Only a few days ago, I was wondering when Elden Ring would start talking about its obviously inevitable DLC plans, given that it was its one year anniversary and that it had exceeded 20 million sales. Both of these milestones were occurring at the same time.
It would seem that the enchantment worked after one year and...three days had passed. In a recent post on social media, FromSoftware has just just revealed that the downloadable content for Elden Ring will be called Shadow of the Erdtree.
The downloadable content update is referred to as a "expansion," and while this label can have a variety of connotations depending on the developer, expansions are typically a level up from smaller DLCs and involve significant content additions. As a direct consequence of this, I can't help but wonder whether or not this will be a $40 piece of content, and I'm certainly curious about what it will bring to the table.
The only hints we have are the picture that is displayed above and the name of the game, which is Shadow of the Erdtree. The name refers to the enormous tree that towers over the entire map and can eventually be scaled.
- Given the events of the game, the fact that the Erdtree appears shattered, charred, and molten in the image does not come as much of a surprise. However, this does lend credence to the notion that the DLC comes after the primary storyline rather than running concurrently with it.
- The terrain contains a few mysterious ruins, as well as what seems to be a field full of eerie gravestones. Not ghosts, unless you count gravestones as ghosts in and of themselves.
- The next thing that I see is what I believe to be Torrent, a solitary blonde figure dressed in white riding a horned horse. It's possible that this is a player-created Tarnished character, given that you can make them look like pretty much anyone you want, but it could just as easily be a DLC NPC that plays a significant role in the narrative that FromSoftware is developing for this game. But considering that it's riding what seems to be Torrent, it's possible that the problem is just with the player. (Update: after giving it a little more thought, I think that Miquella is the one who is riding Torrent.)
Naturally, there is an unlimited number of things regarding the newly revealed expansion that we do not know, including when it will be made available. Even though it is "under development," we do not yet have a date or time frame for when it will be available. I would guess that the earliest possible holiday would be in 2023. My intuition tells me that this is probably more ambitious DLC than they've done in the past, given the scale of Elden Ring itself, so it's possible that it will take longer than the average amount of time that passed between the announcement of downloadable content and its actual release for previous FromSoft games, which was only a few months on average. It's possible that we won't see it until 2024 or later.
At a certain point, everyone was wondering if they would simply move on to Armored Core and not do any DLC at all. It is just to everyone's relief that they have said something about it at this point. For example, the DLC for Sekiro was never released, and whereas in the past it was practically a given that major releases would receive it, this is no longer the case. Nevertheless, I'm delighted that they're going to do it, and of course, I can't wait to get my hands on it.