Elden Ring DLC 2026: Forsaken Hollows Now, $80 Aug 28

Type "Elden Ring DLC release date" into a search bar in July 2026 and the machinery behind it assumes you want one thing: a sequel to Shadow of the Erdtree, the 2024 expansion that swallowed forty hours and spat most players back out humbled. That is not what you are going to get. There is no Shadow of the Erdtree 2. There is no second story expansion for the 2022 Elden Ring in development, announced, or dated. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a rumor.

What actually exists under the "DLC" banner in 2026 is two entirely separate products, with two entirely separate release dates, aimed at two entirely separate audiences, and conflated relentlessly by aggregators who cannot tell a roguelike spin-off from a repackaged base game. One of them already shipped. The other is a box.

The Two Things Elden Ring DLC Means in 2026

The confusion is manufactured, and it is worth taking apart before any dates change hands. FromSoftware and Bandai Namco spent 2025 and 2026 stapling the words "Elden Ring" to three distinct things, and the marketing has never once slowed down to tell you which is which.

What you're actually searching for

There are three products wearing this name: the original 2022 action-RPG, its 2024 expansion, and Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone co-op roguelike that launched in May 2025 and shares a title, a combat engine, and almost nothing else. When a headline says "new Elden Ring DLC," it is doing you no favors about which of those it means. That ambiguity is the entire reason this article needs to exist.

The two-line answer

Here is the whole of the news in two sentences. Nightreign's paid expansion, The Forsaken Hollows, released December 4, 2025 for $14.99 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition — a repackage of the base game plus Shadow of the Erdtree plus a handful of cosmetics — releases August 28, 2026 for $79.99 on Switch 2, with that same content arriving the same day on every other platform as a $5 add-on called The Tarnished Pack. Everything else you have read is one of those two facts wearing a misleading headline.

What is emphatically not happening

For the record, because the misinformation has a long tail: Shadow of the Erdtree released June 21, 2024, not March 2024, and it remains the only narrative expansion the base game has ever received. The Tarnished Edition is not a story DLC. The Tarnished Pack is not a story DLC. Nightreign's Forsaken Hollows is a DLC, but for a different game. If your mental model was "FromSoft is releasing more Elden Ring story content in 2026," delete it.

The Forsaken Hollows: Nightreign's DLC Already Shipped

The single piece of genuine Elden Ring-branded DLC to carry a 2026-adjacent date is for Nightreign, and the joke is that most of the articles asking "when will it release" were published after it already had. Kadokawa's investor guidance had promised the expansion "by the end of fiscal year 2025" — that is, by March 31, 2026 — and Polygon flagged that deadline as the thing to watch. FromSoftware beat it by nearly four months.

Date, price, platforms

Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows was announced November 11, 2025 and released December 4, 2025, exactly as PlayStation's own blog laid out. It costs $14.99 and runs on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam — the same platform spread as Nightreign itself. Pre-purchasers before December 3 got a digital artbook and a mini soundtrack, the usual pre-order lint. There is no Switch 2 version of Nightreign, and therefore no Switch 2 version of this DLC.

This matters for the "release date" question because the deadline everyone fixated on — Kadokawa's FY2025 close of March 31, 2026 — was a fiscal backstop, not a target. The expansion landed inside the Q4 2025 holiday window it was originally penciled for. If you were waiting for it, you have been able to play it since before the New Year.

The Scholar, the Undertaker, and the Great Hollow

Content-wise, The Forsaken Hollows adds two new Nightfarers — the playable classes that define a Nightreign run — and two new bosses. The Scholar is a support-leaning arcane class built around item use, party buffs, and a crowd-debuffing ultimate called Communion; reviewers found him the more interesting of the pair. The Undertaker is a faith-and-strength melee glass cannon whose ultimate, Loathsome Hex, can strip half a boss's health bar in the hands of someone who knows the timing. Neither is subtle. Both are, by Nightreign standards, a meaningful expansion of a roster that shipped thin.

The headline addition is a new Shifting Earth event — The Great Hollow — which reshapes the map Limveld into a crystal-strewn underground of ancient ruins, sacred towers, and cursed crystals that drain your life as you cross them. It is exactly the kind of environmental hazard Nightreign needed more of, and it is the clearest sign that FromSoftware was treating the roguelike as a live product rather than a shipped-and-forgotten experiment.

The reception — and the missing weapons

Reviews were warm but not uncritical. The two new Nightlords earned praise as genuine additions to the boss canon, and the Great Hollow gave the map a reason to exist again. The recurring complaint across outlets — CogConnected filed under the subhead "Same Old Frustrations," TechRaptor under "Hard Reign" — was that a fifteen-dollar expansion to a loot-driven game shipped with no new weapons, an omission that reads as bizarre in a genre defined by the grind for better armaments. For $14.99 you got characters and encounters, not the arsenal expansion the systems were begging for.

The Tarnished Edition: $80 on a Game-Key Card

The other 2026 release — the one the majority of "Elden Ring DLC" searches are actually circling — is the Tarnished Edition, and calling it "DLC" is a category error the marketing has quietly encouraged. It is not new content bolted onto a game you own. It is a new retail SKU: the whole of Elden Ring plus Shadow of the Erdtree, boxed for Nintendo's Switch 2, with a thin layer of cosmetics on top to justify the framing.

The date and the number

The date is August 28, 2026. The price is $79.99. Both were locked on June 4, 2026, via Bandai Namco's official channels after more than a year of "coming in 2026" vagueness. Bandai Namco Europe's announcement confirmed the Switch 2 SKU; the same content ships that day across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. If you have seen the number "$70" attached to this release, it is wrong — a persistent placeholder that predates the final reveal. The confirmed figure is $79.99, a full-priced AAA box in 2026 money.

What's actually in the box

For eighty dollars you get the base game, the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, and the new cosmetic content: two new starting classes (the Knight of Ides and the Heavy Knight), four new armor sets, three alternate skins for Torrent — the spectral mount — and a scattering of new weapons and skills. Note what that list does not contain: a new region, a new boss, a new questline, or a single minute of new story. The "new content" is character-creation garnish.

This is worth dwelling on, because the eighty-dollar figure is doing a lot of work. On PlayStation and Xbox, the Shadow of the Erdtree Edition bundle — base game plus expansion, no cosmetics — has retailed at $79.99 for over a year. The Switch 2 Tarnished Edition costs exactly the same as that existing bundle. You are not paying a premium for the cosmetics on Switch 2; you are paying the standard bundle price and getting the cosmetics thrown in. Whether that reads as generous or merely not-insulting depends on your mood.

The game-key card asterisk

There is a hardware asterisk that Nintendo apologists will gloss and preservationists will not. The Switch 2 version ships as an 80 GB Game-Key Card — a cartridge that contains no game data, only a license key that triggers a full download on first insert. The physical object in the case is a permission slip. You still need the storage, the bandwidth, and Nintendo's servers to remain online for the thing to run years from now. For a full-priced boxed game, that is a meaningful downgrade from a cartridge you can resell with data intact, and it is worth knowing before you pre-order the "physical" edition. We walked through the full calculus in our breakdown of Elden Ring on Switch 2 at $79.99.

The Tarnished Pack: The $5 Version Everyone Else Gets

Here is the part the eighty-dollar headline buries. If you already own Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree on PlayStation, Xbox, or PC, the only genuinely new thing in the Tarnished Edition — the classes, the armor, the Torrent skins — is sold to you separately, on the same day, for the price of a coffee.

Same content, one-sixteenth the price

It is called The Tarnished Pack, it releases August 28, 2026 alongside the Switch 2 edition, and it costs roughly $4.99 — priced at ¥550 in Japan and €4.99 in Europe. It contains the identical cosmetic content: the Knight of Ides and Heavy Knight classes, four armor sets, three Torrent skins, new weapons and skills. That is the whole delta between the base Shadow of the Erdtree Edition and the new Tarnished Edition. Existing owners pay five dollars for it. The eighty-dollar SKU exists to serve exactly one audience: people buying the game fresh on Switch 2.

The math nobody at Bandai will print

Strip the marketing and the pricing resolves into a simple decision tree. What you should pay depends entirely on what you already own and where you want to play:

IF you own Elden Ring + Shadow of the Erdtree (PS / Xbox / PC):
    The Tarnished Pack .............. ~$4.99   <- the ONLY new content

IF you own the base game only (PS / Xbox / PC):
    Shadow of the Erdtree ........... $39.99
    The Tarnished Pack .............. ~$4.99
    ------------------------------------------
    Total to equal "Tarnished Edition" ~$44.98

IF you want it on Switch 2 (nothing owned):
    Tarnished Edition ............... $79.99   <- base + SotE + cosmetics
                                                 (80 GB Game-Key Card)

The only path where $79.99 is the rational number is the last one, and even there you are paying for a game-key card, not a data cartridge. Everyone else is looking at a five-dollar transaction dressed up as a headline release.

Who should buy which SKU

To be blunt: if you have played this game to death on PS5 and you want the new armor, buy the $5 pack and move on. If you skipped Shadow of the Erdtree, the expansion at $39.99 is the actual purchase worth making, and the pack is an afterthought. The Tarnished Edition is for Switch 2 owners and gift-buyers, and for them it is priced exactly at the existing bundle — no better, no worse. The trick the naming plays is making a $5 cosmetic drop sound like an eighty-dollar event.

The Port That Almost Wasn't: 15fps to 1080p30

The reason the Tarnished Edition is a story at all — the reason it slipped from a 2025 launch into late 2026 — is that Elden Ring on Switch 2 was, for a while, a disaster. The arc from "unplayable" to "one of the best conversions on the platform" is the genuinely interesting engineering narrative buried under the cosmetics.

The Gamescom humiliation

The game was first shown at the Switch 2 reveal Direct on April 2, 2025, targeting a 2025 launch. Then people played it. At Gamescom in August 2025, the handheld build reportedly dropped to around 15 frames per second, and Digital Foundry's assessment, relayed through VGC, was brutal: the performance was "basically unacceptable," running "like a poor performing PS3 game." The bottleneck was the CPU, not the GPU — the worst kind of problem to have, because you cannot resolution-scale your way out of it.

The October delay

In October 2025, FromSoftware did the responsible thing and delayed the port out of 2025, citing "game performance adjustments." In an industry where studios routinely ship the 15fps build and patch it later — or don't — pulling the release to fix a CPU bottleneck is the correct call, and it is worth crediting. It also pushed the game into a crowded 2026 Switch 2 calendar, which is its own competitive problem, addressed below.

The GDC redemption

By GDC in March 2026, the story had inverted. Hands-on previews of the revised build were startled. RPG Site called it "a solid 30 FPS at native 1080p" and "one of the singular most impressive Switch 2 conversions." Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio, in a roundup of the previews, found it "much more stable" with "image quality surprisingly strong." The target settled at a quality-first 1080p and roughly 30fps. The honest caveat: every one of those glowing impressions was taken in Limgrave, the opening region, not in the mid-game areas where the CPU load and the frame pacing historically fall apart. Reserve final judgment for the full-game Digital Foundry teardown after August 28.

What the Critics Actually Said

Because this release is one-third pricing story and two-thirds engineering story, the quotes worth reading split along those two lines. All of the following are verbatim from public coverage, linked at the source.

On the price

Engadget's Lawrence Bonk, reacting to the $79.99 figure, put the number in its proper 2026 context — the era of the eighty-dollar first-party game — by noting the price was "putting it in Mario Kart World territory" (Engadget). That is the tell: a four-year-old game plus a two-year-old expansion, priced against Nintendo's newest flagship. The content justifies the bundle; the framing as a fresh eighty-dollar event does not.

On the port

The engineering arc is best told in three quotes. Digital Foundry on the Gamescom build: "basically unacceptable," running "like a poor performing PS3 game" (via VGC). RPG Site on the GDC build six months later: "one of the singular most impressive Switch 2 conversions," a "solid 30 FPS at native 1080p." And Polygon's Colantonio, splitting the difference with earned caution: "much more stable," with image quality "surprisingly strong." Three snapshots of the same port, and the distance between the first and the last is the entire reason this game slipped a year.

Every 2026 Date and Price, Tabulated

The naming is deliberately slippery, so here is the ledger. Two tables: what releases when, and what each thing actually costs.

The release calendar

Every Elden Ring-branded release in the December 2025 through 2026 window, with its true category and status as of July 20, 2026:

What each SKU costs

And the full-franchise pricing picture, so the eighty-dollar number sits in context next to what the same content has always cost:

The two tables together make the point no press release will: the "new" eighty-dollar edition is the old eighty-dollar bundle with a five-dollar pack stapled on.

How Elden Ring Ended Up With Four SKUs

To understand why "Elden Ring DLC" now means four different things, you have to trace how a single 2022 release metastasized into a franchise with a spin-off, an expansion, a repackage, and a sibling game on a rival platform.

2022-2024: the base and the Erdtree

Elden Ring released February 25, 2022, the product of FromSoftware's combat design and George R. R. Martin's worldbuilding, and it did numbers no one at the studio had seen. By April 2025 it had crossed 30 million copies. Shadow of the Erdtree followed on June 21, 2024 at $39.99 — a single, enormous expansion that moved over 10 million units on its own and stands, two years later, as the last story content the base game has received. That is the well people keep expecting to refill. It has not.

2025: Nightreign and the spin-off gamble

Rather than build Shadow of the Erdtree 2, FromSoftware pivoted sideways. Elden Ring Nightreign — a standalone, three-player co-op roguelike reusing the combat engine — launched May 30, 2025 at $39.99. It was a gamble on a genre FromSoftware had never shipped, and it paid: 2 million players in the first 24 hours, 3.5 million in five days, and over 5 million in under two months. The Forsaken Hollows, in December 2025, was that gamble's first and — per FromSoftware's own signaling — likely last major expansion. The studio is winding Nightreign's live support down to balance patches.

2026: the Switch 2 repackage

Which brings us to the Tarnished Edition — not new development so much as new distribution. Nintendo's Switch 2 arrived June 5, 2025 and sold fast enough to make an Elden Ring port commercially obvious, and the Tarnished Edition is FromSoftware planting its flag on Nintendo hardware for the first time with its biggest game. The cosmetics exist to give the repackage a hook. The real product is "Elden Ring, finally, in your hands on a train," and whether the hardware can deliver that at a stable frame rate is the question the last eighteen months have been about.

FromSoftware's 2026 Slate and the Competition

The Tarnished Edition does not launch into a vacuum. It arrives in the back half of a Switch 2 year crowded with ports, alongside a second, far more interesting FromSoftware release that is genuinely new.

The Duskbloods, the actual new game

If you want a new FromSoftware game rather than a repackaged one, the title to watch is The Duskbloods — a Switch 2 exclusive, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, announced April 2025 and slated for 2026. It is FromSoftware's first exclusive for a Nintendo console, an eight-player PvPvE affair starring "Bloodsworn" characters that, per Engadget, reads as the closest thing to a Bloodborne successor the studio has produced. Its Wikipedia entry notes a network test planned for summer 2026 — meaning the two big FromSoftware Switch 2 stories of 2026 are a repackage of an old classic and a beta for a new one, running in parallel. It also drove the June 2026 Nintendo Direct conversation.

The Tarnished Edition vs the Switch 2 port shelf

As a port, the Tarnished Edition slots onto a shelf that already includes Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition — a Switch 2 launch title that shipped its full data on the cartridge — and Star Wars Outlaws, widely tagged the most technically impressive Switch 2 conversion at 1440p/30 docked with ray tracing and DLSS. Against that company, a native-1080p/30 Elden Ring on a game-key card is respectable but not the class leader, and the Game-Key format is a strike against it that Cyberpunk's on-cart data avoids. The comparison that matters to buyers is less "which port is best" and more "do I want this game on this hardware at all."

Elden Ring on handhelds, everywhere else

Which is the honest competitive question, because Elden Ring already runs on handhelds. It has been playable on the Steam Deck since 2022 — Verified, in fact — and the Switch 2's headline pitch is DLSS-assisted image quality the Deck cannot match. If you are weighing where to play it portably, our Switch 2 versus Steam Deck breakdown lays out the DLSS edge against the Deck's open ecosystem, and the Switch 2 pricing situation is its own moving target. The Tarnished Edition's real competition is not another port — it is the copy of Elden Ring a lot of people already own on a machine that already plays it.

Five Predictions for the Next 6-12 Months

Forecasting is where editorial earns its keep or embarrasses itself. Here are five calls for the window from now through mid-2027, with the reasoning attached so you can hold them against reality.

1. The Switch 2 port ships close to its GDC form, and the mid-game exposes it. Expect a stable 1080p/30 in Limgrave and visible frame-pacing trouble in Caelid, the Haligtree, and other CPU-heavy zones. Digital Foundry's full teardown after August 28 will be the document that matters, and it will be more measured than the GDC previews.
2. No second Nightreign expansion is announced. FromSoftware has signaled the well is capped at balance patches. The July 2, 2026 update is the shape of Nightreign's future — tuning, not content. Anyone promising "Forsaken Hollows 2" is guessing.
3. The Tarnished Pack's five-dollar price becomes the story after launch. Once buyers register that the "new content" is a $5 cosmetic drop on every non-Switch platform, expect a wave of "you don't need the $80 edition" explainers — the same correction this article is making, a month early.
4. Still no Shadow of the Erdtree 2, and no tease of one. FromSoftware's attention is on The Duskbloods and whatever unannounced project follows. A second story expansion for a 2022 game is not where a studio this in-demand spends its next two years.
5. The Duskbloods network test lands in summer 2026 and reframes the conversation. The genuinely new FromSoftware game will pull oxygen from the repackage. By the time the Tarnished Edition ships, the more interesting FromSoft story on Switch 2 will be the beta for the thing that isn't Elden Ring.

The Verdict

Strip the naming games away and the "Elden Ring DLC release date" question has three clean answers, depending on who is asking.

If you want a story expansion

You are out of luck. Shadow of the Erdtree (June 21, 2024, $39.99) is the last narrative content the base game has, and nothing on FromSoftware's public slate suggests a sequel. If you have not played the Erdtree, that expansion is the forty-hour purchase worth making. If you have, there is no new Lands Between coming in the next year. Make peace with it.

If you already own the game

Your "DLC" is The Tarnished Pack, out August 28, 2026 for about five dollars on PS4, PS5, Xbox, and PC. Two classes, four armor sets, three Torrent skins, some weapons. Buy it if you want the drip of new cosmetics; skip it with zero regret if you don't. Do not, under any circumstances, buy the $79.99 Tarnished Edition to get content you can have for $4.99. And if you play Nightreign, your actual DLC — The Forsaken Hollows — has been out since December 4, 2025 for $14.99.

If you want it on Switch 2

Then the Tarnished Edition is your SKU, and at $79.99 it is priced at parity with the existing PlayStation and Xbox bundle — fair, if not generous, and bundled with cosmetics for free. The two caveats are the ones the marketing won't lead with: it ships on an 80 GB Game-Key Card, so the "physical" cartridge is a download token, and the impressive previews were all Limgrave. If those don't bother you, August 28 gives you the best-looking portable Elden Ring yet. Just don't call it DLC. It's a box.