My FPS only ever dropped to 45 on PC.
But bros, I DID IT. I beat the last boss of the DLC!
Malenia was still harder, possibly way harder. I still cried a victory screech upon that last blow, though. At last, I can uninstall. It has been almost two years since this game has been installed. Time to move on and play other stuff. I look forward to FromSoft's next announcement.
My thoughts on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree (and a few paragraphs down, Elden Ring in general):
Overall, I really liked it a lot. Possibly loved it? Yeah, I think I loved it. It solves the biggest issue with the main game I think which is there being too big of stretches of land with nothing to do, and same-y caves. Every cave and ruin and underground temple in Shadow of the Erdtree were fun to explore, and were among the game's best. I actually love the final boss and that decision. It makes sense, he is so hyped up in the main game, you can't help but feel like you are fighting an inferior version and sort of wish you could fight him in his prime. Well, now you can™. Beating him requires some finesse, but his patterns are learnable. It just takes a while. It's not as BS as Malenia, not even close. I think it is fair (except for that one sword-slash combo move that almost always hits you unless you're doggie-humping his knee). Overall, I think the fight is superior to Malenia and ultimately less rage-inducing. Just accept it's going to take a couple to a few hours of pattern-grinding as all big FromSoft fights do and you can enter into a monk-like trance and do it. I had 6 heals left. This fight took a few days spread over a week or 2? Maybe more? I had some pretty big breaks. Overall maybe...3 hours? I really am not sure. I had to switch up my weapon strategy a couple times.
I enjoyed every boss. I was annoyed they use like 2 or 3 more of those stupid tree slug guys, that's obnoxious.
Otherwise every boss and mini-boss encounter was enjoyable. My favorites would probably be Rellana, the lion dancing guy, the one right before the last one (do not want to spoil) and the last one. I also notably enjoyed fighting the mini-boss Not-Guts. As well as Rakshasa.
The exploration was fun, there were good old-fashioned encampments and castles here. Storming (or sneaking around the side like I did) Messmer's keep was particularly fun. The game is beautiful and has some of the best art direction and colors in a video game, still, and possibly better than the vanilla game.
The NPCs are neat, I enjoyed them. Some people say they are not prominent enough but I disagree. I like how focused and pretty straightforward the Miquella Squad ended up being. Everything just barrels toward this one goal. It gets pretty epic I feel.
I do not recall a single location I did not enjoy, hmm...Everything feels unique. It still has that same Elden Ring flaw of level design suffering from the open world, but as I said before it's much, much more mitigated here. I did not find myself nearly as often going "oh, come
on already" while traversing and fighting a random group of jobbers that just become trivial on horseback.
I think this is Elden Ring's biggest problem, and maybe it is indicative of a deeper issue with Souls games, though more pronounced in Elden Ring: fighting most enemies on horseback is trivial and a chore, and it is more fun to avoid them outright. Fighting
bosses and a few encounters on horseback is enjoyable and oftentimes fantastic (like dragon fights and knight-on-horse fights). However, while traversing the world, it removes any sort of stakes or challenge. Now, the issue of "you can run past everything" is a small problem in Souls games, but a few things cause enemies to be enjoyable in souls: 1. It is just simply fun to fight anything and everything for the most part in souls games and it's sort of baked into the general exploration 2. There is no horse making everything trivial 3. The level design is tight enough so you are more forced to encounter them 4. Even if you want to avoid them, a corpse-run now becomes an obstacle course of dodging and evading and this in itself is incredibly enjoyable.
All of the above points are echoed in Elden Ring when you are in tight spaces, or a *gulp*
legacy dungeon or cave, or anything that isn't the open world part of the game. The open world part makes up a significant part of the game, however. I wonder if Miayazaki played Shadow of the Colossus and had the same thought I did:
man, this is incredible, but it'd be cool if there were lesser enemies and minions strewn about the land. Well, now we have it, and the execution by FromSoft yields mixed results.
I love Elden Ring, but it is also disappointing in a few key ways, all of them stemming from the combination of horse + open world traversal. The animations, designs (enemies, locations, geography, levels, weapons, NPCs, bosses, armors, etc), battles, combat, factions, characters, voice-acting, personality, story, cool-factor, dungeons, are all still top-notch From quality and it really shines with Shadow of the Erdtree. However, again, to speak about Elden Ring more broadly and again this also applies to Shadow of the Erdtree in a lesser way: the open world and horse-traversal style of gameplay took away from making more intricately designed dungeons and a better game overall.
I still cherish this game as much as any From souls or souls-adjacent work. It is objectively inferior to Demon's Souls, Sekiro, and Bloodborne in my mind. Possibly Dark Souls 1 and 3, too. The game has significant strengths and equally or almost-equally significant weaknesses, but I still loved it. The game is still a product of high quality, as we have come to expect from Fromsoft. I would say probably a 9/10. Like I said, I love all of these games. The fantasy world crafted in The Lands Between is superb. I think I finally nailed down my problem with this game after playing the thing for 222 hours and it feels good. Hopefully they can learn from this and focus more on their strengths. I think the game would have been much, much better if it was horse-less (like Gothic), or had a horse in very limited instances, and was consequently designed around this. Torrent himself is still cool and it's appropriate and fitting that you can now fight the last boss of the main game with him (which I just did and got the Age of Order ending, the most kino one). However, the end-result is still mixed and with caveats, and yet what's good is so good, I still highly rate and deeply enjoyed this title. Thank you for reading, and praise Jesus Christ.
EDIT: I have thought about it a little more, and I think I like this game as much as the souls games, and even Bloodborne. Demon's Souls and Sekiro are just my favorites. I still love this game, it is just
different in its flaws to what came before. Fromsoft tried their big open world experiment and although the open world part does not resound as much as their other gameplay innovations across 6 games (I have yet to play Armored Core VI), the result is still a massively enjoyable game for all the usual reasons anyone enjoys From games.