Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, revisited: a day in the life of the old Shadow, after 2022
Shadow of the Erdtree is the long-awaited expansion of 2022’s game of the year, Elden Ring. According to FromSoftware, this will be the only DLC for the game, giving Tarnished one last crack at the Lands Between.
It is not only that this end- game world wants players to have mastered original content but also that it introduces new resources to buff your damage and defense in the Land of Shadow. While you could try to power through without “Scadutree Fragments,” you’ll likely need to scour the map to acquire them because even early bosses are no joke.
The base game was more frustrating than the beautiful Shadow of the Erdtree. I often galloped in circles, searching for paths down forbidding rock faces. The labyrinthine Ruins of Rauh in particular sucked hours of my time as I fought the same foes and hit the same dead-ends. It’s never been more important despite being tenuous.
My palms are sweating as I scale Belurat, Tower Settlement. A chorus booms as a beast moves towards me. A dragon shooting lightning in all directions on grotesque human arms, mimicking a Chinese dancing dragon. It takes a few attempts, but I eventually prevail, and relief begins to surge through me.
I was going to get another lesson when I got to Belurat’s boss. I wondered how much I would die before I learned the boss’s tricks. But then another beautiful moment happened: I cheesed my way through it. I stayed back to hurt the boss with the hardest damage spell in the game, after I used one of the game’s summons.
The Dark Side of the Erdtree: A Lesson Learned from Me and My Misfortune in the Shadow of the Erd
And while it was frustrating to die so much at the hands of things I knew I could easily defeat, I never felt cheated by any of my fifty ‘leven demises because I understood they were all my fault.
Tarnished, as you embark on your journey, learn from my mistakes and do not be deceived. You will die a lot. Be methodical and be patient. upgrade your Mimic Tear ashes.
This lesson is pretty easily learned once you’ve spent more than an hour in the Shadow Lands. However, the reason I died so many times — and the reason I haven’t been able to make much headway in the DLC — is that I let myself get lured in by how deceptively easy the enemies were to kill. Everything went down in one or two swings of my upgraded sword. If I managed to sneak behind an enemy, the surprise attack shot them. This gave me a lot of confidence, but it took a long time to dismantle. I was essentially saying to myself, “Yes, I am surrounded, but one more hit and I’ll be — oh, heck, there’s 12 of them.”
I was too greedy and too cocky, lacking the humility necessary to navigate Erdtree safely. To me, a lesson like this is important as many players prepare themselves for the event. Taking down Mohg, Lord of Blood — one of the bosses required to access Erdtree — is one of the harder accomplishments in the game (something not a lot of players have done according to Steam charts). And beating him or any of the other harder bosses, like Malenia, might instill in players the same undeserved arrogance I had — the kind that made me think I could just waltz through the new DLC untouched.
You need to keep this in mind when playing Elden Ring because there are four coming up behind you. And if, by some chance, you see the four, there are actually 12 of them, and congratulations, you are now dead.
Source: Shadow of the Erdtree reintroduced me to Elden Ring by kicking my ass
Belurat: a dungeon full of hard humanoids and obsessed scorpions for the first time
The humanoids were easy to kill, despite their strength. This, in turn, led me into a whole mess of problems of my own making.
The inhabitants of the dungeon are less than pretty to look at and less than pretty to fight. The most basic enemies that I faced were the shadowy humanoid creatures and scorpions. Most of the time, the humans didn’t bother me unless I got too close or ventured into their line of sight. However, there was a hardier version of the humanoids who kicked the living crap out of me up and down the dungeon.
The description is attractive, but Belurat is really pretty. It is cast in a pallor of pale gold just like any other location in the game. And I loved looking up at the skybox and seeing what looked like billowing fabric cascading down from the sky as though the whole dungeon were covered in a gauzy funeral shroud.