Gotta be honest, I do not care half an iota about the story in these
The story is always fairly intricate, the world is always beautifully strange, and the environmental storytelling is great
But I'm not reading a bunch of wiki articles to piece it all together, nor am I watching some self indulgent youtuber have a 3 hour theory session
I'm here to have a pleasant journey thru said world culminating in a satisfying fight with an unreasonably fast boss the size of a house, not trying to wax poetic about the sad, 250 year backstory of said boss
It doesn't help that they cut a lot of content for seemingly very little reason. There's a whole voice acted questing for one of the merchant guys that explains most of the madness stuff and it's just sitting unused in the files.
I did like the DLC better in that regard, though. The shaman village was pretty poignant.
Even then, adding it in an update or the DLC would've been nice. It seems like it was far enough along that it wouldn't have been a tremendous amount of work, but I guess only the people at FS would really know if that was the case.
I was disappointed they added nothing to base game like not even 6 player support or the datamined covenants nor the cut quests, it would’ve been cool to hear some dialogue in base game or meet base game NPCs with new dialogue + restoring cut quests but they clearly just focused on the expansion and that alone. It almost feels alien how nobody acknowledges the shadow world even though it’s such an important part in the story
Yeah, as much as I love the game and the DLC, they really should've added something to the base game
I really wish they would've done what they did with the DS2 DLCs where even if you didn't own the DLC you could put your summon sign down in the right place and get summoned into the start of the DLC