Hidetaka Miyazaki says the Elden Ring DLC was always going to be massive: “We wanted an experience for the player that was going to match that of the base game”

There is no world where the upcoming Elden Ring DLC isn’t an absolute unit of a video game expansion, and director and FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki has confirmed that was indeed always the plan.

We learned recently that FromSoftware hasn’t always been perfectly forthright about the size of the Elden Ring DLC, which, as it turns out, is much bigger than originally expected. Miyazaki has a bit of a reputation for underselling things, and Shadow of the Erdtree is no exception with more than 10 new major bosses and “around 100” new weapons packed into the Land of Shadow area. 

Our Elden Ring DLC hands-on preview dives into all of that in detail, and a new interview with PC Gamer sheds light on FromSoftware’s internal plans for an Elden Ring expansion to rival the scope of the base game.

“At the very outset there were a lot of possibilities, but one of the things that was determined very early on was that size,” said Miyazaki. “We wanted that sense of scale for this map, because we wanted an experience for the player that was going to match that of the base game. We wanted them to experience that sense of discovery, and that sense of wonder and exploration again. We needed a map that was going to uphold that and bolster that.”

Back in February, Miyazaki told IGN that the DLC’s main area, the Land of Shadow, would be “probably comparable” to the base game’s opening area, Limgrave. And although his wording has always felt purposefully vague, it’s safe to say FromSoftware undersold and overdelivered in this case.

Did we mention the Elden Ring DLC is way harder than the base game? Here’s what to do before Shadow of the Erdtree.