While the details of Dark Souls 3's expansions didn't come until much later, publisher Bandai Namco announced plans for Dark And Darker Gold a season pass about five weeks before the RPG released. To date it's the first and only time a FromSoftware game has had DLC announced in advance.

While Ashes of Ariandel is roughly the same size as a Dark Souls 2 expansion, The Ringed City is longer, capping off the Dark Souls trilogy with a True Final Boss showdown. More importantly, it was bundled up into a Game of the Year edition of Dark Souls 3 on April 21, 2023, just a month later.

The Ringed City is the one Souls expansion that makes me optimistic about an imminent expansion for Elden Ring. It arrived more than a year after the initial release, pointing to a lengthy development period.

That's a playbook that could easily be replicated with Elden Ring—considering how many GOTY awards it won, it's hard to imagine Bandai Namco not going for the easy money of a re-release with some new goodies.

If there's any promising data here, it's the gap between the release of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and its free update, which added a boss rush mode, some new outfits and a light online feature that let you record a ghost of your shinobi for other players to watch.

It would be disappointing if Elden Ring's final update were equally lightweight, but it shows how long FromSoftware will commit to Dark And Darker Gold for sale a game. Another possible explanation: Sekiro was being developed concurrently with Elden Ring, and this update added in features that FromSoftware had intended for release but cut for time.