Release: 2024
This is a pretty popular release this year and I wanted to give my quick thoughts on it. I truly think this is some of the best Elden Ring content you can experience. There are a ton of things to do, areas to explore, and bosses to face. I think if I could play this DLC on its own in the future I would probably do that! But as it stands you have to put in a lot of hours in the main game to even get access to the area. Not sure if I will do all of that.
But the DLC on it's own is really good. At the end of the base game the creators were playing around with a lot of dense areas with more verticality than was found in the rest of the game. I think they excelled here. There are a few areas of the map that are accessible at several different elevations which is neat. It does kind of make the map useless though, we should have had several different pages to flip through for different elevations or a 3d map, something more like Metroid Prime. That series is known for vertical exploration and usually gives good maps. Maps are new to Elden Ring so I understand the implementation won't be perfect, but with this level of verticality it makes the map kind of useless. I think that may be my only complaint here.
For the DLC they added in a different leveling system that only works in this area. Lovely touch that no one really comes in overpowered. In some of the pre-release interviews they talked about it being more like Sekiro than Dark Souls and I can see where they are coming from. But in Sekiro you increased stats by killing bosses/mini-bosses and in Elden Ring you have to find items littered about. Sekiro was more interesting in my opinion but it was also a linear game so it was easier to balance that way. Elden Ring had way more focus on exploration so I see why they handled it how they did. This is peak Souls content as we know it in 2024 and I believe this DLC deserves all the praise it gets!
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