It turns out that there are a ton of reasons why FromSoft could decide not to add them.
I’m not trying to say that all of these are good reasons; I’m not trying to evaluate the persuasiveness of these reasons at all. I’m just saying that it’s a much tougher sell for FromSoft and not remotely as easy as it sounds to “just add SOTE weapons”.
Weapon Compatibility and Item Balance
The average power level of items and weapons from SOTE are higher than those found in base Elden Ring, so that would need to be accounted for with pretty far-reaching changes to base game or SOTE weapons.
Legendary weapons would be a substantial chunk of the additions, and in NR, each comes with a unique effect that would need to be programmed.
Some legendary effects could be simple to implement, like Euporia already has its charging mechanic and the Swords of Light and Darkness could act as one weapon that just swaps between them on each AoW activation.
Adding more legendary weapons gives some weapon classes access to their first but reduces the chance that you’ll ever see a specific one, nor does it completely address the fact that some weapon classes still don’t have legendaries.
Legendaries aside, many of the new Ashes of War are found separately from the new weapons and the ashes on the new weapons are basic, so they’d need to go through and sort that out; some examples include:
- Queelign’s Greatsword (a Heavy Thrusting Sword btw) comes with Impaling Thrust by default, rather than Flame Spear or Flame Skewer
- Swift Spear has Impaling Thrust instead of Piercing Throw
- Milady comes with Impaling Thrust rather than Wing Stance
- Freyja’s Greatsword has Spinning Slash instead of Savage Lion’s Claw
- Antspur Rapier should probably have The Poison Flower Blooms Twice by default
- Carian Knight’s Sword should probably have Carian Sovereignty by default
Most new weapon classes have more new/unique Ashes of War than there are weapons to hold them, so that is a separate angle that would need to be addressed with AoW pools.
Some weapons just wouldn’t work in NR, either like the Carian Sorcery Sword and Main Gauche. Scholar already uses the Main Gauche + Thrusting Sword unique animation for his preference attack sequence with Thrusting Swords.
Even ignoring that for the Carian Sorcery Sword, catalysts have 2 spells attached to them that you use with L1/R1 | L2/R2, the Carian Sorcery Sword could only give you one spell that would be weaker, coupled with a lame AoW and thrusting sword light attack
Moving away from weapons, some talisman effects have already been incorporated into the game as weapon passives, like Needle Knight Leda’s Crossed Tree Talismans that buff rolling and dash attacks. However, talismans are straight-up stronger than the ones in the base game, meaning they would need to be treated differently or omitted outright, not just added to the existing pool.
Consumables are in the same boat, as crafting many of them required resources that didn’t respawn because they were a lot stronger and definitely would not be balanced for Scholar.
A lot of the new gear is supported by armor that provides extra buffs to that gear. Fire Knight stuff is the clearest example where its weapons, spells, and skills get buffed by the armor, but like a lot of the gear is designed to work together as a playstyle with itself.
There’s less synergy if you don’t bring the whole package. All of that would need to be unraveled and added to base equipment (or not but tested), and of course, there are existing game balance issues and bugs that have yet to be addressed, some of which are the result of NR being built on an older version of ER.
Unfinished Spells
The spells that came with SOTE were not unfinished. I am personally asserting that conclusion based on observations from playing through SOTE 6 times and ER 12 times, being a long-time caster main, and covering it all with guides focusing on cataloging items.
The strongest evidence that the spells in SotE are unfinished, in my opinion, is that several spells cast by the necromancer skeletons in the Catacombs are completely unavailable to the player, which is unheard of in any of FromSoft’s other modern soulslikes.
There are also a substantial amount of bugs and issues with spells added with SOTE, many of which persist to this day:
- Most spells don’t get interrupted properly if you get hit during the cast, like they’ll often still go off if you get hit
- Putrescent spells don’t set things on ghostfire when they hit a wall instead of the floor
- The blue color of Putrescent spells doesn’t even match the gray base ER ghostflame
- Some spells were straight-up trash on release, like Rain of Fire, even if they were eventually fixed.
Bugs aside, spell balance in NR is quite different from base ER, and a lot of that has to do with mobility differences, like a lot of the spells added have ground-based targeting.
Spells in NR work where each catalyst has a default spell in the first slot that belongs to the spell’s school, but they only added 3.5 Sacred Seals and 1.5 staves (Metyr Staff/Crystal Chime is the 0.5), so a lot of the new spells would be super rare.
There is no dedicated catalyst for Rot or Blood Incantations, both just used Dragon Communion Seal in base ER/SOTE, and the pool is way too big to get any spell on that seal reliably. At the same time, you have stuff like the Thorn Staff with 4 spells.
A lot of spells added with SOTE flesh out the existing schools, and realistically, with the larger spell schools of SOTE, it would make more sense to restrict catalysts to only be able to cast spells from their school, which is a pretty significant change.
The default spells on each catalyst are not consistently good in NR now, even for purples:
- Golden Order Seal has Discus of Light rather than Triple Rings of Light
- Meteorite Staff has Gravity Well rather than Collapsing Stars
- Rejection
- Erdtree Seal has Wrath of Gold rather than a heal or crucible spell
- Prince of Death’s Staff offers Rancorcall instead of Ancient Death Rancor
To be clear, some catalysts do have good spells like Gravel Seal, Giantsflame Seal, and the Lusat Staff, but the system they use, and its implementations are super flawed.
Dormant Powers Drops System
The Dormant Powers item drops system is flawed and intersects with Relics in ways that are very problematic for the game in general, but especially for adding new weapons, particularly new weapon classes.
One of the big additions in SOTE was new weapon classes, but most of those weapon classes are tiny, comprising only 2-3 weapons. The Dormant Powers help discover X system is already being heavily abused to effectively guarantee purple weapons of the smaller weapon classes.
This problem would be exacerbated by weapon classes that currently lack a legendary because they’re almost always on the smaller side.
Weapon proficiencies are simplified in NR, but it’s not immediately obvious who should get or be prioritized for each of these tiny new weapon classes, and such a thing definitely isn’t common knowledge in the NR community. Here are a few examples:
- Executor prefers Katanas, but what about Great Katanas (Odachis), which scale more with Str, and Quality is Wylder and Guardian’s wheelhouse.
- Who gets to use Dryleaf Arts (martial combat)? How does it make sense to loot that as an item in NR?
- Are Thrusting Shields for Guardian? How do they interact with his guard stance passive ability?
Game as a Whole
There are some significant considerations related to how both SOTE and NR were designed that make it harder to add SOTE weapons. There’s also the fact that making games is ultimately a business.
Game familiarity matters a ton. NR would not have been nearly as successful without a ton of players who are already familiar with all of the enemies. That applies to weapons as well, particularly the new weapon classes.
While SOTE was a smash hit, it still gets dwarfed by Elden Ring, with only 10% of ER players buying SOTE on Steam and 20% for NR, based on 400k reviews for ER, 40k reviews for SOTE, 70k reviews for NR.
Of course, we have no idea on the overlap between SOTE buyers and NR players, but I would wager that it is substantial.
Even if the vast majority of NR players also beat SOTE, roughly a third of all equipment from SOTE is given to the player right before or after fighting Radahn, or is missable/quest dependent.
Unless you do NG+ after the DLC or after replaying the DLC, you won’t have any experience with these weapons. We already see this issue emerge with the bosses added as part of the DLC and those from DS3.
The sheer amount of garbage you find on the ground instead of good loot is likely because it was consolidated into being unplayable so we could have excessive quest rewards.
The sorts of changes that would need to be made here are the kind of stuff that typically only happens as part of a DLC or major expansion, which usually costs money. Clearly this is way more involved than something like DoN.
I think the additions are compelling enough to be worthwhile, but they are probably involved enough that they would need to cost money and gating them like that is a problem.
The Forsaken Hollows DLC had mixed/negative reception, and that ain’t gonna go over well in the budget meeting even if those players are wrong or whining.
FromSoft has hastened the game’s demise with stuff like Double Balancers Relics and Starting Incantations. Players “solving” the game and abusing game systems to guarantee the same boring OP build ruins the fun, but even without FromSoft’s help, this end was inevitable.
It’s hard to explain to the masses that adding DLC weapons to what would be part of paid DLC because it is recycled content as opposed to new stuff like The Great Hollow zone, new Nightfarers, and Nightlords, but the amount of work it would take to import this stuff is clearly a lot more than usual for a free update, so how does from profit from this investment?
Of course, we know that the game was way more successful than FromSoft anticipated, so if you want to huff some more copium, it’s clear that all of this would take more time to make than any regular free update they’ve done, like way more than the simple ED boss additions or balance updates, but maybe that’s the reason it’s been two months since the last update and radio silence…
