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 had hit 20 million sales.
Well, it looks like the magic number was one year and three days. FromSoftware just 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.
— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) February 28, 2023
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
DLC is classified as an “expansion” and while it can mean many things depending on the developer, expansions are usually a step up from smaller DLCs, and 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 clue we have is the picture above, and the name, Shadow of the Aardtree, referring to the giant tree that looms across the map and is later itself scalable.
- In the image, Erdtree looks broken, burned, and melted, which isn’t surprising given the events of the game, and implies that this DLC takes place after the main storyline, rather than alongside it.
- The landscape features some unidentified ruins and what appears to be an area full of ghostly gravestones. Not ghosts, as the tombstones themselves, are ghostly.
- Then there is a lone, blond figure in white on a one-horned horse, possibly Torrent. I imagine it could be a player-tarnished character, as you can essentially make them whatever you want, but it could also be a DLC NPC that’s important to whatever story FromSoftware is crafting here. Is. But judging by the fact that it’s riding what appears to be a torrent, it might just be the player. (Update: actually, upon further inspection, I believe it is Mikaela Riding Torrent).
Of course, what we don’t know about the just-announced expansion is endless, including its release date. While it is “in development”, we don’t have a date or time window for it. I imagine the earliest holiday will be 2023. Generally speaking, FromSoft hasn’t taken a few months to announce DLC and release it for previous games, but my gut tells me this is probably a more ambitious DLC than theirs. Done before, given the scale of the Elden Ring, so it’s possible it took longer. We won’t even see it before 2024.
It’s good they said something, at a certain point, everyone was wondering if they’d 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 essentially a guarantee. But I’m glad they’re doing it, and of course, I can’t wait to play it.