KeanuChrist: To everyone that left a negative review on Steam, “git gud.”
thehouseofhoops: No worries guys, someone will beat it with a dance pad making us all feel extremely inadequate as gamers.
alvybar2990: A lot of people booted up the DLC with their lvl 400 builds thinking they’d be able to breeze through the whole expansion
zthandrapus.t5685: There are two camps here: people whose first Fromsoft game was Elden Ring and then the people who've played through 800 times and don't realize the reason they're good at the base game is because they've memorized all the enemy movements.
mr.ominous6554: Unfortunately I think Elden Ring getting popular again due to hype may have brought players into the game that really don’t understand how hard soul like games are. Especially considering only Radahn and Mohg need to be defeated to access the DLC
DrunkenEros: A significant portion of those reviews also mentioned performance issues which you neglected to mention or scrolled past entirely
haschwell2757: How is this even a surprise to people. All of Fromsoftwares previous games that had DLC content was way more difficult than the base game content. This is not a new thing.
Death25Soul: I have seen negative reviews for performance issues more than difficulty...
DarthVader-xh3mo: Soulsborne vet here, I’m more than happy to be the black sheep in this. After beating the final boss, I’m more frustrated than satisfied. Doing this DLC on NG 7 above was absolute torture. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. You could be wearing a full set of demigod armour with the most turtle talismans in the game… and everything still kills you in 2 to even 1 hit. It’s borderline masochism trying to enjoy how breathtaking & beautful the DLC is, when you are constantly backtracking from the site of grace only to get sniped or wombo combed into oblivion just to start all over again. For example, there’s a swamp section somewhere in the shadowlands with those scarlet rot bug things. I would ride past them with Torrent, trying to progress… only to get gang sniped by the pest threads. That’s only the common enemies. The boss fights are just lunacy, & doing the final boss solo was almost impossible. Fromsoft’s whole philosophy is about overcoming these challenges. But it feels like I never mastered the fights, I just got lucky that they didn’t hit me with a 10 hit combo or AOE nuke. I didn’t beat this DLC, I survived it
requiem165: Most of the reviews that I have seen are about performance issues tbf
danielwang2795: My only gripe is the lock-on location for the dancing lion fight. Since the lock-on point is near its head, everytime it raises its upper body (which it does for nearly every attack), your camera goes ape and bobs up and down too, making the lion unfightable when its in your face. As many have said, the true boss is the camera.
AndreSelfless: To me the only annoyance was the big bosses in tight rooms where you spend most of the time seeing their innards than fighting
duploj: If you actually read the reviews, they were mostly complaining about performance and artificial difficulty with the Scadutree Fragment.
maximussolini: This sounded like Yong bragging how good he is, for 15 minutes XD
arg_9584: I've also seen a decent amount of people complaining of performance issues such as frame stutters.
Quanziam: Some people did share concerns with the performance. The DLC does not support FSR 3 and ultrawide too.
valzy2267: You skipped the complaints about the performance issues which were all the reviews talking about.
raven-19x: My issues are mostly performance related. The same frame stutter I experienced when ER released is back again. I thought FromSoft figured it out but I guess not.
krissuyx: Most of the negative reviews I've seen were about performance issues and reused bosses.
SuperRamos619: My biggest issue with this DLC is how bad the camera is. The bosses get up right in your face, you cant see anything, which just causes you to not to see attacks and you just die.
Ashaira: To be fair there is a problem with the camera on a few of these bosses that make them far harder than they have to be. So far the hippo and the beast are the biggest examples of this. My biggest enemy in those fights was the camera not the bosses. The hippo is also a bit of a jacks ass because all of it's attacks close the gap by extreme amounts due to it's size. You have to roll 3-4 times to get out of it's attacks hit box (I am referring to distance here not i-frames.)
IchbinX: There's a fine line between "difficult" and "unfun". I think half of these hard bosses, ARE actually fun to learn and engage (Rennala, Mesmer, etc). The other half are unbalanced, and just aren't fun to fight (Hippo, Commander Gaius).
rustlee: the only thing more annoying than people crying over difficulty are people crying over how cool they are for playing it
Communistgunmc: Genuine question, is there any footage out there of Miyazaki actually playing the game
Shaojeemy: There’s difficulty and then there’s artificial difficulty.

I’m level 19 Scadutree blessing with Radahn armor and still get 2-3 tapped.

Artificially making bosses harder by simply having them hit hard, teleport or run away abruptly, and you doing little damage with maxed out greatswords is “artifical”

Bosses like Lord Isshin, where you can go through the entire fight without taking damage by mastering perfect parry, is TRUE difficulty. Nothing artificial about master movesets there.

In this dlc, the end game bosses do some absurd flurry attack with a second delayed wave, fly or run away, and rush you from across the map. They will repeat this 2-3 times before you can get a hit sometimes.
Quicksilver20233: I’ve completed the DLC and it’s very unbalanced, almost all bosses have unlimited poise, will 2 shot you on max vigor, and are unrelenting in their combos giving very little chance to heal if any, and the scadutree fragments are blocked behind bosses blocking certain areas, which you need to defeat to access more fragments, Relana gate blocking scadu altus being a great example
jh9794: The main problem is that bosses in this dlc are fast and recover even faster. Ive faught some of the more BS ones and for a second i thought i was playing bloodborn with cement shoes on.

Hard but fair is what makes souls games popular. Between bloated health pools, agression levels and speed from an entirely different game, yeah learning these bosses is difficult even with spirits giving you breathing room.

I get this is intentional, but im intentionally NOT going to fight these guys with even bigger health pools and more damage. So this DLC only exists on first journey for me. Still worth the buy though, its fun when to get lost in but bosses are definitely overtuned.
BadHombre1: Cant wait for people to eventually beat the dlc with a blindfold on, earplugs, hands behind their back, monitor upside down, and using their voice to control the game
TrueBlueMajikDewd: Am I the only person that feels the time wasted when I beat the boss fights? I don't feel like I got anything out of it. Like when I played and 100%d Majora's Mask I at least felt like I got better on time management in real life. Grinding hours away to do one thing just feels wasteful to me.
stevencastle2491: So hang on. I'm going through on new game, wearing full armor, up to scadutree blessing 12, and the game is still 1 to 2 shotting me all the way from start to the end of the DLC and in one case forcing me to change my build, use spirit summons and spam an op ash of war. Everyone is defending the balancing here but when did Dark Souls ever employ this sort of difficulty? Wasn't it about compounding mistakes adding up rather than one tiny slip up and suddenly your massive vigor bar is gone? I for one don't defend these sorts of stamina tests where everything kills you despite wearing heavy armor and damage negation talismans. I think there are plenty of things in this DLC that could be tweaked to help more people get by with sub optimal builds.
HeatMan155: Going off the Rellana take: Wouldn’t the hallmark of a good, legitimately challenging boss fight be to force the player to evolve THEIR PLAYSTYLE, not force them to swap to a foreign one? Every playstyle can’t work and bosses can’t be balanced around every playstyle, but less than a handful of effective playstyles, which your character might not be spec’d to doesn’t sound like good boss design.
Xfushion2: The problem I have is that regardless of difficulty every boss feels the same: all of them basically rush you down with extremely long attack strings and the hit opportunities are way too tight, no a problem for dex builds but strength ones are gonna suffer.
Due to that the boss encounter get kinda boring since all of them behave way too similar.
Simte: Everyone knows the real bosses in Souls games are the camera and gravity.
xevro5862: The DLC is literally more of the same, but still less regarding lore.

30% of the explorable land is barren/empty.
Re-using pre-existing mobs far too more than the new ones.
Mesmer got revealed as some huge villain, yet he's like the fourth boss and there's absolutely no build-up to him.
He's in the most random ass place where you fight him without any interaction. Just straight into it.
There's close to no lore regarding Mesmer, relation to Marika, Marika's involvement of ''The'' night. Nothing about Godwyn's betrayal. Nothing about Gloamed Eyed Queen.
All these secretive, mentioned, teased characters in the vanilla game got build-up, with exactly nothing related to it in the DLC.
d-pooly79: Yong talking about beating a video game boss like he fought on the front lines of WW2 lol
cinderedwolf8880: Here's my take, this dlc made me realize how much I relied on cheese and the familiarity of the base game of me playing it so much.

My go to when things got tough was bleed, but my into the dlc build was a godslayer greatsword with max fire damage and that did it for most the dlc (I brought in my level 367 which had 60 in every stat except for mind, i was able to adjust to any build i needed)

But, this dlc shoved all that back in face and made me strategize again, made me pay attention, made me git gud as they say. But still most bosses I got through with less than 10 tries except for 2. Messemer and Final boss (trying to avoid spoiler for some) the final boss? I went through my entire build catalog and my best one, bleed, was still only getting me so far.

I ended up doing something I never did before, started to actively learn the moveset, combos, and behaviors. Most of the time I just winged it, but the final boss for the first time in my time of playing souls games, broke me. Force me to change my behavior and I agree with yongyea, the euphoria I got when I beat the final boss? Better than any high I've gotten

Jun 24 2024

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