Why the hell can't an Elden Ring expansion be a Game Of The Year contender?

Controversy broke out in the world of gaming this past week, on account of it being a day that ended in -y that also, unfortunately, contained the opinions of online gamers. This latest interactive hubbub was predicated by the arrival of nominations for The Game Awards, the annual celebration of the best in trailers that have paid to be featured on The Game Awards, and also, incidentally, some statues get handed out. Perusing the list (from a year that has felt pretty glutted with remakes, remasters, and other examples of playing it safe in the wider gaming ecosystem) people noticed that, horror of horrors, Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree had been nominated for Game Of The Year, despite not being a full game. (It’s an expansion to From Software’s Elden Ring, which swept the vast majority of GOTY awards when it arrived back in 2022.)

While we, personally, would argue that this wasn’t even the most controversial decision in the TGA’s typically mainstream selection of picks—hyping up the Silent Hill 2 remake for Best Narrative when it does little but ape and dilute the beats of a 20-year-old game feels wild to us—it does speak to one of modern gaming’s great obsessions: Splitting hairs over largely meaningless terminology. Usually, this attitude gets applied to genre—this is, after all, the artistic medium that, with a straight face, will try to distinguish between “a Metroidvania with rogue-lite elements” and “a roguelike that employs JRPG mechanics”—but the quibbling over Shadow Of The Erdtree‘s status as a “game” speaks to a wider anxiety about the forms that gaming, sigh, content now arrives in our lives.

There is, admittedly, at least some surface merit to debating about this: The rise of downloadable content and the games-as-service trend—where new levels, equipment, characters, and more arrive piecemeal in the months and even years after a game is released, often with a brand new price tag attached—has heavily blurred the line between the experience you get when you first install a game, and the one that eventually ends up on your hard drive. The design process has become far more iterative, for both good and ill, and highlighting one new payload of content as a game of the year candidate potentially opens the field up to some slippery slope arguments. (Even if, as with most instances of the “playing with definitions” game, this kind of thinking is mostly spurious; nobody’s going to be nominating a Fortnite costume pack for GOTY, folks.) Arguing over it with this pick, though, speaks to both a misunderstanding of Shadow Of The Erdtree, and the attitude its creator, From Software, has always taken toward DLC.

Older, more decrepit heads will get what we mean immediately when we assert that Shadow isn’t just “DLC” for From’s wide-ranging masterpiece: It’s an expansion pack. That’s a term that’s largely fallen out of favor in the internet era, but in the days before reliable online downloads, expansions, sold on disc, were the primary way that games got buffed out, improved, and supplemented. The need to justify printing and publishing a brand new disc of content meant that they were typically beefy endeavors that had to actually, well, expand the game in question—and that attitude has pervaded From’s offerings ever since the first Dark Souls was extended with 2012’s Artorias Of The Abyss. Sure, From does the same round of patches and tweaks that every studio does these days, with Elden Ring itself getting a ton of new content in the first year of its release. But the company still hews to the idea that, if you’re asking people to shell out more cash, what you get in return should be robust, impressive, and, above all-else, game-changing.

As From’s biggest expansion ever (fitting for a continuation of the company’s largest game), Shadow fits that brief perfectly. It’s not only massive, encompassing 40 or more hours of new exploration, combat, and more, but it also shows how its developers have refined their understanding of what made Elden Ring a phenomenon. That most especially applies to its map, which condenses down all those things that made Elden Ring exploration so exciting—vast open vistas, convoluted dungeons, and the ever-present sense that some obscure secret was lurking just around the next corner—into a much tighter package of mysteries and surprises. It builds on the work that’s come before, as all good expansions do, but it also operates in conversation with the base game in a way that blurs the line between “expansion” and “sequel.” Even sidestepping arguments about length (always a tricky metric in a medium where some of the most impactful experiences can come with tiny playtimes), the idea that Shadow wouldn’t qualify as a “game” is absurd, even by the standards of the Definition Game; if a Game Of The Year award doesn’t exist to reward a complete, conceptually coherent package like this, just because it comes attached to another title, then it’s hard to see what the point of it would be at all. (Shame it’s going to lose to Balatro when December 12 actually rolls around, but hey, what are ya gonna do?)