The Elden Ring Erdtree DLC was a blast (read all about it here!), and blew my expectations away. But how much stuff are you getting for your $40? As it turns out, a lot. Let’s break it down.
The Erdtree DLC will be in the 20-30 hour mark for most players – that’s expansion-level content!
Erdtree is a little unconventional in terms of how it’s laid out. Think of it like a gigantic map, with a large degree of player agency in terms of where you can go. The DLC still has those little “light markers” to show where critical path bosses are lying in wait: but you can pretty much travel anywhere, and discover the myriad caves, side bosses, and crypts on the map.
It took me roughly 30 hours to get to the final boss in Erdtree, and that’s with a decent amount of exploration involved. If you were a little more speedy and wanted to rush things, you could chunk that down to 20 hours. Several large swaths of the map are reserved for side content and exploration-inclined players.
If you were to zoom through the critical path with a power build, it could take you less than 10 hours. But that’s an edge case, and speedrunners will be able to go through it faster than that, skipping all optional bosses and zones.
If you want to do absolutely everything, it could take you 30 hours or more
So Elden Ring’s first and presumably only DLC is massive.
If you were to do absolutely everything at a regular pace, it could take you 30+ hours to clean everything out. I’m talking about most major items, all the NPC quests and interactions, all additional “big” bosses, and the minor encounters (crypts and goals, which are dungeons and micro-NPC-bosses respectively, just like the base game).
Good luck! There are a few bosses (mostly critical path/story-related) who are absolute monsters.
