‘Elden Ring’ Finally Announces Its DLC Expansion, ‘Shadow Of The Erdtree’

Fair some 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 seems the magic number was one year and... three days. FromSoftware has now just announced The Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, in a new social media post:

DLC is classified as an "expansion" and while that can mean a lot of things depending on the developer, usually expansions are a step above smaller DLC, significant content additions. I wonder if this could be a $40 piece of content, as it turns out, and I'm certainly curious as to what it will add.

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

• In the image, the Erdtree looks broken, charred, and molten, which isn't all that surprising given the events of the game, and implies that this DLC takes place after the main story, rather than alongside it.
• The landscape has some unidentifiable ruins and what appears to be a field filled with ghostly tombstones. Not ghosts, as the tombstones themselves are ghostly.
• Then there is a lone blonde figure dressed in white on a horned horse, presumably Torrent. i guess this could be a tarnished player character as you can make them look like essentially whoever you want, but they could also be a DLC NPC who is somehow important to whatever story FromSoftware is creating here. But given the fact that you're mounting what appears to be a torrent, it may just be the player. (Update: actually, on closer inspection, I think it's Miquella riding Torrent).

Of course, what we don't know about the newly 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 earliest would be holiday 2023. Generally speaking, FromSoft didn't take that long between announcing DLC ​​and releasing it for previous games, just a few months, but my gut tells me this is probably more ambitious DLC than they are. done previously, given the scale of the Elden Ring itself, so it may take longer. We may not even see it before 2024.

It's good that they said something, like at one point everyone was wondering if they would just move on to Armored Core and not do DLC at all. Sekiro, for example, has never received DLC, and it's no longer a sure thing for big 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.

Update (3/1): Thought I'd expand on something that fans have delved into a bit more here, the identity of the person on the horse. Even though she may look like a woman from this perspective, fans seem to have come to the conclusion that she is actually Miquella. Here's who she is, in case you haven't been paying attention to lore:

“Miquella, Malenia's brother, is one of the empyreans. Cursed to be forever young, he created the Haligtree to allow himself to grow into an adult and purge the rot from Malenia. This is after realizing that the Golden Order was unable to cure Malenia of the rot.”

So yes, this is the Miquella of "Malenia, Blade of Miquella" fame, and we may end up learning much, much more about them, if not possibly playing. like them. Well maybe. Regardless, it would be an exploration of a character who wasn't given much screen time within the game itself, but whose presence looms over the landscape of the Elden Ring nonetheless.

Otherwise, the image doesn't really match anyone else in the story, and this makes more sense. It also hints that perhaps Miquella was the original owner of Torrent. We don't have much torrent information on the game itself, but we might be about to get some.

Fans are already theorizing that this DLC could be Miquella's dream, and as such, we could end up fighting a nightmare version of Godwyn, which would make sense given the story.

follow me On twitter, Youtube, Facebook and instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content roundup newsletter, God rolls.

Pick up my science fiction novels hero assassin series and The Earthborn Trilogy.