With the long-awaited Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdree now less than a week away, FromSoft has announced a beefy new content update for the base game that will include bug fixes, balance changes, and a number of new features, and also released a detailed breakdown of when exactly the expansion will unlock.
Full details of the update haven't been revealed at this point but highlights include changes to the inventory that will mark newly-acquired items with a "!" and add a new tab for recently obtained items. Summon pools have also been improved: Active summoning pools will carry over to New Game+, and individual summoning pools can be enabled or disabled in a new Map Functions menu.
And because you (or someone, I guess) demanded it, no fewer than five new hairstyles are coming to the game. Because even if you can't git gud, you should at least be able to look good.
FromSoft also shared a detailed breakdown of the Shadow of the Erdtree global release timings, which clears up potential confusion about when the expansion is actually set to arrive. It's all down to time zones and platforms: If you're in North America, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree drops on June 20, but if you're in Europe, Asia, or Australia, it's June 21—which is why you might have seen conflicting release date info here and there.
Complicating things further, the console releases will not go live at the same time worldwide but will instead drop at midnight in each local time zone, which could be good news or bad news depending on where you live.
In the Eastern time zone, for instance, the PC version goes love at 6 pm on June 20 but the console release doesn't show up until 12:00 am on June 21, a six-hour delay; in the UK, however, the PC version launches at 11 pm—simultaneous with the North American release—but the console release comes just one hour later, at midnight local time.
In Australia, meanwhile, the console version arrives at 12 am on June 21, but the PC release won't turn up until eight hours later. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I do appreciate that at least we've got a map.
In case you missed it, FromSoft also recently revealed the Shadow of the Erdtree system requirements, and the good news is that the minimum spec is unchanged from that of the base game, so if you're already playing Elden Ring, you're all set for Erdtree. As long as you've put Mohg on ice, that is—and a lot of you haven't, so it's probably time to quit fooling around and get to it. That guy's not going to hold the door for you, you know.
