Elden Ring’s DLC map proves Miyazaki lied about Shadow of the Erdtree’s size
FromSoftware/Bandai NamcoElden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is way bigger than we were led to believe but hey, we’re not complaining.
After a long wait, Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC has finally arrived and we can’t get enough of it. The expansion netted a perfect score in our review and a big part of that is the extraordinary value it offers.
Shadow of the Erdtree is big. Like, really big. In a prerelease interview with IGN, Elden Ring Director Hidetaka Miyazaki teased that the DLC would take place in an area “comparable, if not larger, than the area of Limgrave”. After getting their hands on it, players have called that quote a lie, in a good way.
Of course, this was mostly conjecture based on how massive the Land of Shadow felt when exploring. But, a post on Reddit prompted us to do a bit of experimenting and we can say without a doubt that Shadow of the Erdtree is way bigger than Limgrave.
The initial post was meant to illustrate that the Land of Shadow does seem to nestle neatly into that missing chunk in the center of the Lands Between. This has its own implications if true but our takeaway was that the chunk that they’d slotted the DLC map into is definitely larger than Limgrave. Quite a bit larger in fact.
Taking inspiration, we compared the two maps at the same level of zoom and picked two sites of grace in Limgrave that were roughly the same distance apart as two in The Shadow Lands. Travelling from the Waypoint Ruins to the Mistwood Outskirts in Limgrave took us 43 seconds while traveling from the Scorched Ruins to the Three-Path Cross in Gravesite Plain took us 39.
This means that the scaling used in the Reddit post above is accurate at least. Because it is, that means that the Land of Shadow is slightly larger than that big gap in the center of the Lands Between.
FromSoftware/Bandai NamcoWe might need to have our eyes checked but from where we’re sitting, that ocean looks roughly twice the size of Limgrave. This means that Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is absolutely massive, particularly when you consider the verticality of the region.
Most players had already made the assumption that it was a bit bigger than Miyazaki had let on but after collecting all of Shadow of the Erdtree’s Map Fragments we have a better idea just how much bigger. Isn’t science fun?