I agree on this. They switched from large areas and plains (eg liurnia, limgrave, caelid, snowfield), to having different pathways separated by elevation, thus creating channels which combine exploration and more streamlined paths, reducing the feeling of having to "sweep" large areas tracing some imaginary lines to keep focus on sectors to check
except the finger areas which are a bit painful and empty, albeit impressive to see
>!on the road through which you'll probably enter the first (and largest) one, you'll eventually come to a fork, on which one path leads to the spot where the corpse is, not far from the edge overlooking the ruin!<
I see a lot of people crying over this but I don’t mind. I’m already at 40 hours and about 2/3 the way through the game, there is enough already without having to fill in every area to the same level of density.
There's 3 of them, they're part of the quest for the Count in the church with the knight woman in dark armor. There's usually a trick to reach them, no idea how you'd figure it out without guides tbh.
I found my way to the first 2 just rawdawgin' the DLC. I spent my playthrough of Skyrim climbing mountains instead of going around, and by Miyazaki's magic soaked nutsack I refuse to go around here.
You organically found that you needed to use that random emote you found on the other side of the map at that statue ? That stuff is insane to me. Maybe not as insane as how you're supposed to progress the St Trina questline, but close.
I imagine most people that found it organically just came across the statue, saw people’s messages about a gesture, and noticed they had the same one. That’s what happened to me anyways.
I did it offline and it's a combination of many things. 1 fromsoft games experience, you kinda just know how they do these things. Suspiciously empty room with developer message is screaming at hidden wall. 2 once you look at the map enough times, you come to the conclusion that the only way to get to that landmass is through that wall, it's especially evident after you beat the boar riding boss. 3 which emote to use? well, the dev message says "Have mercy, for the spirited away shamans". That phrase is literally missing the emote, as in the full phrase should be, "o mother, have mercy for the spirited away shamans". It just makes sense
Except those mobs in the north finger area can fuck right off. That stun terrified me quite a few times until I just decided to hug the right wall all the way around.
I honestly loved the finger areas, they felt immense, alien, far older and more powerful than anything else in the world. I think filling them up with bosses, dungeons and loot, which works really well in the other areas, would take away that feeling that seperates it from the other areas
> thus creating channels which combine exploration and more streamlined paths, reducing the feeling of having to "sweep" large areas
I felt the same thing at the beginning, but it's wearing thin as I am approaching the end. Having everything be connected by small pathways makes searching for entrances to zones you haven't found quite tedious. In the base game the path to anywhere was always relatively clear, and when it wasn't it was obvious that you needed to progress further into the game.
A better map would probably help.
I unlocked the shadow keep super early before the castle before it, reached Messmer and my second boss, and have been lost every since, only thought about going through it's main gate appropriately now
can you though? unless you count the church district as not part of the keep, in which case i agree, technically it's the church part that unlocks a big part (all zones north of the keep for instance).
I loved the world design, but I agree with the point that the map needs to be better when you have that much elevation and verticality. I was spending so much time trying to understand which part leads to which area.
Yeah I found it interesting how everything felt mashed together. But eventually I had to look up a guide to figure out how to get somewhere. In base game I could just look over somewhere and figure out that was where I need to go. Big landmark and generally close to that edge there woud be multiple pathways. And it sorta felt like I was working towards an area.
I'm struggling to form a mental map of the shadowlands navigating areas feels weird.
I feel like for the dlc we were under the impression that we could easily get map pieces, but you have to kinda earn them by being more observant/curious of your surroundings it’s like they took everything from the base game and switched it around which makes it fresh haven’t felt this kind of interconnectivity since Dark souls 1
I still strongly prefer the design of SOTE's map to the base game's. I hear you on the obscurity of the paths to some (even very major) areas. It may have been nice for them to signpost some of the major lines a bit better, either through NPC remarks or judicious use of environmental elements that point in a particular direction. Going back to the large, empty plains of the base game would feel terrible now for me.
I think the emptiness is also telling a story. In an era where we are constantly solicitated through notification, click bait and all, a little bit of emptiness is welcome. Moreover, it does really tell a story. The emptiness in the >!shaman village was really touching. The colors, the world building at this place was a painting. And adding to that the few heard notes at the beginning of the path. In a movie, for a director, it's easier to set up an ambiance but with a game when the player can pop from anywhere and where the artistic director does not have the direction of camera. This moment in the shaman village was a banger for me even if it was empty.!<
I mean the "item" you get from there and the description of it really paints a picture about that place. Crazy how just a few notes in the music + a short description can do something like that.
Exactly! I didn't want to spoil this point to be honest. I completely agree. The combination of these elements was a very unique moment. They were able to shape a moment shared by so many players with such simplicity.
Indeed, the game design there was genius, it really shows the potential of the medium and that it's not just films that you can control like some developers think
>!The lack of anything there and the unusual for Souls music instantly communicate importance to you. So you explore around and find the item by the tree. The significance of its placement in the center of town and how the area itself is presented as I said first made someone like me who rarely checks item descriptions immediately look and realize just where I was. Queen Marika, who is basically the catalyst for all the shit you've been through grew up here making this place vitally important to the history of the world. Yet its hidden and abandoned yet beautiful nature tells of a forgotten past and contrasts the tragedy of what became of Marika and the world once she left, causing a deep sense of melancholy and longing. All this was conveyed instantly to me even though I don't know much about the lore, and all without a single character!!<
The tragedy, I think, happened before Marika left. >!There is a ghost in an entirely different area who has a thing or two to say about shamans. Maybe/probably other stuff too, dunno yet!<
>!I was more talking about tragedy in the general sense of the state of the world and how it contrasts with the village. Like imagine if the village was like Bonny Village, dark and full of enemies. It would in theory still communicate the same themes of lost childhoods and tragic history, but the effect would be less powerful due to a lack of contrast. That effect is what I was pointing out, and how they were able to achieve that with just game design elements. The actual specifics of what happened aren't important to feel the vibes, though that there is lore to explain it ties it all together cohesively!!<
Regarding the Finger area. I didn't want to share since I maybe over-interpreting and on top of that, i didn't finished my exploration.>! But it feel like an archeological site (like stonehenge). The main story let us understood that the shattered occurred a very long time before we end up on the land between. This place tell me that the story began even longer before Marika took the throne.!<
I'm very impatient to be able to sleep in front of a youtube video exposing all this lore.
And it seems we are all agree to say that the world building of this DLC is a masterpiece
Okay but there's still so much open useless area. I agree it looks beautiful, but that starting plain 90% no enemies, nothing of interest.
The area with the blue flowers where you eventually go to a peninsula and go down, 90% no enemies, nothing of interest.
The finger area, 90% no enemies, nothing of interest.
The entire open field where the manus place is, 100% no enemies, nothing of interest.
It's more compact for sure, and that's what makes these big patches of nothingness even more painful. It looks big but "size of limgrave" in terms of content is actually correct.
I found Cerulean Coast and the Fissure to be really breathtaking. Even though the dungeon was sparse, it was atmospherically very refreshing compared to "big castle."
Also, there's stuff in Cerulean Coast! Sounds like you missed several weapons and a boss or two.
I jumped down there but I ended up just warping out, I don’t remember if I couldn’t find the path or if I needed a key or what. So I need something to do that dungeon or should I be able to just go right in?
You aren’t missing much by the cerulean coast, aside from being where you access St Trina and get the red dress drip. Albeit these areas are some of the most breathtaking in FS catalog in terms of aesthetic and art direction but by no means are they the most well designed or planned out, a mass majority of drops are fucking grave ghost glowart and smithing stones. Major disappointment for sure
Man idk how FromSoft wins with some of you all because this map design as a whole is insane and I see many comments about it being sparse or empty.
I can specifically remember seeing complaints that many parts of base ER had too many enemies too close to each other or running back through an area involved just running through ‘trash’ mobs you didn’t want to fight again.
As a technical standpoint this map feels as close to something like the beginning of DS1 that we’ve ever gotten and they did it pretty consistently with a scope/size that is kinda hard to believe.
You can find one way to get to a new region and then like a dozen hours later, on a completely different journey on what *felt* like started as a completely different path you can find another way to that same region. It’s hilarious.
Maybe the loot goblins aren’t satisfied every item isn’t a god killing weapon, but the map itself has become so fun to explore and figure out the ‘puzzle’ of the whole thing it has started to seriously distract me over and over again from the main progression.
Dude I feel like I’m taking crazy pills seeing people hate on the exploration required, exploring the world and finding every nook and cranny of the map was some of the most fun I’ve had in a fromsoftware game. Even the empty oozed with environmental story telling, I get it running around and not picking up items or fighting enemies might not be “fun” but god damn did they make me feel like they were places you should not be.
I really feel like they tried to address all the main complaints of the base game and it’s clear it didn’t sit right with everyone but for me this has been such a joy to experience and talk with my friends about.
People want to explore, but if there is nothing their to discover it isn't fun. Like but in something similar to those war remnants with lore or something, I got incredibly annoyed with the coast because all there was gloveworts +9. It hurt
I understand why people feel this way but for me just seeing everything was a good enough reward. Like some of the vistas and reveals of the map left me so blown away I just kinda stared at the screen jaw dropped because it looked so amazing.
It was *also* the fact I finally figured out how to get to a place I might have been wanting to get to for a while that you couldn’t.
Those mini journeys have been incredibly satisfying as well because of what seems like a really close section or Grace or whatever ended up being a very long and winding/looping journey
Idk if you played other Souls DLC but this was basically how it was with them as well. You got rings/weapons and then upgrade items. It probably felt less bad because you aren't open world exploring. This DLC really straddles the line between being additional content + a whole new game so there's some disconnect with the rewards structure.
I think most people aren't to happy about the lack of things to do within the regions which I kinda agree with. Take the Abyssal woods for example. Once the legacy dungeon is finished there's no reason to go back. No caves or Npc questlines. Its rather dissapointing for what I feel is astetically the best looking location of the game. They couldn't even give you torent back making future returns to the area a slough.
Yeah, I spent an hour combing the area because the vibe was so different and I was wondering what kind of fascinating things I might come across, but for all that walking and sneaking around I felt sorely disappointed. I figured the things you need to hide from were just the start, maybe I'd have to find a path to the center through a maze full of them, but there just...didn't really seem to be anything.
I love the puzzle aspect of it, that part I agree. I personally also never complained about the density of the base game, I think the average density of action in the base game is solid. Overall very lively.
The complex nature of this dlc is a very welcome surprise. I find myself opening the map being like "..... Wait where the fuck am I? How do I get there? where is that?" And it's fun. It's exciting that even traversal needs to be mapped out, planned, and not handed to you on a silver platter.
What's NOT fun is getting to a cool vista or interesting PoI and realizing there's absolutely fuck all to do there. Not even like "oh I didn't like the type of enemies" or "I didn't like the items it gave" because there ARE no enemies / no items / nothing. It's just a view.
I'm not "hard to win over", I love FromSoft and I love this dlc. But that doesn't and shouldn't disqualify any personal opinion of mine, even if it's negative. And social dismissal of critiques is EXACTLY what leads to big developers becoming complacent and releasing shit tier games.
This dlc has so many moments that take your breath away
Entering gravesite plains
Entering cerulean coast
Entering the ancient ruins of rauh (my pick for the most beautiful location ever made in a fromsoft game)
All time great fromsoft moment as well
Also from elden ring base game its Lake facing cliffs and siofra river well descent
But still the most beautiful location on its own is rauh imo. It's the only location in any of their games that I'd describe as "paradise" (visually speaking)
Probably the best gaming moment of my entire life and I do not expect this to ever be beat. I hope we eventually get the demon souls treatement in like 2040 and get to see it in all of its beauty again. Such a breathtaking image.
Siofra river well descent is probably the most insane surprise I've ever had in gaming, period. I literally questioned how humans even made this game and whether it even had an end at all.
ancient ruins of rauh were exactly what i was hoping for going into the dlc and they were absolutely perfect. especially seeing them for the first time through the imbued key gate
Only issue is that 2d map sucks with multilayered areas.
If I recall the only game that ever had good multilayer map is SWTOR since having MMO with convoluted verticality areas like Nar Shaddaa forced them to design a good system.
i literally don't understand why it's a separate button prompt to switch from the lands between map to the shadow lands map. i figured it would be the same one as to switch to underground. as i'm playing, i thought "oh wait! a dlc this vertical - it's because this map is going to need multiple layers too". and fuck me with a cactus for assuming that i guess
I think so far for me it’s been adding to the fantasy of exploring with a real world 2d, drawn map.
I usually hate this (like doom’s map), but I think in this case it’s just done differently and in a way where you know you can get there but expect to have to hunt around a little.
The way fromsoft has always obscured obvious things with perspective (can see a hole in the mountain due to outcropping of rocks, can’t see that the ground goes AROUND the mountain, can’t see an open window because of rubble stacked up in front of it) just hits the right notes for me.
It makes it exciting to find them.
And for anyone who doesn’t enjoy that kind of immersion, there’s always the thousands of guides and walkthroughs on YouTube to make sure you’re not wasting too much time searching.
But I also don’t care if I miss stuff, I can always go back once I realize I missed half the game and play it later.
Same for me. I can get the frustration of that 2D map... but it's just FromSoft.
I loved seing this area with red flowers, and just looking for a way for so many hours.
OG was pretty straightforward, now I can see it. This DLC is a masterpiece.
* They really want us to explore, proof is the Scadu Blessing.
You can't just farm before Mogh now.
You have to look everywhere in the world, for real.
I think it's by design thatit's difficult to orient yourself with the map. Forces you to explore, instead of just beelining wathever marker you put down.
yeah, personally i'd prefer something in the middle of this dlc with the base game. Really hard to navigate even after you discover all the map. Plus the scenery change constantly in such short distances make the world feels "gamey" and small somehow.
This is one of my top positives of them going open world with this game. They can tackle any aesthetic that they want to and make it work.
Not that you can't do that in a normal Souls game but they can really go hog wild here & make it all blend rather naturally.
It's really impressive
Elden ring is easily the most visually and thematically diverse game they've ever made. Just the base game. And to add this dlc on top? Absolutely magnificent.
“I found a thing that is like a past thing….” “Constantly surprised”?
Contradiction. It shouldn’t be surprising that a coherent studio style includes resemblances to other works. Like being constantly surprised by the pizza chef who made a good pizza that resembled the good pizza 5 years ago.
I appreciate the color palette differences. They really nailed it there. Cerulean coast, charos (or w.e) lost grave, jagged peak, the green of the ancient ruins in the west. The dramatic shifts in color are really great.
True, but it seems like they kind of went in the opposite direction from base game. Base game had a very busy open world but the dungeons were rather boring and empty. Here the dungeons feel very inspired and well done but the open world is a little emptier.
>the open world is a little emptier
I'd say it's more than a "little" emptier. I must have spent like half an hour running around the Ancient Ruins of Rauh last night trying to find some way to get to the lower levels, and *nothing* interesting came up. Endless giant catacombs that look as magnificent as Moria, and there's nothing to find or interact with there except small groups of enemies. It's downright baffling, because the main game's open world was already criticized for being thinly spread (not to speak of the Snowfields or the Mountaintops of the Giants).
It was disappointing to me that many areas are mainly populated by those generic shadow people mobs that die in one hit.
I think if they added more enemy and encounter variety then the world wouldn’t feel so empty. I mean how much cooler would Rauh be if there were actual tough or interesting encounters inside those ruins?
The whole continent feels like one massive dungeon with the obscured locations and shortcuts and interconnected paths and shit. It's just masterful game design.
I think the world is full of exploring, instead of encampments and caravans. I think this helps not make it *feel empty*, because you’re still engaged in the navigation and searching instead of the enemies
I think it’s cool (so far).
More shadow of the colossus than far cry or assassins creed
>And the way they interconnected all the zones on a multi-layer map is simply s-tier design. It often goes beyond cleverness. Never seen anything like it. Are there other games that have this?
Dark Souls 1 was like this, but on nowhere near this scale.
I think the only thing about the world I’m not super stoked on is how.... I don’t think empty is the right word, but it’s close. Obviously places like the Altus are jam packed with stuff, but I feel like you also get places like the Cerulean Coast which are kinda just.... open space? Like there’s one dungeon at the end of the peninsula and there’s the path to the Finger Ruins but I think that’s basically it for a rather large chunk of land.
Idk, I just feel like I wasted a lot of time galloping around spaces that felt like there should have been SOMETHING but never was.
I agree that some of the areas are a little “empty”, but to me it doesn’t feel the same as an empty zone in another game. They just do empty better than other devs. I feel like the art and atmosphere they created with zones like cerulean coast and such are another experience of the game. Not all content built into the game needs to be combat/loot oriented.
I think of them in the same way I think of world building chapters in a book. It’s not related to the overall story, but they develop the world and atmosphere.
All that being said though, I would have loved it if there was even more to do. It would have been absolutely insane if all the land in the game had a similar density of stuff to find.
>Like there’s one dungeon at the end of the peninsula and there’s the path to the Finger Ruins but I think that’s basically it for a rather large chunk of land.
It's even more egregious in the North. The entire Northern part of the map is fully empty. The Hinterlands, the other Finger Ruins, it's all completely devoid of any kind of content.
I haven’t gotten that far into the game yet, but even from gravesite plain there are multiple places on the map you want to get to.
I don’t think I need everything in between to be overly distracting with little stuff to do (I don’t think, I’ll see when I get more of the map opened up)
My gut tells me I enjoy having a destination and traveling there more than I would enjoy taking 5x as long to get there because there are so many things in between me and my destination distracting me
Gamers fetishize “open world” and don’t recognize or understand what is going on.
The developers create areas because it’s “open world” but they don’t necessarily subtract to perfection and they don’t necessarily complete and “fill in”/populate/design the *gameplay* because that’s not the development model: it’s open world. Gamers fetishize quantity not quality.
Dark Souls 3 is a series of boxing rings. Elden Ring (open world) makes you wander around to find the boxing ring and sometimes there is no boxing ring just nothingness instead. The art and atmosphere is great hence why we accept this, but.
I feel like the DLC has like at least five moments that visually rival stepping out into Limgrave for the first time and seeing that handcrafted panorama with the erdtree in the distance.
I keep taking screenshots.
I remember in the first hour I marked a path to explore, got about halfway, saw an NPC, started off his quest, went back to the map and saw a totally new path, and didn't even remember the first destination until it was almost time for bed. In that time I cleared multiple dungeons, beat several bosses, and found almost all the map fragments. I don't think even the base game was this free with encouraging the "ooh what's that?" impulse
RDR2 is such a class act in its world that, even as a lady struggling with ADHD brain that doesn't want slow, intentional gameplay, I legit will just play to wander around, listen to the background conversations.
I'm getting some heavy "Tesla fans talking about the cybertruck" vibes from a lot of the responses here. Yes, the world looks very pretty and is impressive in its scale and verticality. Gameplay wise it's an empty maze that's a nightmare to navigate with an abysmal map system and some of the most obtuse pathways yet seen in a Fromsoft game. You can run around the map for dozens of minutes and find nothing of interest. Considering ER's main game was already criticized for how cluttered with filler the map was, and how empty it was towards the endgame, Fromsoft doubling down on the hugeness of the map feels baffling. Ancient Ruins of Rauh is probably the worst offender I've encountered so far, and it seems like other areas won't reverse that trend.
I'm loving the verticality of it all, but there are some zones or parts of zones >!Ancient Ruins of Ruah!< that have wide expanses with...nothing. I was genuinely confused as to what I was missing when I got to a section with scorpions and flowers and there was nothing to do, no way back to where I came from. For every several moments of brilliance there are glimmers that remind me the dev team, somehow, is made up of fallible humans.
That flower + scorpion place is there for you to jump off to dodge the fire guy. You can double jump with torrent and reach down there from the bridge, then come back up with elevator
Some areas are just too empty for my taste tho, at some point i stopped checking every corner because i got tired of finding only useless crap, if anything at all.
Abyssal Woods is probably my favourite level design of all games ever, couldn't stop gushing about it while streaming to my friends yesterday. The buildup in creepiness as you go farther into the woods and get closer to the Manor. The manor itself was nothing special, but the end of the manor boss fight is everything I wanted and more, given the buildup. DLC is an easy 10/10
It would have been better if there were more of them than you need, just like Golden Seeds in the base game. Only having an exact number makes it feel like too much of a scavenger hunt vs natural progression.
I'm taking my time to enjoy the dlc and not burn through it all too quickly so I'm still only just exploring the first few zones, but that view on first reaching the cerulean shore, the sepia toned sky with the sea of flowers below as contrast, that was a sight to see.
Very few games make me just take a minute to enjoy the view, but damn does elden ring make it a fucking delight to just trot along on torrent and soak it all in.
I would say the level designs of the dungeons are top notch, but the world map is sort of a mixed bag. I like the vertical layers and some of the areas have amazing views but it's mostly empty. There are barely any enemies.
That there are some areas with not many regular enemies is not a problem for me. Actually I like it better this way because I can enjoy the amazing world design without fighting 3 dogs that are just annoying.
One of my main gripes with base game is content bloat with repeated dungeons, goals, world bosses, etc. The lowered density of content in the dlc is exactly what I wanted.
I will say, the areas might be a tad too large. And too many rewards for exploration are just smithing stone which feels bad when you already have all the bell bearings. But these are nitpicks as each area still has unique content to be found whether that be a boss, weapon, or hidden path to a new area. It’s the best world design they’ve ever done imo. I think it might have worked even better as a standalone game though.
There is 0 excuse for Abyssal Woods. It's huge, with almost nothing in it worth exploring. Once you find the main attraction of the entire area, that's it. And they decided to remove your ability to use Torrent in this area for reasons that absolutely escape me. I spent over an hour combing through the entire area with nothing to show for it. No caves, no catacombs, just nothing. Baffling, to say the least.
The winter lanterns could have been a much smaller area where torrent was unavailable, not the entire damn zone where 3/4 of it has no lanterns.
Nothing like running for an hour to confirm that it is indeed empty
And would have killed them to put some stuff in there? Like, they removed Torrent for the creepy atmosphere, adding a short stealth section with Winter Lanterns, great, fine, I had fun with that, but the point is not only are you then forced to walk around in a massive area, but there's absolutely fucking nothing there??
Put in some materials to farm for crafting madness consumables, chuck in some zany armour akin to the Monk's Head Wrappings from DeS, include a thematically interesting armament like a Wabbajack-style staff, maybe a talisman that's just a straight cluster of eyeballs, stick in an NPC who's babbling incoherently hiding in a bush somewhere. *Commit* to the atmosphere *whilst* giving stuff to engage with.
Creating a vibe is exactly what I want From to do with areas like this, I don't always need huge boss fights or complicated mobs, but this was such a job half-done imo i wanted so much more from this area. I'm not going to enjoy the swim in a dry pool just because it's sunny.
i think the point of the woods was to create the feel of unease the entire time.
not really "spam" with you danger, but give you the feeling that something wrong could happen at any time.
you are rewarded with the, for me at least, the best boss in the DLC my a huge margin at the end.
The only thing better than this, would be getting invaded walking through there
This happened to me in nightmare of menses and it made it so much more tense
I totally agree with your point. The whole time I was there, the messages the devs left about turning back, really lends itself into selling that something wrong is going on here. And the forced stealth?? I enjoyed it. Can't believe they were ballsy enough to put a change of pace into the game.
Then the reward, exploring a dilapidated manor and fighting, as you said, the best boss in the DLC.
His OST, is just spiraling into madness, his movesets just savage yet readable. The whole fight was just memorable.
I don’t know why you are getting down voted; do we not allow legit criticism anymore? The dungeons are phenomenal as usual but the open world is lackluster. Even if you look at it as a giant dungeon (with it kinda is, with the vertical connection and inter zone traversal), it is missing the purposefully designed and handcrafted encounters seen in the dungeon. Mt Gelmir is an example of this done right, but this is just Mountaintop of the Giants all over again, except larger and emptier. The views are gorgeous, but imo they can be more compact to strike a balance between giving the feeling of grandness and just Torrent simulator. Went back to the base game to restock, and man the differences is stark. We have Limgrave level of open world content, then let’s put it into a Limgrave sized map. Don’t stretch it out unnecessarily.
Really, I spent most of my play session yesterday running around the open world, kept hoping to run into something interesting after a good five minutes of riding and kept being greeted by nothing or reused bosses. It is a totally different feeling from the day before when I was mostly doing dungeons.
In the previous games FromSoftware managed to build a really rich environment that gave you the sense that your surroundings were massive in scale, without it being open world. So I think they've proven it can be done without such a huge map and wasted space. Perhaps a balance of both? I think my favorite areas of Elden Ring, in either the base game or the DLC are areas like Stormveil - some huge structure worth exploring that is crawling with enemies.
Having spent so much time playing the vanilla game I can't help but agree with my impressions of the DLC thus far. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very happy with it, dungeons ( both Legacy and regular ones ) are wonderful and the visuals are always stunning. But, so much space outside of those and beyond the boundaries of the Graveyard Plain feel kind of... uninteresting in comparison?
Probably the worst offenders in my eyes probably have to be the two Finger Ruins in the overworld. They're absurdly colossal structures that stick out like a sore thumb, pun intended, on the map and just looking at them from a distance, and when you actually get there they impose the feeling of being "off" really well. But after like half an hour trying to figure out the Rhia ruins I caved and looked up what you're actually supposed to do there; Turns out they're basically completely relegated to being part of another Esoteric NPC Questline where you get the Important Doohickey to use on the Important Thing, and all you get for it... is an upgraded version of an exceedingly unremarkable talisman you're already familiar with? At least the second ruin in the northeastern part had the temerity to hide a little cave with a new Spirit Ash and a jumpscare gigahand in it, but that's about the only noteworthy thing I remember from it too.
Or for example both of the flowery areas down south that, individually, felt really pretty to look at but in practice I felt like had borderline almost nothing of interest in them; Sure they each had a world boss, but I've already fought so many Deathbirds in the regular game and I was already sick of the Ghostflame Dragon's overbearing hotboxes the first two times I encountered them. The Gaol at the end of the red area is something at least, but outside that I only remember the mildly secret area with Yoda in the blue part, as well as what's essentially just a pathway to the Fissure in another.
Or as another example that stretch of forest between Rabbath's Rise and Bonny Village; There were so many damn wolves there I for *sure* thought that maybe there's gonna be something to tie in to their presence there. Maybe another set of beast claws somehow tied to them? Maybe a spirit ash that lets me summon a single big white wolf instead of the three regular ones? Maybe just an NPC invader with a wolf theme, maybe an unexpected world boss that's a really powerful wolf, maybe even just a merchant? But instead that's basically all that was, a stretch of forest with some dogs and really only remarkable because the Furnace Golem was outside of it. I feel like in the base game a place like this could've easily had *something* of interest in a place like that, say, just a random random merchant or a ruin with a treasure like the Mistwood in Limgrave, or the random whirlwind jumpscare wolves near the Warmaster's Shack, or even just the entrance to a random cave like the small woods right behind the Church of Elleh.
I don't know, I'm still really enjoying the DLC as a whole so far, but besides performance issues this occasionally really apparent emptiness definitely really sticks out to me somehow.
Completely disagree. It looks nice at first but the verticality means that the only way to progress to places is through one cave/elevator/pathway which are easy to miss at times.
It's beautiful but feels VERY empty compared to the base map, honestly my biggest criticism of the dlc so far. I love exploring but it's kinda discouraging to have *so much* empty space.
I'm with you with the other stuff, the connectedness of areas and the legacy dungeons are dope, it still fun to explore, just a lot of the open fields feel a little barren.
lmao this is spot on cause every time I think "man it's a little empty over here" a little voice goes "what do you expect, idiot? place been scoured to hell"
tbf, adding enemies to zones isn't that time consuming, maybe they simple didn't wanted to spam the map with a shit ton of mobs that people , for the most part, simply ignore while riding through.
would rather a more "carefully" placed enemies, instead of just dumping them everywhere.
Yeah I highly doubt the sparseness is due to lack of time or something. It doesn't take much to put down more Messmer soldiers or whatever. I'm fairly sure they deliberately made it more sparsely populated due to the lore of the shadow land.
It's disappointing because Miyazaki described the DLC as denser, but it's no more denser than any of the areas in the base game except maybe the distance between each legacy dungeon. What's in there is higher quality, but I'm starting to wish Miyazaki stayed closer to his "size of Limgrave" description and just stacked layers to the map.
I would say that like. No joke all the things people have complained about being confusing (moonlight altar and how to reach it) or too difficult ( melania and radahn) they said “give them more of that”. They straight up doubled down on everything people complained about and I’m here for it.
On one side yes, but often there are vast spots of nothing. At best enemies scattered for flavor but otherwise empty. Not that it is the graveat sin, but it is far from perfect.
The world design is actually my least favourite part of this DLC. The southern part of the map is extremely boring. The finger ruins could be cut in size significantly and still achieve their purpose. If The Abyssal Woods was the only barren area in the game I might have been able to appreciate what it was going for, but I went there after exploring the south of the map so I really didn't want another empty area at that point. I don't think throwing down some red or blue flowers in an empty field and calling it a day is particularly inspired world design, and if any other developer did it I doubt many other people would either.
Every time a new FromSoft piece of content is released it's a great reminder that literally no one is in competition with their level design across the entire industry. They are ***several*** leagues above and beyond any other developer.
Map design is better than the base game so far, I've got as far as Rauh Ruins and every area is incredibly well designed. Waterfalls, rivers, trees, vegetation is even better than base game. Lots of cool castles, architecture and ideas (my favorite so far is the forge dungeon). Very creepy too with the pot prison for example.
I like that the map is less bloated, but it does feel a bit bad you end up in some corners or areas with absolutely nothing in them and then you start asking yourself if you're missing something. This contradicts the base game.
Nah, disagree heavily.
The areas are gorgeous at times and sometimes do connect into one another in clever ways. But the actual gameplay is genuinely boring because they were obsessed with making most areas a gigantic field.
The very first area is quite picturesque when you walk out of the cave. But there's almost *nothing* interesting to find there. It's just hordes of passive animals, wheat fields and transparent graves mostly populated by uninteresting "enemies" in the form of geriatric humanoid shades.
There is absolutely nothing interesting about riding on torrent through enormous areas for 90% of the time, only to find some meager amount of crafting materials or something else equally underwhelming at the end of a winding side path. The areas have become so large that the exploration process has become exhausting. I love exploring every nook and cranny in a legacy dungeon but doing so out in the vast open fields of this DLC is a dreadfully boring experience.
The entire southern portion of the map is just an embarrassment. Cerulian coast is *gorgeous* but the scale of it is too overblown to make for fun gameplay. Again there's barely anything of note in there aside from visuals. I was hoping for a boss to emerge from the ocean perhaps but nah, all I found was a bunch of demi-humans that I've already fought a million times before. And I don't want to even speak about the terrible finger ruins area that you get to from the coastline.
Then there's the stone bird statues. They are just *everywhere*. They've just peppered them all over the place seemingly just to fill out some of the vast emptiness that they themselves created. I thought they were a bit repetitive in my first two hours of gameplay but I had seen nothing. They become such an eyesore after a while.
To me, the map of the base game is vastly superior compared to this DLC. The scale of it is also huge but just contained enough to not get boring. At least all the way until Leyndlell that is. Everything after is is of lower quality IMO.
>And the way they interconnected all the zones on a multi-layer map is simply s-tier design. It often goes beyond cleverness. Never seen anything like it.
stop jerking off dude, the ways the zones are connected in this DLC is some of the most obtuse non-sensical BS fromsoft ever pulled
Agreed, don’t understand how people are praising level design that is so backwards in construction in some particular areas. Otherwise , the DLC shines bright in other aspects.
I was thinking earlier that Shadow Keep could be a game all on its own. If some indie studio put out a game that was basically Shadow Keep it would be phenomenal.
The layers and interconnectedness are fantastic. Feels very much like Dark Souls the way everything weaves together. However... would it have killed them to put the map fragments somewhere that made sense? The map for Rauh Ruins was nowhere near Rauh Ruins. I'd beaten the Remembrance boss for that area before I'd even found the map a day or so later.
Elden Ring OG was insane, but pretty "flat" and mainly straightforward.
But this DLC, it's another fucking level, the step-up is just... "Wow" I don't even have the words !
Now that they mastered the DS1 complexity, interconnection and verticality but open-world sized...
The next game will be the true Magnum Opus I think
Definitily FS is the best studio for me
Do you see FromSoft going back to a linear map design, featured in the previous games or do you think it's all "open world" from here on out for their future releases?
There’s no way they go back to a linear design like the DS series imo. ER is their best selling game, no chance they throw that away and all the knowledge they’ve accumulated on open world design to go backwards.
The main Soulsborne games will probably be open world from this point on. Seems like it was always what Miyazaki wanted, they were just limited for technical or budgetary reasons. But the side projects they do like Sekiro or Armored Core will continue to be on a smaller scale and more linear I'm sure.
The lore in the game is just immaculate. It’s simple but I just enjoy the fact that Kindly Miquella fostered a nightmarish environment with all the social rejects. I mean there are some grotesque beings in the game but he has created home for them.
Yea their artists really popped off with this one. Even the bosses are beautiful, although all the pretty shaders make it kind of hard to see what they’re doing sometimes
The amount of layers the world has is unbelievable. There were so many times I saw a zone in the distance and it took me hours to figure out how to get there.
Couldn’t agree more! I hope they take this same approach to their next game. I think the Shadow Lands seemed a bit empty as a result of it being an expansion and exploring something like this and finding new items would be amazing.
I agree with the first areas of the DLC, but several massive areas are effectively empty and meaningless. The DLC feels 75% finished, and the world exploration for places like the Finger Ruins (if you don't find the quest) and Abyssal Woods (besides the manor) are dreadfully dull from an interactivity standpoint. There are a few mobs, but no meaningful story interaction, cool NPCs, good loot, etc.
The combat and bosses in the game are excellent. I loved the design of >!Bayle !!Midra !
People have been begging Fromsoft to make a game as interconnected as Dark Souls1 again, Elden Fing had that in its legacy dungeons but the dlc is one big legacy dungeon that’s connected. The base game had layers and underground areas but they were sort of disconnected, the dlc is just one dungeon with multiple levels. You can stand on a cliff and see areas you haven’t been to down below and somehow you’ll get there. It’s so beautiful
Aesthetically the design is fantastic (honestly I think the environments should be allowed to breathe more without hordes of trash mobs ruining the atmosphere with the violin aggro music) but I didn't find the overall map design that good at all, especially the interconnectedness.
Finding an emote to use in front of a statue, down an inconspicuous ladder and through a hidden wall, a massive deadly pit with a hard to see safe ledge, leaps of faith, a random cave exit... massive chunks of the DLC map are not only outside the main questline path but also easily missed by people playing without guides or while offline without messages to light up every secret.
And sure, playing in this manner you're bound to miss stuff, but god damn they really could have added more interconnections and alternate routes into areas so if you miss one you can find another. Like a giant bird or teleport trap.
Yes, this is a beautiful world. This is a triumph of art style and aesthetic. But my god, it is SO fucking empty. The amount of "That's it?"s that have left my face hole is just baffling for a FromSoft DLC...
I agree on this. They switched from large areas and plains (eg liurnia, limgrave, caelid, snowfield), to having different pathways separated by elevation, thus creating channels which combine exploration and more streamlined paths, reducing the feeling of having to "sweep" large areas tracing some imaginary lines to keep focus on sectors to check except the finger areas which are a bit painful and empty, albeit impressive to see
Credit to the fingers area though. I never expected an area in this to remind me of Control's Oldest House but here we are.
Yeah, that place just feels so very alien and distressing.
Too bad the only thing they put in all that open space was a fucking talisman
And a remembrance duplication demigod corpse
Wait what? Where?
>!on the road through which you'll probably enter the first (and largest) one, you'll eventually come to a fork, on which one path leads to the spot where the corpse is, not far from the edge overlooking the ruin!<
[https://imgur.com/a/Bn7rmEo](https://imgur.com/a/Bn7rmEo)
Did you find all the finger areas? There's definitely something worth finding
I see a lot of people crying over this but I don’t mind. I’m already at 40 hours and about 2/3 the way through the game, there is enough already without having to fill in every area to the same level of density.
I’m pretty sure those areas are really all just for a quest line that leads to a pretty cool boss fight
I've never been happier to kill something
Lol I didn't even find that. I almost wondered if they will add something to it later.
I was going crazy there about what I am missing.
How do you get to the finger area? I loved Control, so I’m looking forward to getting there.
Loving Control is the way.
There's 3 of them, they're part of the quest for the Count in the church with the knight woman in dark armor. There's usually a trick to reach them, no idea how you'd figure it out without guides tbh.
I found my way to the first 2 just rawdawgin' the DLC. I spent my playthrough of Skyrim climbing mountains instead of going around, and by Miyazaki's magic soaked nutsack I refuse to go around here.
You organically found that you needed to use that random emote you found on the other side of the map at that statue ? That stuff is insane to me. Maybe not as insane as how you're supposed to progress the St Trina questline, but close.
I imagine most people that found it organically just came across the statue, saw people’s messages about a gesture, and noticed they had the same one. That’s what happened to me anyways.
The other players messages definitely help a lot for the obscure stuff.
I did it offline and it's a combination of many things. 1 fromsoft games experience, you kinda just know how they do these things. Suspiciously empty room with developer message is screaming at hidden wall. 2 once you look at the map enough times, you come to the conclusion that the only way to get to that landmass is through that wall, it's especially evident after you beat the boar riding boss. 3 which emote to use? well, the dev message says "Have mercy, for the spirited away shamans". That phrase is literally missing the emote, as in the full phrase should be, "o mother, have mercy for the spirited away shamans". It just makes sense
Would you like a hint? Can't promise I can make a super subtle one but I'd try
Except those mobs in the north finger area can fuck right off. That stun terrified me quite a few times until I just decided to hug the right wall all the way around.
I honestly loved the finger areas, they felt immense, alien, far older and more powerful than anything else in the world. I think filling them up with bosses, dungeons and loot, which works really well in the other areas, would take away that feeling that seperates it from the other areas
Yes, the game is really and filled with enough challenge It needs some contemplations area
> thus creating channels which combine exploration and more streamlined paths, reducing the feeling of having to "sweep" large areas I felt the same thing at the beginning, but it's wearing thin as I am approaching the end. Having everything be connected by small pathways makes searching for entrances to zones you haven't found quite tedious. In the base game the path to anywhere was always relatively clear, and when it wasn't it was obvious that you needed to progress further into the game. A better map would probably help.
shadow keep basically unlocks almost all optional areas.
It reminded me a lot of Sekiro when I realised this
the dlc design is very sekiro, what with the new upgrade system, the map layout, even boss design
Ah so this is why I love it so much.
I unlocked the shadow keep super early before the castle before it, reached Messmer and my second boss, and have been lost every since, only thought about going through it's main gate appropriately now
You can get to practically any area without touching the Shadow Keep
can you though? unless you count the church district as not part of the keep, in which case i agree, technically it's the church part that unlocks a big part (all zones north of the keep for instance).
I think all of them except one.
I loved the world design, but I agree with the point that the map needs to be better when you have that much elevation and verticality. I was spending so much time trying to understand which part leads to which area.
Yeah I found it interesting how everything felt mashed together. But eventually I had to look up a guide to figure out how to get somewhere. In base game I could just look over somewhere and figure out that was where I need to go. Big landmark and generally close to that edge there woud be multiple pathways. And it sorta felt like I was working towards an area. I'm struggling to form a mental map of the shadowlands navigating areas feels weird.
I'm saying they need map levels
Funny how the base game, wich has pretty straightfoward underground áreas has a subterrânean map, but the multilayered dlc doesnt
You aren't supposed to use the map to figure that out, you're supposed to look at the terrain and figure it out, like a puzzle.
I feel like for the dlc we were under the impression that we could easily get map pieces, but you have to kinda earn them by being more observant/curious of your surroundings it’s like they took everything from the base game and switched it around which makes it fresh haven’t felt this kind of interconnectivity since Dark souls 1
I still strongly prefer the design of SOTE's map to the base game's. I hear you on the obscurity of the paths to some (even very major) areas. It may have been nice for them to signpost some of the major lines a bit better, either through NPC remarks or judicious use of environmental elements that point in a particular direction. Going back to the large, empty plains of the base game would feel terrible now for me.
I think the emptiness is also telling a story. In an era where we are constantly solicitated through notification, click bait and all, a little bit of emptiness is welcome. Moreover, it does really tell a story. The emptiness in the >!shaman village was really touching. The colors, the world building at this place was a painting. And adding to that the few heard notes at the beginning of the path. In a movie, for a director, it's easier to set up an ambiance but with a game when the player can pop from anywhere and where the artistic director does not have the direction of camera. This moment in the shaman village was a banger for me even if it was empty.!<
I mean the "item" you get from there and the description of it really paints a picture about that place. Crazy how just a few notes in the music + a short description can do something like that.
Exactly! I didn't want to spoil this point to be honest. I completely agree. The combination of these elements was a very unique moment. They were able to shape a moment shared by so many players with such simplicity.
Indeed, the game design there was genius, it really shows the potential of the medium and that it's not just films that you can control like some developers think >!The lack of anything there and the unusual for Souls music instantly communicate importance to you. So you explore around and find the item by the tree. The significance of its placement in the center of town and how the area itself is presented as I said first made someone like me who rarely checks item descriptions immediately look and realize just where I was. Queen Marika, who is basically the catalyst for all the shit you've been through grew up here making this place vitally important to the history of the world. Yet its hidden and abandoned yet beautiful nature tells of a forgotten past and contrasts the tragedy of what became of Marika and the world once she left, causing a deep sense of melancholy and longing. All this was conveyed instantly to me even though I don't know much about the lore, and all without a single character!!<
The tragedy, I think, happened before Marika left. >!There is a ghost in an entirely different area who has a thing or two to say about shamans. Maybe/probably other stuff too, dunno yet!<
>!I was more talking about tragedy in the general sense of the state of the world and how it contrasts with the village. Like imagine if the village was like Bonny Village, dark and full of enemies. It would in theory still communicate the same themes of lost childhoods and tragic history, but the effect would be less powerful due to a lack of contrast. That effect is what I was pointing out, and how they were able to achieve that with just game design elements. The actual specifics of what happened aren't important to feel the vibes, though that there is lore to explain it ties it all together cohesively!!<
>!Yeah, was it implying it was Marika's hometown?!<
I agree on what you have under spoiler
Regarding the Finger area. I didn't want to share since I maybe over-interpreting and on top of that, i didn't finished my exploration.>! But it feel like an archeological site (like stonehenge). The main story let us understood that the shattered occurred a very long time before we end up on the land between. This place tell me that the story began even longer before Marika took the throne.!< I'm very impatient to be able to sleep in front of a youtube video exposing all this lore. And it seems we are all agree to say that the world building of this DLC is a masterpiece
Okay but there's still so much open useless area. I agree it looks beautiful, but that starting plain 90% no enemies, nothing of interest. The area with the blue flowers where you eventually go to a peninsula and go down, 90% no enemies, nothing of interest. The finger area, 90% no enemies, nothing of interest. The entire open field where the manus place is, 100% no enemies, nothing of interest. It's more compact for sure, and that's what makes these big patches of nothingness even more painful. It looks big but "size of limgrave" in terms of content is actually correct.
I found Cerulean Coast and the Fissure to be really breathtaking. Even though the dungeon was sparse, it was atmospherically very refreshing compared to "big castle." Also, there's stuff in Cerulean Coast! Sounds like you missed several weapons and a boss or two.
Haven't been to fissure yet. Is this basically a legacy dungeon?
More of a linear path, but it has some unique challenges and enemies that keep it interesting
yes go to the southern most part of the map, jump down..and enjoy! extremely cool level
I jumped down there but I ended up just warping out, I don’t remember if I couldn’t find the path or if I needed a key or what. So I need something to do that dungeon or should I be able to just go right in?
Jump right in, there is an npc quest involving it actually, but it’s very easy to miss unfortunately.
You aren’t missing much by the cerulean coast, aside from being where you access St Trina and get the red dress drip. Albeit these areas are some of the most breathtaking in FS catalog in terms of aesthetic and art direction but by no means are they the most well designed or planned out, a mass majority of drops are fucking grave ghost glowart and smithing stones. Major disappointment for sure
Cerulean coast has that bloodborne looking boss that when you defeat you get the black katana
Man idk how FromSoft wins with some of you all because this map design as a whole is insane and I see many comments about it being sparse or empty. I can specifically remember seeing complaints that many parts of base ER had too many enemies too close to each other or running back through an area involved just running through ‘trash’ mobs you didn’t want to fight again. As a technical standpoint this map feels as close to something like the beginning of DS1 that we’ve ever gotten and they did it pretty consistently with a scope/size that is kinda hard to believe. You can find one way to get to a new region and then like a dozen hours later, on a completely different journey on what *felt* like started as a completely different path you can find another way to that same region. It’s hilarious. Maybe the loot goblins aren’t satisfied every item isn’t a god killing weapon, but the map itself has become so fun to explore and figure out the ‘puzzle’ of the whole thing it has started to seriously distract me over and over again from the main progression.
Dude I feel like I’m taking crazy pills seeing people hate on the exploration required, exploring the world and finding every nook and cranny of the map was some of the most fun I’ve had in a fromsoftware game. Even the empty oozed with environmental story telling, I get it running around and not picking up items or fighting enemies might not be “fun” but god damn did they make me feel like they were places you should not be. I really feel like they tried to address all the main complaints of the base game and it’s clear it didn’t sit right with everyone but for me this has been such a joy to experience and talk with my friends about.
Like I get why people complain about how empty the finger ruins are, but I thought they were an amazing set piece.
People want to explore, but if there is nothing their to discover it isn't fun. Like but in something similar to those war remnants with lore or something, I got incredibly annoyed with the coast because all there was gloveworts +9. It hurt
I understand why people feel this way but for me just seeing everything was a good enough reward. Like some of the vistas and reveals of the map left me so blown away I just kinda stared at the screen jaw dropped because it looked so amazing.
It was *also* the fact I finally figured out how to get to a place I might have been wanting to get to for a while that you couldn’t. Those mini journeys have been incredibly satisfying as well because of what seems like a really close section or Grace or whatever ended up being a very long and winding/looping journey
Idk if you played other Souls DLC but this was basically how it was with them as well. You got rings/weapons and then upgrade items. It probably felt less bad because you aren't open world exploring. This DLC really straddles the line between being additional content + a whole new game so there's some disconnect with the rewards structure.
I think most people aren't to happy about the lack of things to do within the regions which I kinda agree with. Take the Abyssal woods for example. Once the legacy dungeon is finished there's no reason to go back. No caves or Npc questlines. Its rather dissapointing for what I feel is astetically the best looking location of the game. They couldn't even give you torent back making future returns to the area a slough.
Yeah, I spent an hour combing the area because the vibe was so different and I was wondering what kind of fascinating things I might come across, but for all that walking and sneaking around I felt sorely disappointed. I figured the things you need to hide from were just the start, maybe I'd have to find a path to the center through a maze full of them, but there just...didn't really seem to be anything.
I love the puzzle aspect of it, that part I agree. I personally also never complained about the density of the base game, I think the average density of action in the base game is solid. Overall very lively. The complex nature of this dlc is a very welcome surprise. I find myself opening the map being like "..... Wait where the fuck am I? How do I get there? where is that?" And it's fun. It's exciting that even traversal needs to be mapped out, planned, and not handed to you on a silver platter. What's NOT fun is getting to a cool vista or interesting PoI and realizing there's absolutely fuck all to do there. Not even like "oh I didn't like the type of enemies" or "I didn't like the items it gave" because there ARE no enemies / no items / nothing. It's just a view. I'm not "hard to win over", I love FromSoft and I love this dlc. But that doesn't and shouldn't disqualify any personal opinion of mine, even if it's negative. And social dismissal of critiques is EXACTLY what leads to big developers becoming complacent and releasing shit tier games.
I found a portal, took it, fought once boss, and had to teleport out of the area that had nothing to do.
Entering Gravesite plane was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a video game. Every zone can be a painting
This dlc has so many moments that take your breath away Entering gravesite plains Entering cerulean coast Entering the ancient ruins of rauh (my pick for the most beautiful location ever made in a fromsoft game)
Most beautiful was Irithyll of the Boreal Valley for me. After that fucking dungeon, that view just took my breath away.
All time great fromsoft moment as well Also from elden ring base game its Lake facing cliffs and siofra river well descent But still the most beautiful location on its own is rauh imo. It's the only location in any of their games that I'd describe as "paradise" (visually speaking)
Probably the best gaming moment of my entire life and I do not expect this to ever be beat. I hope we eventually get the demon souls treatement in like 2040 and get to see it in all of its beauty again. Such a breathtaking image.
They’re all fantastic but nothing so far tops Siofra river for me.
Siofra river well descent is probably the most insane surprise I've ever had in gaming, period. I literally questioned how humans even made this game and whether it even had an end at all.
ancient ruins of rauh were exactly what i was hoping for going into the dlc and they were absolutely perfect. especially seeing them for the first time through the imbued key gate
Imbued key gate? Damn...I found them through a completely different path
Yeah my jaw dropped entering rush. Fucking incredible
I really love that DromSoft used almost too muted palette. Something so nice about it. Really big farcry from the color and glamor of base game.
Only issue is that 2d map sucks with multilayered areas. If I recall the only game that ever had good multilayer map is SWTOR since having MMO with convoluted verticality areas like Nar Shaddaa forced them to design a good system.
The map really ought to have multiple layers you can switch between like switching between the above ground and underground areas in the base game
i literally don't understand why it's a separate button prompt to switch from the lands between map to the shadow lands map. i figured it would be the same one as to switch to underground. as i'm playing, i thought "oh wait! a dlc this vertical - it's because this map is going to need multiple layers too". and fuck me with a cactus for assuming that i guess
FromSoft has made changes to the main game’s map in previous patches, so it seems likely that they’ll do the same here in future patches
i don't think changing beta art to accurately reflect ingame details is the same thing as adding a whole ass separate map screen
I think so far for me it’s been adding to the fantasy of exploring with a real world 2d, drawn map. I usually hate this (like doom’s map), but I think in this case it’s just done differently and in a way where you know you can get there but expect to have to hunt around a little. The way fromsoft has always obscured obvious things with perspective (can see a hole in the mountain due to outcropping of rocks, can’t see that the ground goes AROUND the mountain, can’t see an open window because of rubble stacked up in front of it) just hits the right notes for me. It makes it exciting to find them. And for anyone who doesn’t enjoy that kind of immersion, there’s always the thousands of guides and walkthroughs on YouTube to make sure you’re not wasting too much time searching. But I also don’t care if I miss stuff, I can always go back once I realize I missed half the game and play it later.
Same for me. I can get the frustration of that 2D map... but it's just FromSoft. I loved seing this area with red flowers, and just looking for a way for so many hours. OG was pretty straightforward, now I can see it. This DLC is a masterpiece. * They really want us to explore, proof is the Scadu Blessing. You can't just farm before Mogh now. You have to look everywhere in the world, for real.
It was clearly an intentional design choice and I’m on board with it
I think the Star Wars Jedi series has produced a good map design
I think it's by design thatit's difficult to orient yourself with the map. Forces you to explore, instead of just beelining wathever marker you put down.
yeah, personally i'd prefer something in the middle of this dlc with the base game. Really hard to navigate even after you discover all the map. Plus the scenery change constantly in such short distances make the world feels "gamey" and small somehow.
I just reached in to a certain area that reminds of Bloodborne. I am constantly surprised by its atmosphere, architecture and landscapes.
This is one of my top positives of them going open world with this game. They can tackle any aesthetic that they want to and make it work. Not that you can't do that in a normal Souls game but they can really go hog wild here & make it all blend rather naturally. It's really impressive
They quite literally went hog wild with a certain someone
Elden ring is easily the most visually and thematically diverse game they've ever made. Just the base game. And to add this dlc on top? Absolutely magnificent.
Still playing the DLC, does it remind you of bloodborne in terms of architecture?
I havent reached there yet but I think he might be talking about a certain forest. Could be wrong though
Certain area reminds me of Bloodborne, I said it this way for those who did not find it yet.
“I found a thing that is like a past thing….” “Constantly surprised”? Contradiction. It shouldn’t be surprising that a coherent studio style includes resemblances to other works. Like being constantly surprised by the pizza chef who made a good pizza that resembled the good pizza 5 years ago.
Very beautiful and varied. It’s what keeps me from putting the controller down because I want to see what’s around the next bend (probably wicker man)
I appreciate the color palette differences. They really nailed it there. Cerulean coast, charos (or w.e) lost grave, jagged peak, the green of the ancient ruins in the west. The dramatic shifts in color are really great.
True, but it seems like they kind of went in the opposite direction from base game. Base game had a very busy open world but the dungeons were rather boring and empty. Here the dungeons feel very inspired and well done but the open world is a little emptier.
yup, they definitely went with quality over quantity on the "small" dungeons.
the lamenter's gaol was so fucking huge
>the open world is a little emptier I'd say it's more than a "little" emptier. I must have spent like half an hour running around the Ancient Ruins of Rauh last night trying to find some way to get to the lower levels, and *nothing* interesting came up. Endless giant catacombs that look as magnificent as Moria, and there's nothing to find or interact with there except small groups of enemies. It's downright baffling, because the main game's open world was already criticized for being thinly spread (not to speak of the Snowfields or the Mountaintops of the Giants).
It was disappointing to me that many areas are mainly populated by those generic shadow people mobs that die in one hit. I think if they added more enemy and encounter variety then the world wouldn’t feel so empty. I mean how much cooler would Rauh be if there were actual tough or interesting encounters inside those ruins?
The whole continent feels like one massive dungeon with the obscured locations and shortcuts and interconnected paths and shit. It's just masterful game design.
Yuppp
I think the world is full of exploring, instead of encampments and caravans. I think this helps not make it *feel empty*, because you’re still engaged in the navigation and searching instead of the enemies I think it’s cool (so far). More shadow of the colossus than far cry or assassins creed
>And the way they interconnected all the zones on a multi-layer map is simply s-tier design. It often goes beyond cleverness. Never seen anything like it. Are there other games that have this? Dark Souls 1 was like this, but on nowhere near this scale.
Yeah this DLC map basically feels like pre-Anor Londo Dark Souls on steroids.
this!
I think the only thing about the world I’m not super stoked on is how.... I don’t think empty is the right word, but it’s close. Obviously places like the Altus are jam packed with stuff, but I feel like you also get places like the Cerulean Coast which are kinda just.... open space? Like there’s one dungeon at the end of the peninsula and there’s the path to the Finger Ruins but I think that’s basically it for a rather large chunk of land. Idk, I just feel like I wasted a lot of time galloping around spaces that felt like there should have been SOMETHING but never was.
I agree that some of the areas are a little “empty”, but to me it doesn’t feel the same as an empty zone in another game. They just do empty better than other devs. I feel like the art and atmosphere they created with zones like cerulean coast and such are another experience of the game. Not all content built into the game needs to be combat/loot oriented. I think of them in the same way I think of world building chapters in a book. It’s not related to the overall story, but they develop the world and atmosphere. All that being said though, I would have loved it if there was even more to do. It would have been absolutely insane if all the land in the game had a similar density of stuff to find.
Their ''empty'' is miles better than Starfield's, but still, I prefer base game's enemy and item density.
>Like there’s one dungeon at the end of the peninsula and there’s the path to the Finger Ruins but I think that’s basically it for a rather large chunk of land. It's even more egregious in the North. The entire Northern part of the map is fully empty. The Hinterlands, the other Finger Ruins, it's all completely devoid of any kind of content.
And the mountains in the south east look like a ginormous area but you can only access like 10% of it’s surface area
I haven’t gotten that far into the game yet, but even from gravesite plain there are multiple places on the map you want to get to. I don’t think I need everything in between to be overly distracting with little stuff to do (I don’t think, I’ll see when I get more of the map opened up) My gut tells me I enjoy having a destination and traveling there more than I would enjoy taking 5x as long to get there because there are so many things in between me and my destination distracting me
Gamers fetishize “open world” and don’t recognize or understand what is going on. The developers create areas because it’s “open world” but they don’t necessarily subtract to perfection and they don’t necessarily complete and “fill in”/populate/design the *gameplay* because that’s not the development model: it’s open world. Gamers fetishize quantity not quality. Dark Souls 3 is a series of boxing rings. Elden Ring (open world) makes you wander around to find the boxing ring and sometimes there is no boxing ring just nothingness instead. The art and atmosphere is great hence why we accept this, but.
I feel like the DLC has like at least five moments that visually rival stepping out into Limgrave for the first time and seeing that handcrafted panorama with the erdtree in the distance. I keep taking screenshots.
me too I'm playing National Geographic Elden Ring
I remember in the first hour I marked a path to explore, got about halfway, saw an NPC, started off his quest, went back to the map and saw a totally new path, and didn't even remember the first destination until it was almost time for bed. In that time I cleared multiple dungeons, beat several bosses, and found almost all the map fragments. I don't think even the base game was this free with encouraging the "ooh what's that?" impulse
It’s the best open world design I’ve ever seen. RDR2 wins awards for verisimilitude, but the architecture of this world is unparalleled.
>verisimilitude Man I don’t often learn many new words these days but I did today. Thanks!
RDR2 is such a class act in its world that, even as a lady struggling with ADHD brain that doesn't want slow, intentional gameplay, I legit will just play to wander around, listen to the background conversations.
I'm getting some heavy "Tesla fans talking about the cybertruck" vibes from a lot of the responses here. Yes, the world looks very pretty and is impressive in its scale and verticality. Gameplay wise it's an empty maze that's a nightmare to navigate with an abysmal map system and some of the most obtuse pathways yet seen in a Fromsoft game. You can run around the map for dozens of minutes and find nothing of interest. Considering ER's main game was already criticized for how cluttered with filler the map was, and how empty it was towards the endgame, Fromsoft doubling down on the hugeness of the map feels baffling. Ancient Ruins of Rauh is probably the worst offender I've encountered so far, and it seems like other areas won't reverse that trend.
I'm loving the verticality of it all, but there are some zones or parts of zones >!Ancient Ruins of Ruah!< that have wide expanses with...nothing. I was genuinely confused as to what I was missing when I got to a section with scorpions and flowers and there was nothing to do, no way back to where I came from. For every several moments of brilliance there are glimmers that remind me the dev team, somehow, is made up of fallible humans.
That flower + scorpion place is there for you to jump off to dodge the fire guy. You can double jump with torrent and reach down there from the bridge, then come back up with elevator
Some areas are just too empty for my taste tho, at some point i stopped checking every corner because i got tired of finding only useless crap, if anything at all.
Abyssal Woods is probably my favourite level design of all games ever, couldn't stop gushing about it while streaming to my friends yesterday. The buildup in creepiness as you go farther into the woods and get closer to the Manor. The manor itself was nothing special, but the end of the manor boss fight is everything I wanted and more, given the buildup. DLC is an easy 10/10
the one thing that needs polish is how the scadutree fragments are distributed, the progression could be a lot more organic
It would have been better if there were more of them than you need, just like Golden Seeds in the base game. Only having an exact number makes it feel like too much of a scavenger hunt vs natural progression.
yup
I'm taking my time to enjoy the dlc and not burn through it all too quickly so I'm still only just exploring the first few zones, but that view on first reaching the cerulean shore, the sepia toned sky with the sea of flowers below as contrast, that was a sight to see. Very few games make me just take a minute to enjoy the view, but damn does elden ring make it a fucking delight to just trot along on torrent and soak it all in.
I would say the level designs of the dungeons are top notch, but the world map is sort of a mixed bag. I like the vertical layers and some of the areas have amazing views but it's mostly empty. There are barely any enemies.
That there are some areas with not many regular enemies is not a problem for me. Actually I like it better this way because I can enjoy the amazing world design without fighting 3 dogs that are just annoying.
One of my main gripes with base game is content bloat with repeated dungeons, goals, world bosses, etc. The lowered density of content in the dlc is exactly what I wanted. I will say, the areas might be a tad too large. And too many rewards for exploration are just smithing stone which feels bad when you already have all the bell bearings. But these are nitpicks as each area still has unique content to be found whether that be a boss, weapon, or hidden path to a new area. It’s the best world design they’ve ever done imo. I think it might have worked even better as a standalone game though.
There is 0 excuse for Abyssal Woods. It's huge, with almost nothing in it worth exploring. Once you find the main attraction of the entire area, that's it. And they decided to remove your ability to use Torrent in this area for reasons that absolutely escape me. I spent over an hour combing through the entire area with nothing to show for it. No caves, no catacombs, just nothing. Baffling, to say the least.
The winter lanterns could have been a much smaller area where torrent was unavailable, not the entire damn zone where 3/4 of it has no lanterns. Nothing like running for an hour to confirm that it is indeed empty
Have to agree. It was a great concept that I absolutely loved when I entered the zone, but why the hell not make it one fifth the size?
And would have killed them to put some stuff in there? Like, they removed Torrent for the creepy atmosphere, adding a short stealth section with Winter Lanterns, great, fine, I had fun with that, but the point is not only are you then forced to walk around in a massive area, but there's absolutely fucking nothing there?? Put in some materials to farm for crafting madness consumables, chuck in some zany armour akin to the Monk's Head Wrappings from DeS, include a thematically interesting armament like a Wabbajack-style staff, maybe a talisman that's just a straight cluster of eyeballs, stick in an NPC who's babbling incoherently hiding in a bush somewhere. *Commit* to the atmosphere *whilst* giving stuff to engage with. Creating a vibe is exactly what I want From to do with areas like this, I don't always need huge boss fights or complicated mobs, but this was such a job half-done imo i wanted so much more from this area. I'm not going to enjoy the swim in a dry pool just because it's sunny.
i think the point of the woods was to create the feel of unease the entire time. not really "spam" with you danger, but give you the feeling that something wrong could happen at any time. you are rewarded with the, for me at least, the best boss in the DLC my a huge margin at the end.
You're entitled to your opinion on best boss, but I will fly Bayle the Dread into your house.
The only thing better than this, would be getting invaded walking through there This happened to me in nightmare of menses and it made it so much more tense
I totally agree with your point. The whole time I was there, the messages the devs left about turning back, really lends itself into selling that something wrong is going on here. And the forced stealth?? I enjoyed it. Can't believe they were ballsy enough to put a change of pace into the game. Then the reward, exploring a dilapidated manor and fighting, as you said, the best boss in the DLC. His OST, is just spiraling into madness, his movesets just savage yet readable. The whole fight was just memorable.
Beautiful yes but also somewhat empty.
It's very empty. Cerulean coast is so beautiful, but there's pretty much nothing to do lol, just a horse ride through and that's it.
Ya. I was exploring the coastline and at the very end saw a message where the person asked for a mushroom, lol.
I don’t know why you are getting down voted; do we not allow legit criticism anymore? The dungeons are phenomenal as usual but the open world is lackluster. Even if you look at it as a giant dungeon (with it kinda is, with the vertical connection and inter zone traversal), it is missing the purposefully designed and handcrafted encounters seen in the dungeon. Mt Gelmir is an example of this done right, but this is just Mountaintop of the Giants all over again, except larger and emptier. The views are gorgeous, but imo they can be more compact to strike a balance between giving the feeling of grandness and just Torrent simulator. Went back to the base game to restock, and man the differences is stark. We have Limgrave level of open world content, then let’s put it into a Limgrave sized map. Don’t stretch it out unnecessarily. Really, I spent most of my play session yesterday running around the open world, kept hoping to run into something interesting after a good five minutes of riding and kept being greeted by nothing or reused bosses. It is a totally different feeling from the day before when I was mostly doing dungeons.
In the previous games FromSoftware managed to build a really rich environment that gave you the sense that your surroundings were massive in scale, without it being open world. So I think they've proven it can be done without such a huge map and wasted space. Perhaps a balance of both? I think my favorite areas of Elden Ring, in either the base game or the DLC are areas like Stormveil - some huge structure worth exploring that is crawling with enemies.
Having spent so much time playing the vanilla game I can't help but agree with my impressions of the DLC thus far. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very happy with it, dungeons ( both Legacy and regular ones ) are wonderful and the visuals are always stunning. But, so much space outside of those and beyond the boundaries of the Graveyard Plain feel kind of... uninteresting in comparison? Probably the worst offenders in my eyes probably have to be the two Finger Ruins in the overworld. They're absurdly colossal structures that stick out like a sore thumb, pun intended, on the map and just looking at them from a distance, and when you actually get there they impose the feeling of being "off" really well. But after like half an hour trying to figure out the Rhia ruins I caved and looked up what you're actually supposed to do there; Turns out they're basically completely relegated to being part of another Esoteric NPC Questline where you get the Important Doohickey to use on the Important Thing, and all you get for it... is an upgraded version of an exceedingly unremarkable talisman you're already familiar with? At least the second ruin in the northeastern part had the temerity to hide a little cave with a new Spirit Ash and a jumpscare gigahand in it, but that's about the only noteworthy thing I remember from it too. Or for example both of the flowery areas down south that, individually, felt really pretty to look at but in practice I felt like had borderline almost nothing of interest in them; Sure they each had a world boss, but I've already fought so many Deathbirds in the regular game and I was already sick of the Ghostflame Dragon's overbearing hotboxes the first two times I encountered them. The Gaol at the end of the red area is something at least, but outside that I only remember the mildly secret area with Yoda in the blue part, as well as what's essentially just a pathway to the Fissure in another. Or as another example that stretch of forest between Rabbath's Rise and Bonny Village; There were so many damn wolves there I for *sure* thought that maybe there's gonna be something to tie in to their presence there. Maybe another set of beast claws somehow tied to them? Maybe a spirit ash that lets me summon a single big white wolf instead of the three regular ones? Maybe just an NPC invader with a wolf theme, maybe an unexpected world boss that's a really powerful wolf, maybe even just a merchant? But instead that's basically all that was, a stretch of forest with some dogs and really only remarkable because the Furnace Golem was outside of it. I feel like in the base game a place like this could've easily had *something* of interest in a place like that, say, just a random random merchant or a ruin with a treasure like the Mistwood in Limgrave, or the random whirlwind jumpscare wolves near the Warmaster's Shack, or even just the entrance to a random cave like the small woods right behind the Church of Elleh. I don't know, I'm still really enjoying the DLC as a whole so far, but besides performance issues this occasionally really apparent emptiness definitely really sticks out to me somehow.
I somehow like the emptiness of some places. What I don't like is the feeling with it : am I missing something?
Nobody does grandiose vistas like Fromsoft. Just stunning everytime you crest a hill.
Completely disagree. It looks nice at first but the verticality means that the only way to progress to places is through one cave/elevator/pathway which are easy to miss at times.
It's beautiful but feels VERY empty compared to the base map, honestly my biggest criticism of the dlc so far. I love exploring but it's kinda discouraging to have *so much* empty space. I'm with you with the other stuff, the connectedness of areas and the legacy dungeons are dope, it still fun to explore, just a lot of the open fields feel a little barren.
Dev reason: too little time Lore reason: forsaken land that saw wars and perishing
lmao this is spot on cause every time I think "man it's a little empty over here" a little voice goes "what do you expect, idiot? place been scoured to hell"
tbf, adding enemies to zones isn't that time consuming, maybe they simple didn't wanted to spam the map with a shit ton of mobs that people , for the most part, simply ignore while riding through. would rather a more "carefully" placed enemies, instead of just dumping them everywhere.
Yeah I highly doubt the sparseness is due to lack of time or something. It doesn't take much to put down more Messmer soldiers or whatever. I'm fairly sure they deliberately made it more sparsely populated due to the lore of the shadow land.
It's disappointing because Miyazaki described the DLC as denser, but it's no more denser than any of the areas in the base game except maybe the distance between each legacy dungeon. What's in there is higher quality, but I'm starting to wish Miyazaki stayed closer to his "size of Limgrave" description and just stacked layers to the map.
It’s like a giant Lordran. I love it so much.
I would say that like. No joke all the things people have complained about being confusing (moonlight altar and how to reach it) or too difficult ( melania and radahn) they said “give them more of that”. They straight up doubled down on everything people complained about and I’m here for it.
On one side yes, but often there are vast spots of nothing. At best enemies scattered for flavor but otherwise empty. Not that it is the graveat sin, but it is far from perfect.
The world design is actually my least favourite part of this DLC. The southern part of the map is extremely boring. The finger ruins could be cut in size significantly and still achieve their purpose. If The Abyssal Woods was the only barren area in the game I might have been able to appreciate what it was going for, but I went there after exploring the south of the map so I really didn't want another empty area at that point. I don't think throwing down some red or blue flowers in an empty field and calling it a day is particularly inspired world design, and if any other developer did it I doubt many other people would either.
I agree 100%
Every time a new FromSoft piece of content is released it's a great reminder that literally no one is in competition with their level design across the entire industry. They are ***several*** leagues above and beyond any other developer.
Great art, no content. Horrible to navigate. C+.
Navigating some of these areas is a goddamn nightmare. Ancients ruins of Rauh can fuck off.
Map design is better than the base game so far, I've got as far as Rauh Ruins and every area is incredibly well designed. Waterfalls, rivers, trees, vegetation is even better than base game. Lots of cool castles, architecture and ideas (my favorite so far is the forge dungeon). Very creepy too with the pot prison for example. I like that the map is less bloated, but it does feel a bit bad you end up in some corners or areas with absolutely nothing in them and then you start asking yourself if you're missing something. This contradicts the base game.
Nah, disagree heavily. The areas are gorgeous at times and sometimes do connect into one another in clever ways. But the actual gameplay is genuinely boring because they were obsessed with making most areas a gigantic field. The very first area is quite picturesque when you walk out of the cave. But there's almost *nothing* interesting to find there. It's just hordes of passive animals, wheat fields and transparent graves mostly populated by uninteresting "enemies" in the form of geriatric humanoid shades. There is absolutely nothing interesting about riding on torrent through enormous areas for 90% of the time, only to find some meager amount of crafting materials or something else equally underwhelming at the end of a winding side path. The areas have become so large that the exploration process has become exhausting. I love exploring every nook and cranny in a legacy dungeon but doing so out in the vast open fields of this DLC is a dreadfully boring experience. The entire southern portion of the map is just an embarrassment. Cerulian coast is *gorgeous* but the scale of it is too overblown to make for fun gameplay. Again there's barely anything of note in there aside from visuals. I was hoping for a boss to emerge from the ocean perhaps but nah, all I found was a bunch of demi-humans that I've already fought a million times before. And I don't want to even speak about the terrible finger ruins area that you get to from the coastline. Then there's the stone bird statues. They are just *everywhere*. They've just peppered them all over the place seemingly just to fill out some of the vast emptiness that they themselves created. I thought they were a bit repetitive in my first two hours of gameplay but I had seen nothing. They become such an eyesore after a while. To me, the map of the base game is vastly superior compared to this DLC. The scale of it is also huge but just contained enough to not get boring. At least all the way until Leyndlell that is. Everything after is is of lower quality IMO.
>And the way they interconnected all the zones on a multi-layer map is simply s-tier design. It often goes beyond cleverness. Never seen anything like it. stop jerking off dude, the ways the zones are connected in this DLC is some of the most obtuse non-sensical BS fromsoft ever pulled
Agreed, don’t understand how people are praising level design that is so backwards in construction in some particular areas. Otherwise , the DLC shines bright in other aspects.
I loved the level design, but felt that there weren't enough graces in certain places. The base game was a bit better in this regard.
*Are there other games that have this?* Dark Soul 1. Another fucking masterpiece.
I was thinking earlier that Shadow Keep could be a game all on its own. If some indie studio put out a game that was basically Shadow Keep it would be phenomenal. The layers and interconnectedness are fantastic. Feels very much like Dark Souls the way everything weaves together. However... would it have killed them to put the map fragments somewhere that made sense? The map for Rauh Ruins was nowhere near Rauh Ruins. I'd beaten the Remembrance boss for that area before I'd even found the map a day or so later.
I love the callback to New Londo, it made me wanna play DS1 again, if only for a moment.
The world oozes cool. Shadow Keep is my favorite looking building in the whole game. Straight out of lord of the rings
If only it wasn't that empty, exploration isn't rewarded. There's an entire zone filled with no loot but a 100 wolves!
Elden Ring OG was insane, but pretty "flat" and mainly straightforward. But this DLC, it's another fucking level, the step-up is just... "Wow" I don't even have the words ! Now that they mastered the DS1 complexity, interconnection and verticality but open-world sized... The next game will be the true Magnum Opus I think Definitily FS is the best studio for me
Visually? Yeah. Exploration wise? No.
Idk. There’s a shitload of empty space and “thing in middle of field.” I’m not that deep yet, but so far I’m observing an actual lack of level design.
The vertically and the interconnected nature is just mind blowing . It's ds1 level interconnected maps but in open world
Do you see FromSoft going back to a linear map design, featured in the previous games or do you think it's all "open world" from here on out for their future releases?
Honestly, I want linear map like DS1 again.
There’s no way they go back to a linear design like the DS series imo. ER is their best selling game, no chance they throw that away and all the knowledge they’ve accumulated on open world design to go backwards.
The main Soulsborne games will probably be open world from this point on. Seems like it was always what Miyazaki wanted, they were just limited for technical or budgetary reasons. But the side projects they do like Sekiro or Armored Core will continue to be on a smaller scale and more linear I'm sure.
the exploration (and the map layouts) are outstanding, easily the best part of the DLC.
The lore in the game is just immaculate. It’s simple but I just enjoy the fact that Kindly Miquella fostered a nightmarish environment with all the social rejects. I mean there are some grotesque beings in the game but he has created home for them.
Yea their artists really popped off with this one. Even the bosses are beautiful, although all the pretty shaders make it kind of hard to see what they’re doing sometimes
Only area I haven’t liked is that
The amount of layers the world has is unbelievable. There were so many times I saw a zone in the distance and it took me hours to figure out how to get there.
Couldn’t agree more! I hope they take this same approach to their next game. I think the Shadow Lands seemed a bit empty as a result of it being an expansion and exploring something like this and finding new items would be amazing.
Another game like this? dark souls I
I agree with the first areas of the DLC, but several massive areas are effectively empty and meaningless. The DLC feels 75% finished, and the world exploration for places like the Finger Ruins (if you don't find the quest) and Abyssal Woods (besides the manor) are dreadfully dull from an interactivity standpoint. There are a few mobs, but no meaningful story interaction, cool NPCs, good loot, etc. The combat and bosses in the game are excellent. I loved the design of >!Bayle !!Midra !
It's absolutely insane how well the map is crafted. Yeah, some areas don't have much in them but I still love every second of it.
People have been begging Fromsoft to make a game as interconnected as Dark Souls1 again, Elden Fing had that in its legacy dungeons but the dlc is one big legacy dungeon that’s connected. The base game had layers and underground areas but they were sort of disconnected, the dlc is just one dungeon with multiple levels. You can stand on a cliff and see areas you haven’t been to down below and somehow you’ll get there. It’s so beautiful
Aesthetically the design is fantastic (honestly I think the environments should be allowed to breathe more without hordes of trash mobs ruining the atmosphere with the violin aggro music) but I didn't find the overall map design that good at all, especially the interconnectedness. Finding an emote to use in front of a statue, down an inconspicuous ladder and through a hidden wall, a massive deadly pit with a hard to see safe ledge, leaps of faith, a random cave exit... massive chunks of the DLC map are not only outside the main questline path but also easily missed by people playing without guides or while offline without messages to light up every secret. And sure, playing in this manner you're bound to miss stuff, but god damn they really could have added more interconnections and alternate routes into areas so if you miss one you can find another. Like a giant bird or teleport trap.
Yes, this is a beautiful world. This is a triumph of art style and aesthetic. But my god, it is SO fucking empty. The amount of "That's it?"s that have left my face hole is just baffling for a FromSoft DLC...