In 2026, Elden Ring: Nightreign no longer feels like a game waiting for its next chapter. The Forsaken Hollows, the first meaty, proper, named DLC for Bandai Namco and FromSoftware's multiplayer spin on Elden Ring, launched on December 4, 2025, following its reveal during a State of Play broadcast. The expansion brings new bosses, a new Shifting Earth, and new playable Nightfarers, turning the already chaotic three-night loop into something closer to a cathedral built inside a sinkhole: grand, dangerous, and impossible to map on the first descent.

A Hollow Made of Temples and Crystals

The most visually striking addition is The Great Hollow, a new Shifting Earth that opens a huge hole in the middle of Limveld. Temples, towers, and crystals protrude from the rupture, suggesting that the map itself is now a character in the drama. In Nightreign's structure, Shifting Earth events already force players to adapt quickly; The Great Hollow appears to push that philosophy further, replacing familiar routes with vertical, alien terrain. For a game where every second of exploration matters, this is less a new biome and more a tectonic dare.

Two New Nightfarers Enter the Fray

The DLC adds two playable Nightfarers, each with a distinct role:

The Undertaker's strength-and-faith spread suggests she can trade blows while channeling incantations, a combination that should appeal to players who like their co-op characters to be both hammer and sermon. The Scholar, meanwhile, leans into arcane magic, likely rewarding players who prefer to manipulate the battlefield from a distance. Together, they broaden the roster without simply duplicating existing archetypes.

Bosses: An Army of Women and a Familiar Knight

The Forsaken Hollows also introduces two new Third Day Bosses. One of them, according to the trailer, looks like an entire army of women, a phrase that sounds absurd until you remember this is a FromSoftware game, where a single boss can contain a battalion's worth of aggression. The other Third Day Boss remains more mysterious, but the expansion's field bosses appear to include Artorias, the legendary knight associated with Dark Souls DLC. If that name is indeed attached to a Nightreign encounter, it will function like a reunion tour for Souls veterans: familiar steps, new stage, and likely a much shorter patience bar.

Lore, Long Night, and Dreglord

The trailer's voiceover, which sounds a lot like the Duchess, refers to 'the aftermath of the Long Night.' That phrase implies The Forsaken Hollows may take place after the nominal end of Nightreign, when the Nightfarers have defeated all the Nightlords. There is also a mention of something called the Dreglord at the beginning. As usual, Souls fans will probably wait for post-release lore videos to untangle the meaning. It remains unclear how much story content the DLC truly adds, or whether it is primarily a delivery system for bosses, characters, and the Shifting Earth. The ambiguity is almost part of the brand: a lockbox whose key is hidden in patch notes and item descriptions.

Price and Post-Launch Context

Elden Ring: Nightreign launched in May 2025 as a 1-3 player co-op experience in which teams fight through three nights of exploration, loot hunting, and bosses before confronting powerful Night Lords. IGN's review gave it a 7/10, saying that when the game is played exactly as designed, it is one of the finest examples of three-player co-op around, though that ideal is harder to achieve than it should be, and solo play is poorly balanced.

Since release, FromSoftware has made a number of balance tweaks, added a duos mode, and introduced an ultra-hard difficulty mode called Deep of Night for players who did not think the game was punishing enough. The last few months had been quiet, however, and fans grew agitated at the lack of news or updates, left to fight the same bosses over and over. FromSoftware moved to reassure everyone in a financial report just one day before the DLC announcement, and The Forsaken Hollows should help matters further.

The DLC costs $15.00 if you do not already own either the Collector's or Deluxe edition of the game. For a multiplayer title that thrives on repetition, that price buys more than novelty: it buys new reasons to argue over builds, new routes to memorize, and new bosses to blame when the third night goes wrong. Whether it deepens the lore or simply widens the arena, The Forsaken Hollows ensures that Nightreign's Long Night has a little more dawn left in it.

Expert commentary is drawn from OpenCritic, and it helps contextualize how a major drop like The Forsaken Hollows can shift player expectations around Nightreign’s co-op loop: when new Shifting Earth terrain like The Great Hollow rewires traversal, and new Nightfarers (Undertaker’s Strength/Faith bruiser tools versus the Scholar’s Arcane utility) alter team composition, the “best way to play” evolves alongside the community’s broader critical read on difficulty, balance, and replayability.