When Elden Ring: Nightreign was announced at The Game Awards just a few weeks ago, much of the discussion focused on how surprising the announcement was. After all, this is an online cooperative game from a studio known mainly for its single-player gameplay.
While many FromSoftware games allow players to connect in cooperative mode, these games are primarily intended for solo play. There was one substantial mechanic, however, that made these journeys less lonely, and it’s not one we’ll see again in Nightreign.
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One of the most beloved features of most Souls and Soulslike games created by FromSoftware is the ability to leave messages for other players. The mechanics were used in many different ways, but not all of them were useful.
Typically, players could leave messages to admire a particular view, comment on a moment that occurred where the message was left, point out hidden treasures or illusionary walls to players, or even simply troll and mislead players.
The messaging system only consists of specific words, so players had to be clever with their sentences, which led to many jokes, many of which were rude. Unfortunately, this entire experience won’t be found in Elden Ring: Nightreign.
This was recently confirmed by game director Junya Ishizaki IGN Japan interview, and his reasoning actually makes a lot of sense. Ishizaki explained that the relatively compact session time of 40 minutes simply does not allow players to stop and read/write messages. Nightreign is designed to offer condensed RPG gameplay that consists almost entirely of combat, so announcements are of very little apply.
Indeed, given the one-shot style of play, constant messages that are liked and disliked by other players don’t make much sense. What Is However, the ghosts of the players are coming back, and that’s something. Another notable omission is that resting in a Place of Grace will not cause defeated (normal) enemies to respawn, which removes the element of risk from the decision to rest, so it will be intriguing to see how this affects the bigger picture in challenge conditions.
These are all intriguing design decisions and prove that FromSoftware may have been inspired by the many mods and randomizers that the community has created over the years for various games.
Nightreign will be released later this year on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Our next substantial Nightreign reveal will likely come with the network test in February.
