Shadow of the Erdtree launched on Friday and the reception has been extraordinary even by FromSoftware’s standards. The Elden Ring expansion has achieved the highest Metacritic score for any DLC in the history of the site, with most major outlets landing between 94 and 97. The consensus is consistent: this is not a padding exercise. It is a second game attached to the first.
The expansion takes players to the Land of Shadow, a mirror world connected to the base game’s Lands Between through a mechanism that the story unfolds gradually. The area is substantial: reports from reviewers suggest roughly 20 to 40 hours of content depending on how thoroughly you explore, with a new upgrade system (Scadutree Fragments) that scales player power specifically for the expansion’s difficulty.
The difficulty is the dominant conversation. Shadow of the Erdtree is harder than the base game, specifically in its boss encounters. The first major boss, Messmer the Impaler, has become the new benchmark comparison for Elden Ring’s notoriously demanding fights. Day one social media was, predictably, full of players being destroyed by him.
Steam concurrent player numbers jumped to over 1 million on launch day, a remarkable figure for a game that released over two years ago. The playerbase returning for the expansion suggests Elden Ring’s community has remained active and invested in a way few titles maintain.
FromSoftware confirmed this is a single expansion rather than a series of content drops, though the studio’s typical reticence on future plans means nothing about what comes next has been stated.
Whether this counts as the best DLC ever made is subjective. The score distribution suggests a critical consensus that it is at least on that shortlist.