Why Scadutree Blessings are not the answer: A lesson in incentives and rewards

With Shadow of the Erdtree looming over the collective consciousness, it makes sense that a lot of online discourse is surrounding it. What is somewhat surprising with Shadow of the Erdtree is that a lot of the discussion has to do with its difficulty; specifically, how it is too difficult. This is unusual for a FromSoft game - typically, these games are difficult, but that's considered a draw rather than a downside. Reviewers of the game were chided for complaining about the game's difficulty, often facing calls of "git gud" or accusations of their poor skill at video games in response to their bad reception. But now that the game is out, the game currently sits at mixed review status on Steam, the online videogame marketplace, with one of the primary complaints cited (other than performance issues) is that the game is too hard. Here, I plan to break down one specific aspect of this complaint: the progression.

This is your last spoiler warning, in case you were trying to avoid spoilers still. I don't expect much of the contents of this analysis to be very spoilery, but I do discuss a lot of mechanics in the new DLC and some early encounters, so if you're trying to go in completely blind, turn back now.

What is a 'Scadutree' anyway?

The main method of character progression in the new DLC is collecting two pieces of new special upgrade materials, which both increase your stats only while you're within the Shadowlands. The first are Scadutree Fragments, and the second are Revered Spirit Ashes. Both are redeemed at Sites of Grace, similar to Golden Seeds. However, instead of increasing your number of flask charges, both items instead give you and your summons, respectively, a 5% damage and damage reduction boost per stack per tier. Each tier takes more of these items to upgrade to, similar to golden seeds. You can also find these scattered around the shadowlands and as drops from certain enemies, just like golden seeds (noticing a theme here?).

So what's the big deal anyway?

This is an extremely reasonable question to ask. Golden seeds are a progression method that feels pretty smooth in the base game, at least in my experience, and I've heard few complaints about them from other players. So why is this new progression system such an issue?

I think the main difference between these two systems is how damage fundamentally feels like a gating mechanism. In the base game, if you run out of flasks in a boss fight, there are usually other things you can do to improve your combat prowess. You might get a few flask charges on the way, but you are likely to go out and look for new weapons, upgrade materials, spirit ashes, ashes of war, and similar. You fill out what you're missing, make your character more well rounded overall or seek out a specific counter for this boss, and then come back and ideally kick its butt. This might mean getting some flask upgrades, but it could just as easily mean dealing more damage by leveling up your weapon, getting more vigor, or learning a new spell that works better against this enemy. This contrasts starkly with a character going into the new DLC. To get into the new DLC area, you have to have already killed Mohg, Lord of Blood, a fairly tough enemy himself locked behind several other tough enemies in one of the most lategame areas. If you are accessing this DLC, you already have a very well rounded character.

When you fight enemies at this stage in the game, you are generally already "on the same level" as them, and there's a certain expectation of how hard they hit and how durable they are. This goes for regular enemies as well as bosses; there's certainly some diversity between them, as slower enemies and easier to dodge enemies tend to hit harder than quick enemies, but there's sort of a baseline expectation of what feels like a natural progression for the next stage of the game. This is why it feels so insane when you go from being a fairly competent character to the insane damage spike in the DLC. At least it felt this way to me, who had played through the game a second time in anticipation of the release of the DLC. I think it may have felt much more normal to people who had not played the game in over a year, but it still feels like they're trying to implement Margit 2.0.

Margit 2: Electric Boogaloo

Margit is generally considered to be one of the most instructive parts of Elden Ring. You load into the first non-tutorial region, and the first boss you are forced to fight for progression is far too strong for you to handle. There's also a roaming boss immediately outside of the first area that is also impossible for most people to fight. These teach the player that there are times when they should come back later, they should gather more runes, find some upgrades, and come back. There's two big problems with this philosophy when it comes to DLC content. The first is that the players have already learned this lesson. We didn't technically have to fight Margit to get to the DLC, but I can only assume there's a very small number of players playing the DLC who didn't learn that for some encounters, they need to get more powerful before continuing. The second is that this upgrade comes in one of the most boring forms possible. You're not uncovering a new weapon, or learning a new spell, or getting a new ash of war, or even increasing your level and picking a new stat. You are just changing the numbers back to what they were before the DLC's artificial inflation.

(One other piece of evidence that I have to support this theory that they are trying to recreate the entrance to Limgrave is how they have slapped down a Furnace Golem right by the opening path, in the same way that they have the Tree Sentinel right outside the First Steps site of grace. This isn't really relevant to the rest of the discussion, but I do think that it's evidence that this is what was being attempted.)

But what else is there?

If I'm being honest, I'm not super happy with Elden Ring's primary progression system either: runes. The RPG elements definitely feel like one of the weakest parts of the game, with the progression being easy to grind, and a minimum of 40 vigor being required to engage normally with most bosses in the game, and most other stats primarily being relevant for the spells and gear that they unlock rather than the miniscule damage per level that they add. However, there are a few parts of runes that I think are implemented pretty well in the base game:

• They're a reward from pretty much everything, so no matter what direction you go you're going to find something you can use

• Most bosses provide enough runes to level up at least once at the point where you encounter them, with major bosses giving you several levels.

• The soft and hard caps on levels give a natural-feeling leveling off point as you collect enough of them, leading to a level 100 character and a level 150 character feeling not too far apart from each other, and a level 150 and 200 character are even closer.

Scadutree fragments, on the other hand, exist in some quantity no matter where you go, but generally once you find a fragment in an area, you can be pretty confident that there aren't any others in a certain radius around. Most bosses don't drop any of the only resource that makes the game meaningfully easier, and a lot of rewards in the DLC from exploring are trash items that most players will make very little use out of, such as cookbooks or mid-level upgrade materials. They also provide a power curve increase that is close to linear, so while you might need more fragments to reach the next tier, each tier is roughly the same power increase as the last. These downsides all lead me to believe that we would be better off with a system where we were all just reset to level 1 at the start of the DLC, or just playing it as a new game.

So about those incentives...

I think I've already covered how these Scadutree Fragments make inadequate rewards, by just scaling back down the game to the level that you are intended to fight all the enemies at before they boosted their stats. What I want to take a second to do now is talk about how such a direct increase in power affects how people play. When you first encounter an enemy that feels like it has too much damage in the DLC, what immediately comes to mind: "I have to learn how to no-hit this boss so that the damage doesn't matter!" probably isn't the first thing on the list. You know the enemy damage is purposefully too high, and the game has pretty much directly told you that you're supposed to go collect these fragments in order to progress.

So, what does that look like?

It looks like some of the least fun I have ever had playing Elden Ring. And I have had some bad times playing Elden Ring.

First off, many of these are placed next to Crosses, which an NPC is supposed to give you a map for. I say "supposed to" because I am 90% sure that for my playthrough, this NPC never actually loaded, and I was unable to obtain the map. I looked up the location they're supposed to be at and they just aren't there. I'm willing to let that go though, it sounds like this is not a common problem and most people were able to meet them at the correct site of grace and obtain a map from them.

After that, you have to go around exploring. This is as good a time as any to mention that the DLC map is very vertical, and that the map system is not set up to support this. I though the area in the southwest of Liurnia of the Lakes was bad for its map, and this region is on a different level (get it?). It's so bad that two of the maps are extremely difficult to find without assistance, even with the map locator on the undiscovered map - I would be completely unsurprised if 80% of people who beat the DLC are missing at least one map. This means that a lot of trying to locate these is stumbling around blind. Even when you do have a map, the verticality means that even when you get geographically close to a location on the minimap, you might be a long ways away from that location still.

Even if you choose to explore still and are going blind like I am, it turns the progression system into a checklist. Collect 8 macguffins for your next upgrade! It makes me look at nearly everything I find that isn't a fragment as a nothing reward, and each fragment is just something I need to collect to be able to engage with the bosses in the same way that one engages with the rest of the game. This sucks. It sucks because it turns something that should be fun (exploring) into a grind that is mandatory if you want to meet the game on its own terms.

What could have been

One of the reasons this also sucks is because this could have been good. I don't like to just yell at things without offering possible solutions. So here's my list of suggestions:

• Make the DLC weapons/spells better than the base game or specialized for the enemies you are encountering much more explicitly than they are now. The weapons feel roughly balanced against the base game weapons, and most of the incantations I've tried so far have felt really ineffective compared to the base game staples like pest threads and stone of Gurranq. Just give them all 15-35% higher damage than the base game weapons of their same tier, so while we don't necessarily feel compelled to use them and play on the game's terms, maybe we'll be incentivized to pick them up and try something new rather than continue on the same build they've used for the rest of the game.

• Instead of directly making the weapons stronger, you could just add things that happen to match up well against the enemies that exist. Maybe the Death Knights happen to have designed their axes to kill the Yellow-robed horned devil dudes, and the ash of war has the poise thresholds to stagger them every hit. Maybe there is some stuff like this and I just haven't found it yet, or it's not very well hinted at by the descriptions.

• Keep the macguffins, but have them be required keys to progress. Miquella lost his keys and needs your help in order to find them! This solves the issue of people just bum rushing the boss so the DLC only has "5 hours of playtime," but it makes it impossible to do the type of challenge run most Elden Ring players believe they can do but can't actually complete.

• Literally just reset us back to level 1 in the shadowlands, and then maybe make every level upgrade you get in DLC land equal to ten levels or something. This would make people mad because they wouldn't be able to keep rolling on the same build they had before and their previous progress would be useless, but given how much more impactful fragments are than levels, they kinda already made your previous progress useless. Not literally useless in that you have no possible use for levels in the shadowlands, but just like the difference between a level 50 character and a level 100 character is rather large compared to the differences between 100 and 150, I'd rather be a level 100 character that got all the fragments immediately and had normal scaling than be at level 150 and have zero fragments and had to deal with extremely overtuned damage and durability all game.

I'm not under the impression that any of these are like a magic bullet solution that fixes all the problems. I just think they'd be better solutions than the one we got.

These are far from my only complaints with the new DLC. I think there are a variety of problems that I have skimmed over in this post, that only tangentially tie into this one. But I think this is the one that's the most disappointing, mostly because its so clear that this is a kludge being used to bash players into extending their playtime instead of rushing to the end, and because it just turns every hard fight into a sigh and a shrug as they wander off to collect more Scadutree fragments.