Elden Ring won Game of the Year at the 2022 Game Awards on Thursday night, but something more interesting happened shortly after. No, not the prankster who finally took the mic and yelled out his rabbi, Bill Clinton — FromSoftware leads Hidetaka Miyazaki’s acceptance speech. After expressing his gratitude, Miyazaki commented, “I still have a lot of things I want to do with ‘Elden Ring’, so I’m really encouraged to receive the GOTY Award this time.”
To me it sounds like a beautiful three letter DLC.
Elden Ring was the biggest game of 2022, but how big is it on an epic scale? It’s not as big as GTA or Minecraft. Still, Dark Souls, the series people have never been able to keep their mouths off Ten years, sold a combined 33 million copies. Elden Ring sold 17 million in just a few months.
Any other video game of this magnitude released in 2022 would have been desperate to keep players’ attention with a drip feed of new quests and microtransactions. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, for example, had six “seasons” of DLC after its release that included everything from new haircuts to new weapons to new regions and questlines. But aside from a few balance patches, Elden Ring was a black box for nine months from his February 26th until his December 6th. We are excited to announce the addition of a new arena for PvP play.
However, that free PvP DLC is just an appetizer, not the kind that ruins your dinner by eating too much. Not just hungry, but starving. If FromSoftware announced a proper expansion for Elden Ring next year, kindly single-player adventurers would be hooked for another 10, 20, or 30 hours, and 17 million players would be greedy for it.
In the history of PC gaming, was the most-played and best-selling game of a given year actually an expansion of an existing game? There’s really only one game that’s getting in the way: Starfield.
Elden Ring is big, but maybe not as big as Fallout. Bethesda’s Fallout 4 he shipped 12 million in a single day, and probably over 25 million in a few years. Perhaps its audience has only grown in the years since, Starfield had the potential to blow Fallout 4 away. Players are ready for it to be the next epic, unimaginably big RPG. But Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda means Starfield won’t be coming to PS5. That means 25 million potential sales are quickly lost (ignoring how many people own his PS5 for easy math). When Xbox or Gaming PC). Ars Technica has some useful charts We analyze Elden Ring’s early sales to other open-world giants.
On PC alone, we expect Starfield to be the hottest new game of 2023, but it could have some competition as well.Diablo 4 looks like a success, but Diablo 3 sold 12 million copies The first eight months (that was in 2012 when there were far fewer PC gamers). The rest of the game’s most famous names coming in 2023 aren’t really as big as Elden Ring, despite its long history. , it is not equal to salesFinal Fantasy 16 will certainly be big, but Final Fantasy 7, the best-selling game in the entire series, 24-years-old It sold as many copies as Elden Ring for less than one. It’s amazing to me.
If every Elden Ring player bought the expansion in 2023, it would outsell all new games in the world, with the exception of Starfield and Diablo 4, and perhaps even beat them. It doesn’t work that way, but it’s hard to make informed predictions. DLC sales in some cases from as little as 5% of existing players Rare insane sales of euro truck simulatorElden Ring has tipped insanely good, and we expect at least 40% of players to play the meaty expansion.
So what are FromSoftware’s plans, and when are they due? The trio was announced just three months after its release and quickly started to land.For Dark Souls 3, publisher Bandai Namco announced a season pass for two DLC packs before the game launched. However, it took a little longer to arrive than Dark Souls 2.
There is no clear pattern that applies to Elden Ring. Will FromSoftware do two or three smaller expansions in 2023? Add it to the map? I think it’s more likely. To me, these smaller expansions feel like publisher Bandai Namco is pushing what was trending at the time, but with Elden Ring, I think FromSoftware could call all their own shots. One big expansion, the 2023 Game of the Year edition, and the next game.
As for what’s included… some of the dataminer clues found in Elden Ring were part of the recent free PvP update, but there were others. Point out more bosses and legacy dungeons, which is not exactly revelatory. The most likely path seems to be a storyline focused on Malenia’s brother, Michela.Michela’s presence is strongly felt in Elden Ring, but remains unexplored. pretty good guess.
Personally, I hope FromSoftware is working on some performance updates to fix Elden Ring’s stuttering. DLSS and FSR support would be great too. But for the most part, I’m excited to see just how big Elden Ring can get, both in terms of its already huge world and its cultural impact. Brainstorming how Dark Souls flew in the face of big-budget design trends, its surprising success spawned a wave of action RPGs emulating Dark Souls instead.
Now, in one year, 17 million people have seen the same lens applied to open world games. Expect to hear stories about the shocking number of players who bought and played Elden Ring’s DLC next year, and how Elden Ring changed the last decade of open-world gaming four years from now It will be just in time for FromSoftware’s big new project coming after Armored Core 6.
