Was Shadow of the Erdtree Worth the Wait
The highest rated expansion critics have ever scored, and a Mixed rating on Steam in its first week. Both of those things were true for a reason.
Shadow of the Erdtree arrived in June 2024 after two years of waiting and immediately produced one of the strangest reception splits in recent memory. Critics gave it a 95 on Metacritic, the highest score any expansion has ever received, beating The Witcher 3’s Blood and Wine for the record. Players on Steam pushed it to a Mixed rating inside a week.
Two years on it’s easier to see that both reactions were pointing at real things.
What the critics were responding to
The Land of Shadow isn’t a set of extra dungeons bolted onto the map. It’s a full region with its own verticality, its own layered secrets, and a density of hand-placed detail that makes parts of the base game look sparse by comparison. FromSoftware built it as a compressed, more deliberate version of Elden Ring rather than more of the same, and the reviews reflected people playing it with the base game fresh in mind.
The bosses are the strongest set the studio has produced, and the final one in particular is designed with an aggression and a rhythm that rewards players who had already spent a hundred hours learning the systems. The environmental storytelling holds up. The scale is genuinely surprising the first time you realise how far down the map goes.
What the players were responding to
Three things, all legitimate.
The scaling system
The expansion uses its own progression currency, the Scadutree fragments, rather than your existing character level. This was a deliberate choice to stop a maxed-out endgame build trivialising the content, and it works as design. It was also poorly explained in-game, so a large number of players walked into the first serious fight badly underpowered without understanding why, and concluded the balance was broken.
Once that clicked, the difficulty complaints thinned considerably.
PC performance
This one wasn’t a misunderstanding. Stutter and frame pacing problems on PC were real at launch, in a game where a dropped frame during a dodge is a death. It was patched, but the reviews were already written.
The entry barrier
You need to have beaten two specific late-game bosses to get in. Plenty of people bought the expansion, discovered they were locked out of it by a save that hadn’t progressed far enough, and reacted accordingly.
Where it settled
The Steam rating recovered to Mostly Positive as the patches landed and as the community documented the scaling system properly. That’s roughly where it has stayed. The gap between the critic score and the player score is smaller now, though it hasn’t closed entirely, and it probably shouldn’t.
Is it worth playing now
If you finished Elden Ring and liked it, yes, without much hesitation. You’re buying it into a version of the game that has been patched, with two years of community knowledge available for the parts the game doesn’t explain. Look up how Scadutree fragments work before you start. That single piece of information is the difference between the critic experience and the launch week player experience.
If you never finished the base game, this isn’t the reason to go back. The entry requirement is real, and the expansion is built for people who have already internalised the combat at a level the main campaign doesn’t demand.
It’s the best thing FromSoftware has made in terms of raw content quality. It’s also the least accessible, and it never pretended otherwise.