FromSoftware shocked us all by announcing Elden Ring: Nightreign at The Game Awards, a new standalone game set in the Elden Ring universe, and thanks to our friends at PC Gamer we know more about the three-player co-op roguelike.
PC Gamer went to Tokyo for some hands-on time with the upcoming game (I’m not jealous, you’re jealous) and an interview with its director, Junya Ishizaki. Elden Ring: Nightreign is a co-op roguelike adventure set in a parallel version of the Lands Between that changes each time you play. There’s no character creator; instead, you choose from several heroes and clear levels while avoiding a “battle royale-style wall of deadly rain” that closes in on you. You’ll have to survive two days of the game’s cycle, with a boss to fight each night and a chosen big bad you face at the end of each “30-ish minute run.”
For those of you worried that FromSoftware is jumping on the live service bandwagon, you can breathe a sigh of relief. “We wanted to have a game that felt like a complete package out of the box on the day of purchase, so everything is unlockable… it’s not what we’d consider a live-service game,” Ishizaki says via interpreter.
The roguelike DNA shines through in the progression. Each run will award you with relics that you can equip to one of your heroes in future matches to buff their abilities, so don’t worry if you don’t get to the end. One gives your healing flask a group effect, PC Gamer found, restoring the health of your teammates.
The heroes are all different, functioning loosely like classes. The Duchess, for example, has a faster quickstep that replaces the dodge roll. It’s straight out of Bloodborne, and while I’m happy to see something from the ol’ eldritch action game, I still just want a sequel, man. The Duchess has another powerful ability that doubles the damage you and your team have just dealt to an enemy, and yes, it works with bleed procs. You can also customize your hero during rounds by finding Sites of Grace and equipping the new weapons and powers you’ll find as you fight and explore.
“The focus was condensing this experience down – the RPG elements, the exploration, the character building and leveling. We wanted that to feel like it was all coming together and culminating in a boss fight but in a more concentrated form,” Ishizaki explains.
Not unlike a MOBA, you start off at level one and have to explore and defeat weak enemies to get stronger and stand a chance against the deadly bosses of the night. Sites of Grace function much like they do in Elden Ring, allowing you to refill your flasks and increase your stats. Unlike Elden Ring, all your stats get upgraded at once, so you don’t need to slow down and decide how to invest – it’s more like going up a class rank.
Asked how he’d respond to the idea that Nightreign is just a combination of popular elements from topical games, Ishizaki said: “For this new sense of accomplishment that you wouldn’t quite find with Elden Ring or our previous titles, we felt like we needed some new mechanics and some new elements to add into that mix. We’ve never really held the stance, ‘let’s absolutely not do anything that other companies are doing or not follow any trends.’ So we didn’t really see this as chasing a trend, but we saw these as interesting elements that could work well within our multiplayer-focused session-based gameplay.”
As for the bosses, you may want to consider being part of a team rather than going solo, synergizing abilities and communicating to make sure you can succeed. That said, solo play is fully supported. If you’re worried about the game getting repetitive, there are evidently “large-scale changes to terrain in the form of procedurally appearing volcanos or swamps or forests,” per Ishizaki. It wouldn’t be a FromSoftware game without a poison swamp, now would it?
For everything else revealed tonight, check out our live coverage of The Game Awards 2024.