How long is the Elden Ring DLC?
Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC will take roughly 40 hours to complete, assuming you’re planning to find and explore every location in the Land of Shadow. With that said, your experience may be shorter or longer depending on your skill level and how much you choose to wander off the beaten path.
The Elden Ring DLC is longer than most games
Shadow of the Erdtree may be an expansion for FromSoftware’s award-winning 2022 ARPG Elden Ring, but make no mistake: this DLC is bigger than most full-sized games. This quickly became apparent to me as I journeyed across its massive map for my Elden Ring DLC review playthrough, unearthing secret after secret after secret in the Land of Shadow.
There’s a ridiculous amount of content to engage with here, with 10 major boss fights, three large-scale Legacy Dungeons, and tons of additional “medium dungeons” and minibosses to find, explore, and overcome. All of these are found within the Land of Shadow’s open world, which is itself brimming with verticality, biome diversity, and even some creative interconnectivity fans of the original Dark Souls will love. Throughout it all, you’ll find a huge variety of exciting treasures to collect, including tons of new weapons, armors, spells, and talismans usable by and suitable for all of the different possible Elden Ring builds.
My first playthrough — speaking as an experienced Soulsborne fan who completed the DLC blind — took me just over 36 hours to finish. However, I know for a fact there are two small areas I missed, as well as two of the Land of Shadow’s 10 main bosses I didn’t find. With that in mind, I’d say the experience for most people will be roughly 40 hours long, assuming you choose to adventure as much as you can.
Note that depending on how skilled you are at FromSoftware’s Soulsborne ARPGs, your runtime may end up being considerably shorter or longer than mine. I can definitely see some gods-amongst-men types crossing the finish line in under 30 hours, and on the flip side, you might be playing for upwards of 50 if the bosses are giving you a particularly hard time.
How big is the Elden Ring DLC?
So, Shadow of the Erdtree is big — big enough that it’ll probably take you 35-40 hours to experience everything it has to offer. But just how big is that, exactly, in terms of map size?
After doing some comparisons of the Lands Between and the DLC’s newly added Land of Shadow, I’d say the expansion’s map is about the size of Limgrave and Liurnia of the Lakes if you were to put them together side-by-side. Something to keep in mind, though, is that the map as a whole is denser with more sizable and original side locations, and contains fewer of Elden Ring’s more formulaic dungeons such as mines and catacombs.
In this way, a considerable amount of what makes the DLC’s zones feel colossal is how “deep” they are compared to the base game, even though the literal physical depth and verticality of the Lands Between and the Land of Shadow are quite comparable.
Elden Ring is one of the best Xbox games and best PC games of all time, and I strongly recommend picking it up and beginning a playthrough now if you haven’t done one already. That way, you’ll have some time to experience what 2022’s Game of the Year has to offer before the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC launches on June 21. Notably, the expansion is available to preorder on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and Windows PC now, and there’s even a Collector’s Edition with several awesome collectibles included.
