Elden Ring’s latest update might be pointing towards ray tracing and DLC maps

elden ring The latest update arrived earlier this week and appears to harbor some secrets that could point towards ray tracing, and maybe even DLC.

The main goal of Elden Ring patch 1.07 was that PvP and PvE balance is now separate, meaning adjustments to one will not affect the other. However, data miner Lance MdDonald discovered that some new menu strings mentioning ray tracing were found in the code.

Later, McDonald was able to enable the ray tracing settings, which he shared on his Twitter. He did notice that the feature appears to be broken at the moment, speculating that some missing shaders might be the problem. McDonald also found that with ray tracing enabled, the game still uses reflections of screen space in the water, meaning geometry isn’t rendered twice, so it’s not too performance-intensive.

Ray tracing is obviously an exciting prospect, but what’s more intriguing are the new references to maps that didn’t exist before the update. As shared by another data minerSekiro Dubi, these new maps are labeled m20 and m45, neither of which are currently attached to a visitable area.

The m20 reference seems to follow in line with the game’s legacy dungeon number system, as m10 is Stormveil and m11 is Leyndell, leading to m19, platform stone. At this time it is unknown what m45 could be for, as there are no numbers corresponding to it, so it could be a whole new section for players to visit.

These map references are not the only ones that seem to point to the preparation of DLC, as it seems that an explicit reference to DLC01 has been done, but of course until an official announcement is made, this is mostly just speculation (thanks, eurogamer).