Shadow of the Erdtree’s questline system is a massive disappointment.

I’ll preface this by saying I’m particularly fond of every NPC you can find in the Realm of Shadow. What is extremely annoying for me is how easy it is to soft lock yourself out of certain quests.

For example, I can no longer progress Freyja’s questline because I’ve given Ansbach the scroll he needed to tell him what Miquella wanted Mohg’s body for. I can now no longer give Freyja the letter from Ansbach because he’s just disappeared. This is extremely irritating because you find the scroll way before you find Freyja, and it’s obvious that you need to give it to Ansbach. When you find Freyja, she just keeps repeating the same dialogue over and over and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Another example, Moore invaded me after I killed an enemy that we have been conditioned to kill from the base game (the weird bug things you can find in the Lake of Rot). I know I’m not the only one who has made that mistake, its a reasonable conclusion to jump to when you see one of those things curled up on the floor with no option to talk or engage with it. Now I’ve had to kill Moore and he’s gone forever. I’m lucky that you can still progress Thiollier’s quest without Moore, or I would’ve likely stopped playing out of frustration.

I’m sorry but I do not remember the base game’s quests being anywhere near this obtuse and disjointed. There should be a much smoother way for these quests to flow together, and you should not be able to soft lock yourself out of quests so easily by simply playing the game.

A really fun and challenging DLC so far, completely held back by its lack of cohesion and design in NPC questlines. I’m sure most of you won’t have similar issues to me, but it’s extremely easy to do this when you’re trying to see every aspect of the game. Hope these issues get patched soon.