When I found out that FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki wasn't going to be able to talk to me at 3 pm as initially planned, I couldn't believe my luck. Good luck. His busy schedule meant our interview was pushed back by two hours, which meant that I had two more hours to play Shadow of the Erdtree. I spent a whole day sequestered in a media room in FromSoftware's shiny new offices in Tokyo, sitting in front of a PC and jumbo gaming monitor with the whole expansion tantalizingly open in front of me. I defeated its first two major bosses, reached a whole new area, and walked away feeling like I'd seen just a small portion of what this expansion has in store.
Shadow of the Erdtree may not be as big as Elden Ring, but it's almost certainly longer and deeper than most other videogames you'll play this year—I expect most players will spend dozens of hours trying to find everything hidden in the Land of Shadow. In our interview, Miyazaki explained that the expansion's map just had to be this big to recapture "that sense of discovery and that sense of wonder and exploration again."
