How One Item Fractured Elden Ring's Fanbase

[@CircleToonsHD]

WHAT BOSS (honestly in any game) GAVE YOU THE MOST TROUBLE??? I'm curious lol

[@Lafinout]

Literally any fight against Zeke in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had me stressing every time. Like I had to grind farther just to beat him at each time.

[@cheesepopper2655]

promised consort radahn

[@deogracias9869]

darkeater midir was the first and only boss that made me cry when I beat it

[@Grimnoire]

Mohg, I think that boss and Ebritus Daughter of the cosmos from Bloodborne are two bosses that I just can't consistently beat the first time even years later.

[@SpoopyChicken]

Radahn for sure. Beat every boss solo no summons (except bayle because Igon's a real one,) but I had to summon for Radahn because his 2nd phase just felt straight up unfair (loved his phase 1 though.) I'm starting a new playthrough to test him after the nerf because I haven't tried him post-nerf yet but hopefully I'll end up liking him now that he's been toned down. Edit: ok he's actually a good boss now in my opinion, beat him with a fth arcane bleed build with the knight's starting halberd at skadu level 18 with no summons and 6 spare estus. Guess the crown now falls back on Malenia as the hardest boss.

[@CarcosaVagrant]

That handshake was clean af

[@CookingWithTheFrogs]

If it isn't rotoscoped then I can't imagine how long it would have taken circle to do that. Really impressive

[@Grimnoire]

Rotoscoped for sure

[@sharif47]

Or whatever method Joel Haver uses.

[@charliemacsart]

@@CookingWithTheFrogsoh yeah it’s rotoscoped, I filmed my wife and I doing a handshake and then spent like 3 hours rotoscoping it lol

[@trevorjmello.]

95% of the video's budget

[@DrBrickface]

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

[@MaskedDragon]

Amon in Judgement did it first I'm afraid.

[@Korosflo]

Immediatly thought about Amon too, the whole boss was a slow motion fight ​on PS4 @@MaskedDragon

[@rb9882]

Did you not experience blight town?

[@kennethamberson9873]

Completely off topic here, but why tue hell was the switch up into the sponsor, kinda smooth

[@trenhen4311]

Prior to the game test by content creators that frame attack would also stun lock your character if u were hit by the first or second cross slash. Making the subsequent within the combo guaranteed hit

[@And-er-ooh]

The funny thing is that since Elden ring was my first game and I didn’t use the wiki, I went into multiple areas under levels during my first play through, so the DLC isn’t actually that different then what I was experiencing during Elden ring lol. And I LOVE it.

[@EldenRingPlayer-q7c]

THAT IS HOW YOU PLAY

[@Zaczac111]

Legit the first place I went to was Caelid after not even clearing the starting zone. I was stuck with a weak weapon for most of it too because it spawned in mid tier mats there. Only left after I got to the castle and was completely unable to do anything there until later. Made my time getting to the Plateau a breeze.

[@CrizzyEyes]

The most enraging thing for me personally was doing the quest to get to Mohg's early. I did realize that I was under leveled and came back later, but I found out I was like 40 levels under what most people seem to fight him at even when I did return and beat him.

[@realkingofantarctica]

The one item that fractured Elden Ring's fanbase was deodorant.

[@Yikes705]

Lmao true

[@SlendySalty]

Soap

[@WingXCustom]

😂😂😂

[@synderion-1361]

*Magic: the Gathering's fanbase

[@dafatone1791]

REAL BRO (I’m stinky)

[@PatheticApathetic]

The Scadutree Fragments aren’t even there just to make the DLC easier. It’s the DLC’s level up system. Not using them and then complaining about how hard it is, is like playing the base game at SL1 your first time

[@Stargazeer]

Legit. Anyone who's played through the Souls games knows that the DLC always comes in at a certain point. And by that point, you can have a general idea of what that player's level should be at. But because Elden Ring is so open, a player can have beaten like 3 actual bosses before getting to the Shadow Lands. OR they could be overlevelled gods who have already beaten the game. I think they did an excellent job balancing for it given the situation, and really brought everyone down to the same playing field... Flattened under the foot of a furnace golem.

[@dogf421]

i think its stupid for the dlc to have a level up system at all.

[@PatheticApathetic]

@@dogf421 why? The point of it is so that it still provides a challenge regardless of what level you do it

[@IcecAnimates3104]

@@dogf421Exactly! Every Fromsoft dlc I have played before has never used this system and I feel like I had a waaaay funner time with them.

[@ChadLeorio]

@@IcecAnimates3104that’s because past games never needed to have a new system. Without a new system in place here, there’d be literally 0 balance whatsoever.

[@samuelwilliams2266]

The fragments are a cool system on your first playthrough because they make you explore, but on any subsequent playthroughs its like doing chores before getting to actually play the game.

[@landonoconnor7341]

I’d argue you’re missing gameplay by not going through and getting them people cheesed the game too much by just duping runes and pc still has a cheat engine so console players are the only ones having to do these chores you speak of but then again the DLC was meant to be played and explored not rushed

[@samuelwilliams2266]

@landonoconnor7341 I mean, yeah, but I've played through the DLC like 5 times now, and it's just annoying to collect them every time. On any playthrough beyond the first one, I don't care as much about exploring, I've already done that. Now, I just want to fight the cool bosses.

[@MetalSolidCrisis]

​@@samuelwilliams2266 then just fight bosses? It doesn't matter how much damage you take if you don't get hit and if you've beaten the dlc 5 times, you should know all the bosses moves. If you still can't win, then you need to practice more or hunt down the fragments haha

[@-Nightingale]

@@MetalSolidCrisis So did you choose to be brain dead or were you born like that?

[@FancyBerry1767]

The rotoscoping was so funny

[@darthmaul7434]

I think it was the same technique Joe Haver used in his videos.

[@charliemacsart]

@@darthmaul7434 it was rotoscoping! I filmed my wife and I doing a handshake and then traced all the frames to give it that funny looking vibe. Rotoscoping is really funny to me for some reason lol

[@darthmaul7434]

@@charliemacsart I know what rotoscoping is, I made one myself of a breakdancing guy on Asesprite, I was talking the particular way the rotoscoped looked reminded me of Joe Haver's rotoscope style.

[@charliemacsart]

@@darthmaul7434 Yeah it definitely has a Joel vibe, though it was done completely by hand! I wish I knew how to do it the way Joel does, it would’ve saved me hours of work lmao

[@nonchalantgaming6535]

@@charliemacsart kzbin.info/www/bejne/qqLCfIKjjd6JetE

[@kanjo4976]

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

[@TheDoomsdayzoner]

Knight of Solitude?

[@ttvkyberwolf6659]

Black Gaol Knight caught the whooping he deserved (after many many tries because I refused to go find a fragment, I needed to prove to myself I could beat the first boss I saw fresh off rip.)

[@_KungFuBarbie_]

As was briefly mentioned, I think the biggest issue with the scadutree fragment system is that you have to collect EVERY fragment if you want to get to max level. This differs from the golden seed system which has a surplus. This means you don’t have to scour the entire map or go through a guide to get all your flasks… unlike the scadutree system.

[@danielfreezer8469]

This is true. However there is a soft cap on scadoos from level 12, so one could argue collecting them all isn't all that beneficial. I still agree that a surplus would be better.

[@Foxtail190]

There’s a soft cap, and they carry over. No one needs to be even remotely max level for it to matter. So it’s not an issue. Schadu level 12 is more than enough for the entire thing

[@_KungFuBarbie_]

@@Foxtail190 Yeah I’d agree with that I suppose. I was at level 11 when I reached the final boss and went to collect more to help me out with the fight but I wasn’t seeing much difference at level 16

[@desuordie4856]

@@Foxtail190 You're ignoring that the devs admitted early game Scadu fragments were felt underpowered and buffed them on a whole. With the largest buffs being up to Scadu 12. Most of the issues players had, excluding the final boss, was being stomped on early levels and then praying to find a scadu fragment to even the odds.

[@zacbranch2083]

You need lvl 12 to get the majority of the buff. The surpluss fragments are good to get you a tad more percentage of damage and resistance (roughly 5%). Surplus golden seeds get you nothing (0%). Seems like Miyazaki was being nice.

[@masonkitzhoffer6133]

Bros spine is a glow stick 0:23

[@spyderxx6309]

He's now gotta play Deadspace

[@a_baby_glaggle]

@@spyderxx6309he will probably never find out about the tanks weakpoint if he does like it took so long to find out…

[@spyderxx6309]

@@a_baby_glaggle what

[@a_baby_glaggle]

@@spyderxx6309 the like tank necromorph thing with the weak back and high health

[@RuneSeoui]

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

[@Generic-ODST]

Or ending really, for that matter. Sure you have the little cutscene of miquella talking with radahn, but there’s no big clip regarding the ramifications of your actions, it just kinda ends.

[@A-Rune-bear]

i really love that. you’re finally in the dlc, weird tunneled area reminiscent of dark souls introductions, and then when you walk outside, with that music sync… you see the whole of land shadows encompassed by the scadutree. its just so beautiful im so glad they didnt make a cutscene

[@arsenii_yavorskyi]

the cinematic is in the trailer, apparently. for the base game too. I'll never understand why they stopped putting them in the actual game.

[@Pfromm007]

I was totally dissapointed at the ending. I expected Marika to pop up on stage and thousands of hornsent walking in for the big concert.

[@DirtyMcMills]

I understand your sentiment, but FromSoftware hasn’t done that with any of their DLC’s. You’re always transported into the DLC without explanation, and left standing in the final boss arena when completed. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone. The ending of the DLC is not the game’s end. Elden Ring ends after defeating Elden Beast and choosing whatever option you like. Still I get what people are saying. I just wasn’t disappointed by it personally. It makes sense in my head why they do it this way.

[@bunnyboo9097]

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

[@timmysdad4741]

Radahn’s undodgeable cross slash:

[@BisManTheBisMan]

@@timmysdad4741 It was fixed to be dodgeable at least

[@glitchedout2035]

@@BisManTheBisManI beat him anyway, BUT THAT CROSS SLASH WAS AIDS

[@blimp9741]

It's a common quote used in the fighting game community

[@blimp9741]

It's a common quote used in the fighting game community

[@brigadiersblue9232]

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

[@VickTheConqueror]

same

[@The_Fracture1]

Amen

[@bearpigyakthing8829]

This is my first video I’ve ever seen by this guy and I immediately subscribed. Fantastic animation and comedy mixed with genuinely good information and just the right amount of self flagellation. We need more KZbinrs like this.

[@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.

[@choiswimmer]

What a fucking brain dead take

[@ZeroUam]

Exactly

[@dreadknight0]

That's one of the critics but there also were people complainning about the dificulty, Elden Ring surely feels like the closest to what a From Software mmo would be. The DLC worked just like any MMO expansion, you don't touch the main world, you make a new Island or go to other world, there the old consumables become useless, because are harder to farm, instead in the new zone you get even more powerfull ones that are more easy to make, the whole story of this zone have little impact in the main world too, etc.

[@slepoi_toliy7299]

@@dreadknight0 Now Dark Souls has become a genshin impaсt. We live in a weird place.

[@BickeringBuckets]

@@dreadknight0But literally every single from soft expansion has taken you to a new place and this dlc was amazing. Seriously you guys are impossible to please

[@JulianGem]

That handshake was immaculate

[@charliemacsart]

❤

[@Meaeatt]

Made me sub 😂

[@jacobsatterlee3941]

Between this, helldivers, and Space Marine 2, I feel like everyone has turned into a games journalist

[@boshwa20]

Fromsoft fans continue to stick their heads into the ground when it comes to criticism

[@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

[@khaledahmed9136]

Not to mention how much strain that move puts on your hardware. This boss is not only trying to kill you in game but also trying to kill your PC

[@GorbWasHere]

​@@khaledahmed9136 next game, the boss just fucking chokes you through your screen

[@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.

[@RenegadeStriker7]

This! My balls twist each time I unbuff my own dumbass

[@klaw-rp6ji]

Yeah so then if you actually want to use that stuff you have to go learn for an hour or 2

[@steev1121]

Honestly this is the only genuine criticism of the game I've heard that isn't just gamers throwing their toys out of the pram. The buff system could do with a little more explanation, maybe just a note of which slots a buff will use would help reduce the learning curve.

[@boolaidman471]

@@steev1121or just a quick KZbin video search explains everything u need lmao not complicated

[@_Nobody_Special]

There are a lot of things that aren’t explained whatsoever by the game. Sometimes that’s okay but, I kinda wonder if the whole thing is just so over complicated that even Fromsoft doesn’t know wtf is going on.

[@PurpleFreezerPage]

The Miyazaki quote at 10:15 changed the way I played Elden Ring. I was less stubborn about what I allowed myself to use- and had a much better time. This is my 9th character, but it was the first I got through Godfrey on.

[@aokyoutsuki7744]

Thats why i just refuse to participate in any gamer discourse, theres so many ladder (metaphorically or literally) climbing gamers that i just... Ignore and refuse to attempt to converse with if you psycho analyze them understand why they do what they do, its just that

[@donnish3326]

You should always play how you want to play before considering what some try hards think. If I'm lame and wimpy for going bleed/dex or I can't comprehend such great game philosophy for using mimic tear, then your God-developer is lame for designing it in the first place. Those people look like clowns trying to tell you how to play a game they didn't work on for not even a second of their lives.

[@duckyduckington9736]

@@donnish3326 I think the game is best enjoyed when you struggle to beat a fight, and know "I could've dodged that" instead of "That attack is way too similar to this attack, I had to guess" If you view every mistake as your fault (ALOT of them are) you often will see yourself improve, and if you record your gameplay, its SOOOO satisfying to watch back at you being a shitter, knowing how far you've come.

[@donnish3326]

@@duckyduckington9736 "best enjoyed" is very subjective to one's own situation. I Enjoyed dumping hours into Street Fighter training room, learning unique tech, combos, reviewing pro-level play, all to climb the competitive ranks. Now I have less time (college) to spend in one place and now I don't find such time-consuming games so fun. I haven't lost any appreciation to the grind, it just isn't significant to me anymore. If most people in the souls community understood this, the fanbase would seem more mature.

[@lactofermentation]

I hope it changes the way you think about games in general! Outside of cheating on PvP or MMO situations, there's not a right or wrong way to play. It's just a game! Have fun with it, whatever that means for you. Anyone telling you otherwise is compensating for something.

[@Zarkonem]

"Are you saying you're less skilled than a goldfish?!" Well. I rage quit at the fire giant and never came back soooo...

[@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.

[@KeiTheOne991]

This. if more people understood the actual mechanics behind some of these decisions, they wouldn't complain so much. The fan base complains so much that we are losing artistic integrity and decisions because "we don't want to alienate people who don't have left thumbs." I'm terrible at platforming games, but I don't want them to be more "accessable" I just want to have fun, so I'm not playing platforming games. It's that simple.

[@landonstrong9686]

tbf, until they patched the scabutree formula, the curve of the scabutree leveling meant that scabutree level 17 pre-patch was about equivalent to scabutree 13 post patch. or something like that, i forget the exact numbers. Also, the bigger problem was that many of the scabutree fragments were somewhat random in how they were scattered. if they were instead placed along the main questline, or in predictable locations, it would have been a lot less stressful.

[@Ghorda9]

@@landonstrong9686 you don't need all the fragments and most of them are along the path to the main bosses

[@landonstrong9686]

@@Ghorda9 Not needing all is good…but to get to the original expected level of scadutree blessings (about 17), you still needed 41 of them. (this has been reduced to 26 post patch). Keep in mind that 2 fragments were in the abyssal woods, which was not in the main storyline, 4 were in the cerulean coast (which i believe is also optional), 5 were in Rauh Ruins, and another 5 were locked behind the optional boss at shadowkeep’s back gate, which itself can be difficult to find. The new blessing rebalance is great, don’t get me wrong, but that is more than enough fragments alone that could be missed on the main story that you would be ‘underleveled’ by the time you reached the final boss in the original game.

[@Ghorda9]

@@landonstrong9686 you don't need more than blessing level 13, that number you're throwing around has no bearing.

[@PZ_Lima]

8:57 To be honest, I did not struggle with the DLC at all until the final boss. My problem with the final boss is that it has changed the Souls community into people going into fextra life and being as optimized as possible instead of having fun

[@soulpogger7561]

Your assuming that people can't have fun optimizing a game, which is clearly untrue.

[@simplyhammer5105]

As a long time souls player... Rahdan was just an over tuned monster that should not have happened. A) thematically ruined by miquella, and ruined the visuals of his fight B)his hit boxes were really bad for normal rolling C) he could oneshot with 4-5 attacks max defense and fragments (just why) Had the same arguments with malenia. Her "recovery" effect should have stopped when she goes second phase Not that it matters because she poise breaks easily.

[@VeryBasedAnon]

@@simplyhammer5105 Radahn was a bit overtuned ngl but for me the main problem was the FUCKING FLASHBANGS in phase 2. EVERY ATTACK has a blinding pillar of light, not to mention the "lmao enjoy 30fps during this specific attack!". I could do phase 1 practically perfectly taking 0 hits but the second phase 2 starts I just lose track of the damn animations because of the flashbangs. Apparently one of the recent patches "Improved visibility" during his fight but I already summoned to get past him after my like 100th attempt.

[@Felsparx]

I wouldn't even try complaining about min-maxxers as they're a problem and have been a problem in every single game for the past 15 years. An absolute plague. It will remain that way for as long as the internet and social media is readily available. The days of innocent, gaming for fun died in the mid 2000's. Unfortunately. Now you're forced to conform or be left behind.

[@JamesBondBurgered]

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

[@EternalSalaryman]

Oh my sweet Promised Consort Radahn, how I miss thee... with my sword because you negated my build entirely. Oh how I miss thee.

[@CookingWithTheFrogs]

Still kinda crazy that pointcrow's fish beat malenia

[@Vini168]

And consort radahn

[@DemonEyeHelix]

Fish spends its entire life watching a professional speedrunner play games. It knows what it's doing lmao

[@wasabilai9405]

Crow has died so much that Tortellini learnt the fight from the tank

[@forgottensnecko4631]

it happened with spirit ashes, it happened with nerfs, it happened with Scadu fragments and it'll keep happening, but not one of us will ever stop playing

[@user-cg3em4cw4f]

Wait, are you saying that the bosses having unfun mechanical design is because people ignore spirit ashes? I feel like they get less fun with ashes, not moreso.

[@trentonloomis9565]

​@user-cg3em4cw4f For certain parts of the game I would agree, but summoning in thus game works differently than any other Souls game. The bosses are built around you using them.

[@eragon78]

@@trentonloomis9565 Only a few are. Most arent. Summons completely trivialize bosses in elden ring. only a few have any sort of attacks that can deal with them to any real degree. Like, the only bosses which I can think of (in the base game) that actually counter summons to any degree of effectiveness are bosses like, Radahn (base), melania, the gank bosses like godskin duo or commander nail, and maybe fire giant. But a lot of the base game bosses just get completely destroyed by summons as they just walk up as massive HP sponges to eat all of the boss's agro, while you sit back and destroy the boss with super high damaging ranged attacks. Honestly, summons feel like so much of an after thought. Especially since you cant even USE them in co-op, which feels so weird. Like why? Summoning co-op completely locks out all other summons. And unlike your spirit ashes, which dont make bosses any stronger at all, summoning a friend makes bosses have like twice as much HP and poise. And your friend only gets half flasks compared to a spirit ash, which means they are significantly less tanky. I mean idc if people use spirit ashes, but they definitely make the game pretty trivially easy, and invalidate most of the bosses in the game. Especially if you use ranged builds. But even with melee builds, the summon just eats all the damage for you and you can wail on the boss with little to no concern. Elden ring with spirit ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY easier than every other souls game. Thats another indication that the bosses werent really built around spirit ashes. At least it doesnt feel like they were, because theyre just completely ineffective at dealing with summons.

[@forgottensnecko4631]

@@user-cg3em4cw4f ahhhhh, someone proving my point. love to see it

[@Weppi4]

​@@trentonloomis9565using spirit ashes means you will just spam your strongest attack over and over again without having to pay attention to the boss at all

[@arthurdurham]

My issue is not difficulty, it's that all fromsoft can think to do to add difficulty is increase stats and extend boss combos and tracking but maintain the same core mechanics. All the options you have are to either spend more time dodging/blocking, sometimes parry, and waiting or essentially nerf the difficulty with magic or spirits. None of it is truly increasing your moment to moment choices and actions. Wukong reminded me that I'm not sick of the souls formula I'm just sick of Elden Ring. You can have bosses that have crazy acrobatics and combos if you give the player a bunch of abilities to combine and use as they like to combat it like in Wukong (as well as having exploration that actually leads to cool encounters or useful items and not reskins or useless crafting items). But just being able to dodge, block, distract agro, or essentially nuke a boss isn't cutting it anymore for me. Even stranger as Fromsoft made Sekiro, which was a fantastic evolution of the design when in the moment combat was the focus so they clearly can do it differently.

[@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.

[@lukewatts3997]

Never made that roll in thousands of attempts

[@hudsonlutwyche3559]

i have never played ds2 i am a new souls fan (elden ring recent) and i find the idea of a death door hilarious and want to play ds2 for that reason

[@7hunnedbands]

@@hudsonlutwyche3559ds2 is goofy silly fun times until it isn’t

[@Niakra]

Given the reputation it wouldn't seem out of place, I guess. The same area also has a door which just has a skeleton feebly crumble after you open it. It's a bit funky that way.

[@CrizzyEyes]

@@hudsonlutwyche3559 DS2 is... polarizing. I didn't think it was that bad, but from a thematic perspective, the world is extremely jarring and disjointed. It feels like playing classic Castlevania but even more disjointed. You will take a 40 story elevator from a poison swamp which is also a mine into a Super Mario 64 lava castle. The PvP was peak of the franchise, in my opinion, though.

[@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.

[@kastaarbeauclair4070]

Go back to the first merchant you saw at the beginning of the game, Kale. He sells a crafting kit. Cookbooks allow for more crafting recipes

[@AuroraTheFirstLight]

@@kastaarbeauclair4070 The thingy to change ashes of war is also hidden somewhere There are definitely some design decisions taken in the game

[@dawsong5208]

How could you have cleared weeping peninsula without finding anything when you get multiple weapons, staffs, spells, and the like there? Also Melina spawns at any Limgrave sites of grace after you’ve rested at a few, not sure if she can appear to offer you her help within the weeping area though. So did you just ignore or miss most sites of grace when you were exploring through Limgrave?

[@MeIoTheYellow]

@@AuroraTheFirstLight """"""""""HIDDDEN""""""""""

[@stereotypicalweaboo]

@@AuroraTheFirstLight There is literally an engraving on the road to the ruins that says there is a underground section here. Even if you miss that you can purchase the item from the round table.

[@tonyblitzar8407]

This might be the single most entertaining video I’ve seen all year on YT. CircleToons’s style never ceases to entrance my ADHD brain

[@vladspellbinder]

7:12 I really like that Elden Beast, so cute. Just doing his little happy dance without a care in the world. Thanks for the video.

[@Craft2299]

Skipping out on that last boss talk huh? Well, I agree, but there are places in the game that do feel unfair. The many things that Elden Ring has been parodied for, and criticised for is made worse in the DLC. For example, bosses delay their animations even more, making their moves less natural and nonsensical. There are multitudes of moves that are just there for the visual flair, while the same exact visual flair on another boss actually damages you. Joseph Anderson probably has the best long-winded review of the DLC, and in short he explains the DLC as "Gym goer who has trained incredibly well looking very good, but look down and you see he totally skipped leg day".

[@NaturesFlame]

Was his review good? After he spent the first 10 minutes complaining about people complaining, I had to click off. If there's more meat to it than that I might have to go back and skip past that.

[@Craft2299]

@@NaturesFlame a lot more meat.

[@michaelgjrjvebs]

I didnt have much problems at all prior to the final boss(pre nerfs). I legitimately think phase 2 was a huge issue not only because it was hard but the flashes gave me huge eye strain and threatened my epilepsy. The skibiditrees are honestly a cool idea and I can totally imagine people not reading the prompts and then complaining online they got filtered.

[@AtomicZamurai]

what do you think about him after the """"nerf""""

[@soul-5]

​@@AtomicZamuraii know you didnt ask me but i thought i'd out my view for "survey value"; i still dont like it, doesnt give me the feeling that i like about from soft games; if you're only interested in his opinion specifically, you can ignore this 👍

[@inanefabas4402]

​@@AtomicZamuraiA fraud will always remain a fraud

[@VanquishR]

Yeah, Promised Consort was ridiculous. His most devastating attack was the one against your FPS. With the exception of his cross slash, he was more or less dodge able. In fact, his first phase was a lot of fun to learn and overcome. His second phase became a hodgepodge of laser beams and ultra precise dodging only to die cuz your FPS dropped harder than the story of SOTE once you finally do beat the DLC. Not to mention the ridiculous hitboxes that felt like PC was hitting you with buildings instead of swords. I was fine beating the rest of the bosses on NG+2 solo, but PC forced me to use the great shield, rot rapier strat, and that felt kinda bad. Ofc I could have probably beaten him with my normal build if I lived in my mothers basement and didn’t have anything else to do, but that’s not realistic

[@michaelgjrjvebs]

​@@AtomicZamurai I just saw this. KZbin has decided I don't get notifications anymore apparently. Anyway I feel he is a lot better fight now and he causes less eyestrain, though that could just be a bit of confirmation bias. He is significantly easier but still challenging... and I think that's ok. It's fine that a final boss can bust your balls a little bit but not smash them into oblivion.

[@pewpewplasma3793]

The Scadutree fragments were the loudest part of the discussion, but usually the loudest part of the discussion is only that way because it’s easy to point to and requires little thinking about the topic. In other words, it’s usually the wrong focus. There are genuine criticisms to be made about SOTE, namely enemy design. I think the one most people immediately think of is Radahn, but I want to focus on something smaller: Divine Beast Warriors (the Lion guys in the final area), and Curseblades (the spinning dual blade guys with a thousand combos, you get ambushed by one upon almost immediately entering Gravesite plain). These two enemies in particular are hard for the sake of being hard. There is a lot of spectacle to them like most things in Elden Ring, which is fine, but if you can tell me you find fighting them fun with a straight face I wouldn’t believe you. They’re cool enemies, that’s about where the praise ends for most people. For one, the poise on both enemies is through the roof meaning stance breaking them is going to be difficult. On top of that getting them to flinch is extremely difficult depending on what move they’re using (I don’t even think the Divine Warriors can flinch). To make matters worse both enemies are extremely mobile with long combos and very short dodge windows. Sound familiar? All the same problems as Radahn. For reference, I played through the DLC as a strength character and switched between Greatsword and Ancient Meteoric Ore Greatsword, Scadutree level of 19. On my first playthrough of the DLC I tried to fight them as I came across them. Eventually I just started running past them because it’s easier and not a drain on resources, especially since they are “common” enemies. I learned that a lot of people had similar experiences. So do I think that all the DLC enemies are this way? No, in fact I think Messmer’s forces are some of the better designed ones. This is more or less a problem with Hornsent enemies and the endgame area specifically, but I think it’s indicative of an underlying problem in the DLC that SOME enemies are just hard for the sake of being hard and that’s a problem. When you created an enemy that the player would rather run past than fight straight up that’s an issue and your enemy design effectively failed. And I think to some degree the devs knew the player would want to run past these enemies which is why they are highly mobile so they can cut you off, and have devastating ranged attacks if you try to speedily exit their sphere of influence.

[@Ghorda9]

just because an enemy is really tough doesn't make it bad design, also Feebleking and Joseph Anderson shouldn't be taken seriously.

[@pewpewplasma3793]

@@Ghorda9 idk who either of those people are and idk why you brought them up out of the blue. Regardless, there are plenty of enemies that are “hard” that I find much more enjoyable to fight. Like the Fire Knights or those massive scorpion spider enemies. The two I mentioned are particular extremes in the enemy lineup that I find to be ridiculous to a degree that warrants mentioning, and as it would happen from what I’ve seen of online discourse surrounding those enemies others tend to agree. At the end of the day it’s subjective, but to shave my points down to “just because it’s tough doesn’t equal bad” is extremely reductive of what I said. It’s not that they are tough it’s what *makes* them tough that I find disagreeable. In a similar vein just because Godfrey is a tough boss doesn’t mean I dislike him because I find his design far more approachable, unlike Promised Consort Radahn. Plenty of other people agree on that point as well evidently given the nerf, and again the reason I didn’t bring him up is because he’s a far more prominent example and usually the first people use. I find talking about enemies such as the Divine Warriors much more interesting for the reason that they don’t get talked about enough.

[@Ghorda9]

@@pewpewplasma3793 you need to keep in mind that "online discourse" is almost entirely made up by a loud minority and the only people that are loud are the ones that complain. I found them fun to fight and none of them have really blocked my progress either if i didn't want to fight them in the first place.

[@pewpewplasma3793]

@@Ghorda9 and similarly people who have the opposite opinion of said discourse are also called a minority. There’s no way to gauge any of that truly, so it’s effectively meaningless to the conversation and only serves to downplay criticism, like you’re doing now. Like I said earlier at the end of the day whether people find the enemy hard/fun to fight is a subjective opinion. I said nothing about blocking progress so idk why you’re bringing that up, I’m glad that you say that you had fun fighting them. I don’t really understand what you’re trying to add to the conversation with that, but happy for you

[@Ghorda9]

@@pewpewplasma3793 people that are content are the least likely to express themselves online. You also can't assume that people voice the same complaints either.

[@davidgantenbein9362]

Loved that the DLC always had several paths open for me to take till nearly the end. It really supports that exploration feeling and was ok for my level (being over-leveled still is beneficial as everything is altered on percents, so it’s not like all those hours leveling are lost).

[@karenbonds264]

0:30 That’s a clean rotoscope right there.

[@charliemacsart]

❤

[@Meaeatt]

@charliemacsart wait is this u?

[@charliemacsart]

@@Meaeatt yeah, I’m one of the animators on the CircleToons team!

[@flying-magpie]

My issue with the fragments more come from replaying the DLC. Playing the DLC first time I feel the fragments work because everything is new and you WANT to explore ever nook and cranny, and you are rewarded for doing so. However, I feel replays are gonna be annoying because now you're familiar with everything, but instead of going right to the bosses you're going to be forced to run all around the map to collect fragments first just so you won't die in two hits.

[@omenjesus1]

this has been my thought as well, i'm waiting a while to let it feel fresh again before i do another new run

[@Alex_Barbosa]

That same issue is in the base game tbf

[@dukeofnylon]

@@Alex_Barbosa not it's not all the important items you need to collect have a surplus, so you don't need to play "Where's Waldo" like you do with the scooby doo treats.

[@Alex_Barbosa]

@@dukeofnylon That's not what the comment was about

[@fellow9939]

The true tragedy of the DLC is that many players will do everything from soft wanted, still struggle with the game and then when they go look for help get compared to a goldfish. Also pre-nerf bosses were bullshit. You can't tell me the final boss' half-framerate reducer and half-flashbang attack that made it impossible to see what the fuck was going on even on new top-spec hardware was even remotely fair

[@CrizzyEyes]

I think people have been dick-riding Miyazaki way too damn hard ever since ER came out. Sure, it's a cool game, but in terms of general progression and boss design I'd say prior games were overall better. With Bloodborne being arguably the peak. The Horned Warriors (I think that's what they're called, the big guys with the curved greatswords) are probably the best example of the problems with their design philosophy. They seem to think it's okay for enemies to spam boss-tier combos and absurd AOE attacks because "well you should be overpowered now." As if the player and enemy both slinging stupidly overpowered spells and abilities at each other is good game design. Spamming a million buff items and abilities before a fight is very tedious as well, I haven't done that since I played Baldur's Gate 1 + 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day. Monster Hunter Generations had a similar problem compared to other Monhun games. I hope FromSoft course corrects slightly for their next game like Capcom did.

[@tr1191]

8:04 I saw her beat the same bosses simultaneously, one with the dance pad and the other with a controller which is insane

[@Fry3211]

Goated Sam cameo @ 7:50

[@Aovelius]

Previous DLC's all were scaled up without the need of additional mechanic, Artorias of the Abbys was available once you acquired the lordvessel, DS2 had the doors to the bonus content scattered prior to Drangleic castle with bonus COOP focused locations once you defeated each main DLC boss, for DS3 Andariel required you to defeat Dragonslayer armor and the ringed city was post game content. For Shadow the sandbox approach is a double edged blade since you can enter it pretty much right away once you get the medal from Varre, meaning that your stuff and levels will be severely underpowered. But even when I entered it after killing the elden beast fully decked out, the mausoleum knight still wiped me in a few swings. On some level the new mechanic makes sense, you want the player to be able to feel progressively stronger but at the same time, you dont want to make new game + utter breeze.

[@senounatsuru6453]

I think it's fine for people to be able to roll it with an endgame build, and from soft designing the DLC specifically to prevent that left a bad taste in my mouth.

[@TriforceWisdom64]

Idk if it was different on release, but you enter Ariandel before reaching the Cathedral of the Deep. And I enjoyed getting rolled by SotE, that mausoleum knight just made me laugh.

[@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.

[@635574]

Because ER is the result of many years of content bloat with barely any pruning.

[@Brasswatchman]

Expecting not to have to explore in a game that emphasizes open-world exploration -- from a studio well-known for their open-world environments -- strikes me as a little foolish. I mean, what exactly were you expecting?

[@massgunner4152]

The problem is that normal mode doesn't exist in elden ring, you either have to be a turbonerd with a build so overtuned it would disintegrate a warframe player, or a turbo tryhard that collects punishment like infinity stones in Fortnite, there is a sizeable middle point for a player building their character that completely dissapears after godrick.

[@inanefabas4402]

​@@BrasswatchmanCorrection: from has historical made dungeons and interconnected levels, not open worlds. ER is the first open world game by fromsoft. Also, "exploring" by the dlc's terms is running around the map like a headless chicken hoping that the next blue item drop is a fragment. Exploring in the base game was pretty much doing anything, leveling up by killing enemies, getting new weapons, etc. You'd likely know this if you actually played the game instead of peddling other people's opinions around.

[@Brasswatchman]

@@inanefabas4402 If you say so.

[@OrganizedBonfire]

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.

[@shigerumiyamoto9612]

The reason why they do this and not your option is because i assume they wish to reward people who strugles with a boss and takes a break and do something else like trying to look for stuff.

[@irpanfauzi1160]

i think with current System its Make Scadutree feel not important if you Know what are you doing, like gathering less Scadutree Playthrought for Example you only Start to hunt them when you are Strugle Enought with the game

[@tevenpowell8023]

​@@shigerumiyamoto9612 Yeah that's the sticking point isn't it. If the Fragments were behind bosses then it would be closer to Sekiro, where if you're having too much trouble with the bosses then you're out of luck; because the leveling items are only found on bosses.

[@icebox1954]

@@irpanfauzi1160 I don't think so. Granted I always run defensive builds that prioritise damage negation over damage increase but even though I could beat most of the DLC without any fragments with ease there's no point if you need them for Radahn later. You might as well reduce the clearing time by getting them early as the DLC is mostly a rush to Radahn after first playthrough. I'll probably not go back to Midra as I've already beaten him in two tries. That entire section is a huge waste of time.

[@Graysett]

You're describing Sekiro. And one of the main complaints people had about Sekrio was that most of the time the only way to get meaningfully stronger was to beat the bosses and minibosses around the world, when a lot of the time even when you were on-"level" with them they were still really challenging for most players. It sounds better until you realize you're replacing "wander around on Torrent" with "go through mini-dungeons and fight bosses you may or may not like or actually want to fight yet" to get the same reward. And they both boil down to "find random location with fragments" but now it'd be "find random location with fragments, and also run a gauntlet and then do a fight for it". Whether people find running around on Torrent more tedious than doing Encounters or not is up to them, but I infinitely prefer the way ER handles it. The openness and not having to do content I don't want to is the reason I have 4x the playtime in ER than I do in DS3, even though I've barely touched ER's PVP and I did like 80 hours of DS3 pvp.

[@EmmanuelAniTheSchism]

:32 whoa! Didn't know you were chill like that dog

[@youssefbencheikh8637]

6:11 "I HATE overcomplicated visual gags that cause you to have to pause the video to be able to see it and then you realize it's not even worth it to pause in the first place" lol got me there

[@acetrainer5564]

I have to hard disagree. I didn't avoid Scadutree fragments, I didn't bee-line towards bosses. I played like you suggested, exploring around. And what I found was wall after wall after wall. "Oh ok, this guy can take 200 hits, and also one shots me, so I should go the other direction until I'm stronger... Oh, this direction has a different guy who is the same strength and is even faster... Ok maybe I sneak by them and- oh, no no this is a major dungeon, this is beyond my level right now. Maybe some minor dungeons to get stronger first would be good? Oh nope, this random hole in the ground has a knight with a crossbow that is also hundreds of times stronger than me." Like ok where the hell am I supposed to go to get stronger? EVERY direction is a wall. And before you say that Souls players are meant to like a challenge, I am a decade long souls player wiht 100% completion in every game, I know the deal. I know you're supposed to learn a boss's moveset and get good at fighting them. But, when that damn lion one shots me, I never live long enough to learn the moveset. And when I leave to hunt down Scadutree fragments for hours and come back with an extra +2, and it STILL one shots me, because the difference between +0 and +3 (high as you can get in the area) is only 0.092% damage reduction. That's just not balanced right! I can't learn shit by dying to the first hit all the time! People always jump to the "just get tree fragments bro" argument, the difference is just extremely minimal to the point of being unoticeable. Even collecting FIFTY fragments (every fragment in the game) only gets you a 0.487x defence buff. It's not about it being hard, it's about it being unfair. A hard boss I can handle, I can figure it out, I can beat it. A twinblade knight who demands perfect dodging for followup attacks 150 times in a row that will end the fight on the first mistake by one shotting you just isn't fair. No souls game before has been like this. People praised DS1 for herding the player in the right direction without a quest marker by making two of the three routes available to you (New Londo and the Catacombs) freakishly hard, which naturally guided you towards the Undead Burg. The thing is, the DLC doesn't naturally guide you anywhere. It's all just as hard as the rest of it. That's bad.

[@jackcois6077]

Git gud.

[@13JackDiamond]

@@acetrainer5564 Shhh! You're giving a nuanced argument, you fool. You're supposed to act like a caricature of an Elden Ring detractor and act like the only problem in the DLC is Skibidi Fragments. You can't point out obvious stuff like how the game doesn't tell you how many fragments you can collect, who drops them, what and how much they increase, why you're punished so hard for being summoned because the host didn't collect them all but you did. You're just supposed to fling sh¡t and yourself at the wall till something sticks and pretend the game is what you wanted it to be. What do you mean that's antithetical to what the games were like before by being more focused and had proper challenges rather than artificial difficulty? You're crazy. All the previous games were always this bad and had this kind of artificial difficulty, or at least that's what every person who only enjoys ER tells me. Also, ignore the fact that this game is the only From game where they had to nerf bosses at all while also buffing players so often so they could keep up. Definitely not an admission from Michael Zaki that they might've pushed the envelope for what the player can handle.

[@acetrainer5564]

@@jackcois6077 Good advice doesn't stay good when an idiot repeats it in an unrelated situation.

[@Layne_____]

fewest comments I've seen on a post here because I just don't see how people can say you're wrong here. I will be stealing this comment for future conversations. thanks

[@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.

[@Generic-ODST]

Consort Radahn was a genuine mess, and I had to spend hours summoning people to siege him down. I mean for goodness sake, you couldn’t even finish getting through the fog wall before he was on you in seconds. Even when I did beat him with my summoned buddy, we were both at the end of our rope with inches of hp

[@AhmOOO]

Dlc bosses were goated, only boss I found “unfair” was that one dragon on your way to Bayle Just git gud!

[@acasualmusiclistener7919]

Commander Gaius pre patch made me want to rip my hair out, him rushing towards you before you even enter the arena got me almost every time.

[@DemonEyeHelix]

This comment sums it up very well. Difficult but fair is a great challenge (Messmer) Difficult but unfair is miserable (Most of the other dlc bosses)

[@pengmaeda9908]

@@AhmOOO Stop eating the slop uncritically

[@ghostboy1564]

That handshake at the beginning was incredible. Dap me up miquella.

[@Mostima25]

This is such a shallow take on this matter, the issue was not the item itself, the issue was unbalanced enemy damage, overtuned endless combos, and scummy delayed attacks, it didn't make the dlc difficult it made it tedious and unfun Difficulty in souls game was majorly just a byproduct of good game design, but it became the sole premise of SOTE, didn't matter how enemies killed you, all it mattered to the devs is that you're dead

[@Jojo.com999]

0:38 that handshake was mischievously fire

[@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.

[@chef_boysauce4399]

I wasn’t there from the beginning, but I feel the same way. I started in 2017 with bloodborne. And then i beat DS1 and 2 Elden Ring, then DS3 and Sekiro. Just got a PS5 for Demon’s Souls and beat it recently. ER really is often the least enjoyable one for basically the reason you said. However, i LOVE sekiro. I think it’s the thing about devs tailoring the experience. The other games have more linear style. The games started hard but you could feel yourself getting stronger through playstyle and leveling. DS1 had to get easier so that you don’t get overwhelmed no matter which lord souls you go for. DS2 had the beginning areas get easier and then it was linear shot forward from drangleic castle, so the experience was specifically tailored to be the correct amount of hard. DS3 usually gave you 1 or 2 choices as to where you went. So it was even more intentionally designed. Sekiro was the same way. That’s what i enjoy about the games. They have very intentionally designed experience where if you use every tool, it works and it’s really never been hard with the exception of sekiro. It’s just a rhythm. It’s moveset memorization to it’s core. Which is what many laud the games bosses for. It makes you memorize them. To a degree at least. Sekiro is full stop in comparison. The thing about Elden Ring, is that every tool, includes the spirit ashes. I did 3 playthroughs. A blind run, where i used ashes sparingly, which was frustrating. A second run, where i used ashes willy nilly no matter what. That felt like it had the same difficulty as my blind ds3 run. And then i did a third run where i used to spirit ashes whatsoever. It went right back to being frustratingly hard. I sincerely think the spirit ashes and the scadu fragments did the same thing. The difference is, newbies used spirit ashes. This time, they got the same experience as the vets who didn’t use spirit ashes. They went in deciding not to use the scadu frags. And now the majority is noticing the problem we (or at least I) have noticed.

[@chef_boysauce4399]

Sorry for giving you a novel

[@mrwizard5012]

The problem is they stopped being souls and started being crappy xbox ninja gaiden games without the requisite mechanics that make those fun (if you can even call them that).

[@sephreed1938]

I think teleporting is antithetical to the entire concept of these games. It cuts out a ton of exploration and makes it so there’s no such thing as being backed in a corner.

[@nobody1336]

About that time you got faster reaction speed old man

[@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 💚

[@Khotetsu]

My biggest issue with the system is similar to yours, but it's how the scadu fragments obfuscate the stats in the DLC. I walked into the final boss fight with weapons that on paper dealt 1.5k damage, 60-70 vigor, and damage resistances above 50% for every magic type and 80% for physical, and still got 2-3 shot by the boss. Objectively, I think the first phase of the fight was perfectly fine and the second phase had a lot of issues, but from a player power perspective, being slapped when my damage resistances were far higher than anything you could see in the base game simply didn't feel fun. It felt like they were meaningless.

[@Ghorda9]

@@Khotetsu the blessing multiply your base damage and resistance, so your levels do matter a lot. you can even see the numbers in yellow on the stat page

[@Foxtail190]

When I found out my first level gave me around 60 AR, I immediately understood the value. This was before the nerf, so, hard disagree here

[@Joonee668]

bro at exactly 0:38 when i was watching the like count and the view count went up suddenly it was crazy

[@yallmight5752]

Infinite views glitch

[@fugr0]

Kal

[@Ilikehatss]

It reloaded the views and likes

[@ZeroN1neZero]

Damn, I haven’t watched Circle in a minute, what an improvement in quality, comedy, and some other words I can’t fully articulate because I’m sleepy.

[@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".

[@jazzman7842]

if you deal that little damage and are so little in resilience, your build may need tuning

[@FinnishArsonist]

And how else do you expect them to balance the DLC? You can get to Mohg as your first shardbearer, or as your last. The Scadutree fragments effectively act as a replacement to the level up system for the DLC only.

[@PersonGuy968]

@@FinnishArsonist Every other DLC did so just fine...

[@FinnishArsonist]

@@PersonGuy968 but the other games aren't open world. They are very linear games, and so the devs can tune the DLC to your progression.

[@PersonGuy968]

@@FinnishArsonist Maybe not put 40 of these, and guarantee 1 scadutree blessing level up per boss defeated.

[@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.

[@newwick]

To make things worse not even all pot guys with sparkle effects carry scadu fragments

[@StylesX]

Really? Needed a guide, if you dint explore yeah. But even then, all you need is 12 to hit a soft cap. The difference in power from 12 to 20 is so small. If you literally follow the main path from NPCs, you'll get 12 essily. Plus you dont even need any to beat bosses. The only time I needed to use them was at Enir Elim.

[@ihavenonamestilldonthaveon8970]

Dude they carry over per playthrough, its not exactly difficult to just get the easy ones and go to another new game plus. You get to scadutree 20 from just playing through the dlc twice.

[@maximoy2288]

@@ihavenonamestilldonthaveon8970 You gotta be trolling lmao, 'just replay this 100hour game + dlc to level up for the dlc'

[@AtomicZamurai]

YOU DONT NEED TO BE MAX SCADU LEVEL YOU DONT NEED TO BE MAX SCADU LEVEL YOU DONT NEED TO BE MAX SCADU LEVEL YOU DONT NEED TO BE MAX SCADU LEVEL YOU DONT NEED TO BE MAX SCADU LEVEL

[@woomy-chan9627]

I’ve done the whole “mute everything” spoiler free route with Monster Hunter Wilds, can’t wait to see all the monsters, armor, locales and characters for the first time as I play it. No trailers (aside from the first 2)

[@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...

[@deeps6979]

I managed to miss the freakin' spirit bell because I didn't visit the cathedral at night, with no indication for it. Some of the design decisions can only be described as "a choice"...

[@The_Dennator]

@@deeps6979 you can buy it from the twin husks after stormveil is done

[@EvalithFoG]

​@@deeps6979If you miss the bell at the church you can buy it from the Twin Maidens at the Roundtable

[@KeiTheOne991]

​@@deeps6979 you can actually purchase the bell from the round table for 100 runes if you missed ranni. Most items that are core features can be gotten in multiple ways.

[@Wolfi501]

@@deeps6979 Honestly, nah. If you happen to miss the spirit bell you can just purchase it at the merchant statue in the Roundtable... Aside from some Lore implications, that encounter in the Church of Elleh is no big deal. ALSO the game does a pretty good job sending you back to that church multiple times since kale acts like a guide for the early parts of limgrave once you get lost. The Church is THE FIRST THING you see when you enter the Open world. The rays of grace lead you there directly. The big Tree sentinal is guarding that particular BIG building, in an otherwise empty field. There is no other real point of interest around in the first moment. They couldnt hold your hand more obvious with that Church, apart from telling you GO TO THE CHURCH right away

[@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.

[@Generic-ODST]

The divine beast was the genuine worst since he could attack like 10 times in a row without stopping, and give you .2 seconds to hit him before he goes again. I genuinely had to summon an npc and my mimic just to break up agro and even then, it was close

[@theresnothinghere1745]

@@Generic-ODST "The divine beast was the genuine worst since he could attack like 10 times in a row without stopping, and give you .2 seconds to hit him before he goes again." At that point you just straight up don't understand how to actually engage a boss. Divine beast has a stupid amount of openings but you actually have to use the mechanics instead of waiting about for the boss to stand still and let you hit them.

[@quickleap554]

as a pointcrow viewer i am happy that you included the beating a boss part

[@usagipoutine]

My only real critic no the dlc is the frienzied forest that has only ONE boss and no varient of other bosses that we see pretty much everywhere. Like the place is near dragon peak and we have no frienzied dragon! And like, I'm fine with walking a whole 8th of the map on foot, but give me some bosses at least. I wanted to see how scary the frienziness is.

[@dannydogs4385]

I remember watching another video and they mentioned they think the game was rushed and incomplete due to some of the large mostly empty areas that don't make much sense to be as empty as they are.

[@usagipoutine]

@@dannydogs4385 I kinda agree, like, the finger print place and the frienzied forest should have been more lively instead of just being filled with weak and annoying enemies. It gave me a lost izalith dragon butts flashback.

[@KeiTheOne991]

​@@dannydogs4385the game feels unfinished because people complain about repeat bosses and how hard the game is. I don't blame FromSoft, I blame the fans.

[@super_presh7456]

​@@dannydogs4385 I feel like they wanted to do a lot more but didn't want to make the dlc basically elden ring 2

[@FinnishArsonist]

​@@dannydogs4385I highly disagree. They took the quality over quantity approach, with each area being more distinct but having less loot in it. A great example is the catacombs, they feel so much better.

[@the_chill_man]

8:05 don’t underestimate tortellini you could never scale up to him.

[@PJsVoiceArts]

As a person of the original 09’ Demon’s Souls pain party and playing through all the Souls games/like-games, this game was A BIG adjustment to such open exploring and constantly getting lost, but I liked not expecting the same exact structure as previous FROMSOFT games. And the DLC is 😘👌🏻 the fragments for powering up just to handle the enemies in the game was strange at first, but I liked that I had to work for it like I was in a NG all over again! Got that “FUCK YEAH I DID IT!” Beating Consort Radahn. A feeling all too rewarding after immense suffering 🤣 really enjoyed your review and viewpoint on this video 💪🏻💪🏻 congratulations on beating it, man!

[@unpronouncable2442]

I think "you are playing the game wrong" is a bad take to have. The job of a developer is to make game (even open world one) in such a way that the natural tendencies of a player take them from place where they need to be for their current state to another place where they need to be for their current state. A shiny item here, a light there, a vibrant color somewhere else. Breadcrumbs and paths they can follow. People are also sensitive to the way you present information to them. There is a world of difference between "nerf the player and let them recover with an item" and "buff the DLC and let the player grow more powerful to face it with an item" even if mathematically both approaches are equivalent One is perceived as punishment the other as a reward. Now I do not play FromSoft games so what I wrote is based on the information provided in the video.

[@iheartblock3792]

this is pretty well thought out as a long time souls fan who didn’t like elden ring. it feels like the game honestly obscures key information at times, borderline requiring you to look up information, which is antithetical to the immersive exploration it’s meant to provide. Searching up all the key locations for items isn’t fun, it’s a fetch quest, and it feels like the game punishes you for not doing the fetch quest!

[@3sbon]

If I see a breadcrumb path in a fromsoft game I just know patches is going to kick me down a pit.

[@olivialambert5975]

As someone who is not a souls player you are the first person that I have heard talk about this game in a way that actually makes me want to play it

[@videocrowsnest5251]

Elden Ring was my first ever game of this kind. Definetly recomend giving it a go if you feel so inclined! Had a lot of fun with it, even if the learning curve felt a bit steep to begin with (mostly controls). Once I found my footing though it was a pleasantly intense experience. DLC was a step up in difficulty (as it assumes you beat the base game) so it definetly is expecting an adept level of understanding of how to do things as opposed to brute force rushing a boss with a big mallet and hoping the stars allign in just the right way for it to work out.

[@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.

[@Allknowing18]

Eh, I think exploration is just as much a core part of the game as bosses are as is the growth in character power. It's also not grinding to expect the player to actually interact with the world especially considering you really only need about half the available fragments to get the most out of the system at scadu level 12. I mean I can't think of a system beside nerfing the player back to RL 1 in the DLC that would create the same growth in power that the main game gives.

[@Graysett]

I disagree with your thoughts on the fragments (especially that you have to grind them, because I've never seen anyone actually hit a boss and go "yeah I can't do this now, I'll come back later after I've found a bunch of fragments" in my playthrough, my friends playthroughs, or any of the LPs I've watched (except for Messmer and Radahn, but mostly Radahn), but I want to single out this in particular. "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." Those games exist, they're the games Team Ninja has been making since Nioh 1 except for WoLong and maybe Rise of the Ronin, I haven't been able to play RTR yet. It's a perfectly fine system, but the rate they shower you in loot makes inventory management a nightmare. But on the first difficulty if you're not swapping out your gear every 4ish main missions at the slowest, you're gimping yourself (I would know, that's how I play them because I hate all the inventory management so I just put it off until I can tell I'm being stat checked too hard to reasonably progress).

[@MF_Loomy]

Bro acting like we didn’t explore around to increase our flask # and amount healed in base game. I doubt you just played based game w 1 flask +0

[@Danongorf]

That’s got to be the best animated dap-up I’ve ever seen. Adult Swim, count your days!!

[@GetMadz]

OUCH! My Elden Spleen!!

[@kirbylover2.038]

What

[@dztrict1000]

What

[@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.

[@koktszfung]

same, everything else is fine, but that final boss just feels different, its moves feel cheap. It is better after the nerf though

[@TheBoxGhost_tm]

My retinas still haven't fully recovered from that fight and it's been three months. I am strongly considering getting a pair of welders goggles for the next time I attempt it. Who playtested that and thought "Yeah, that's visually appealing. Ship it."?

[@EC_Orion]

Yeah the final boss was actively unfair before the balance changes, and that's a word I use so sparingly I can count the times I've done it on one hand. I managed to beat it, pre-patch and without cheese, but it was frustrating and unsatisfying.

[@carsonandrews8857]

@@EC_OrionI let out a war cry after I beat him lol. Last time I had that much difficulty was the final boss in sekiro

[@CorpseMarine]

​@carsonandrews8857 i loved sekiros final boss but it still took me 3 hours straight to beat and I felt amazing beating him. I'm pretty certain I couldn't have beaten the elden ring dlc without cheesing it with a great shield and point stick. I actually felt pretty miserable beating it

[@Juniverse0]

The only thing that upset me about the DLC was the same thing that annoyed me about the base-game: The game has some of the best content I’ve ever played, but seems borderline keen on locking me out of it. Seriously, I had to roll back to a save where I had not beaten Messmer yet, because I found out that entering his room (not beating him, just entering his room) locks you out of a whole bunch of NPC-quests and their rewards along with it. I didn’t mind the difficulty, but I wish the game would warn me about stuff like that.

[@Kacil9999]

I think the idea of just throw everything at you can all at once at the boss after learning most (if not all) of the attacks and the weaknesses and times to attack and to run/hide is the best, since it means you already know what might happen but you are MUCH stronger, and even if you don't win 1st try, it just means the time you kill it is more satisfying. Also your friend being able to kill the final boss without moving is WILD lol

[@sildurai8287]

Was he talking about the "How to all hit Elden Ring" video from ymfah?

[@davidduncan5897]

You got a Subscription for this. Very well said. No notes.

[@demolukas9909]

First things first, For me this game isn't hard, I played every single Fromsoft game, yes including king's field, this DLC is just a normal souls experience. But, there is a lot of problems that gets overshadowed by the difficulty complains. Like the map are too big for it's content, sometimes people(like me) do feel it's a bit empty, or the rewards are being lackluster, for example, when I exploring a beautiful scenery, I'm loving it, but after awhile I only get a handful of mushrooms and a few smithing stone (1). I mean I had to defeat Mohg to get to the DLC, and this is what you offered me as reward? Come on Fromsoft, you can do better than that! And last, I think ER community are being too defensive about criticism, nothing is perfect, this game too. We as players have to point out the shortcomings for developers to improve on, other wise is just bunch of nonsense, that doesn't help anyone at all. Remember, if there's a thing that you can't criticise but only praise, that's a cult.

[@TheTalentlessWriter]

This is the best animated video game video essay that was posted on September 21st 2024

[@nono9543]

I genuinely believe a lot of people are just stubborn. FromSoftware fans being one them. Hell, when Elden Ring was released I was playing it like it was Dark Souls, not realizing that there were tons of items, hints, and exploits that made the game a whole lot easier. Aside from a few bosses, this game is probably the most newbie friendly of any FromSoftware game.

[@dvys4558]

The handshake was the best part of this video fr.

[@charliemacsart]

❤

[@Kulkogo]

“What” CircletoonsHD, 2024

[@Zangelin]

Kinda crazy takes here. Elden Ring is way harder than any other souls game if you don't meta game and just look up what is broken and what is not. I showed up to the final boss with a sword that couldn't damage it and realized I had crippled myself by going with an element that half the game has high resistances to. But going back to any older Dark Souls title they are absolute cakewalks by comparison. Mostly due to being able to actually use reactions and everything doesn't have roll catches and does DMC combos on you.

[@chegg3391]

If half of people call it too easy And another half calls it too hard Its called....*unbalanced*

[@BlueEyedMessiah]

Exactly

[@JacksonGato]

I haven’t seen your channel in years, its very different from what I remember. I like it.

[@chegg3391]

People didint have a problem with the difficulty they had a problem with WHY it was difficult

[@manastorm5308]

Its why people complain about the DLC's difficulty and not the Basegame. Seeds and Tears are similar to the Fragments, but much better placed. Until the late game, you don't have to go out searching for the base game upgrades, while you do with fragments.

[@padiowadio]

The reason why it was difficult is because of the massive open world of the base game. You can enter this DLC near the endgame, or very early if you do Vare’s questline. This can mean you are very overlevelled and overpowered, or very underlevelled and underpowered. One of the biggest complaints for the base game was the significant ramp up in difficulty in the Mountaintop of the Giants. This was due to Fromsoft trying to keep the difficulty of the game, as a lot of players would be overlevelled by time they hit Morgott. But a lot of players were also fairly levelled, so they just got hit straight down to the curb by the spike in difficulty. So, to avoid this from happening again, they introduced Scadutree fragments into the DLC, allowing every person at every level to have a fighting chance. They were simply trying to cater to as much of their playerbase as possible without compromising the core fundamentals of their game design. And I personally believe that they did a really good job. You could argue that they drove themselves into a corner with the overall design of Elden Ring and thus they had to make the DLC difficult, but I’d argue that to expect them to do have done anything differently - bar a few little touchups on certain mechanics, not outright changing them - would be expecting them to try and make a game for everyone. And as we all know, that never usually works out.

[@TomyDayos]

​@padiowadio in the dlc the enemies scale to your level. The only way to get stronger is by getting the itens.

[@Foxtail190]

Because they were underleveled and refused to use in game mechanics like spirit ashes?

[@Foxtail190]

@@manastorm5308wrong, after I beat Mesmer at schadu lvl 12, I didn’t look for a single other fragment.

[@minlow7831]

Tying the DLC’s level up system to a collectible you get from the most inconsistent locations was a weird choice

[@BlacklistedSoup]

It was the same system they used for Sekiro yet I see seldom complaints about that game's leveling up.

[@dantefiore8442]

@@BlacklistedSoup Sekiro tied it to major, obiovus bosses, not a corpse in a corner behind 3 rocks

[@landonstrong9686]

@@BlacklistedSoup Sekiro’s level layouts were also a lot more linear and connected. you didn’t have giant sprawling fields that you needed to cross, and there was generally a clear direction to the boss.

[@BlacklistedSoup]

@@dantefiore8442 I'm talking about prayer beads

[@BlacklistedSoup]

@@landonstrong9686 true, but most of the Scadutree Fragments are in fairly obvious areas

[@w4ywardlucky]

These animations are so fluid and well done it’s great❤

[@GregMcClean]

7:32 he ate berd 😭

[@alexhutchison8447]

RIP berd

[@meru2695]

I have never seen one of your videos, but damn this was really good! Keep making these!

[@NoamAgai]

8:10 hey, don't disrespect Tortellini like that!

[@mammalianmolasses4724]

I don’t know if this has been said before, but my problem with the Scadu Fragment system is how they work in NG+. The main draw of NG for me is to get to fight the early game bosses with weapons that are only available in the late game normally. The problem is, Scadu Fragments are a pain to collect, so you start NG with max Scadu Level, and melt the early bosses (namely dancing lion and rellana) whether you want to or not. I think a much better system would be to start NG with all the Scadu Fragments in your inventory, and allow players to consume them at whatever pace they want to. Just my two cents.

[@crestfallenhussar895]

"I'm playing an unoptimized build" Is using a lions claw great sword build Every time

[@lukewatts3997]

That is unoptimized, he should be using it on giant crusher

[@crestfallenhussar895]

@@lukewatts3997 I think great sword's reach and move set make it superior overall, but Giantcrusher would be higher raw damage.

[@lukewatts3997]

@@crestfallenhussar895 Oh I wasnt serious about it being an unoptimized build, just a little joke about how there's always a bigger Bonk stick

[@jacksonbuck4842]

Love this take on the DLC! I've been having a blast having a new place to wander around and explore and find challenges in every corner. I felt like the new power system for the DLC is simple enough that it didnt need much explaination, as is the fromsoftware way. Its just been so nice to explore and discover more in the elden ring universe and the visuals of the DLC are amazing. Its also been a blast to actually have to consider and update my build, have difficult fights, and no just blast everything with my darkmoon greatsword and move on. Overall I think the DLC is a masterclass on how a DLC can be, and way worth the $40, practically a full game and people still complaining about the price lol

[@joeymoore7209]

The real reason the DLC gets hate is because people don't want to spend 15 minutes dodging just to get a single dagger light attack in, just to die next cycle due to frame rate dropping right as they try to dodge

[@RoyG.BivDevoe]

2:19 Is that you Haku??!

[@Allenkcw]

The “get back in your goal cell” comment had me lollllll

[@CrizzyEyes]

Casuals be maldin' because they don't know shit about Olde English.

[@JohnSmith-kt3yy]

@@CrizzyEyes I would never have guessed scadu was ye olde english way of writing shadow.

[@CrizzyEyes]

@JohnSmith-kt3yy It's not, but it is inspired by that style of language. Gaol, however, is the old English word for jail, and "jailer" is still spelled "gaoler."

[@matheusataide3368]

The only thing i dislike about the scadu fragments is that the game doesn't tell you how many there are in an area or how many you already got, so backtracking to try and find more if you're stuck in a boss is impossible unless you wanna risk spoilers watching an youtube video.

[@angelhood101]

This comes from my experience going into the fight NG+1 SL150. Malenia defeated as a warm-up two or three days before DLC dropped. I've played through all prior FromSoft DLC at the PvP meta level on NG+. I had no reason to assume this would be any different, and the experience would be challenging but overall fair. More difficulty doesn't always mean more good. Elden Ring was already approaching the point where the experience was more frustrating than fun with Malenia and it honestly felt like she was set as the bar for boss difficulty in the trailer. Add to that that particle effects made fights extremely busy and much harder to read while also tanking framerates on hardware that could play base Elden Ring fine at 60 FPS, very long-winded boss combos where your options were openings are so slim it harms the viability of larger weapons and gives you the option to recover from a mistake made from dodging the combo or healing but never both. In previous Souls titles it felt like there were periods where you were defending and attacking, but in SotE it felt like you were *always* on the defensive. Mimic tear or other high-powered spirit ashes like Rollo or Dung Eater felt more necessary, but then since mimic aggro was reduced heavily in SotE, it felt like more defensive/evasive spirit ash options that'd provide openings for you to attack like Lhutel or Tiche weren't reasonably usable at all anymore. The end experience was that I felt much more pressure to cave to a str/arc turtling build with a greatshield and a bleed weapon or spam mimic tear and just let my spirit ash kill the boss while I watched between dodghing the boss constantly trying to turn me into a pancake going "ah yeah that was cool." Is it beatable? Yes. With the right build is it easily won? Yes. But I feel the pressure to respec and use tools that belong to specific playstyles and to use higher-power tools as a necessity is a very unhealthy outlook for a game where one of its strongest leading points is its customizability and diversity in playstyle. That and the sheer amount of particle effects, arena-spanning AoE effects, and the insistence on forcing players to jump some boss effects instead of dodgeroll them when that's fairly unique a requirement to the DLC (a lot of stuff could be jumped in the base game but wasn't inordinately difficult if not impossible to dodge by rolling instead). It just didn't feel good from the standpoint of people who don't want to win with what's good, but people who want to win with what's theirs.

[@AexolBUILDER]

0:59 bro didn't want to get spoiled at all, bro wanted to experience the dlc more then I wanted to play zelda totk when I got it on my birthday, bro stayed away from all content surrounding the eldenring more than I did avoiding the playthroughs of zelda totk.

[@CatastrophicTV]

What the hell are you talking aht

[@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.)

[@Alex_Barbosa]

I think your unfamiliarity with These types of games may have left you misunderstanding some things. The troll door your talking about isn't actually just a needless joke door there to make you walk off. It is a shortcut you open to get back down to the area faster from the last checkpoint by jumping off the ledge from above to the open door. This is apparently misunderstood by the video as well. But I mean, even if it was just a trap, the game has been teaching you for a very long time, (especially in the level it takes place in) to move slowly and look around corners and stuff before you go forward. Dark Souls 2 (the game it's in) especially likes to ambush you if you go through the levels willy nilly. I personally like this kind of stuff, Dark Souls 2 IMO just does it too often so the surprise and charm wears off far before it's over. Elden Ring definitely has a problem with replayability because of the need to pickup all the seeds and equipment and stuff around the map with every new character when you already know where it all is, but I also don't have a better solution for an open world game of this type, besides just making the game smaller, but that would not be the kind of game they set out to make. I personally don't have a huge problem with this because Elden Ring is not just a boss rush game, it is also an RPG, which means, even if you have to go around picking up the seeds and stuff, you still will be underleveled if you do that then go straight to the main dungeons and bosses. Which is great that you have that freedom, but it is inherently going to make the game much more difficult regardless of how many heals you have. (Which is what the seeds do) Sorry if you already knew that, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the game since you said your not a player. I have started over Elden Ring at least 5 times (though only completed it twice) and I can confidently say that you don't have to spend an hour going around collecting every golden seed at the beginning to make progress. If you do that it is because you are looking to get to the bosses quickly, which is fine, but that is not typically how RPGs work. You go to all the different areas, kill enemies, go through dungeons, do side quests, get loot, level up and become stronger until the big challenging areas and bosses aren't as much of a mountain to climb. Running to all your upgrades as quickly as possible is a valid way to play, but it is ignoring a good bit of the RPG progression the game is trying to give you, and playing this way is inherently more of a challenge run than a normal playthrough. It is essentially playing it as strictly an action game like Sekiro. Which i don't think is entirely fair to blame the game for. And honestly I think the Skadurtree fragments was a pretty good idea for the DLC because Elden Ring is an open world RPG and adding this new system of building power gives players the opportunity to feel that sense of progress again even if they have already beaten the base game. I suppose they could have just made the enemy's levels, damage, and health alot higher so that you basically had to have beaten the game and been overleveled to get through the DLC reasonably, but with the Skadurtree system it allows late game characters to still go to the DLC far before beating the base game, and obtain the unique items and weapons and stuff so they can later use it in the base game as well. Because the enemies and stuff are handled through scaling based on the exploration you have done moreso than your overall level. Not that the levels don't matter (they do) but that's why it's only accessible once you reach the late game. Past Fromsoft games had this as an option, but the difficulty and levels of the enemies in the DLC always made it a bit of a tossup if you were appropriately leveled for the DLC. The DLC was scales assuming you had already beaten the base game, so when you went to the DLC your character build was already fully established, and your upgrade materials were likely all used, so most players were not able to fully utilize the new equipment and items once they reached the DLC until they started over in NewGame+. Which honestly most players don't do NewGame+. I don't either. I just start a new character. And the damage I have to agree is still overtuned. The enemy damage was overtuned at the end of the base game as well, so its really more of a carryover from there than a fault of the Skadurtree fragments. One of the main and most common criticism of Elden Ring was the huge damage even basic enemies dealt in the last areas. Making basic fodder enemies kill players with 60 Vigor (which is the hard cap for health scaling) in 3 hits unless they were also wearing the super heavy armor. It was never a massive issue that ruined the experience, but it definitely lead to may frustrating encounters in the last portion of the game where you can get killed by a basic enemy as fast as you would a mid-game main boss.

[@nssheepster]

@@Alex_Barbosa In order: I wouldn't know the specifics of the door, but the video referenced it so I used it as an easy example. Unfortunately it's not the only example, even if there is a use for that in particular to players who have either been told or learned it the hard way. I certainly agree ambushes can be good, but there's a difference between a hidden enemy, which the souls games love, and a murder door... Especially given that an obvious way to avoid the ambushing enemies, is to get into the center of the room as fast as possible. SOME of what FromSoft's game do IS good, I want to be clear on that... Some of it ISN'T, and is called good anyways. I referenced the solution in my comment indirectly: Put them behind bosses/as boss drops, so that players are actually getting to engage in real gameplay, not just wandering around picking up things off the ground. I would say it IS fair to blame the game for. Just because you don't 'have to' do something doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to do it, and a bad idea not to. Sure, you COULD go through the game with no upgrades of any kind, it's POSSIBLE, you don't HAVE to ever upgrade things... But you should, yeah? They had other options, they just didn't choose them. Adding a system of building power would be good, I'd agree... Except that wasn't what Scadus WERE, they were a system of RECLAIMING power, which adds a very different feel and look to things. If they were strictly buffs, then they'd have been recieved entirely differently. Instead, however, they removed power players already had, and forced them to engage in something they knew players already didn't like to get it back. As for just adding enemy damage and health... That IS the FromSoft formula for DLCs, yes. More damage, more health, more speed, more agression... Which is what they did in SOAT. And that would've gone over fine, if they hadn't added the Scadus alongside that. Overall, my opinion is just that FromSoft could've easily seen this reaction coming, probably shouldn't have implemented the Scadus either at all, or in this particular fashion, (Because I do think, if they'd been done differently, they could've been alright), and that FromSoft fans have a habit of defending things as 'challenge' when they really aren't that at all due to the FromSoft community culture that has grown up.

[@Alex_Barbosa]

@@nssheepster Yea Fromsoft fans can be really weird when it comes to criticism. I don't think it's as open and closed good or bad as many of them like to put things. I do think it's funny that you mention running into the middle of the room as a solution because that's what I did a lot when I started out too lol And it was almost always the worst option because if you make it past the ambush, you get quickly overwhelmed by enemies unless you are very familiar with the enemies and layout lol Especially Dark Souls 2 that throws more hordes at you than any of the other games. DS2 is the black sheep for a reason. And when I say I don't think you can blame the game, I was specifically talking about the difficulty of playing the game as a pure action game and challenge run, which is essentially what you are doing if you rush around grabbing the golden seeds to take on the main dungeons quickly. I was speaking on the difficulty and character progression. It's ignoring a big portion of the gameplay to try and play it like Sekiro or Dark Souls 3 when that's not what it is. Like you do have that option, but it's designed with the whole experience in mind. Like how I wouldn't criticize Breath of the Wild for allowing people to ignore the entire experience of the game by going straight to the castle, grabbing all the best items, and immediately beating Ganon. That's kinda how I see it. Personally I would have just preferred they drop the golden seeds all together and went back to the Estus flask of Dark Souls 1. They kinda got it perfect there, and it would have worked fine in an open world format. But the open world format inherently has the need to place rewards around the map, and whats a better reward than an Estus charge. SMT5 had this problem as well with the glory upgrades. It's in most open worlds, and when it's not they have the problem of not having ANY good rewards lol like Breath of the Wild. Oh and I wanna say I'm not trying to argue. I just think it's a good conversation.

[@nssheepster]

@@Alex_Barbosa Honestly, the thing that made Estus Flasks work, despite many of their upgrades also just being left on the ground, is that it took work to get to them. Yeah, sure, you could get one in New Londo by just knowing where it was and sprinting, but even experienced players die doing that sometimes. Golden Seeds, on the other hand... You grab out of abandoned churches, often with nothing around. Same for some of the physick tears too. If they just made you WORK for the seeds, then not only would it be more entertaining, but it'd also discourage both starting by rushing for every upgrade, AND bothering to get every upgrade. Same with the sacred tears and smithing stones. If you don't work for something, you don't value it as highly, and running around just picking things up is, frankly, not all the engaging, and certainly not the gameplay you got a soulslike for. As for the Open World issue... I don't disagree, but honestly I've yet to see a single Open World that actually NEEDED to be Open World, much less one that didn't have a TON of empty, meaningless space and repeated bosses. They just aren't all they're cracked up to be, IMO. The theoretical benefits of making a game Open World just never get realized in practice.

[@Rxmedic43]

2:27 the poop joke was not lost on me. Good shit sir

[@oldensad5541]

Nah, straw man. Problem is not people ignored Scooby snacks, problem is - Scooby snacks is badly implemented, lazy mechanic wich force you to interact with itself and punishing you with higher difficulty if you don't.

[@Maxiom5]

If you don't level up the game will be hard, sorry to say.

[@teletubbyfan8209]

@@Maxiom5 true, but the level up system shouldn't be a fetch quest. that's tedious and boring as fuck

[@toxsun]

​@@teletubbyfan8209To you, perhaps. Not to everyone.

[@oldensad5541]

@@toxsun what a non-response you give. Do you realize everyone can say this about everything wich makes this phrase completely useless as an argument? :)

[@DarthVella]

@@toxsun Eh... it really is, though. Especially once you get to the very end and you didn't mark down which ones you picked up, meaning you have to find a list and check every single spot for completion's sake...