'Elden Ring' Finally Announces Its DLC Expansion, 'Shadow Of The ...

Elden Ring

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Just a few days ago I was wondering when Elden Ring would start talking about its seemingly inevitable DLC plans, given that it was its one year anniversary and it had hit 20 million sales.

Well, it appears the magic number was one year and…three days. FromSoftware has now just announced Elden Ring’s DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, in a new post on social media:

The DLC is classified as an “expansion,” and while that can mean many things depending on the developer, usually expansions are a step above smaller DLCs, significant content additions. I wonder if this could be a $40 piece of content, as a result, and I’m certainly curious about what it’s going to add.

The only clues we have are the photo above, and the name, Shadow of the Erdtree, referring to the giant tree that looms over the entire map, and is itself scalable later on.

In the image, the Erdtree looks broken, charred and molten, which is not all that surprising, given the events of the game, and it implies that this DLC takes place after the main storyline, rather than alongside it. The landscape has some unidentifiable ruins and what appears to be a field full of ghostly gravestones. Not ghosts, like the gravestones themselves are ghostly. Then there is a lone, blonde figure clad in white on a horned horse, presumably Torrent. I suppose this could be a player Tarnished character, as you can make them look like essentially whoever you want, but it could also be a DLC NPC that is somehow important to whatever story FromSoftware is crafting here. But given that fact that it’s riding what appears to be Torrent, it may just be the player. (Update: actually, on further inspection, I believe it’s Miquella riding Torrent).

Torrent

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Of course, what we do not know about the just-announced expansion is endless, including its release date. While it is “in development,” we have no date or time window for it. I would imagine the soonest would be holiday 2023. Generally speaking, FromSoft didn’t take that long between announcing DLC and releasing it for past games, just a few months, but my gut tells me this is probably more ambitious DLC than they’ve done previously, given the scale of Elden Ring itself, so it’s possible it takes longer. We may not even see it before 2024.

It’s just good that they’ve said something, as at a certain point, everyone was wondering if they’d simply move on to Armored Core and not do DLC at all. Sekiro, for instance, never got DLC, and it’s not a sure thing for big releases anymore the way it used to be essentially a guarantee. But I’m glad they’re doing it, and of course, I cannot wait to play it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.