A knowledgeable Elden Ring YouTuber by the name of Ziostorm recently made an interesting discovery and shared it on Twitter. This discovery is that the highly anticipated DLC expansion for Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, has seemingly been in development for approximately a year, which means that work on the DLC expansion began not long after the game launched. According to the LinkedIn profile of one Kenneth (Kin Yue) Chan, a director and producer at the Japanese studio FromSoftware, he has been working on Shadow of the Erdtree since April 2022. This information was gleaned from the website. That would imply that FromSoftware has been working on this downloadable content (DLC) expansion for at least a year, and most likely for a little bit longer than that. One thing is now abundantly clear. FromSoftware, unlike the developers of many AAA games released in this day and age, did not initially plan to create downloadable content (DLC) for Elden Ring. The studio most likely made the decision to do so only after the game was a huge success. In addition to this, although it is not set in stone, it seems to indicate that the expansion is going to be quite significant.

The amount of time required to develop downloadable content (DLC) is significantly less than the amount of time required to develop a game from the ground up. This is because the groundwork for the game's gameplay, mechanics, systems, and user interface (UI) has already been completed. The fact that they have been working on it for an entire year gives rise to the expectation that Shadow of the Erdtree will include a great deal of new content that players will take pleasure in enjoying. In addition, the downloadable content does not yet have a release date, and there is not even a release window. It's possible that we're not there yet. It was previously reported that FromSoftware's upcoming game, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, would come out before Shadow of the Erdtree, but you should take that information with a grain of salt because it hasn't been confirmed. If that is the case, however, and Armored Core 6 is released in August (as is claimed by Insider Gaming), then it will be some time before Shadow of the Erdtree is made available, which only lends credence to the possibility that it will be a significantly large expansion.

Having said that, FromSoftware is probably working on a number of different projects at the same time, not just Shadow of the Erdtree and Armored Core 6, so it is entirely possible that the company's divided attention is what has caused this DLC expansion to take such a long time to complete.