The Tarnished Edition DLC for ELDEN RING has been out for barely a moment, and the community's most dedicated dataminer has already pulled back the curtain on its two new NPC invaders.
Zullie the Witch, one of the most prolific FromSoftware researchers in the community, has published a new video dissecting the faces of Knight Leontiel and Noble Broken Mask, the pair of new NPC invaders added with the Tarnished Edition content drop. What she found is exactly the kind of obsessive, unnecessary detail that makes FromSoftware games so compelling to dig into.
Knight Leontiel is basically a Dark Souls 2 love letter
Anyone who spent time in Dark Souls 2 will clock Leontiel immediately. Her armor set is a high-definition reimagining of the conquistador outfit worn by Lucatiel of Mirrah, one of DS2's most memorable NPCs. The greatsword moveset lines up too. But the real detail is under the helmet.
Strip away the mask and Leontiel has a burn mark over her left eye, placed in exactly the same position as the hollowing rot that scarred Lucatiel across her Dark Souls 2 questline. That is not a coincidence. FromSoftware put that detail on a character model that the vast majority of players will never see without a datamining tool, and they did it anyway.
Here's the thing about Lucatiel's arc in DS2: her questline is one of the series' most emotionally direct stories about losing yourself to undeath. Leontiel carrying that same scar into the Lands Between reads less like a cameo and more like a quiet tribute.
For players who want to trace every thread of NPC lore across the game, the White Mask Varré questline guide is a good reminder of just how deep these character threads run in Elden Ring.
Noble Broken Mask and what he might tell us about Goldmask
The second find is less of a callback and more of a lore implication. Noble Broken Mask is the Tarnished Edition's new counterpart to base game NPC Goldmask, the silent golden figure whose face is permanently obscured. Goldmask technically has a face model, but it appears to be a generic placeholder rather than a designed character.
Broken Mask, by contrast, has a fully realized face: austere, pinched features with striking pale gold eyes. Zullie points out that his face shares visual characteristics with the perfumer enemies found throughout the Lands Between, which is the kind of detail that sends the lore community into a frenzy.
This is not the first time Zullie has done this kind of work. She has previously unmasked NPCs from the base game and Shadow of the Erdtree, and her catalog goes all the way back to a 2016 project doing the same for the Dark Souls 3 cast. The consistency of FromSoftware's hidden detail work across a decade of games is genuinely remarkable.
Why this matters beyond lore trivia
What most players miss is that this kind of datamining work does more than satisfy curiosity. It documents a design philosophy. FromSoftware builds full character models for NPCs whose faces players are never meant to see, writes questlines that most players will miss entirely, and hides callbacks to decade-old games under helmets that never come off in normal play.
The Tarnished Edition gives the community a fresh reason to pull at these threads again. Servers are more populated right now than they have been in years, which makes the online invasion and co-op systems feel alive in a way that mirrors the game's original launch window.
If you're working through the new content and want to make sure you're not missing questlines with this level of hidden depth, the full Elden Ring strategy guides collection covers everything from NPC quests to boss routing.
