The good:
-The dlc is big with a beautiful map to explore
-The bosses are visually interesting
-Bosses like Mydra and Bayle are one of the best in the entire game
-The NPCs are one of the most interesting and engaging in the series
-Some of the new weapons are very fun to use.
The mid:
-The difficulty. It yet again confuses me on where to put this game and its dlc in the scale of the easiest and hardest game in the series. The presence alone of the summons and several builds that almost have no counter to them make this game and dlc the easiest, but aside from that almost all of the bosses would be the hardest but their surrounding mobs and area bosses are still way too easy for a dlc area and they have their damage tuned a bit high for compensation.
The bad:
-The story ends in a beyond dissapointing manner and, to add insult to injury, the boss is a reuse from the base game. Also the cryptic manner of which it is told hold it back, compared to their previous titles.
-Many of the mobs in the dlc are just reskinned base game mobs and the new additions feel like they have infinite poise, which essentially removes the need for slow but poise breaking weapons
-The NPCs still break if you don't babysit them
-The DLC is very badly optimised even compared to the base game let alone with other games. Some areas will make the fps dip to single digits, and when the game speed it tied to the fps, it makes bosses in more complex rooms almost impossible to fight
-The scadutree fragment system is bad: you can obtain a significant amount before fighting a single boss, but you just end up exploring the map in a suboptimal way. Even then the consistent question when playing the DLC is "is my Scadutree level optimal for this area" and the answer is no, since even at level 20 two different enemies from the same area might deal drastically different damage. Some bosses will always deal 70% of your healthbar no matter what and still demand +6 minutes of consisten damaging to defeat them.
-The map is very confusing and some areas require the finicky platforming these games are known to include for some reason.
-Some of the areas are best described as "empty". At around 60-70% of the map there is nothing really to do. The random items are useless in the stage of level progression most people enter the dlc.
-Some of the bosses are a visual mess.
-The DLC requiring an endgame boss to be defeated means that most of the characters' level is hitting several softcaps, so inside the dlc, having this many empty areas, most of the areas have almost no value to be explored more than once except out of boredom. This is worsened by the fact that the DLC-specific leveling system is spread and hidden in such obscure places it actually makes the exploring this huge daunting task that must be done on replays.
I enjoyed the dlc, but I would hope their scope for the next games would be a bit smaller, closer to their previous releases, or at least experiment a bit more with the open world idea and not it be just the dark souls engine and playable characters in a 40 acre fields.
