Arise, Tarnished: a new Elden Ring DLC image just dropped, and it looks like a fresh take on an old enemy wielding a cool new weapon type

The Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree is nearly upon us, but there’s still time for the FromSoftware special: ravenously speculating about a single piece of artwork. The game’s official Twitter account just dropped a shot of a new enemy coming in the DLC, so rev up that speculator, Tarnished. 

I’ve scoured the trailers and store pages just to double-check, and this DLC enemy certainly seems brand-new. “Fearsome foes of unfathomable power await you in the Realm of Shadow,” the tweet teases below. 

The gnarly, spiraling, crimson-tinged horns are a telltale sign of an Omen, a type of monster found throughout Elden Ring’s base map. It seems the DLC’s Land of Shadow has Omens of its own – or perhaps one special Omen, if this figure is a boss. We know Omens as hulking, cursed beings, but this Omen looks a bit more agile. It’s also more feminine in appearance between the slender mask, long hair, draped skirt, and slimmer frame – and, as some players have pointed out, the composition seems to resemble a uterus, perhaps echoing themes from FromSoftware’s Bloodborne. 

The big draw for me is this Omen’s weapon: a pair of massive chakrams. Elden Ring director and FromSoft boss Hidetaka Miyazaki has stressed that new weapons and entirely new weapon archetypes are a key feature in Shadow of the Erdtree, and now I’m hoping the expanded arsenal includes these chakrams, whether they’re a normal item or a boss weapon. An existing enemy type, the Crystalians, technically already uses chakrams, but the weapon type has been unavailable to players. Please let these be usable, FromSoftware, and please let us properly throw them. 

Elden Ring’s Malenia was just defeated by Twitch’s biggest streamer – and it only took him 24 hours and 400 straight deaths to do it.