Just this morning, From Software made use of the official Elden Ring Twitter account to make the announcement that DLC for the game was finally coming, a year after its original release. The DLC, titled “Shadow of the Erdtree”, doesn’t have a release date yet, but hopefully we’ll learn more information about it soon.
Alongside the announcement, From Software also posted a piece of artwork that has gotten Elden Ring’s more lore-conscious fans worked up. The image shows a long-haired figure riding Torrent through an empty expanse of grassland, with ghosts and ruined buildings scattered around. What looks like the Erdtree, dying and leaking golden sap, stands in the distance.
Players are already guessing that the DLC will finally expand more on Miquella, one of Queen Marika’s demigod children, who has very little actual story presence in the game. Trapped in an eternal sleep after being kidnapped by the villainous demigod Mohg, many fans are guessing that we’ll finally meet Miquella himself in his dreamworld.
Exactly how big that dreamworld is remains to be seen. While former Soulsborne maps have been fairly large, they’ve also been fairly linear affairs, with players going through a straight progression. This is a far cry from Elden Ring, which gives players a massive continent to explore. Miquella’s dreamworld, if that’s what this is, will likely be similarly open, possibly the size of another region in the base game with all the dungeons and landmarks that would entail.
The Haligtree area in Elden Ring is the product of Miquella, who, in an attempt to create a place where all could be equal, began to grow a tree that could be a successor to the Erdtree, along with curing his twin sister Melania of her Scarlet Rot corruption. However, his kidnapping by Mohg resulted in Malenia being lost to the rot and the Haligtree beginning to die.
Fans have often complained that there was no way to save Miquella or inform Malenia of his location, so Shadow of the Erdtree might finally help to extend that plot thread. This being a From Software game it might not have the best sort of ending, but hopefully we’ll be proven wrong.
Once again there’s no release window or any other information on Shadow of the Erdtree, but hopefully we’ll get more information about it at some future gaming event, like the Summer of Gaming or something else. Hopefully, we can expect it to release a few months from now, considering how the release gap was between the announcements of past Soulsborne DLCs and their releases.
If From Software has been developing Shadows of the Erdtree ever since the game released, they’ve had a year to work on it, so with luck we’ll be seeing it hopefully sometime this year.
