Elden Ring Nightreign will receive a DLC on December 4, 2025. This introduces an area into the game that is already causing shivers among longtime fans of FromSoftware just by its name.
What kind of area is this? The DLC “The Forsaken Hollows” will be released on December 4, 2025, and it features not only fresh characters but also new areas. Among them are poisonous and toxic swamps, as Junya Ishizaki, the head of the title, revealed to GameSpot.
This may not sound particularly dramatic to the uninitiated. However, those who have played previous titles from FromSoftware – including the main game Elden Ring – know that swamps in the games of the Japanese developer are something very special. In a frustrating way.
Being poisoned gradually
Why are swamps bad? In almost every game from FromSoftware, there is at least one swamp. Whether in Dark Souls, Elden Ring, or its DLC, the developer has always managed to incorporate these very expansive areas.
The problem is this: upon entering a swamp, the movement of your character is severely slowed down. At the same time, a bar starts to fill up, indicating how close you are to being poisoned. Sometimes it’s not poison, but toxin, or, as in Elden Ring, scarlet rot. However, this has a similar effect.
Once the bar is full, you are poisoned and slowly lose health. You can counteract this by taking certain items. In Elden Ring, these are called bolis, in Dark Souls, they were moss clumps.
Combining slow movement with decreasing health and item scarcity, you only need annoying enemies to perfect the frustration. For example, in the notorious swamp in Blighttown from Dark Souls 1, flies that also spit poison approach from all sides. To make it perfect, they spawn infinitely.
Swamps are a MUST – even in Elden Ring Nightreign
What does the developer say about it? Now the new DLC finally adds a swamp to Nightreign, as such an area was previously missing. Thus, this game also follows a tradition of FromSoftware, which has long become a meme and drives fans up the wall. Swamps in the Souls games seem almost mandatory. In a conversation with GameSpot, Junya Ishizaki commented:
It’s not that there’s a rule or guideline here [at FromSoftware] that we must have a swamp, but it always seems to happen that [before you know it] someone came up with the idea, it’s somehow there and has developed a life of its own.
Junya Ishizaki
It seems to be simply part of the DNA of a true FromSoftware game to incorporate an annoying swamp. One can only hope that the one from Elden Ring Nightreign at least offers a satisfactory reward – such as when you traverse the swamp or find a specific location.
What is certain, however, is that the new area will again lead to numerous curses and perhaps even destroyed controllers. All that’s left is for one of the challenging boss fights from the game to take place in the middle of a toxic lake. But let’s not give the developers any stupid ideas. Besides the swamps, the main highlight of the expansion is: The new class of Elden Ring is a nun with a giant mace, named after a professional wrestler
