Elden Ring DLC seems, yet again, closer than ever thanks to another Steam update

FromSoftware should really just go ahead and reveal Elden Ring's DLC release date, because another Steam backend update is making it seem closer than ever.

Back in December, a leak suggested that the upcoming Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Edtree will be releasing sometime this month, i.e. February. Then, in the middle of January, an update on the Steam backend made reference to DLC, but not much more than that. And following that, Bandai Namco updated one of its Elden Ring YouTube playlists making everyone think a trail had been added, though one obviously hasn't materialised just yet. Now, the Steam backend has updated once more, again making reference to some kind of DLC, though some of the entries appear to be a bit more specific this time around.

As you can see on the SteamDB page for Elden Ring's changelist history, several new depots have been added (thanks, GamesRadar). As explained by Steam's documentation, depots are a "logical grouping of files which are all delivered to a customer as a single group." Essentially it just categorises different files for developers to sort through and organise, and isn't as relevant to the buyer.

The thing that you're more likely to care about, is that across several of these newly added depots, the DLC tag can once again be seen. Some of these depots are just titled "pd" with different numbers ascribed to them, but more interestingly depots labelled qa-debug, qa-release, dev-release, and dev-debug have also been updated to include the mention of DLC. What this means in terms of how close we are to the DLC launching, who can say! February isn't a particularly long month, so if FromSoftware wanted to do a good bit of marketing, it's running out of time.

On the other hand, Elden Ring was wildly popular, so who needs marketing anyway! Plus, while you wait for DLC, the best time to replay Elden Ring is right now, anyway.