Photo: FromSoftware, Inc.
I imagine that for most video-game designers, people having friends is a huge pain in the ass. Making a satisfying interactive experience for one person is hard enough. People are fickle and unpredictable; give them a rule and they’ll immediately try to break it. But asking multiple people to play together? As collaborators? The variables must be maddening.
Elden Ring Nightreign attempts to brave this challenge. A multiplayer spinoff of FromSoftware’s gorgeous, uncompromising Elden Ring, Nightreign is a strange attempt to transform a mostly solitary style of video game into something you do with friends. Something sessionable but not casual — because cooperating in previous FromSoftware games was about lightening the load. This one is about challenging the whole group. That’s kind of the problem: Nightreign is a version of Elden Ring you can play with people you hang out with, but playing it is the opposite of hanging out.
On a very basic level, Nightreign is Elden Ring by way of Fortnite, a mad dash across a shrinking map to procure the best weapons and resources possible before a grand-finale boss fight. It’s a pretty simple pitch. Playing Nightreign, however, is not so simple. Even just learning how the game is structured is a bit of a homework assignment. Here is what it looks like, as briefly as I can manage:
A match (“Expedition” in the game’s parlance) consists of three ten-to-15-minute rounds called “days.” The first two are familiar to anyone who has played a battle-royal game like PUBG: Battlegrounds or the aforementioned Fortnite — a ring of fire begins to envelop the map you’re exploring, shunting you and your two companions into a smaller and smaller ring until there is nothing left but a boss and the space to fight them in. But this is not the boss you are here to fight. The big boss is called a “Nightlord,” and to even face them, you have to survive a second “day” with another boss at the end of it before a portal opens up and takes you to “day” three and your actual quarry. Of course, along the way, you are encouraged to find other bosses still, because killing them will net you the best stuff — stuff you’ll want to fight the Nightlord. It’s bosses all the way down, a nightmare of middle management.
Technically, you can find much of this information in the game, in a “Visual Codex” tucked away in the menus. However, it’s on you to seek it out — the only in-game instruction you get is a simple tutorial establishing how the game differs from Elden Ring in small but important ways, and that’s it. You’re off to do whatever it is you do in Nightreign. There is no downtime save for the moment it takes for the ring to reset between days one and two and a tranquil lobby right before the final Nightlord fight on day three. Barring these blips for catching your breath, Nightreign demands your full attention for the entirety of a 30-to-45-minute expedition.
That is quite a lot of time for a battle-royal game, especially one with such a high skill floor as Nightreign. The ticking clock of the shrinking map is a constant stress, and the expectation that players constantly seek out challenging boss fights in that time constraint adds even more pressure. And, this being a FromSoftware game, a studio (in)famous for punishing difficulty, you can fail at any step along the way. You’re expected to, even — failures will still net you rewards that can be used to improve one of eight playable characters, making your next run a better one. Still, the game is a Big Ask and demands that its players be locked in.
I, however, play most multiplayer video games with a bunch of yahoos. It’s not that my friends are incapable of rapidly assembling a killer Nightreign character build, one well optimized to the task at hand and complementing one another’s playstyles; it’s just that they choose not to. They boo loudly when a game introduces more than three numbers and boo even more loudly when none of those numbers tells us who is winning. And they’re right: Why should we spend our limited time hanging out meeting KPIs? For a video game? Be serious. We are the opposite of locked in.
It’s possible that I’m wrong here, that even this bunch of yahoos can be inspired to rise to meet an interesting challenge. It’s just that the pleasures of Elden Ring stem from the downtime, the tinkering, the fact that you can solve problems in a multiplicity of ways. The original game even already lets you call friends in for a sufficiently difficult challenge. While Nightreign has its share of mysteries and little quirks to discover as you play (or, more realistically, Google), the majority of the time, the game is pushing you to scramble, in a desperate rush to distill the complete Elden Ring experience — going from frail wimp to capable hero as you explore a land of danger and mystery — into endlessly repeatable 30-to-45-minute chunks. And your experience of that can vary wildly based on whom you play with.
I played Nightreign in just about every configuration I could during the limited prerelease period in which I had access to it. Like a restaurant critic, I adopted an alias (“james cameron”) and matched up with strangers. I felt lost and embarrassed. People seemed to know what to do, and I did not. After that, I played a bit solo and was humbled in the way that every FromSoftware game humbles players, only with the knowledge that the game wasn’t designed for me to go off and do reps and come back better. (You can come back a coward, tediously, wrestling the game into submission in a war of attrition. But that’s no fun, and it takes forever.) I gave it a whirl with my usual crew, and we were perplexed, but having fun, while achieving zero goals. And then I had a very focused, productive session with a PR rep working on the game and another reviewer, who were both quite good, and while it was nice to see what an ideal match looked like, I attribute none of its success to myself. I was a spectator carried by my teammates and, frankly, a little worn out.
As a critic given early access to the game, I was provided with a bunch of tips and general guidance that you will not receive. I was told things that players are meant to learn for themselves, and I learned that Nightreign is a game that lives or dies based on familiarity — a successful expedition depends on at least one member of a trio being conversant enough with the game’s quirks to guide the others, or an assembled trio must be familiar enough with one another to quickly adapt to the game’s challenges. Many years of FromSoftware games have shown that community does form around them, and it’s very likely that a large pool of experienced players will be happy to guide newbies through the game’s many challenges. It stands to reason that you could play the whole game matching with strangers and, with a little patience and trial and error, get through it just fine.
But I’ve come to think of Nightreign as a game really designed for the same crew to play over and over. If Elden Ring — and the many FromSoftware games in its lineage — is about individual improvement, about experimenting with playstyles and adjusting your way of thinking until a brick wall becomes brittle before finally crumbling, then Nightreign is about improving as a team. That’s where the pleasure lies: not in defeating its many bosses but with whom you are defeating them.
Watch us yahoos take ’em all. Or play another game. It’s late on a Wednesday, and Nightreign is kind of a lot.
