Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC was announced 10 months ago with no set release date, but with the Game Awards coming up, could that be about to change?
Developers From Software have yet to make an official announcement, yet there have been quiet updates to the game’s backend on Steam, which could hint at future news.
The Game Awards, which take place on the 7th of December, do have a history of reveals with the first glimpse of gameplay for Breath of the Wild dropping at the show back in 2016. More pertinently, Nintendo dropped the DLC reveal of Joker for Super Smash Bros Ultimate in 2018 and last year saw the release date announcement for Final Fantasy XVI, so speculation is ramping up that Shadow Of The Erdtree could get its big debut.
Elden Ring itself needs no introduction, being the game that took the Dark Souls formula and applied it to an open world. With Dark Souls already the darling of the gaming world, Elden Ring was an appealing proposition, From Software subsequently nailed the execution meaning that it became an instant classic.
Now Elden Ring did see colosseums added to the game a year ago in a free update, but fans will want their hunger satiated now that they know there is a fair chunk of content on the horizon.
Are there any clues pointing to the Elden Ring DLC release date?
So what can we glean from the information we have so far?
Looking back on From Software’s previous games does not provide much of a hint. Dark Souls 3 took six and a half months to release its first wave of DLC, The Ashes of Ariandel, with a second wave, The Ringed City, landing just under a year after the initial release. Similarly for Bloodborne, the release of The Old Hunters DLC came eight months after its initial release.
It would be a fitting time for the long-awaited Elden Ring DLC to drop, with the base game approaching its second anniversary, having been released in February 2022. Previous expansions to the Souls series have been warmly received so they could perhaps be feeling a pressure to succeed. This could be heightened for publisher Bandai Namco, who recently had their fingers burned when Tales Of Arise DLC was released to mixed reviews, with people criticising the lack of new content away from the story.
Yet Elden Ring defeats any example that can be thrown at it, in that fans instantly beloved it. Pointing to Tales Of Arise only just works, it was well-received by fans but neither did it light the wider gaming world on fire, while games like Cyberpunk and No Man’s Sky needed their post-launch expansions to do well following disastrous launches.
Elden Ring is distinctly different from that category so the developers can afford to take their time with this. Yet anniversaries are not good moments for fans desperate for new content so DLC release date news would be timely. At any rate, The Game Awards will be an exciting show for video games as a whole, with big news of some sort likely to be revealed. If an exact date for the future release of Shadow Of The Erdtree is revealed, it would only help crown what has been a memorable year in gaming.
The base game was released to a reception that saw it receive a staggering 331 awards, topping the list for the most ever received by a game.
If you want to know the other nine, then check out our article on the 10 most awarded games of all time.
