Lance McDonald just debunked the recent alleged leak for Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.
As a quick refresher, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is the first DLC FromSoftware is making for their 2022 hit. While the title clues us in that the game is set deep in the lore of Elden Ring’s Erdtree, we don’t really know what FromSoftware, and for that matter, George R.R. Martin, has planned for us.
That lack of information is, for better or worse, now the norm for video games. Even if we don’t know what insiders talk about, we have seen the industry shift towards limiting their promotions to the last two months before its release. In many cases, we know the release date many months before promotions start.
That doesn’t mean that these companies are being cheap with their promotions. Even the big companies, like Microsoft and Nintendo, save their global million dollar campaigns, going so far as advertising on buses and train stations around the world. They definitely put a ton of money and effort into these campaigns, but they only do them in the last two months now. We don’t know the why, but we know the what; these companies have found this is the only promotion period that really matters.
But that hasn’t stopped fans from trying to fill in these gaps. In this case, someone who claimed to be working at an outsourcing studio in Singapore claimed to have the inside scoop on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. They claimed that this content would be equivalent to two expansions, and is a duplication of the original game world, as a Shadow Realm.
They even went so far as to call it Elden Ring Part 2 with the amount of content it had. But given that the information came from an anonymous posted, how can we believe it?
The truth is, rumors are a dime a dozen, and we can’t dismiss the times that someone got everything right. This is especially ironic because there are also many cases where someone who gets debunked by people who overthink things, later turn out to have been accurate all along.
And so we get to Lance McDonald, who doesn’t work for FromSoftware, but is a well-known influencer himself. As shared on Reddit, he quoted this rumor claiming that it simply isn’t true.
We can’t force you to believe Lance McDonald here. But if they’re certain an alleged source who can’t corroborate their credibility isn’t telling the truth, it’s reasonable to believe they’re correct. The burden of proof, at least that they know what they’re talking about, definitely goes to the leaker.
What we do know for sure for now, is that it is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows via Steam.
