It’s been nearly a full year since FromSoftware announced a full-fledged expansion for Elden Ring in the form of Shadow of the Edrtree, excitement surrounding it has grown rapidly, though updates on what it will entail or when it will launch have, sadly, not been forthcoming. Recent developments, however, have indicated that that could change soon.
Earlier this month, updates made to the paid DLC category of the game’s Steam page backend suggested that FromSoftware and Bandai Namco were perhaps gearing up for marketing for Shadow of the Erdtree to begin in earnest, and now further updates, which can be viewed on SteamDB, seem to indicate the development on the expansion has entered its latter stages.
At the time of writing, over the course of the last couple of hours, Elden Ring’s Steam page has received a number of updates, and the changelist for them includes several that have been uploaded with the “qa-release”, “qa-debug”, “dev-release”, and “dev-debug” tags, suggesting that final quality assurance testing for the expansion is ongoing both internally at the studio and through external testers.
In December, an online retailer listing suggested that Shadow of the Erdtree could launch in February, showing a new Elden Ring-themed controller by Thrustmaster that, as per the listing (which was promptly taken down), would release in February to align with the expansion’s release.
That said, there have been other indications that have pointed to the DLC’s release being further off. Though FromSoftware has insisted development is proceeding smoothly, in December, producer Yasuhiro Kitao said that it was “still some way off” from launch. Prior to that, FromSoftware parent company Kadokawa had also stated that the expansion wouldn’t launch this fiscal year (i.e. until after April 1, 2024).