CarcosaVagrant: That handshake was clean af

FancyBerry1767: The rotoscoping was so funny

JakeTheArmyGuy: I think the main reason people complained is that they were expecting the DLC to be an extension of the main game, but instead they got basically a new game. Granted, running across the map for seeds and tears is the most tedious part of starting a new character, but that's just part of it.

DrBrickface: Only a genius like Miyazaki could think of such a creative mechanic as a final boss attacking your framerate directly.

bunnyboo9097: "If they're spamming a move that always kills you, you're spamming a mistake." EXCELLENT line

RuneSeoui: I'm still miffed that the DLC has no intro cutscene. Like you're just in the Land of Shadow.

brigadiersblue9232: You know for as much as I enjoy the shorter skit videos my favorites will always be these longer breakdown type videos!

VenomSnake420: It took me 6 hours to find the level up lady. I had cleared the weeping peninsula and hadn’t found a weapon or armor or clothes yet. I did have 7 cookbooks on me.

I still do not know how to cook.

kanjo4976: “I’m still the Elden Lord” -Things I said before dying 12 times in a row to the first enemy

JulianGem: That handshake was immaculate

organizedbonfire2649: Imo more Scadutree Fragments/Spirit Ashes should have been tied to beating field/main bosses, and rewards at the end of dungeons, rather than random pot enemies or corners of the land of shadow. It would have given a better incentive on repeat playthroughs to engage with more of the interesting content in the dlc if you wanted to become stronger, rather than just finding the path that makes you the most optimally powerful while doing nothing but horse riding around the map doing Fragment/Ash collecting.

BlueShellshock: Fun bit about Skadoosh fragments, they have a soft cap too! Blessings after 12 are only about 20% as effective, so while it can feel bad not to have gotten everything, you need less than half the total fragments to hit 12 and be okay.

JamesBondBurgered: Bold of you to assume I have a fraction of Tortellini’s gaming prowess.

yurimaldonado4966: Nothing will ever take away from my experience of reaching Radahn's second phase just to see him and his Miquellester brother T-pose in my face and levitate to then nuke me with a light spell equivalent to a carpet-bombing of flash granades. If that wasn't peak fiction, nothing is

Exile_Sky: Open World Game: You need to explore me.

Some folk: Wait. That's illegal. I thought this was Skyrim.

dvys4558: The handshake was the best part of this video fr.

xan42O: My main issue with it was all the npcs just dissapearing cause i progressed the main story...like wtff half the content just gone...

CreamTheEverythingFixer: There needed to be redundant fragments, the main issue is for me is unlike seeds or tears that allow you to miss a couple, you missing one fragment you cant get max level.

The random glowy pot shadow dude having a shard was a proper wtf moment for me. I just used a guide after that cos I was not going to go back through the whole dlc, going to every shadow pot guy group in the hopes one might have a little sparkle effect.

JoeyJo-JoShabadoo: I bought Demon's Souls in the first week it came out in America. Dark Souls is my favorite game of all time, so I am a big fan of Miyazaki's work. The thing about the old games is that the pace of the combat is slower and usually gave you time during combat to collect yourself when you got overwhelmed. They rewarded the player for being observant. These newer games rely a lot more on manual dexterity and remaining hyper-focused for long stretches of time, and most of the time when I win a fight it wasn't because I mastered it but the boss was just less aggressive that run. When that happens, I don't get the "sense of accomplishment" from beating a tough boss. Sekiro was the first of his games I only played through once. The combat required too much precision, the game was more demanding than fun. Isshin took me roughly a week to beat, when I finally won I simply had no interest in going back. Promised Consort Radahn is like that as well. There's simply too much happening on the screen all at once, and I wind up losing to disorientation from all the flashing lights and crazy effects the boss doles out at break-neck frequency. I enjoyed Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree isn't bad either, but it is undeniable that these games have gotten more difficult over time. I never really felt as though Dark Souls was a particularly hard game, and I didn't enjoy it because of the difficulty.

toddvogel8887: Gonna say, I had almost no issue with the DLC until the final boss. That was some bullshit, and I just gave up after a while, just said fuck it and let someone else cheese it for me.

thomasturner8570: Great video, I agreed with almost everything you had to say, but I do have one other problem with the Scadutree Fragments that I don't think a lot of people have talked about. The Scadutree Fragments appear (upon first glance) to be an arbitrary number, and you don't really feel their impact as much compared to something like upgrading your weapon in the base game. Combine both of those with some of the hardest bosses in the game, and it makes the player wonder if they're suffering from a genuine skill issue or if they just haven't levelled up their tree number to a high enough number yet. This can make some bosses incredibly hard or shockingly easy for different players, which I think is a good thing on paper, but they do so in a way that sows doubt in the player's mind, which I'm not a huge fan of personally.

Great video though, as usual

funkermonker6485: After multiple dlc runs and mastering every boss i believe the right design choice would've been to give us star points after killing every enemy and we could choose to level up Hp or Bp

Alex-hy9cw: I simply feel like the quality of bosses went down, the DLC has the best & worst I've seen in all of fromsoft's games.

Best environments, best music, great exploration & unit diversity.

Boss mobility however.... elden beast before torrent, putrescent knight, golden hippo, bayle, ....

Bosses aren't fun if I spend half the fight chasing after the boss.

On the other hand we got recycled content (way to much) , cheap aoe spam or long winded combos that make boss fights a marathon.

If I could pick I'd go back to the dark souls formula of a linear game with some open routes but less quantity , more quality. Elden ring is great & the DLC even more but never have I felt more conflicted with enjoyment than Elden ring.

pengmaeda9908: People really don’t know the difference between difficult but fair and difficult but unfair. The latter is what I thought of a lot of Shadows and even a lot of the late game of the base game. I think Fromsoft has been slacking on actual balancing in favor of escalating the ever growing difficulty curve soul veterans expect as they get better and better at souls games, to the point where the game will just become blatantly unfair, best example from the base game I can think of is Waterfowl dance. And Pre-nerf Consort Radahn was an absolute mess in Shadows, even for a final boss, the anime light show is just ridiculous.

Niakra: While the "Dark Souls 2 death door" seems like a troll moment, it's actually a shortcut. You can roll into it from above, which skips the guards on the upper floor if you need to go back there. A precise little action that will probably kill you a couple times before you get it right, so maybe don't bother. But there's purpose to it, y'know.

fanficlover: I personally feel like the scadu tree frags are too much of a departure from normal elden ring gameplay and level progression since unlike the base game where the effect of leveling was more of a linear and subtle climb whereas the treef rags are more like exponential rock walls and act more like a hard cap to your progression.

Yes you can obviously brute force your way through the, but with the much more aggressive boss design of the dlc, the excessive particle effects for some, and tge drastic weakening of your character the act of learning is much more mitigated and forces you to not engage with arguably the core part of the game, the bosses, until you've gone out of your way to grind the tree frags for a bit.

While i don't think a game like this shouldn't be without grinding, the much more limited and niche nature of the tree frags, compared to the souls of the base game, make it hard to find the game enjoyable since it's such a departure.

It's like playing a game where after every boss you have to find and replace all your gear and weapons with objectively better versions of the same gear, with no mechanical alterations or differences or additions, to progress instead of slowly increasing the power of the already existing components.

Nero24200: It feels strange to be critical of a fanbase claiming the game is too hard while showing evidence that not playing the game a specific way would... well.. make it hard.

I think that's my grip with Elden Ring as a whole. I've seen plenty of people struggle with the game but the ones that haven't happily chime in to say it's "Too easy" while spamming dual wielding jumps and buffing themselves to hell and back. My experience was the same - I struggled with some of the bosses but once I co-opted some of the BS I saw online the game became almost laughably easy.

You're right in that games like Sekiro doesn't offer builds but the positive element that provides is that everyone experiences the same struggle. Issues like this will always be a problem with games like Elden Ring - especially when so many of the weapon/build options in the game are presented as decent but turn out to be hot garbage.

tophatstudios9069: I hate the fragments because i dont want to play an easter egg hunt every time I replay thru the dlc. it was fine the first time but when i've already explored everything I just want to fight the bosses but nope. unless I want to handicap myself I gotta get the fragments. i enjoy the dlc its just tedious at times

GetMadz: OUCH! My Elden Spleen!!

PersonGuy968: The problem with Scadutree Fragments is that unlike any other Fromsoft DLC released before, which relied solely on new enemies and bosses with new and more difficult movesets/gimmicks, this one relied on "find 40 Golden Seeds 2.0 to not get 1-shot by everything in this DLC while dealing as much damage as a wet noodle".

KageRyuu6: Just in reference to the increasingly over used phrase "A game for everyone is a game for no one", as Helldivers 2 learned, sometimes your vision needs a rework.

grantbosworth6418: The reason i don’t use everything at my disposal is half of the buffs and consumables negate the other half. And it isn’t explained well in the game which negate what.

maximoy2288: Yeah, you are just blatantly ignoring all the actual issues people had with the dlc. You keep talking about the shadowtree fragments forcing you to explore but what even is there worth exploring? Runes no longer mean anyhting and same as base game 95% of loot will be completely worthless. Also most arent even on interesting spots, you can just ride by with torrent, finding tears and seeds is the most boring part in an elden ring playthrough and they added 50 like them.

There is also the terrible performance issues on launch that dont really have any excuse since they show up as soon as firt boss, just like the completely unfixed camera.

And this brand of boss design is just getting tiring, overtuned for the shake of overtuned, sure you can summon both an npc and bell unit to make them a joke, but that still doesnt make them fun, there is no real sense of a proper 1v1 duel on equal terms like the rest of the series, and the feeling for winning most fights is just 'im glad its over'.

Well, hope these ramblings made sense for anyone wondering why many arent satisfied.

nssheepster: As a non-FromSoft player, allow to me give you some outside perspective: You're doing the FromSoft fan thing.

What do I mean?

When you started talking about Elden Ring being the easiest of FromSoft's games, your literal first example was 'Almost all builds are viable' - That's not 'making the game easier', that's 'Not screwing up the balance so incredibly badly that it has spawned multiple memes across multiple years in all our Souls game communities.' That's not doing ANYTHING to make the game easier, that's just FromSoft actually engaging in good game design and fixing long held mistakes. It was never 'good' that you had non-viable weapons, or 'noob traps', but FromSoft fans accept that from FromSoft in a way that other communities would not, because of the 'git gud' culture that has sprung up about these games. Not everything that made the prior games harder was 'challenge', a lot of the time it was 'bad game design'. I'm not saying Elden Ring isn't easier, but a LOT of the things people assign to 'it being easier' are actually things that were just really bad about the prior games that they simply learned to accept. After all, if they ever complained about it, they just got told to 'Git Gud' and insulted, so they learned that it was a problem with THEM, not a problem with the games, (even when confronted with things like a door that opened directly into a death pit that objectively added nothing of value to the gaming experience and could not reasonably be foreseen or expected before encountering it, for example).

As for the fragments themselves... There's a few critical things you've just... Ignored, and I'm not sure why. The first, quite simply, is that they didn't need to be there, at all. You stated that 'Nobody would buy a FromSoft DLC that their late game build can destroy' - Yes they would. You know they would, because that's EXACTLY what has happened time and time again. And the thing is? That's GOOD game design. In games like this, based on power progression, it is INTENTIONAL that, if you go back to an earlier game area, you feel overpowered. It's how you, the player, can feel strong, can feel that you're actually progressing and improving, despite all the fresh bosses still clapping your cheeks in an instant when you first run into them. So taking a character that has COMPLETED the game, back to LITERALLY ANY PART of the game... SHOULD result in you feeling at least a little overpowered, because that's how these kinds of games WORK. Would people complain? Yes, they've done it with every Souls DLC, and the response they always get is 'Try doing it from a fresh character or in NG , rather than taking in an overleveled character'. It's been what happens for years, and it... isn't an issue? Like, there's nothing at all wrong with that sequence of events and it certainly hasn't seemed to cause any issues with selling their DLCs. So the entire 'Take away the player's strength to avoid them being overpowered' thing... That was an experiment from FromSoft, to try something new... And I dare say it failed, but not solely because of this. Leading me to the next issue:

You talked about the Land of Shadow stealing your power and giving it back via fragments... Except they didn't. You don't regain all of your previous strength even at max Scadu level, you're still going from 'I can take X hits from bosses' to 'I can take barely any hits from bosses', no matter what you do. Sure, the damage comes back, but the ability to take hits while trying to learn the boss? That doesn't (Outside of very specific buids), and it's noticeable, especially given that that exact mechanic, taking hits and learning the bosses, is CORE to the entire genre that FromSoft has created. If the players got back ALL their power, that would certainly help, but they really don't, by comparison. And sure, you can say 'Oh well it's the DLC boss's damage, not the Scadu system, you actually HAVE all your power back, they just hit really hard'. Except in practice, nobody just playing the game, not searching the game's code or using a questionably accurate wiki, actually KNOWS how much was taken away by the Land of Shadow or how much they're really getting back with the Scadu system, so that doesn't actually help the feeling of permanently lost power that, as FromSoft players, they DEFINITELY worked very hard to earn. That's not a good feeling, and it was never going to be.

Another thing: Part of the Scadu issue comes from the game they're attached to. It's no secret that the 'best' way to start a fresh playthrough of ER is to run around for an hour and a half gathering seeds and tears and smithing stones, because the Open World nature of the game allows you to get a TON of stuff before fighting any enemy. More, it encourages you to do so, not only because you'd get more powerful, but because a LOT of these things are hidden in weird random places that you won't be visiting for any other reason than to get these items. Sure, on your FIRST playthrough you'd be there to check it out and explore - But the replayability of games like this is a major part of their value and popularity, and on your replays, this whole fetch quest nonsense at the start of the game feels bad. Bad enough that people who challenge run the game for fun, or join competitions and stream the game nonstop, people who truly LOVE this game - All hate it. And they've expressed that, very thoroughly, to the developers. So in a community that already dislikes having to pull up a wiki page and spend time hunting down a ton of tiny collectables without doing any of the fighting that makes the game fun.... They stepped foot into a new DLC that had them do the exact same thing, proving that not only did FromSoft not listen to their complaints, they didn't even learn from their mistakes and make you fight tough enemies for most of them, just keep picking them up off the ground in random places you wouldn't otherwise be.

I'm not going to say the Scadu fragments were some horrible awful betrayal of the community, or that whoever made the system should be fired, or any other such nonsense I've heard around the internet. And I DO understand what FromSoft wanted to accomplish with them, even if I heavily disagree with the method they chose to use. BUT, I also can't say that, even as someone who doesn't play Soulslikes, own Elden Ring, or even WANT to do either of those things.... That I don't ENTIRELY understand WHY people would be pissed about getting nerfed, getting told to do ANOTHER long and irritating fetch quest to get unnerfed, and then finding that they still don't seem to BE unnerfed. That's just not something players were ever likely to be terribly happy about, even without the context surrounding it, but there are a LOT of people defending it zealously because they've bought into the Git Gud community and mystique surrounding FromSoftware's games. Sure, it's not as bad as some of the detractors are saying it is... But the blind fanboys saying there is nothing wrong with the system are not correct either, it WAS a bad idea to do this in this way, in this context, and it was entirely foreseeable that it would get this reaction from the playerbase.

TLDR: It makes sense that people aren't happy about the Scadu fragments, to the point that FromSoft 100% should have seen it coming in advance. Those defending it as being without flaw have fallen into the FromSoft community mystique that leads them to ignore the notable flaws in FromSoft's prior and current games as thoroughly as FromSoft's enemies have ignored walls since the Demon Souls days. (Seriously, I've no idea why after all these years FromSoft still can't make walls actually solid, it's just crazy at this point.)

Sep 29 2024

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