Elden Ring Nightreign has a glaring problem, the players

Elden Ring: Nightreign has been a successful venture for FromSoftware and Bandai Namco. It’s delivered a familiar soulslike experience and reinterpreted it as a roguelike, and it’s very enjoyable.

I had a good time reviewing the game with colleagues and even more so following the game’s launch with friends, but I have one massive issue with the game, I hate queuing up with randoms.

Elden Ring: Nightreign supports either one player or three players, there’s currently no option to run duos but FromSoftware has confirmed it’ll look into it with a post-launch update.

This means your options include; playing alone, playing with two random players, playing with a friend + a random player or playing with two friends. The latter option is the definitive way to play the game, and the one you should be aiming for if you can.

Here’s the thing though, in my adult life I’ve learnt that it’s very difficult to organise a game night for yourself let alone with two other people so if you prefer to play with people you actually know like I do it’s not easy. When friends haven’t been available I’ve hopped into a few matches with other players and have honestly found the experience miserable for a few reasons…

The first reason is the reluctance I’ve seen to adapt to Nightreign’s play-style… It’s a roguelike with a time limit and you need to do a lot of exploration and boss slaying in a short amount of time for the best chance of progressing to the next phase. This means calculating the optimal route through the map and knowing when to leave certain bosses alone, whether they’re too high of a level or won’t drop enough runes to be worth the hassle.

Bandai Namco

From my experience though the players have a hard time letting a boss go. They’re Elden Ring players after all, they’re more than used to throwing themselves at a boss over and over again, learning their patterns and eventually landing that sweet, sweet killing blow. That’s not the way to play Nightreign though, and spending too much time stubbornly trying to kill one boss isn’t going to do you any favours in the long run but the players I’ve been partying up with have struggled to understand that. I’ve seen so many players hurl themselves at a Draconic Tree Sentinel and Magma Wyrm to no avail, when they could have been using that time to fight bosses worth pursuing then coming back later.

Combine this with the fact that Nightreign essentially has the longest boss runbacks of any souls game and it gets really annoying when you could have had a decent build by the end of a playthrough, if your teammates had played ball.

It’s clear many players are finding it hard to shake the classic Elden Ring mindset of “if it bleeds, we can kill it.” In the Elden Ring you have all the time in the world to try, and try, and try again but you get no such luxury in Nightreign. I’m hoping it’s something that’ll change as time goes on but I’m not holding my breath.

What Elden Ring: Nightreign really needs is the option to play as a duo. The game scales the difficulty slightly when you’re playing by yourself so it can do the same for two people.

Right now I’m content with waiting for two of my friends to be available to play, but if I really want to invest over one hundred hours in the game something is going to have to change, either the amount of players I can take with me or player mentality in general.