Hidetaka Miyazaki likes making excellent video games. And when he is done making those games, he instantly goes around to making even better DLCs for those games. This has been evident from the work he has done previously. Pretty much every game before Elden Ring FromSoftware has released had an expansion, and each one of those expansions only made those games better.
And now, after more than two years of launching their last game, Elden Ring, they are once again preparing an incredible new expansion. This expansion promises a new map with a bunch of new areas to explore. A bunch of new bosses and new lore. But the director thinks there’s something else that makes it stand out from everything they have done before.
FromSoftware has made Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree much better than their previous DLCs
How does one determine what is a good expansion? A good expansion feels like a logical expansion of the original title; it gives its buyers worthwhile content to explore. Sometimes an expansion also expands the story of the original game in a meaningful way.
It might be weird, but there are hardly any games out there that receive such expansions. Only a few of them match the above-mentioned requirements; Minerva’s Den for Bioshock 2, Dawnguard for Skyrim, and Far Harbor for Fallout 4 are some of them.
But FromSoftware hits a bullseye with their expansions most of the time. From Artorias of Abyss to The Ringed City, they have hardly delivered a DLC that was not worth its price. Especially the Old Hunters DLC for Bloodborne, this DLC only made the game better with all those new weapons and a bunch of excellent bosses.
And now, FromSoftware and Hidetaka Miyazaki have to one-up this with Shadow of the Erdtree. Elden Ring is an open-world game; it has hundreds of locations to find, numerous secrets to uncover, and many weapons to unlock. What’s even more interesting is the fact that this game had around 238 bosses. In every way, Elden Ring is larger than any game FromSoftware has ever worked on before.
They have to expand all this and make sure players feel that sense of discovery with this DLC too. And if director Hidetaka Miyazaki is to be believed, this DLC has that. It is reportedly the largest DLC they have ever worked on. It’s larger than the largest of any DLC for Dark Souls titles.
He even mentioned in one of the interviews, “speaking about the volume of the DLC, it is clearly larger when compared to DS3 or Bloodborne. It is no mistake to say that this is our biggest DLC ever.”
And this kind of DLC takes time to develop, too. No wonder they took almost two years to develop it and announced it so late. And if fans of the game are asked, Shadow of the Erdtree looks like a DLC that belongs to a game as massive as Elden Ring; it gives that feeling of an expansive world.
He even talked about its size and explained why they decided to make it so large ” When we thought about an experience worthy of Elden Ring, we felt that this size was necessary. There are the threats that need to be overcome, and there is the degree of freedom to engage in that, there is the excitement of exploring the unknown, and what you might discover at the end of each journey – an altogether Elden Ring worthy adventure.”
What is next for FromSoftware after Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree?
There’s much speculation about what direction this developer might take after they launch Shadow of the Erdtree. One rumor suggests that they are actually working on multiple projects at the moment, and one of them would be developed for Sony. There’s no clear information on who would publish the other game.
As mentioned a number of times by FromSoftware fans, here’s hoping Bloodborne 2 is on the table this time around. That game has been delayed for so long that it is now physically hurting fans. Until their next game is announced, fans would rather enjoy Shadow of the Erdtree, which launched on June 20, 2024.
