Shadow of The Erdtree is a masterpiece. That’s hardly surprising when you consider it expands on Elden Ring, FromSoftware’s magnum opus that took home the same accolade back in 2022.
But its status as an expansion has positioned it as an outlier in this year’s ceremony, considered somehow undeserving of standing alongside the likes of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Balatro, or Astro Bot. But it’s in the running fair and square, so here’s why it deserves to take home the gold.
Shadow Of The Erdtree Is The Best Expansion Ever Made
When considering Shadow of the Erdtree’s quality, you first need to compare it to all past FromSoftware expansions. The developer has built upon many of its titles in the past with paid expansions that offer new areas to explore, bosses to conquer, and loot to uncover. But all of these have been relatively small in scale, encompassing only a handful of biomes in a new area completely detached from the main game. Most of them are excellent, but there is something unusually solitary about their existence that Elden Ring doesn’t suffer from.
Like past FromSoft expansions, reaching Shadow of the Erdtree is a challenge in itself. You might view this as a negative, but there’s a special sort of confidence exuded when you lock so much amazing content behind such definitive walls.
Shadow of The Erdtree takes us to the titular realm designed to be a grim reflection of The Lands Between. A melancholic glimpse into Miquella’s deepest thoughts and dark circumstances. The story it tells is both a continuation of Elden Ring and a valuable companion to its narrative, spurring you onward to find Miquella’s many disparate parts, as if you’re piecing together a puzzle of your own making. Unlike Elden Ring, the expansion contains a surprisingly linear and self-contained plot that is both easy to follow and capitalises on all of our prior knowledge to envision a tragedy of epic proportions.
It Offers More Content Than Most Full Games, And It’s All Brilliant
I embraced every new character, every fresh line of dialogue, and every mysterious location and how they factor into the greater whole. FromSoftware is renowned for being surreal and esoteric in its storytelling, but Shadow of The Erdtree benefits from being concrete in its thematic ideas. It’s undeniably moving, propelled forth by an open world bigger than most full-priced games, coming in at around 25 hours – longer than Balatro or Astro Bot.
Few other games in 2024 had a chokehold on my attention like this one, because like all great FromSoft titles before it, you won’t want to stop until every boss has been conquered, and every mystery has been solved.
Not to mention how Erdtree compliments so many of the systems we already know and love, so much so that many of them feel new again.
Hand-to-hand combat allows players to finally roleplay a roaming fighter who does all of their talking with a flurry of punches and kicks. You can also make use of perfume bottles to throw forth elemental attacks, turning what we often expect to be a consumable item into a compelling new magic playstyle.
Erdtree brings with it so many new weapons, armour sets, items, and surprises that even the most hardcore of all Elden Ring players will feel spoiled for choice. Few games encourage replay value on both a mechanical and narrative level quite like this one.
But Is Shadow Of The Erdtree Worthy Of GOTY?
Putting aside its existence as an expansion and the parameters The Game Awards has cast upon it, Shadow of the Erdtree is one of the gaming highlights of the year no matter the form it takes. If another expansion – such as last year’s Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, which won Best Ongoing Game – offers this level of high quality content, it would be just as deserving.
The conversation wouldn’t be any different, and until Geoff Keighley entertains a ‘Best Expansion’ category I see very few ways a problem like this can be remedied. But when I put Erdtree up against every entry in the GOTY category, there are so many reasons why it deserves to come out on top. If it was called Elden Ring 2, would you feel differently about its inclusion?
Elden Ring was already a perfect game in the eyes of millions, and the most we expected from Shadow of the Erdtree was a confident victory lap that expanded on the original, not adding so many new and exciting ideas that it essentially eclipses it. It’s superior to what came before it in every conceivable way.
More confident, more challenged, more digestible, more willing to subvert our expectations, and more assured of its own identity that every single other game up for the gold this time around. There are few bad things to say about Erdtree, and when I look back on it decades from now, it’ll be with fondness in my heart.
Shadow of the Erdtree is the first and only DLC expansion for FromSoftware’s groundbreaking Elden Ring. It takes players to a whole new region, the Land of Shadow, where a new story awaits the Tarnished.