There was great praise when FromSoftware announced a fresh Elden Ring game, Elden Ring: Nightreign, last week, and great lamentation from some quarters when it turned out to be a cooperative game. If you missed this installment, perhaps because you value sleep more than the spectacle of Geoff Keighley’s mod friends, let me catch you up: in Nightreign, you choose one of eight pre-made characters and explore a parallel version of Elden Ring’s Limgrave map, fighting minor enemies and quickly leveling up , so you can fight the boss at the end of each 15-minute in-game day.
The map is surrounded by deadly weather that descends as night approaches, reducing the navigable area to a boss arena – a nod to the Battle Royale genre. Each round lasts three days and ends with a battle with one of eight unlockable main antagonists. Between rounds, you can spend a currency called Murk on cosmetics in the Round Table Fort and equip relics that provide indefinite character upgrades.
It seems to be based largely on watching more dedicated fans play and tinker with Elden Ring – a remix of the speedrunner with a glossy co-op mod and some confusing allusions to the wider Fromverse in the presence of the Nameless King from Dark Souls 3. Buildings and threats terrain on the map changes between visits – bigger surprises include volcanoes and invading field bosses like our ancient pal Margit the Fell Omen – so it’s more replayable than you might think for a game with “only” one map and eight quiet “chapters” that (judging by my back-of-the-napkin math) could theoretically be completed in a day.
Of course, we created a lot of multiplayer games. The Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring series offer convoluted co-op and PvP features via in-game guilds, along with asynchronous online features such as player phantoms and sprays. But this is the first time they’ve created something like Souls, where multiplayer is an option on the menu rather than something slowly peeled away and explored on a solo journey. So is there something here for people who would rather not fight the hordes?
The good news is that Nightreign can be played both solo and offline. When playing solo, the game also reduces the enemy’s health pool and there is no PvP raider element to disrupt your wanderings.
It’s also not a “live service” game – like a game that’s openly designed to evolve over time through regular, perhaps separately sold DLC injections and a season pass model. “When you buy Nightreign, you will receive the complete package, everything will be unlockable at once” – game director Junya Ishizaki he told Games Network’s Ian shortly before the reveal. “So we want to make it clear that this is what we wanted to create. This is not a game intended for a live service.”
Beyond that, however, the image becomes blurry. According to Ishizaki, Nightreign focuses primarily on cooperation. It’s balanced mostly around three-player teams (somewhat arbitrarily, there’s no two-player support), this is a “sweet spot” that avoids Nightreign becoming “too overwhelming or too busy” when players split up to farm the map and reunite at sunset.
It’s also missing some key handles for solo Ringers. First, there are no Spirit Ash items to summon helpful NPCs, although according to Ishizaki, one of the pre-made heroes has “sort of a spirit buddy as a gameplay mechanic.”
As you might expect, given the constantly changing map, it is no longer possible to leave a soapstone message about your geographic location. It may sound cliché, but this news adds so much to FromSoft worlds, even if they are calling everything dog. At least you’ll be able to collect treasures dropped by other killed players via asynchronous online mode.
Throw these morsels of knowledge into the blender of reckless deduction, and you might speculate that Nightreign supports solo players, but doesn’t particularly encourage them. Play alone, and by the sounds of things, you’ll be cutting against the grain – which, admittedly, is the norm for some dedicated Soulservers, with their nightmare talk of completing entire games without having to level up or wear any clothes.
If the above has left you despairing, the best news is that Nightreign won’t necessarily be the first of many multiplayer-focused games. “We don’t really have a plan in terms of, oh, we’re going to do more spin-offs, or it’s going to be a one-off,” Ishizaki told IGN. “It was just a coincidence that I wanted to direct my own game and I wanted to use Elden Ring and the battle project I was involved in as the basis for this game, as well as my interest in online cooperative games.”
Regardless, the Nightreign concept clearly fits well with Hidetaka Miyazaki’s comments from earlier this year about working on smaller projects in the future. Perhaps they’ll find a way to provide a scaled-down single-player offering next?
