided to Total Gaming Network for review purposes.
