Elden Ring DLC Dates: Dec 4 2025 and Aug 28 2026

Type "Elden Ring DLC release date" into any search box in August 2026 and the machine returns a confident answer that happens to be wrong, because there is no single date. There are two. They belong to two different games wearing the same brand, and both trace back to a single line in a Kadokawa earnings deck from November 2025.

As of this writing, August 24, 2026 (four days before the second one ships), here is the honest version. The first Elden Ring DLC of this cycle was The Forsaken Hollows, an add-on for the co-op spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign, and it arrived December 4, 2025. The second is Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, a Nintendo Switch 2 package bundling the base game, its expansion, and a slab of brand-new content, landing August 28, 2026, with that same new content sold to everyone else as a five-dollar pack. One of these was a critical disaster. The other is a redemption arc. Let us take the machine apart.

Two Dates, One Earnings Slide

The question that quietly splits in two

The confusion is structural, not accidental. "Elden Ring" in 2026 is no longer one product with one roadmap. It is a franchise with a base game (Elden Ring, 2022), a full expansion (Shadow of the Erdtree, 2024), and a standalone co-op offshoot (Nightreign, 2025). When people ask about "the DLC," they could mean the paid add-on for Nightreign or the new content coming to the main game via the Switch 2 edition. In this cycle, both exist, and both got dates within nine months of each other.

Two games, one brand, two content drops

Keep the two threads separate and everything else clicks into place. Thread one is Nightreign, the roguelike co-op title, which received its first paid DLC, The Forsaken Hollows, on December 4, 2025. Thread two is the main Elden Ring, which is getting a fresh bundle of classes, armor, and mount cosmetics that launches as the full Tarnished Edition on Switch 2 and as the cheaper Tarnished Pack everywhere else on August 28, 2026. Different games, different content, different audiences, one shared surname.

The short version, before the details

If you only remember three things: Forsaken Hollows is Nightreign DLC that already shipped; Tarnished Edition is a Switch 2 edition of the original game arriving this week; and the same new main-game content costs existing owners around $5, not $80. Everything below is the receipt for those three sentences, with the hard numbers, the quotes, and the review carnage attached.

How Kadokawa's FY2025 Set the Clock

What the earnings materials actually said

FromSoftware's parent company is Kadokawa, and Kadokawa reports on a Japanese fiscal calendar. In its Q2 FY2025 earnings materials, surfaced in early-to-mid November 2025, the company disclosed that FromSoftware was developing Nightreign DLC planned for FY2025. It also noted that Nightreign had "performed well beyond initial expectations," and that the game had already moved roughly 5 million copies. The same disclosure name-checked the Switch 2 Elden Ring and The Duskbloods for 2026.

The outlets that ran with "by March 31, 2026"

Because FY2025 ends on March 31, 2026, every outlet did the same arithmetic and reached the same conclusion. GameSpot framed it as a DLC that could launch by the end of March 2026. IGN reported the same window on November 10, 2025, with the pointed subtext that frustrated players were already leaving negative Steam reviews while they waited. ScreenRant, Kotaku, and Game8 all landed on the identical read: a paid DLC, tied to the fiscal year, due by the end of March 2026 at the latest.

Duskbloods, Tarnished Edition, and the 2026 pile-up

Fiscal-year language is a deadline, not a date, so the smart move is to translate it before quoting it. Here is the decoder the whole story runs on:

Kadokawa fiscal year -> calendar window
  FY2025 = 01 Apr 2025 ... 31 Mar 2026
  FY2026 = 01 Apr 2026 ... 31 Mar 2027

"Nightreign DLC planned for FY2025"  => ship on/before 31 Mar 2026
  Forsaken Hollows    04 Dec 2025  ->  inside FY2025   [ON TIME]
  Tarnished Edition   28 Aug 2026  ->  inside FY2026   [SLIPPED +1 FY]

That single table explains the whole confusion. The Nightreign DLC hit its fiscal window with months to spare. The Switch 2 edition, listed loosely for "2026," slid past the FY2025 cutoff and into the next fiscal year entirely. Same disclosure, two very different outcomes. This is the same corporate-calendar logic that governs when other publishers ship, and it is why a game can be "delayed" purely to land in a preferred quarter, as we saw with GTA 6's two delays into a November 2026 window.

Answer 1: Forsaken Hollows (Dec 4, 2025)

What it added: Scholar, Undertaker, and the Great Hollow

The Forsaken Hollows was revealed at a State of Play on November 11, 2025 and shipped December 4, 2025 across PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. It added two playable Nightfarers and a new Shifting Earth map. Per FromSoftware's own PlayStation Blog announcement, the Scholar is "An academic who walks the Lands Between" who "gains incredible advantages through battlefield observation," while the new region, Shifting Earth: The Great Hollow, is "A great cavity in the depths of Limveld" strewn with "exotic ruins and temples" and "crystals that exude a cursed, life-draining miasma." The Undertaker, the second Nightfarer, is an abbess built around strength and faith. Two new bosses round out the package.

The price, and the Deluxe loophole

Forsaken Hollows costs $15 (¥1,760) as a standalone purchase for base Nightreign owners, and it is free for anyone who bought the Digital Deluxe edition. That matters because Nightreign itself launched cheap: $39.99 for the base game and $54.99 for Deluxe. So the true cost of the full Nightreign experience with its first DLC is either $55 (base plus DLC) or $55 (Deluxe, with the DLC folded in). FromSoftware essentially priced the Deluxe edition as a pre-commitment to content it had not yet built.

The Steam backlash: FromSoft's worst-rated release

Here is where the deadpan gives way to the autopsy. Nightreign was already, at launch, FromSoftware's worst-reviewed game on Steam, sitting at "Mixed" on day one with roughly 4,000 of its first 12,000 reviews negative and one reviewer summarizing it as "This is not the Elden Ring you are looking for." The DLC made it worse. According to GamesRadar, The Forsaken Hollows became FromSoftware's worst-rated PC release at around 46% positive, roughly ten percent below Dark Souls 3's Ashes of Ariandel. Complaints clustered on thin content and the absence of new weapons beyond the two new class kits, plus a broader sense that FromSoftware and Bandai Namco had moved on. And yet the commercial and critical stories diverge completely: the DLC still shipped over 2 million units. Worst-reviewed and two-million-sold, at the same time. That contradiction is the real headline.

Answer 2: Tarnished Edition (Aug 28, 2026)

The Switch 2 package and the $79.99 question

The second date is the one dropping in four days. Elden Ring Tarnished Edition arrives August 28, 2026 exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 at $79.99, as a Game-Key Card (the cartridge is a download key, not the data). The bundle is the base game plus Shadow of the Erdtree, layered with new starting classes (the Heavy Knight and the Knight of Idles, whose second name outlets have rendered inconsistently), new armor sets, weapon options, and, for the first time, customization for Torrent, your spectral steed. On the sticker shock: Engadget put the $79.99 tag "in Mario Kart World territory" but also noted the crucial context that "a combo pack with the base game and the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC costs $80 for other platforms." In other words, the Switch 2 price is not a Nintendo tax; it matches the existing bundle price everywhere else.

The $5 Tarnished Pack for everyone else

This is the single most useful fact in the article for existing owners. The new content is not locked to Switch 2. On the same day, August 28, 2026, the identical classes, armor, weapons, and Torrent cosmetics ship on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC as the Tarnished Pack for roughly $5 (€4.99 / ¥550). If you already own Elden Ring on any of those platforms, you do not buy an $80 edition to get the new toys. You buy a five-dollar pack. The $80 SKU exists for Switch 2 newcomers who want the whole game in one Game-Key Card, not for the tens of millions who already own it.

From 15fps disaster to 30fps delivery

The Tarnished Edition also carries the most dramatic technical arc of any 2026 port. At Gamescom in August 2025, the Switch 2 build ran badly enough that Digital Foundry called it "basically unacceptable," saying it "runs like a poor performing PS360 game," with the handheld frame rate reportedly collapsing to 15fps in the worst moments (as relayed by VGC). The problem was diagnosed as CPU-bound, not GPU-bound. FromSoftware delayed the game in October 2025, and by GDC in March 2026 the story had flipped. Writing for RPG Site, James Galizio called it "one of the singular most impressive Switch 2 conversions I have played to date," reporting "a solid 30FPS, and with a resolution either hitting or very visibly close to a native 1080p." The final build targets 1080p at a locked 30fps, quality prioritized over frame rate. If you want the reconstruction context for why 30fps at native-ish 1080p on a handheld is a real achievement, it is the same upscaling-and-target-resolution conversation driving the PS5 Pro's PSSR reconstruction push.

A Short History of Elden Ring DLC

Base game to Shadow of the Erdtree (2022-2024)

The cadence only makes sense against the timeline. Elden Ring launched February 25, 2022 at $59.99 and became one of the best-selling new IPs in the medium, passing 30 million copies. Its lone true expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, arrived June 21, 2024 at $39.99, sold 5 million copies in three days, and has since reached around 10 million. That is the gold standard for FromSoftware DLC: one enormous, self-contained expansion, priced like a small game, delivered once. Nothing since has matched that shape.

Nightreign and the pivot to something service-shaped

Nightreign, released May 30, 2025, was the pivot. Instead of a single expansion to the main game, FromSoftware spun out a standalone co-op roguelike at $39.99 and signaled from launch that it would receive ongoing DLC. That is a different post-launch philosophy: smaller, recurring drops rather than one monolith. The Forsaken Hollows on December 4, 2025 was the first of those drops, and the reception, as covered above, suggests the audience did not want Elden Ring reshaped into a live-ish service. The friction was baked into the model, not just the content.

The sales that justify the schedule

Follow the money and the schedule stops looking random. Per Tweaktown, the Elden Ring franchise has broken 46 million cumulative sales across the base game (30M+), Shadow of the Erdtree (10M), and Nightreign (5M). When a franchise sells at that volume, its parent company reports content plans on fiscal slides, and those slides become de facto release windows. The DLC calendar is a byproduct of the accounting calendar. That is not cynicism; it is just how a company the size of Kadokawa communicates.

The Numbers: Dates, Prices, Platforms

Release-date timeline

Every dated Elden Ring product in one place, so you can stop cross-referencing five tabs:

The what-do-I-actually-pay matrix

Timelines tell you when. This tells you what to buy, which is the question that actually loses people money:

Reading the tables

The two rows that matter most are the ones with the widest price gap. The same main-game content is $79.99 as a Switch 2 edition and roughly $5 as a cross-platform pack, because one price includes two full games and the other includes only the new bits. Do not confuse them. The Nightreign DLC (Forsaken Hollows) and the main-game content (Tarnished Pack) are also completely separate purchases for two separate games; owning one gives you nothing toward the other.

How It Compares

Against FromSoftware's own DLC history

Measured against Shadow of the Erdtree, The Forsaken Hollows is a step down in ambition by design. Erdtree was a $39.99 expansion the size of a small game with a 10-million-copy tail; Forsaken Hollows is a $15 drop of two classes, a map, and two bosses that landed at 46% positive. The lesson is not that FromSoftware forgot how to make DLC. It is that the recurring-drop model for a co-op spin-off draws a fundamentally different, and harsher, review response than a single monolithic expansion for a beloved single-player game.

Against the Switch 2 port class

As a Switch 2 conversion, Tarnished Edition sits near the top after a rough start. Its 1080p/30fps target and "very visibly close to native 1080p" image put it in the conversation with the platform's most technically impressive ports, rather than its compromised ones. That matters because Elden Ring is a stress test: an open world with a CPU-heavy simulation, which is exactly the profile that punished the Gamescom build. If you are weighing where to play it portably, it also reframes the ongoing Switch 2 versus Steam Deck debate, where Elden Ring already runs on both.

Against the AAA fiscal-window playbook

Zoom out and the Elden Ring cadence is a textbook example of releases pinned to accounting windows. Publishers routinely time drops to land in a chosen fiscal quarter, and platform holders time hardware and pricing the same way, as the Switch 2's own June 2025 launch and September price move demonstrate, and as the shifting PS5-versus-Xbox-Series-X pricing in 2026 shows on the console side. Content becomes a lever pulled to hit a number on a slide. Elden Ring's two 2026-adjacent dates are just that lever, made visible.

5 Predictions for 2026-2027

Nightreign's support and a possible second DLC

Given the review reception, the near-term outlook for Nightreign is cautious. My read on the next 6 to 12 months:

1. No second major Nightreign DLC is announced before mid-2027. Forsaken Hollows landed at 46% positive with "abandoned" complaints; FromSoftware is more likely to patch quietly than to double down with another paid drop in the same fiscal year.
2. Tarnished Edition reviews well but sells modestly. Expect strong port impressions (following the RPG Site and Engadget framing) but a smaller install base than the base game, because it is an $80 edition of a four-year-old game competing with a $5 pack.
3. The Tarnished Pack outsells the Tarnished Edition by units. Tens of millions of existing owners at $5 is a bigger raw number than Switch 2 newcomers at $80, even if the edition earns more per sale.
4. FromSoftware's next dated reveal is The Duskbloods, not more Elden Ring. The Switch 2 exclusive was grouped into the same Kadokawa disclosure for 2026, and it is a new game, which is where the studio's marketing oxygen goes next.
5. The next Kadokawa fiscal slide (FY2026, ending March 2027) sets the following window. Whatever comes after August 2026 will be telegraphed the same way it was this time: as a fiscal-year plan, not a date, and outlets will do the March-31 math again.

Why these are the safe bets

None of these require a leak. They fall out of the incentives already on the table: a bruised co-op title, a low-friction $5 upsell, a new IP hungry for attention, and a parent company that communicates through fiscal calendars. Predict the incentives and you predict the calendar.

The one thing that would break the pattern

The wildcard is a surprise second Nightreign expansion sized like Shadow of the Erdtree rather than Forsaken Hollows. That would signal FromSoftware believes the co-op experiment is worth a real rescue. Nothing in the current data points that way, which is exactly why it would be the story if it happened.

The Machine's Verdict

If you own Nightreign

Buy The Forsaken Hollows for the Scholar and Undertaker if you still play, and skip it if you do not. At $15 it is two classes, a map, and two bosses, and the 46% Steam rating is a fair warning about volume. It is content, not a revival. If you own the Deluxe edition, it is already yours, so there is nothing to decide.

If you are eyeing the Switch 2 edition

If you have never owned Elden Ring and you live on Switch 2, Tarnished Edition at $79.99 is a legitimately good deal: two games in one Game-Key Card, running at a genuinely impressive 1080p/30fps after a year of engineering. If you already own the game anywhere else, do not touch the $80 edition. Buy the $5 Tarnished Pack on August 28, 2026 and keep the other $75.

The pattern to watch

The real takeaway is not either date. It is that "Elden Ring DLC release date" resolved into two answers because a franchise this large now ships content on a fiscal metronome. One drop hit its window and flopped critically while selling two million; the other slipped a fiscal year and looks like a technical triumph. Both were legible months in advance to anyone who read the earnings slide instead of the headline. That is the machine, and now you can read it too.