Elden Ring DLC discussion has been talked about ever since the game launched back in February. With the exception of Demon’s Souls and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, every game in FromSoftware’s masocore series has had DLC of some sort. Whether it’s the coliseum PvP areas or the leaked Barbarians of the Badlands logo, we’re bound to get some sort of additional content in Elden Ring.
The latest patch pretty much confirms it. Patch 1.07 pays attention to PvP and magic, but there are additional strings of code not included in the patch notes that have fans talking. Lance McDonald, known for boundary-breaking videos of Soulsborne games, pointed out that raytracing is listed by name. Elden Ring doesn’t currently support RTX, but patch 1.07 seems to be laying the groundwork for the feature in a future update. It’s also worth noting that the code says “enabling ray tracing will lock performance settings,” which sounds like a fair tradeoff. Such a feature often comes at the cost of a higher framerate.
Fellow Souls series dataminer Zullie The Witch shared some additional insight. Among the code strings are two new map IDs: m20 and m45. As they explain, Elden Ring’s maps are arranged numerically, with m10 through m20 covering the game’s legacy dungeons and other zones in the style of previous FromSoftware games. For comparison, the m30 range includes side dungeons and m60 denotes overworld locations. This means that there is some new locale in the works, and there’s a chance it’s another core dungeon in the style of Stormveil Castle, Crumbling Farum Azula, and others.
Item m45 is the real head-scratcher here. The letter denotes that it’s a map, but there are no others in the m40 range right now. Perhaps this could be the first of those aforementioned PvP areas — the currently locked coliseums found in Limgrave, north Caelid, and Leyndell?
Our fingers are crossed for more information at this year’s Game Awards. That show has been home to several trailers and other key information about the game, so there’s a precedent. The 2022 Game Awards will air on Thursday, December 8.
