Before Elden Ring Nightreign Even Releases, It’s Clear What Will Make or Break It

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home March 8, 2025 52 Views 6 Min Read
Before Elden Ring Nightreign Even Releases, It’s Clear What Will Make or Break It

Although it looks extremely promising, it’s hard to say that Elden Ring Nightreign is a predictable FromSoftware release. The upcoming co-op roguelike seemingly stands in fundamental opposition to much of what the famed studio is known for: bespoke, tightly organized, single-player experiences like those of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and, of course, Elden Ring itself.

FromSoftware has made it clear that Elden Ring Nightreign can be enjoyed solo, but its central identity as a cooperative multiplayer game might still raise some eyebrows. In Nightreign, players can assume one of several character archetypes, each with pre-baked stats and abilities that can be augmented or improved over the course of a given run. This roster features the expected FromSoftware weirdness (one character is an inexplicable bird-human hybrid, for instance), but it mostly seems to adhere to traditional action-RPG classes like mage, tank, and rogue. This swing at character synergy within a co-op framework begs an essential question: will Elden Ring Nightreign actually be fun to play solo?

Elden Ring Nightreign’s DLC Will Have as High of a Bar to Clear as the Base Game

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Elden Ring Nightreign’s DLC Will Have as High of a Bar to Clear as the Base Game

While DLC for Elden Ring Nightreign sounds like an obvious move, it invites comparisons to Shadow of the Erdtree as well as Elden Ring.

Why Elden Ring Nightreign’s Solo Mode Will Be Important

Potential Issues Facing Elden Ring Nightreign’s Solo Gameplay

Looking at FromSoftware’s past work, specifically those games with co-op functionality of some sort, they are clearly intended to be single-player experiences first and foremost. Players have free rein, more or less, to craft their avatar however they see fit, slipping into a hand-wrought playstyle that works for them, informed by so many hours of gameplay.

A similar sort of player-avatar connection will no doubt be mirrored in Elden Ring Nightreign, though it will likely have fundamental differences. For instance, a player may prefer the Recluse, the mage archetype, and master this particular playstyle over several runs. But Nightreign, presumably, is meant to be equally enjoyable and challenging regardless of character choice, meaning that playing exclusively as the Recluse would be akin to missing out on the lion’s share of the game’s content.

A possible counter to this point would be to compare Nightreign to Elden Ring itself: one could argue that it’s impossible to experience all of Elden Ring‘s content in a single playthrough due to build variety, similar to how a single playthrough of Nightreign as one character is an incomplete experience.

More pressing is the multifaceted problem of balancing. Simply put, if Nightreign is primarily designed to be played in co-op, it could quickly become unfairly difficult for solo players. This is a potential problem not easily remedied by simple damage and hit point scaling, as key factors like boss and encounter design would need to be tweaked for single-player vs. multiplayer runs. For instance, a room filled with a dozen enemies attacking simultaneously in multiplayer would have to be depopulated for a single-player run, lest it become an overly hectic, frustrating barrier. One only needs to look at co-op games like Helldivers 2 to see how solo players can run into these sorts of impassible conundrums.

Why Elden Ring Nightreign Having Strong Single Player Is Important

A particularly ardent co-op supporter may brush off the aforementioned concerns. After all, Nightreign is meant to be a multiplayer game, so why would anyone expect the single-player mode to be up to snuff? If anything, it’s simply nice that such a single-player mode even exists.

There are several possible rebuttals to such an argument, but an appeal to pragmatism may be best: at the end of the day, FromSoftware is known for its single-player games. The majority of Elden Ring Nightreign players will be returning Elden Ring fans, and with most of them presumably favoring the single-player gameplay the developer has staked its reputation on, alienating them through a poorly balanced solo mode could spell trouble for Nightreign‘s commercial success, regardless of its quality otherwise.

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