I've been playing Elden Ring's new DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, for about 15 hours or so—this leisurely pace is because I'm not the one who put together our Shadow of the Erdtree Review, nor am I our illustrious guides writer Sean Martin, who appears to have an infinite well of time and has seen nearly all it has to offer.
However, I feel like I've been getting pretty far. After an hour or two spent refamiliarising myself with the game's controls and beating Mohg (without the anti-nihil flask, because I'm stubborn), I've knocked over several legacy dungeons and fought a smorgasbord of bosses. My map is flooded with sites of grace in the dozens. So when I sat down to watch the launch trailer, I expected to see a whole bunch of familiar faces. Clearly, this didn't happen.
To avoid spoiling anything about where or how you encounter them, I won't tell you which ones are old friends—but, counting on my hand, six of the bosses featured in this trailer are completely unrecognisable to me. One of them I've encountered, but I haven't killed.
That's too many bosses, folks. I haven't even been having that much trouble wading in on my level 150 strength/faith build—and am yet to meet a wall I couldn't knock down with a bit of patience and 10-15 attempts, often less. I would consider myself decent at soulslikes—I beat Malenia without ashes, I did my time. I've also not been that much of a completionist. I've looped back to earlier areas to explore, mind, falling down the rabbit holes of unexpectedly-deep dungeons, but that's it.
I'd assumed fellow PC Gamer writer Ted Litchfield wasn't kidding when he said that the DLC was bigger than most full games, but nothing has put the fear of god into me quite like realising oh, right, I've still got half a dozen bosses to kill, minimum.
On the plus side, while I'm quaking in my boots, that at least means you've got one hell of a journey ahead of you when the game unlocks later tonight (or tomorrow morning, if you're in Sydney or Auckland). If you're still hungry, though, you can go on ahead and join the surprisingly-active Mohg speedrunning scene.
