Shadow of the Erdtree is FromSoftware’s downloadable expansion for Elden Ring. You may be forgiven for wondering whether Elden Ring needs loading down – whether that vast range of steppes, cliffs, hills, woods, and sticky malevolence requires expansion. Or, for that matter, more shadow. Nevertheless, here it is. In true FromSoftware fashion, this bolt-on wad of fresh nightmares cannot be accessed by anything as pedestrian as a menu. No, you must have beaten two of the game’s tougher bosses, then warp to a starry chamber and approach a giant egg, from which hangs a limp arm. Reach out and touch the arm, et voilà: you are now a proud citizen of the Realm of Shadow, a balmy getaway of unending contentment.
Elden Ring itself bore welcome hints of The Legend of Zelda, from 1986, with its sap-green fields and dripping caves, its determination to let the narrative and the player hang – to offer you a sword and steep you in the rich danger of going alone. It’s reassuring, then, that Shadow of the Erdtree keeps up the homage; the moment you approach that lifeless arm, my mind went straight to Link’s Awakening, wherein the entire setting was dreamt forth by a creature in a brightly coloured egg. When it hatched, the illusion of the world cracked and scrambled, and there is the same sense here of a place as a shell, a negative image. You wonder if it truly existed, when it got pulled into darkness and if it could ever go back. Not that you have any great pause to ponder these things, given how crammed this land is with all manner of crawling nastiness.
Word, by now, is out. This thing is hard. So much so that FromSoftware has patched it, since launch, smoothing a lotion of light adjustments over the way you level your character up. Whatever your potency in the main game, you are rudely awakened here. If you want a hope in combat, you must hunt down something called Scadutree Fragments, which litter the landscape in careful nooks. These buff your offence and defence, and, combined with your existing stats, they start to give you a fighting chance. The first boss, Divine Beast Dancing Lion, feels designed to prod you into being cowardly; leave the arena, go after these fragments, and take in the sights before looping back for a rematch.
This pattern is like being tossed on the waves: you crash against the rocks, before being pulled back into the open and rising up for another salty attempt. In this regard, the rhythms of play aren’t much changed from what they were in the main game. The difference being that, rather than merely grinding through enemies to toughen your build, the onus now is on thorough exploration. This is good news, because the new environments are worth the effort. I was particularly fond of the Cerulean Coast, with its spray of glowing flowers. The Ruins of Rauh, meanwhile, make you feel like Gibbon, sat in the Capitol and musing on dusty remnants. There’s a Colosseum-like structure hanging in the air, paused in mid-shatter, that is somehow more beautiful – more loaded with import and lost glory – than the studious recreations of the real Rome that Ubisoft managed for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.
You don’t get the sense here, as you did in The Old Hunters (FromSoftware’s Bloodborne DLC, and its best to date), of an expansion that feeds on the main game – that alters its implications and shifts your understanding of it. The best thing in that episode was The Hunter’s Nightmare, a sun-bleached version of familiar streets, where stonework seemed to knot into fibrous muscle. You came out of it as if from a bad sleep, with a headful of fevered images, and you couldn’t look at the rest of the game the same way again. Shadow of the Erdtree doesn’t have that power, and it may simply come down to genre. Bloodborne was a linear mechanism; its compact DLC meshed in like a clump of new gears and oiled the inner workings with a welcome murk. Elden Ring is an open world, and any additions to that structure can be filed – for better and for worse – under more, more, more.
This, of course, is doubtless a widespread craving. If you hacked through Elden Ring, in 2022, and have been hungry ever since, this will sate your appetite. Lore-hounds have plenty to sniff out, with the plot trailing Miquella, previously an errant figure and now the focus. But perhaps its coup is one of finality. With Shadow of the Erdtree, FromSoftware has finished Elden Ring, its biggest and most exhausting achievement yet – though not its greatest. This chapter is, like the rest of the game, a staggering thing: the work of a studio that returns doggedly to the anvil time and again, hammering away keen variations on a long-annealed formula. You wonder where FromSoftware, having struck such gold, can possibly go from here. Is there any turning back from an open world, or would people consider that a diminishing? Personally, I wouldn’t mind the return to a narrower gaze, like snapping awake from a gilded dream.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is out now, priced $39.99/£34.99. It adds no new achievements.
Thursday, July 04, 2024
Shadow of the Erdtree is FromSoftware’s downloadable expansion for Elden Ring. You may be forgiven for wondering whether Elden Ring needs loading down – whether that vast range of steppes, cliffs, hills, woods, and sticky malevolence requires expansion. Or, for that matter, more shadow. Nevertheless, here it is. In true FromSoftware fashion, this bolt-on wad of fresh nightmares cannot be accessed by anything as pedestrian as a menu. No, you must have beaten two of the game’s tougher bosses, then warp to a starry chamber and approach a giant egg, from which hangs a limp arm. Reach out and touch the arm, et voilà: you are now a proud citizen of the Realm of Shadow, a balmy getaway of unending contentment.
Elden Ring itself bore welcome hints of The Legend of Zelda, from 1986, with its sap-green fields and dripping caves, its determination to let the narrative and the player hang – to offer you a sword and steep you in the rich danger of going alone. It’s reassuring, then, that Shadow of the Erdtree keeps up the homage; the moment you approach that lifeless arm, my mind went straight to Link’s Awakening, wherein the entire setting was dreamt forth by a creature in a brightly coloured egg. When it hatched, the illusion of the world cracked and scrambled, and there is the same sense here of a place as a shell, a negative image. You wonder if it truly existed, when it got pulled into darkness and if it could ever go back. Not that you have any great pause to ponder these things, given how crammed this land is with all manner of crawling nastiness.
Word, by now, is out. This thing is hard. So much so that FromSoftware has patched it, since launch, smoothing a lotion of light adjustments over the way you level your character up. Whatever your potency in the main game, you are rudely awakened here. If you want a hope in combat, you must hunt down something called Scadutree Fragments, which litter the landscape in careful nooks. These buff your offence and defence, and, combined with your existing stats, they start to give you a fighting chance. The first boss, Divine Beast Dancing Lion, feels designed to prod you into being cowardly; leave the arena, go after these fragments, and take in the sights before looping back for a rematch.
This pattern is like being tossed on the waves: you crash against the rocks, before being pulled back into the open and rising up for another salty attempt. In this regard, the rhythms of play aren’t much changed from what they were in the main game. The difference being that, rather than merely grinding through enemies to toughen your build, the onus now is on thorough exploration. This is good news, because the new environments are worth the effort. I was particularly fond of the Cerulean Coast, with its spray of glowing flowers. The Ruins of Rauh, meanwhile, make you feel like Gibbon, sat in the Capitol and musing on dusty remnants. There’s a Colosseum-like structure hanging in the air, paused in mid-shatter, that is somehow more beautiful – more loaded with import and lost glory – than the studious recreations of the real Rome that Ubisoft managed for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.
You don’t get the sense here, as you did in The Old Hunters (FromSoftware’s Bloodborne DLC, and its best to date), of an expansion that feeds on the main game – that alters its implications and shifts your understanding of it. The best thing in that episode was The Hunter’s Nightmare, a sun-bleached version of familiar streets, where stonework seemed to knot into fibrous muscle. You came out of it as if from a bad sleep, with a headful of fevered images, and you couldn’t look at the rest of the game the same way again. Shadow of the Erdtree doesn’t have that power, and it may simply come down to genre. Bloodborne was a linear mechanism; its compact DLC meshed in like a clump of new gears and oiled the inner workings with a welcome murk. Elden Ring is an open world, and any additions to that structure can be filed – for better and for worse – under more, more, more.
This, of course, is doubtless a widespread craving. If you hacked through Elden Ring, in 2022, and have been hungry ever since, this will sate your appetite. Lore-hounds have plenty to sniff out, with the plot trailing Miquella, previously an errant figure and now the focus. But perhaps its coup is one of finality. With Shadow of the Erdtree, FromSoftware has finished Elden Ring, its biggest and most exhausting achievement yet – though not its greatest. This chapter is, like the rest of the game, a staggering thing: the work of a studio that returns doggedly to the anvil time and again, hammering away keen variations on a long-annealed formula. You wonder where FromSoftware, having struck such gold, can possibly go from here. Is there any turning back from an open world, or would people consider that a diminishing? Personally, I wouldn’t mind the return to a narrower gaze, like snapping awake from a gilded dream.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is out now, priced $39.99/£34.99. It adds no new achievements.