Why Elden Ring's Barbarians of the Badlands DLC Would Be a Storytelling Misstep

There’s a strange trembling in the community right now, a mixture of hunger and unease. I first caught wind of the rumor while sifting through the wreckage of that massive Bandai Namco cyberattack from a few years back—the one that spilled so many secrets onto the floor. Among the shards was a name: Barbarians of the Badlands. The leak suggested a full Elden Ring DLC that would haul us out of the Lands Between and dump us onto the blood-soaked plains where Godfrey, as Hoarah Loux, once led the Tarnished in a long march of slaughter. And while every fiber of my being craves more Elden Ring, I can’t shake the feeling that this would be like a master painter abandoning a half-finished mural to go sketch stick figures in the dirt. The Badlands are the periphery of a story I never needed to see. The heart of the mystery still beats, and it beats inside the rotting branches of the Haligtree.

The Badlands, as a concept, are supposed to be where the exiled went to become less human and more weapon. The loose power structure there is built on a single currency: bloodshed. According to the scraps of information, the DLC would let us walk among chieftains who model themselves after Godfrey’s brutal simplicity. It sounds visceral, but it also sounds hollow—like a bowl filled with nothing but gravel. What made Elden Ring sing was not the act of killing but the vertigo of discovering why you were killing, and what it meant in a cosmos where gods could rot and children could dream entire realities into being. Sending the Tarnished back to the Badlands to witness more mindless carnage feels like prying open a treasure chest and finding only the same rusted coin you’ve seen a thousand times before. The real treasure is still buried beneath the Erdtree’s ashes.

Two names sit at the center of that buried treasure: Miquella and Malenia. Their story is the unplayed chord that still haunts me two years after I first set the Erdtree aflame. Miquella, the eternal child, spent his existence weaving needles to cure his sister’s Scarlet Rot. He grew the Haligtree as a shelter for the forsaken, a direct rebellion against the Greater Will’s order. By the time players rescue him from Mohg’s blood-soaked cocoon, the world has already shifted. The Erdtree is burning, the Elden Beast is dead, and Malenia—his twin, his reason for everything—has been defeated by the very Tarnished who freed him. She is now dormant, but not gone. Prophecy says she will bloom a third time and truly become the Rot Goddess. That third bloom is a sword dangling over every theory I’ve ever loved. If the DLC were to let us return to the Haligtree with Miquella, to find him standing over the flower that was once his sister, the emotional algebra would be staggering. Do we fight alongside him to subdue the goddess she has become? Do we kill the last hope of the downtrodden because he cannot let go? These are questions that make the Badlands look like a dusty joke.

Imagine a DLC where Miquella confronts you in the heart of the Haligtree, not with anger, but with a grief so vast it warps the geometry of the arena. He is the most fearsome Empyrean not because of physical strength, but because his intelligence and charm could unmake the new order you’ve just built. He could offer you a bargain: help him contain the Rot God, and he will purge the Greater Will’s residual scars from the Lands Between. But that bargain would mean sparing Malenia, who now exists as a walking cataclysm. The moral fracture in such a choice is exactly the kind of narrative that Elden Ring mastered in its base game—the sense that there are no clean answers, only wounds you choose to live with. Sending us to the Badlands instead would feel like FromSoftware closing a stained-glass window and handing us a piece of sandpaper. The Greater Will itself might still be out there, aware of the power vacuum the Tarnished created. A DLC that picks up those threads could make a whole new game, not just a side story.

I understand the appeal of the Badlands. A harsh, primal zone where the Tarnished history is carved with axes and screams has a certain mythic pull. But the Lands Between are a wound that hasn’t finished bleeding. Miquella’s unfinished Haligtree, Malenia’s ticking prophecy, even the fate of the now-absent Outer Gods—these are operas waiting to be sung. To divert our attention to a war-choked plain would be like a chef abandoning a slow-cooking feast to go toast a piece of dry bread. The rumor of Barbarians of the Badlands should remain just that: a rumor, a ghost, a false note. Because the real music is still playing, and I’m not ready to stop listening.