A few days ago, I was wondering when Elden Ring would start talking about its seemingly inevitable DLC plans since it was its one-year anniversary and 20 million sales.
Well, it seems the magic number was one year and three days. FromSoftware announced Shadow of the Erdtree, the DLC for Elden Ring, in a new post on social media:
Rise, Tarnished, and let us walk a new path together.
An upcoming expansion for #ELDENRING Shadow of the Erdtree, is currently in development.
We hope you look forward to new adventures in the Lands Between. pic.twitter.com/cjJYijM7Mw— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) February 28, 2023
DLC is classified as an “expansion” and while that can mean many things depending on the developer, expansions are generally a step above minor DLCs, substantial content additions. I wonder if it might be a $40 piece of content, as a result, and I’m certainly curious as to what it’s going to add.
We only have the image above, and the name, Shadow of the Erdtree, refers to the giant tree that appears across the map and is later scaled by itself.
In the image, the Erdtree appears broken, burnt, and melted, which is not surprising given the events of the game, and indicates that this DLC takes place after the main story, not alongside it.
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Elden Ring DLC is coming
The landscape features some unidentified ruins and what appears to be an area full of haunted tombs. Not ghosts, as the tombs themselves, are ghosts.
Then there is a lone, white figure in white on a horned horse, presumably Torrent. I imagine it could be a player character since you can essentially make them look like whatever you want, but it could also be a DLC NPC that is somehow important to whatever story FromSoftware is crafting here. But given the fact that it is riding the torrent it appears, it can only be the player. (Update: Actually, upon further investigation, I believe this it’s Miquella riding Torrent).
Of course, what we don’t know about the just-announced expansion, including its release date, is infinite. While it is “in development”, we don’t have a date or time window for it. I think 2023 will be the earliest holiday. Generally speaking, FromSoft only took a few months to announce the DLC and release it for previous games, but my end tells me that this is probably a more ambitious DLC than theirs. Given the scale of the Elden Ring, it’s likely to take longer. We won’t even see it before 2024.
It’s good that they said something, at a certain point, everyone was wondering if they would just move on to Armored Core and not do DLC at all. For example, Sekiro never got DLC, and it’s no longer a sure thing for major releases the way it used to be necessarily a guarantee. But I’m glad they’re doing it.
