Nightreign’ Has Some Very Big Problems And No Easy Fixes

Elden Ring: Nightreign is a major departure from the games we’ve come to expect out of Japanese developer FromSoftware. It takes the basic gameplay from hit action-RPG Elden Ring and turns it into a brisk, multiplayer roguelite with Battle Royale mechanics, though no player-vs-player combat.

For fans of Elden Ring, there’s much to love about the game. Tough boss fights. Some really cool new enemies. The various heroes you can play as are much more varied than Elden Ring’s, with non-human characters to choose from. It’s also much more streamlined. Leveling up is a single action. You don’t need to tinker with stats at all. Inventory is also much more limited. It’s pure action with only a touch of RPG, as you and two companions fight your way through three days and nights of enemies and massive bosses, all while looting and leveling up in order to take on the third and final boss.

It’s incredibly punishing, especially for solo players, and yesterday’s patch took that into account, though it left the game’s biggest problems untouched. I’ll go over what I see as the main problems holding back Nightreign’s true potential, and why some of these might be harder to fix than others. I should note that yesterday’s big patch did nothing to address any of these issues.

First, we have the various glaring problems that everyone in the community has already talked about at length. The lack of a Duos mode means you can either play solo or try to matchmake with two other players. If you and a friend want to play, you’ll need a random third to accompany you. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a Trio at hand, you’re stuck with randoms, which in a game this challenging is far from ideal.

Voice chat is also missing, which isn’t a problem if you’re playing with friends using Discord or Xbox Game Chat or some other third-party solution. When I was playing with my son, we used Game Chat but our randoms were not part of the party.

Finally, there is no cross-play. Once upon a time, not having cross-play was the norm. Now, it’s almost unheard of in major multiplayer titles. It’s also incredibly limiting, making it even harder for people to put together a party with friends who may be playing on other platforms.

These are the big issues the Elden Ring community has already discussed at length. My problem with the gameplay loop, however, is less about what’s missing from the game’s multiplayer capabilities, and more about how it plays on a deeper, more fundamental level.

Nightreign drops players into a map with a big circle around the edges. This is a circle of blue fire that constricts as each Day passes. It’s effectively the same as the encroaching circles you’ll find in Battle Royale games like Fortnite and Warzone. Players are pushed inward toward the final circle as each Expedition progresses, ending with a big boss fight in the final circle’s random location.

While this works well in Battle Royale games, I dislike it intensely in Nightreign. Partly, this is because of a couple of very basic features that are missing: A clear timer that makes it easy for players to know when the circle is approaching, and a mini-map. The lack of a mini-map is brutal in all the wrong ways. I expect a Souls-like game to be challenging, but to suddenly have blue fire racing up on you while you’re almost done fighting a mini-boss or a dragon is more frustrating than anything.

On top of this, the pacing feels off. Matches feel too fast and frantic. I suppose this is probably because I’m so used to how Elden Ring plays, which is effectively at your own pace, but more than that it’s a combination of factors. The lack of clear indicators on the incoming circle, the difficulty of seeing where to go and where the circle is coming from, the fact that you’re often caught in the middle of something when the circle gets to you – it makes everything before you reach the boss fight a lot less rewarding than it could be.

This makes me question the very nature of the circles to begin with. These are useful in Battle Royale because they push competing players toward one another until they reach the end-game and the final shootout to determine a winner. In a PvE game, however, the utility of this mechanic is questionable at best. I’d prefer something else. Perhaps other things trigger the final fight, like players activating points on the map or defeating X number of mini-bosses. Even just a timer would work, giving players X number of minutes before the boss appears and then a countdown timer to engage with the boss, giving players enough time to reach the fight but a consequence if they don’t make it.

The circle would make a lot more sense if Nightreign were PvPvE, pitting multiple player squads against one another and against the enemies. On the other hand, perhaps something more akin to Destiny 2’s “Gambit” mode would make more sense here, with players given the option to invade an enemy team during a match, as two teams try to defeat the enemies in their own game before the other. A third option would be to have three teams enter the arena in the beginning, and only have the final boss spawn once only one team remained. The point is, I can see a lot of ways this could work better than an encroaching circle.

I doubt this will change, however, so adding more clear communication about the circle and a mini-map would go a really long ways to making matches more fun and less chaotic. The game is challenging enough. It doesn’t need to make navigation of the map and timer this much of a pain.

Finally, something must be done about player revives. To revive a downed player, you have to go up and thwack them with your weapon a few times. They’re on the ground, which means that they’re awkward to actually hit with a lot of the weapons. The hit boxes are clumsy without being able to lock-on. Reviving could be a simple interact button, or even interacting and then mashing the interact button until the revive meter was full. It could be any number of things – even special items – that would be less obnoxious than how it is in its current form.

As it stands, while I am enjoying Nightreign for what it is, a big part of me just wants to go play Elden Ring instead. I’d like to bring over some of the cool armor sets the heroes come with, and face off against some of the cool new monsters from this game, but I’d probably have more fun doing it in actual levels where I could explore and find secrets and do it all at my own chosen speed. Better yet, an official update to that game that allowed full-blown co-op (without a mod, and on console).

I also worry that Nightreign will quickly get very repetitive compared to the main game unless FromSoftware drops a ton of post-launch content. But a big part of me just doesn’t want one of my favorite game developers to become a live-service company, so I’m not sure I want this fix to begin with.

What are your thoughts on Nightreign so far?

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