We’re less than a day away from the release of Shadow Of The Erdtree, and as promised, FromSoft has just released the latest patch (notes Here) for an open world game. It’s only 6GB and you’ll need it to play the expansion, so click that button if you haven’t already. The main features of the update – recent hairstyles and improvements to inventory and QOL summoning – were announced last week. However, it looks like they buried it deeper than my loathing of the game’s Albinuaric murder community: Torrent, the game’s ghostly steed, can finally be summoned in the final boss fight – just as the community has long speculated was always intended To be.
There are spoilers below for this boss’s name if you’d rather not know.
“Added a new function to summon a ghostly steed during the Elden Beast boss battle,” the item declares, as if it were no gigantic deal. Some context: The Elden Beast fight is the worst moment in an otherwise intriguing series of endgame bosses in Elden Ring. The real creature itself is a gorgeous and very strange Ghibli-esque ink dragon. But the boss arena is huge, and the beast likes to teleport around it, making painful sprints back and forth as you try to keep up. This, along with certain attacks that look like they were designed for Torrent to jump over, has led to speculation that this fight was always about defeating the mount, but for some reason your mount couldn’t be summoned in the launch version of the RPG. In other words, this is an extremely welcome change.
Elsewhere in the patch, the following header changes have been made:
- Added support for SHADOW OF THE ERDTREE DLC.
- Five recent hairstyles have been added to the game. These can be selected during character creation, using the Cloudy Mirror Base, or using Rennali’s Rebirth feature.
- Added “Map Features Menu” to the Map Menu.
- Active Summon Pools will now be moved to NG+.
- Individual Summoning Pools can now be turned on and off in the newly added Map Features menu.
New inventory features:
- Newly acquired items will be marked with a “!”.
- A recent tab has been added called “Recent Items” where you can view recently acquired items.
- Display settings can be changed in the Display tab in the system menu.
- Added a recent function to summon a ghost steed during the Elden Beast boss battle.
- A recent feature has been added to the Colosseum: crafted single-use items that have been used during battle will be replenished at the end of the session.
- Added Arabic language support.
The patch also includes the following Steam-only changes:
- New keyboard/mouse settings:
- Added “lock change threshold” setting for mouse control.
- Added a setting to change cursor movement behavior in the map menu.
- Added key bindings to open the map in the Key Settings menu.
In addition, various other balance changes have been made to weapons, war ashes, and great runes, both related to PvP and in general. Shadow Of The Erdtree itself received a recent launch trailer today, which you can find below. Fair warning though: it’s not afraid to mess up what looks like a few bosses.
“The Shadowlands may not be as expansive as the Lands Between from the base game, but they are a knottier, denser, more sinuous mass that burrows into the ground and soars into the sky. For this reason, I think it contains some of the best moments in Elden Ring, as exploration leads to a truer sense of discovery, reminiscent of the Souls of old,” Edders wrote in his review of Shadow Of The Erdtree, “but I also think the sheer density reveals more cracks in an open-world format whose interconnected dispersion leads to an even greater paralysis of memories.” However, you should read the whole thing. Contains the phrase “fuck per capita”.