After Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree snatched The Witcher 3’s crown, one Blood and Wine dev says he’s gonna buy it just “to support the team”

As you might have seen, when the reviews of Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree came out the other day, it snatched the title of most highly rated DLC ever among reviewers on Metacritic. The Witcher 3’s brilliant Blood and Wine expansion was the foe it surpassed to earn that honour, and now developer CD Projekt’s whipped out the charm to congratulate the new titleholders.

In fact, one of the key developers behind the very DLC that Shadow of the Erdtree eclipsed says he’s going to go a step further and give Miyazaki and co a little financial pat on the back.

In a tweet quoting the one CD Projekt put out via The Witcher’s official account, Pawel Sasko, who served as a lead quest designer on Blood and Wine – in addition to having assumed important roles on both Cyberpunk 2077 and its currently-in-development sequel since that point – has declared his intention to buy Shadow of the Erdtree despite not having beaten the Elden Beast even once.

“Congratulations to our dear friends at FromSoftware for the stellar reviews of the Elden Ring expansion,” the developer wrote, “I didn’t yet manage to finish the base game after 30 hours in The Lands Between, but will get the Shadow of the Erdtree to support the team.”

While it’s easy to roll your eyes a bit at the unavoidably PR-y feeling nature of tweets like that one from Sasko and the one from CDPR as a whole – which includes some art of Geralt post defeating Mogh anmd some screens of CD Projekt staff prepping to play Shadow of the Erdtree themselves – given the general mood of the industry in 2024, occasionally getting a back and forth of compliments between developers like this is nice.

Helps you remember that, at the end of the day, we’re all in this because we like playing games, even if the financial realities and cynicism that inevitably come with any vocation where there’s cash involved can and will get in the way of that a lot of the time.

Anyway, I’ll stop being a bit soppy or philosophical and blame having done so on writing this midway through a Friday afternoon.

So, there you go. If you’re cracking into Shadow of the Erdtree as half of the world seems to be at the moment, make sure to check out our huge array of helpful guides that’ll aid you in your quest to start working out just what in the Roundtable Hold is up with Miquella.