Elden Ring celebrated its one-year anniversary on Saturday with a live event in Stockholm Sweden. The event had prize giveaways, a PvP tournament, Elden Ring trivia, and more. However, it was somewhat more low-key than many fans had expected for 2022's game of the year, and the night ended without the much-anticipated DLC announcement that many were hoping for.
To be fair to the fans, there was a lot of reason to hope for a major DLC announcement. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki said during his acceptance speech at The Game Awards that there was more he wanted to do with Elden Ring, and datamines from late last year hinted at new maps and even a ray tracing update. Then last month there were updates to the playtest branch, and then in February, updates to Steam's database contained images, prices, and sample text. Combine that with an in-person event and Bandai Namco revealing Elden Ring had surpassed 20 million units sold, and it just seemed like the stars were aligning for a DLC announcement.
Sadly, that didn't happen. A megathread on the Elden Ring subreddit gave us the play-by-play of the event and the mounting disappointment from Tarnished the world over.
"Hate to say it but judging from the quality of this production there def won't be a DLC announcement," one fan noted early in the broadcast. "Lame event for such an awesome game," another chimed in. Others were even more morose about the lack of DLC news.
There are already some sad memes being posted, however, there are also some happy ones too. Not all fans are disappointed that Elden Ring didn't have a huge DLC announcement, and many are still hopeful that DLC will come to the Lands Between in the near future.
Even without paid DLC, Elden Ring has changed quite a bit since it was released over a year ago. Updates changed the behavior of many of Elden Ring's toughest boss fights, while the Colosseum update gave the game a balance pass for its highly active PvP crowd and several dedicated arenas for bloodthirsty Tarnished to ply their trade. How might the Lands Between change with actual paid DLC?