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Elden Ring: Nightreign will support singleplayer, but it might not reward itFromSoftware seem mighty keen on this “co-operative multiplayer” concept
FromSoftware seem mighty keen on this “co-operative multiplayer” concept
Image credit:Bandai Namco
Image credit:Bandai Namco
Great was the adulation last week when FromSoftwareannounced a new Elden Ring game,Elden Ring: Nightreign- and great the lamentation from certain quarters when it was revealed to be a co-op-focussed experience. If you missed the reveal, perhaps because you value sleep overthe spectacle of Geoff Keighley’s fashion friends, let me catch you up: in Nightreign, you pick one of eight preset characters and explore a parallel-universe version ofElden Ring’s Limgrave map, fighting lesser foes and levelling up quickly so that you can battle a boss at the end of each 15-minute in-game day.
The immediate good news is that you can play Nightreign both alone and offline. During solo play, the game also scales down enemy health pools, and there’s no PvP invader element to interfere with your meanderings.
Beyond that, though, the picture grows muddled. According to Ishizaki, Nightreign is very much co-op-first. It’s balanced primarily around three-player teams (somewhat arbitrarily, there’s no two-player support), this being the “sweet spot” that avoids Nightreign becoming “too overwhelming or too busy”, with players splitting up to farm the map and reuniting at sunset.
It’s also missing certain key handholds for solo Ringers. For one thing, there are no Spirit Ash items to let you summon helpful NPCs, though according to Ishizaki, one of the preset heroes does have “a sort of spiritual buddy as a gameplay mechanic”.
If the above has you down in the dumps, the best news of all is that Nightreign won’t necessarily be the first of many multiplayer-centric games. “We don’t really have a plan in terms of, oh we’re going to make more spin-offs or this is going to be a one-off time one-time thing,” Ishizaki told IGN. “This was purely sort of happenstance of me wanting to direct my own game and wanting to use Elden Ring and that battle design that I took part in as a base to this game, and my interest in online co-op games as well.”
