What the hell does an Elden Ring DLC even look like?
Earlier this week, FromSoftware finally confirmed it's working on an expansion to its 2022 bestseller Elden Ring
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Earlier this week—and to the mildly frothing annoyance of the game’s millions of fans, who’d been hoping to hear something on the anniversary of its release, and not a couple of days after—the creators of Elden Ring formally announced that last year’s A.V. Club Game Of The Year was getting an expansion. This was actually already something of an open secret, of course, since Elden Ring was a massive bestseller, and creator From Software is well-known for its extensive efforts to extend out the lives of its games with these kinds of large-scale content packs. (Unless you’re poor, neglected Sekiro. R.I.P. Sekiro.)
The interesting part of the announcement, then, wasn’t the mere existence of DLC, but the tiny trail of breadcrumbs that accompanied it, which came in two parts: A title (Shadow Of The Erdtree) and a single wallpaper-sized image, showing a blond-haired figure riding the game’s signature horse-goat-steed thing, Torrent, toward a tree that seemed to be overflowing with the same energy that imbues the game’s titular Elden Ring with its vast cosmic power. Internet detectives have already gone over this image with a fine-toothed greatsword, noticing things like distinctive braiding in the rider’s hair, ghost soldiers lurking in the tall grass, and even picking out that some of the architecture on the horizon seems to resemble that found in ruins buried deep under the game’s world.
What this kind of sleuthing can’t answer, of course, is what Shadow Of The Erdtree will actually be—or even what fans of the game will want it to be. It’s hard to imagine a piece of downloadable content carrying more expectations than this, whenever it ends up arriving; Elden Ring pushed the boundaries of the Dark Souls form (and, sometimes, the patience of its players, as explorations of its vast world ticked up past the 100-hours mark), and Shadow will have to live up to it, like it or not. So, what are those expectations? What do we actually want from Shadow Of The Erdtree?
More map
Mapping is an integral part of Elden Ring’s design; one of the primary functions of the game’s sweeping open world is to make the players feel deliberately, bewilderingly lost, pushing them to explore, find in-game maps, and slowly build a mastery of their environment. Although it’d certainly be easier for From to just structure Shadow Of The Erdtree as a series of the game’s (very good) dungeons—which is how past Souls games have typically handled their DLCs—we’d be very surprised if the expansion didn’t come with a new chunk of world for players to run and leap around. As to where it might go… Well, it’s hard to imagine the game’s designers screwing with its incredible vistas by dumping a whole other land mass on the horizon; more likely we’ll be teleported elsewhere—maybe even into some kind of dream realm, which is both a) a popular Souls solution to this kind of question and b) linked tightly to some of the characters suspected to show up in the DLC—to begin our new adventures.
More diverse multiplayer content
Although From has continued to refine and expand the multiplayer side of Elden Ring’s content over the last year—most notably with the Colosseum update, which opened up multiplayer arenas for Tarnished to duke it out, in December of 2022—it’s kept the actual things you can do in multiplayer pretty basic. (That is, you’re either invading another player’s world as a villain to kill them, or joining them for a little jolly cooperation.) That’s a little disappointing, in so far as past Souls games have made consistent efforts to make interactions between players a little more elaborate, nuanced, or just simply weird. We’d love Shadow Of The Erdtree to re-embrace this sort of thing, whether it’s another stab at the “summon another player to act as a boss” mechanic that’s cropped up throughout the series, or some kind of trap-strewn labyrinth that players have to defend from each other. Souls multiplayer has always been a weird place, and it’d be great to see Elden Ring embrace that more oddball part of the series’ legacy.
Closure—but not too much closure
Let’s be clear: There is no way Shadow Of The Erdtree will answer every lingering question kicking around in Elden Ring’s narrative, a massive trove of open queries that’s been steadily building up since long before the game released. Not only would that be borderline impossible—because how could any piece of content answer all of our questions about what it looks and smells like inside those ambulatory, talking jars—but it’d also be counter to the game’s goal, which is wrapped up in fostering a persistent sense of mystery. We will certainly get some answers from Shadow, which, from that opening image, certainly seems like it’ll address the question of Miquella, the only one of the game’s demigods that the player never directly confronts during its original story. (As noted above, lots of observers have pointed out how the Torrent-riding figure resembles the few glimpses of Miquella we get throughout the game.) But it’s also nigh-certain that we’ll get more questions than answers, in the end—because as much fun as Elden Ring is to play, From knows that it’s just as fun to drive ourselves nuts asking questions about mysterious figures like The Three Fingers, The Loathsome Dung Eater, and The Gloam-Eyed Queen. (Note to non-Elden Ring players: We’re making exactly zero percent of that shit up. Thanks, George R.R. Martin!)
Chasing a feeling
Most importantly, though, we’re just excited at the idea of there being more Elden Ring. There were few things in the last year of gaming more exciting than cresting a hill in the Lands Between, for little more reason than to see what was lurking out across that next horizon. The original game was a remarkable achievement in creating a world of horror and wonder; there’s no reason to think Shadow Of The Erdtree won’t be a worthy follow-up—whenever it actually ends up coming out.