Desperate for more juicy info about Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC? Well, the ESRB listing for it is now live, showing us the rating and some interesting details about some of the dodgy stuff in, uh, the base game.
Yes, stop wondering what life would have been like if you’d kicked off your first playthrough of the Elden Ring by chilling on a beach or which FromSoft characters Malenia might be related to, there’s a new DLC thing to gawk at. Though, if you’re expecting any cool teases about Shadow of the Erdtree’s contents, you might want to calm down a bit.
You can find the listing for the DLC on the website of the ESRB, and it looks to have just become a thing. However, if you’re intimately familiar with the rating’s board’s listing for the base game, you might have trouble telling the two apart.
From the rating itself, mature 17+ with “blood and gore, language, suggestive themes, [and] violence”, to the rating summary, which is the bit that usually sees the ESRB outline why it’s given the game in question the rating it has, everything’s identical to the listing for the original Elden Ring.
The summary is arguably the bit that’s surprising in that regard, given it’s where we can sometimes get details or allusions to the contents of a game that’ve led the board to assign it a certain rating. It’s how we’ve learned about things like Starfield’s sex, drugs, and violence. However, this one’s just a copy and paste of base Elden Ring’s spiel about severed fingers and people occasionally saying s**t.
Why is that? Well, as far as I can tell, the only reason Shadow of the Erdtree has been given its own ESRB listing at is because Bandai Namco and FromSoftware are going to sell a Shadow of the Erdtree Edition of the game, which comes with both DLC and base game. This looks to be what this listing is actually for, not just the DLC on its own, despite the title it cites not having ‘edition’ on the end to make things a bit more clear in that regard.
So, we’re in more of a Skyrim/Skyrim Special Edition scenario here (this is the former and the latter), hence the repeated summary, and the fact that if you look up other huge DLCs on the ESRB site, such as Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC, you won’t find a separate listing dedicated to them. That said, you can also find separate listings for some of Fallout 3’s DLC packs, which don’t repeat that game’s summary, but instead just say “not available for this title” where it should be, so that’s a thing.
To be fair, if we all head through that egg to start Shadow of the Erdtree and find ourselves just playing through the base game again, but maybe with some more intense shadow rendering, that’d be pretty funny.
In any case, it’d make it easier to carve through in a fashion that’ll allow you to delve straight into Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail on June 28, even if it definitely isn’t the case.