Heads-up, Tarnished: a new Elden Ring Steam update might mean the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is dropping soon

It's looking more and more likely that the February release date for Elden Ring's DLC could be accurate, as a recent Steam backend update has made reference to DLC.

Almost two years after the game came out, it might finally be time to head back into The Lands Between, as a recent update on Steam suggests Elden Ring is getting prepped for DLC. As spotted by zeta50 on Resetera, the Steam backend for Elden Ring was updated today, as listed by SteamDB. The update added in a new file depot that's currently unused, but does have a DLC label attached to it. There's pretty much no other information attached to it, just the exact time the update was introduced, so there's no way of knowing for sure that it is the upcoming Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, but you know, what else could it be?

Shadow of the Erdtree was announced almost a year ago now, and we know literally nothing about it outside of one teaser image that, admittedly, goes hard as hell. FromSoftware quite literally just announced that it's in development, and that was about it, so I personally am a bit desperate to see more, honestly. It's very possible that the DLC will drop in February, much like the base game's original release date, as a leak from last year certainly seemed to suggest it would.

The leak in question came for an ad for some Elden Ring-themed controllers that said they would release in February 2024 to "sync with the new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion release," which sure is a bit of a blunder if the leak is real. Of course, as always it's better to take these things with a pinch of salt, but at the very least it does seem like FromSoftware is in the beginning stages of releasing it. The DLC could easily be announced through social media, but it's always possible it'll appear at Xbox's Developer Direct later this week, or even a PlayStation State of Play - though one of those is still yet to be announced, if one will be at all.