If I were a betting man, Elden Ring Nightreign would have cost me a lot of money. After all, who could have predicted FromSoftware‘s next game would be a co-op multiplayer roguelike survival game with battle royale elements – and an Elden Ring spin-off, no less?
But that’s exactly what FromSoftware rolled up to The Game Awards 2024 and revealed. If a studio with just a modicum less prestige than FromSoftware announced this sort of pivot, they would have been laughed out of the room and accused of the industry’s cardinal sin: Trend-Chasing. But my initial read on Elden Ring Nightreign is that there’s a lot of promise here already, and if FromSoftware can get a handle on its long-running issues with multiplayer, it could have a real winner on its hands.
Summon signs
Perhaps Elden Ring Nightreign’s reveal trailer doesn’t help itself, with its characters gliding Fortnite-style into The Lands Between. But the more I’ve read about Nightreign, the more I’ve fallen hopelessly for it. The challenge and grit of a Soulslike – from the genre’s founding studio, no less – condensed into a brutal three days and nights that players merely have to try and survive? Having to survive in a shrinking zone, and beating a boss every single night, just to keep going? Un-furl that finger and summon me in immediately.
Some features, like choosing between preset classes with their own abilities, feel like bigger risks. And for as much trust as I have in FromSoftware’s vision, I don’t think it’s an infallible studio. Nightreign is the biggest creative risk the developer has taken since Demon’s Souls, its first shot at applying itself to a genre it doesn’t already lord over. But Elden Ring’s open world was itself an unknown quantity from a studio renowned for creating tight, linear hellscapes – and look how that turned out.
From a less faith-based perspective, I think there’s a real appetite for what Nightreign is offering. Modded randomizer runs have been turning the likes of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring into homemade roguelikes for years. These mods shake up the spawns for bosses, items, and enemies in a way that would give most Soulslike fans heart palpitations, but their popularity is undeniable – I’ve seen more randomized Elden Ring streams than regular playthroughs on Twitch, and these mods have helped keep older titles like Dark Souls in the spotlight for ages.
If FromSoftware can get its jolly co-operation in order, the thought of an Elden Ring roguelike is pretty damn hard to beat
Even beyond FromSoftware’s own wheelhouse, 2024 has proven that there’s a real appetite for well-made co-op games. Helldivers 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, arguably the only big-budget games of 2024 to dramatically over-deliver in their developers’ eyes, both defied competitive multiplayer trends by finding success with PvE formats, giving players a common enemy to fight. Perhaps we just love killing weird, chitinous aliens – but, I’d also wager, we’ve had a long-enough break from co-op shooters that absence has made the heart grow fonder. Big-budget co-op has been left on the shelf for awhile, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see more developers start embracing PvE once again – especially if FromSoftware can make it work with a multiplayer-first roguelike, a genre with remarkably less precedent for success.
But all of this comes with a big, glaring caveat. Multiplayer functionality has been FromSoftware’s weakest link for years, with its issues ranging from iffy netcode to consistently convoluted co-op. I’ve still got painful memories of playing through Dark Souls 3 with two friends in 2018, and having to ask “have you put your summon sign down?” enough times to crack the strongest of psyches. Likewise, I was – not to toot my own horn – very bloody good at winning round after round in players’ unofficial fight clubs, but the hoops you had to jump through to take part were wild considering how big a part they played in the community.
Elden Ring was equally disappointing in that its co-op summons were broken up into smaller areas, which meant having to download a seamless co-op mod to play with friends properly. Likewise, bosses – although easier than ever to summon in help for – could rarely handle being piled-on, and weren’t effectively balanced around fighting multiple players.
Historically, FromSoftware has been given a pass on all of this because multiplayer isn’t really the focus of its games. Nightreign changes that pecking order, and it’ll be hard for the studio to take home a win if its foundations don’t work. But if FromSoftware can get its jolly co-operation in order, the thought of an Elden Ring roguelike is pretty damn hard to beat – and if I can shield-bash my friends into the depths of a poison swamp, you can be damn sure I’ll be playing Nightreign from day one.
There’s an Elden Ring Nightreign network test coming in February, so we won’t have long to wait before diving in ourselves