'Nightreign' Let Down the Souls-Like Fanbase

Ever since Elden Ring came out in February of 2022, it has brought a lot of attention and love towards the souls-like RPG side of gaming. For anyone unfamiliar with the term “souls-like,” it refers to role-playing games that rely on the idea of “high risk, high reward” and usually are incredibly difficult, despite having checkpoints. It originated with FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series (hence the name) and has expanded into games such as Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring. Elden ring changed the formula by giving players much more freedom instead of forcing them to follow a strict, linear storyline.

A spinoff from Elden Ring has been released recently, and that would mean that it would be of exquisite quality, right? The idea behind it was original and sounds amazing on paper, but it was not executed well. Nightreign’s main concept is that it keeps the difficulty of elden ring bossfights, but it is now a run-based game. Matches consist of three days (not 72 hours, the sun just comes up thrice), in which the first two days are for exploring the map, finding resources, and preparing for day 3. On day 3, one of 8 harrowingly difficult bosses is chosen randomly to spawn and must be defeated in order to finish the match.

Now, before anyone reading this rushes to buy themselves a copy, it is important to first recognize all of the issues with the game. It is mainly a co-op game, which means that if any player’s friends do not have the game or are always busy, they will be matched with three other random players. They could also play the solo mode, but apparently it is a nightmare in terms of balancing. Ted Litchfield, a writer at PCGamer, states that “Nightreign's singleplayer experience elevates all the game's flaws to their maximum annoyance level.” he also mentions earlier in the article that he much prefers singleplayer in souls-like games, calling himself “Mr. Antisocial Souls⁠.” if the singleplayer experience is so bad that a dedicated singleplayer enthusiast much prefers playing the game with other people, that probably means that players seeking a singleplayer experience should not seek it from this game. Multiple balancing updates were made to the game, but they did not really change the overall experience.

According to Dalton Cooper, a writer at GameRant, most players that were skeptical about the game and got it requested refunds, so that would mean that anyone interested should only buy the game if they are a complete Elden Ring devotee. Some long-time fans of FromSoftware’s games have also refunded Nightreign (or at least have tried to), and considering FromSoftware’s reputation when it comes to releasing good games, the amount of people that have refunded the game is quite surprising.

Like with most co-op based games, leaving a match early could compromise the experience of a player’s teammates, and the game is aware of that. It warns of a possible penalty when backing out of a multiplayer match, but the issue resides in the fact that if all four members back out, they are all warned about the quitting penalty. Isaac Rouse from Polygon tells a personal anecdote about this issue. He was playing with his friends when the game started glitching out and the matchmaking stopped working properly. When they finally got into a match, they decided that they wanted to quit and make a new one. That was when they “learned there’s no clean way to quit a match without risking a penalty.” This penalty happens to be getting multiplayer access revoked. They, reasonably, didn’t want to risk this, so they tried to coordinate synchronized dying, as that is how one ends a game. They failed three times, and ended up just quitting, but the game had other plans for them. It sent them “straight into the ring of fire, pun intended.” This is only one example of the lack of quality of life features in the game, but the fact that it can get this bad is enough to discourage most players from buying the game.

Truthfully, it does not matter whether or not you like the game, what really matters is the fact that FromSoftware used their (and Elden Ring’s) reputation to market a game that was not at all up to the expectations they had set. It is only one bad game, but if it gets even half of the amount of success that Elden Ring got, it may falsely assure its developers that players do not care about the quality of a game, and will buy it anyway because it has been so embellished by advertising. It is too early to say that this has already happened, but if the next FromSoftware game is as below-par as this one, we know what happened.