I was there for the long wait between Elden Ring's initial 2019 announcement and its release in 2023. There was a collective, memed-upon despair—the kind only the most devout of FromSoftware gamers can summon—at the lack of further news following its E3 2019 trailer.
History is doomed to repeat itself. While we've been given a screenshot—one that's been the source of an entire Erdtree's worth of speculation—FromSoftware have otherwise been characteristically mysterious about their upcoming DLC, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.
It doesn't help that an end-of-show announcement at the Summer Game Fest left fans reeling. We've been waiting for more news to devour, so a game introduced as "a new look at an expansive world we can't wait to explore again" was so tantalising that you could hear the entire internet shuffling to the edge of its collective seat.
It turned out to be a look at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. While the next instalment in the remake is certainly welcome news, it's left us lowly tarnished stranded in the Lands Between. A thread on the game's subreddit mourning the lack of news with a very apt gif of the "madness" debuff has gathered nearly 15,000 upvotes.
u/bloodhunter2500 agrees with my assessment on the cyclical nature of this news starvation: "Almost 2 years ago, the age of hollowing ended, but it seems that those days of gold have come to an end, and a new era of hollowing begins."
Though if you're a more seasoned FromSoftware fan, you might not be all too surprised, as u/BannedSvenhoek86 states: "We probably won't get much until after [Armoured Core 6]. It's not [FromSoftware's] thing to go crazy with pre-release material, especially for something like a DLC."
I'm sure the revival of Armoured Core is a great reason for a slower DLC release schedule—and I'm confident that it will be more than worth the wait. It's looking very likely, however, that we'll be getting into the cockpit of a mech long before we brush off the rust on our tarnished souls.
Alternatively, as u/Igagug suggests, "They're going to announce DLC release date and Bloodborne on PC at the same time, just you wait." While the chances of that are slim to say the least, I can't judge anyone for finding coping mechanisms, especially in the face of even more months of theorycrafting.
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