FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki on ending Elden Ring with an epic final verse.
Even when you reach the heart of FromSoftware in glittering western Tokyo, the studio behind Elden Ring holds tight to its secrets. Tantalizingly close, beyond a door my guest keycard won’t unlock, its developers are putting the final touches on expansion Shadow of the Erdtree after more than two years. After playing it for hours and felling three brutal bosses, I can’t believe how little it feels like I’ve seen of this new doomed realm.
According to Elden Ring’s director, its one and only expansion was always destined to be a colossus.
Hidetaka Miyazaki has a cold bottle of water in front of him. He wears long sleeves despite the looming summer heat outside. He does not have a watch. He keeps his phone politely ensconced in its wallet-style case, but I can tell by the thickness it’s the snazzy type that unfolds into a small tablet. None of these small details reveal much about the president of FromSoftware, who rarely divulges much about the cryptic stories of his games and even less about himself. « We think the DLC will provide some supplementary information and some extra ideas. We wouldn’t necessarily call them answers, but something that will stir the player’s imagination in regards to the base game even more », he says slyly.
There’s a gold ring on Miyazaki’s left hand, the only hint at the private life he’ll be heading home to late tonight. After tending to what was almost certainly more important business until 5 o’clock, he has our interview standing between him and the end of the day—or perhaps, given his famous work ethic in a country known for its long hours, I’m just a miniboss standing between him and more quality time in his office, and not a particularly imposing one next to the Erdtree boss that just killed me a dozen times by flattening me with a gigantic magical moon.
My attacks are, at best, grapefruit-sized. Perhaps because we’ve finally reached the end of a journey that started in 2017, though, Miyazaki is more talkative than I expected.
« At the very outset there were a lot of possibilities, but one of the things that was determined very early on was that size. We wanted that sense of scale for this map, because we wanted an experience for the player that was going to match that of the base game. We wanted them to experience that sense of discovery, and that sense of wonder and exploration again. We needed a map that was going to uphold that. »
He says that Erdtree’s story was actually planned as a part of Elden Ring, but « around halfway through development » they realized it wasn’t going to fit. And so the makings of an expansion following Miquella, the brother of infamously deadly hidden boss Malenia, began to take shape.
I’ll leave the exhaustive lore deep dive to others, but my takeaway from a day-long journey into The Land of Shadow in search of Miquella is this: the most powerful god in Elden Ring’s pantheon is having a Bad Time. Violent cartographer
Shadow of the Erdtree’s new map plays all of FromSoftware’s greatest hits with new instruments and a booming mix. There’s a stunning vista to gawp over at least once an hour, fields and canyons and castles all voguing to be the centerpiece of a fantasy paperback cover. There are enough new enemies and twists on old ones to come across as a bit of a flex, or an assurance that this isn’t just more of the exact same world you’ve already explored. Towering giants comprised of eternally burning bodies roam the land and shrug off my first tentative attacks like I’m tossing pebbles instead of barrages of glintstone magic; fleeting from one, I run headlong into a cemetery filled with a whole new type of horrible zombified bird. Sorcery, thankfully, is more effective against them.
I’m immediately smitten with two of Shadow of the Erdtree’s new weapons, which come from a set of eight wholly new archetypes rather than slotting into the existing arsenals of straight swords and axes and the like. My favorite is the Milady, a fast-swinging « light greatsword » with a graceful two-hit heavy attack that swoops forward with a calligrapher’s flourish. A throwing dagger that magically reappears in my hand after every attack fits my eventual faith-focused build even better, letting me keep my distance from all the scary new enemies without burning through all my spell flasks hurling lightning.
Even coming in with a level 120 character, Shadow of the Erdtree is hard. There’s a mausoleum 30 seconds from the start that holds an optional boss, the Blackgoal Knight, who tore through my 43 vigor with a single hellish volley of flaming crossbow bolts.
