I enjoyed this article; I was interested to find I had the opposite reaction to Shadow of the Erdtree as you and Keller. My favorite part of the game was the maze-like nature of the over world. In the base game, if you saw something cool you could typically run straight to it. In the expansion, it felt satisfying to finally find the entrance to an area that I'd been searching for since the night before. I especially liked the way the world used vertical layers to hide areas in the world map. The abyss, the dragon mountains, and the back way into the keep were my favorite places to "discover".
Cool to read about your experience with the game, it's always interesting to hear differing opinions.
Hi Evan! Yeah I think the tight review deadline has something to do with that, as I did enjoy the exploration more once the time pressure had eased. I'm still not sold on the Ruins of Rauh--it's got too many similar landmarks and dead-ends. As opposed to the Specimen Storehouse, which has elaborate and intriguing levels and hidden entry points.
I do think some of the ways the world intersects are too obtuse; but that's always been a piece of the From Soft puzzle. DS1's Ashen Lake, Bloodborne's Choir, DS3's Catacomb Bridge — they're special areas that would take luck or persistence to find on your own. The studio's genius lies in incentivizing community collaboration — and that element is missing to early reviewers. The pendulum swung too far to the obscure side in SotE, but that's probably because they wanted to give diehards more to chew on. I mean, they even made exploration all-but-mandatory with the Scadutree Fragment system.
I enjoyed this article; I was interested to find I had the opposite reaction to Shadow of the Erdtree as you and Keller. My favorite part of the game was the maze-like nature of the over world. In the base game, if you saw something cool you could typically run straight to it. In the expansion, it felt satisfying to finally find the entrance to an area that I'd been searching for since the night before. I especially liked the way the world used vertical layers to hide areas in the world map. The abyss, the dragon mountains, and the back way into the keep were my favorite places to "discover".
Cool to read about your experience with the game, it's always interesting to hear differing opinions.
Hi Evan! Yeah I think the tight review deadline has something to do with that, as I did enjoy the exploration more once the time pressure had eased. I'm still not sold on the Ruins of Rauh--it's got too many similar landmarks and dead-ends. As opposed to the Specimen Storehouse, which has elaborate and intriguing levels and hidden entry points.
I do think some of the ways the world intersects are too obtuse; but that's always been a piece of the From Soft puzzle. DS1's Ashen Lake, Bloodborne's Choir, DS3's Catacomb Bridge — they're special areas that would take luck or persistence to find on your own. The studio's genius lies in incentivizing community collaboration — and that element is missing to early reviewers. The pendulum swung too far to the obscure side in SotE, but that's probably because they wanted to give diehards more to chew on. I mean, they even made exploration all-but-mandatory with the Scadutree Fragment system.