Elden Ring’s Tarnished Edition is exciting enough on its own, but it’s also our last chance to properly experience the game’s launch day hype

Elden Ring is one of the best videogames I’ve ever played, and now, four years from launch, is possibly the last time you’ll get to experience it as an event. The Tarnished Edition DLC looks small on paper⁠—two new classes and a smattering of armor and items⁠—but it is still something new, something unexpected added to our 2022 game of the year.

What in any other context might make for a Horse Armor-style embarrassment is one of the most exciting releases of 2026 for me, and I’m only, like, a quarter joking. Elden Ring is the type of game that made a couple borked quests getting patched into a massive communal treasure hunt. New weapons, armor, and classes at this late date feels like a profound gift, even if I’m paying for the privilege.

But, in addition to the material additions coming to Elden Ring, the Tarnished Edition DLC serves as an enticement to the playerbase, something to bring them back all at one time and bring life back to the Lands Between’s ailing multiplayer invasions and co-operative boss battling.

I still remember how magical the first days of Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree were, the density of asynchronous messages and ease of matchmaking. The Tarnished Edition won’t be able to match either of those highs, but its launch may represent the biggest spike in player activity we could ever expect to see in Elden Ring again.

If you’ve somehow missed the boat on this one since 2022, I envy the first experience you’re about to have. Elden Ring’s fantasy is somehow both mythic and anthropological, zoomed out, and deeply personal.

You’re an anonymous warrior on a quest to become God’s Husband (gender-agnostic). The God in question is a man and woman, separate but the same, consubstantial with, and plotting against themselves. Her pope is a giant turtle, and she is perpetuating a millennia-old conflict involving both racial animus and metaphysics. You can make her goth half- (single? step?) daughter God instead if you so choose.

It’s all set in a world of literally impossible beauty, one of the best fantasy settings ever rendered in a videogame. It’s dominated by the alien, iconic view of the Erdtree, an ethereal, skyscraper-sized growth that’s visible from every part of the Lands Between. Elden Ring is, perhaps, one of FromSoftware’s most bright and cheerful creations to date, but it’s also one of the weirdest. In four years, it’s lodged itself into my psyche like almost no game world I’ve ever seen.

But enough about all that nerd stuff: FromSoft had already ruined all other 3D action games for me by the time Elden Ring came out, and while it lacks the pure focus of Sekiro’s perfect block symphony, I think it matches that more straightforward action game as a fantasy combat experience. Elden Ring is one of the broadest, deepest, and most exquisitely designed action-RPGs that’s ever been made.

It even contains Sekiro in a limited sense: One of the character build options added in the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is a perfect block mechanic lifted straight out of the ninja sim. Like no other game I’ve played, Elden Ring balances mechanically pure “it’s your fault if you die” combat with a myriad of class fantasies and character build options. Knights, barbarians, spellcasters, rogues, priests, samurai, nude men with earthenware hats, you can inhabit any of these roles while engaging in some of the tightest, richest, and most challenging action combat put to silicon.

Which, funnily enough, feeds back into the relatively small additions of the Tarnished Edition DLC: When the mechanics in play are this good, with so much already up in the air, even a minute adjustment feels momentous. FromSoft has not released a full-fledged, solo/async experience like Elden Ring, since Elden Ring, and until it shows off what it’s working on next, the Tarnished Edition release will be the closest thing we have to playing a new FromSoft joint at launch.

I have a love/hate/hate relationship with Elden Ring Nightreign, which also no longer seems to be getting updates. In addition to being a Switch 2 exclusive, FromSoft’s upcoming Duskbloods looks to have more in common with Nightreign than Bloodborne, firmly in the realm of “a multiplayer thing.” PCG contributor Tyler Colp’s sense of FOMO withered on actually playing the game, and mine is rapidly following suit. With no FromSoft fix on the horizon to truly tickle my fancy, I can only turn, once again, to the Lands Between.