Summary
- The first trailer for Elden Ring Nightreign confirmed that it brings back bosses from Dark Souls.
- That, combined with some other familiar elements, has made fans wonder what’s going on to make it a shared universe.
- Nightreign’s director has explained that it’s partly due to wanting more bosses for the game, but also simply because it’s “fun”.
Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki says that the game’s inclusion of bosses from Dark Souls, such as the Centipede Demon, was to make sure it had enough bosses and because he thought it’d be “fun”.
Following the unbelievably successful launch of Elden Ring in 2022 and its even better expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, last year, no one had a clue what FromSoftware might be working on next. While sequels to Bloodborne or Sekiro seemed like good guesses, no one would have bet that the studio was working on a co-op roguelite spin-off of Elden Ring.
Related
Elden Ring Nightreign Includes A Few Dark Souls Bosses
The Nameless King is a gimme, but did you spot the other two?
And yet, that’s exactly what we’re getting with Elden Ring Nightreign, which looks very different from what we’d expect from the creators of Dark Souls. Well, that isn’t quite the case for every aspect of the game, as there are actually a ton of similar elements from previous FromSoft games, including the bosses.
Elden Ring Nightreign Director Explains The Inclusion Of Dark Souls Bosses
We’ve already highlighted a ton of the features from old FromSoft games that are present in Elden Ring Nightreign (such as the climbable walls being marked with white paint like Sekiro), but the bosses are big dogs for sure. We’ve already seen the Centipede Demon, Nameless King, and a hint at The Duke in Nightreign’s footage so far, leaving fans to wonder what the heck is going on.
Elden Ring and Dark Souls fans have been theorising that Nightreign might be part of a larger connected FromSoft world for some time now, but the answer is actually a lot more simple than you might think. Gamespot’s Tamoor Hussain had the chance to talk to Nightreign’s director, Junya Ishizaki, and asked him what the returning bosses meant for the game.
Ishizaki explained that there are two reasons for their inclusion. The first is that, from a gameplay perspective, Nightreign needed a lot of different bosses, which made going back to the FromSoft vaults a good idea. Ishizaki notes that adjustments were made to them to make them fit into Elden Ring’s universe so they “felt at home”.
We obviously understand that our players have a lot of affection for these characters and they have a lot of fond memories of battling them in these games, so we didn’t want to encroach too much on that lore aspect. We wanted them to make sense within the atmosphere and vibe of Elden Ring Nightreign. – Junya Ishizaki
The next, and simpler, reason is because Ishizaki simply thought that including older FromSoft bosses in Elden Ring Nightreign would be “kind of fun”. That suggests there’s not really a deeper lore reason to it, but we won’t know for certain until the game releases on May 30.
Action RPG
Soulslike
Roguelite
Next
The People Who Would Love Elden Ring Nightreign The Most Probably Won’t Play It
Elden Ring Nightrein is the most and least FromSoftware game ever, which makes it a weird one to market.