Arise, Tarnished.
There are those among us who doubted, but friends, the prophesied day has come. Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC finally got its official reveal today, in the form of a three-minute YouTube presentation that went live just moments ago.
And hey, let’s cut to the quick. Here’s the skinny: Shadow of the Erdtree is set to release on June 21 this year, so make sure your bosses, friends, lovers, and rivals all know you’re set to be ravaged by some kind of debilitating week-long virus around that time. That’s right, folks, it’s really happening.
In fact, quite a lot of it is happening. I’m no Elden Ring loremaster, but FromSoft sure seemed to cram a lot into that three-minute reveal. The main boss the trailer showed off looks to be a fellow named “Messmer the Impaler,” and I’d be willing to bet money he has something to do with Rykard from the base game. Plus, looks like we’ll be getting into Miquella’s cocoon, which is the kind of sentence you can only really wring out of FromSoft games.
Most importantly, though, is a sad knight with a big jar. I hope we get to alleviate whatever his jar-based concerns are over the course of the DLC.
Elden Ring, if you haven’t heard, was PC Gamer’s 2022 Game of the Year, and sold over 20 million copies in under a year after its release. It’s understandable, then, that the hype levels have been absolutely unfathomable ever since its new DLC chapter got announced almost exactly one year ago.
Fans have been slavering for any scrap of info they can get on just what Shadow of the Erdtree is gonna be. In fact, here’s a little peek behind the curtain for you: I’m writing the bulk of this post ahead of the trailer’s official release. At time of writing—a drizzly Wednesday morning in Europe and the dead of night in the US—32,000 people are sat waiting on the trailer’s YouTube page, staring at a black screen with “Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree” written on it as they wait for the reveal to go live. It’s a level of feverish, mystery-induced excitement that few studios can stir up, but FromSoft manages it as a matter of course.
For good reason, too. Historically, FromSoft games’ best parts have come with their DLC. Dark Souls’ Artorias of the Abyss add-on might still be my favorite videogame add-on of all time: its eerie, antediluvian setting of Oolacile and its absolutely incredible Artorias bossfight make for some of my favorite gaming memories to this day, and even Dark Souls 2 dislikers tend to tip their hats to its trio of expansions.
Will Shadow of the Erdtree live up to the precedent set by previous FromSoft games? I’ve got a good feeling about it, but we’ll only truly know when it finally hits on June 21.
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