played it for a couple of hours, loved it until game became a bit weird, not fun anymore to play... last time i played the servers were absolute ♥♥♥♥, the amount of cheaters was frustrating and the new changes made the game look like im playing something between valorant and arma which just felt weird... the game still can be fun and i'd still recommend it, but for my old ass "old times were better"

*edit: adding some stuff and making it nice*

i'll start with the original elden ring being imo not too hard, sometimes too forgiving but still difficult enough while keeping the fun part in it.
the lore had some real depth to it and it was quite easy to understand (compared to other Froms games, thanks martin). it was beautiful, the world was full of stuff and exploring it was a pleasure.

but... i really don't understand how people can defend this dlc while comparing it to other souls games dlcs...for example, ds3 dlcs imo weren't that hard at all, the only actual challenge was sister Friede, but it was way more packed, it felt fresh compared to even ds3 itself, it wasn't that big, but it was a fun dlc with its own challenges. Ringed city was a bit worse but still really good and challenging, and even tho it reused a lot of stuff, it wasn't annoying to fight those all over again. ds1 dlc is amazing, no question here. ds2 isn't ds.

they took fkin 2 years to make this dlc and what do you got for the not so low price?

1.you get a lot... most of them actually... of reused enemies from base game or other souls games with very few of them being actually new and fresh. now i don't say give me 50 new enemies, but cmon... like 70% of them are reused. I've already fought like 25-30 dragons in original game, you really gonna make me fight another 10~ish more of those? fallen star beast or whatever again? really? there are more examples for that ofc. but some of the new enemies feel... boring. like the huge fire giants that you need to ride near their legs dealing super low damage, and after 5 mins you stagger them, do about 45-50% hp dmg, and do that again for another 5 mins. its not fun, its long, its boring, and if you die by accident its really annoying to do that all over again.

2.locations are absolutely beautiful but... why do i have to search every cave and every rock to get to the next location? why do i need to figure out which statue i need to pose in front to get to another location? why not make it more straightforward and nicer, instead of being overly complicated... and be honest most of the map is empty, with a few big castles, 1 huge mountain peak, and a few empty fields with a few enemies here and there. for something that has been in the works for 2 years that's extremely... empty.

3.bosses - they are overall not fun. why? because they have a ♥♥♥♥ ton of hp and damage while being extremely fast and aggressive... depending on your build you either gonna have a walk in the park or you will suffer and sit on each boss for 5 hours. their design is nice, their move-sets aren't bad, but why do you need to make every boss extremely fat, fast, and have a huge ass aoe that is blocking your vision and toasts your GPU? why not mix up stuff a little bit, like in og elden ring, you had different bosses - godfrey, renala, maliketh, the three headed dragon (forgot the name) they are all different, fun and interesting. dlc bosses don't feel like they are even half way there. i'm not gonna say anything about individual bosses but there some bad choices here as well.

4. the way they decided to make you stronger with those tree shards is... stupid. a boss shouldn't be extremely hard just because you don't want to search all the map to get them all, i'm playing a souls game not fkin Pokemon. it just feels that they really tried to make people spend as much time as they could, not just with the exploration, searching for shards, and rather difficult bosses, but also because if you don't get all the shards you will have a way harder time which kinda forces you to go out there if you want to have higher chances.

also, in 150 hours of playing elden ring before the dlc, i have never had fps drops or any other performance issues, but in the dlc? wtf happened? its not like the graphics are better, its not like the effects are something out of this world, so how the fk my pc which is quite decent runs on around 45-50 fps on avg and on bosses even lower

there are more personal things that i liked more or less, but overall if i had to give it a score i would give it about a 6.5-7/10, for a dlc that has been worked on for 2 years, this is extremely underwhelming, empty and feels soulless (the irony). if you liked elden ring a lot and a big souls fun, grab it, you will have fun, you will die a lot, you will suffer. if you're not a big fan? don't play it, save your nerves and money.