Where’re we dropping, boys? Elden Ring players have joked about “Fort, Night” on the many messages they have left in game with strong approvals, and here we are, FromSoftware releasing Elden Ring Nightreign. The second Elden Ring release in two years, and continuing a streak of one release per year since 2022.
FromSoft is running hot. And they’re striking this hot iron that is Elden Ring with a multiplayer game.
One could easily perceive Elden Ring Nightreign as a trend-chaser, jumping on gold rush of live service where you either go big or go bust, when only a few got big and many went bust. Or worse, a soulless cash-grab.
But even with the cobbled together repurposed assets and an online infrastructure held up with duct tape, a spaghetti mess of wires that are barely holding on and the prayers of one devout network engineer, Elden Ring Nightreign manages to create a one-of-its-kind multiplayer experience. Most, if not all, of the mechanics you see in this multiplayer title comes from either Elden Ring itself, or the many genre trends of modern gaming that it’s inspired from. Yet, it coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts. So long as you’re not stuck in matchmaking purgatory, that is.
Presentation
Elden Ring Nightreign, rather unsurprisingly, looks like Elden Ring. Like, a lot. In that a lot of these assets feel like they’re directly lifted from that game to be plopped into one map. Every time I go into a camp, or a sorcerer’s tower, a Church Of Marika, or an ancient ruin, it all feels eerily familiar. I’ve been here before, I played Elden Ring. You’ll even see multiple locations that dots the map of Limveld being a copy paste, with slight variations of what enemy lurks there.
And it’s not just the environment. A lot of the enemies, weapons and items are lifted straight out of Elden Ring. Some are even lifted from past FromSoft soulslikes, there are bosses from the three Dark Souls games making a cameo. And I swear that deflect sound effect from an Executor’s Cursed Blade was taken from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
Not that there’s nothing new in Nightreign, there are still fun surprises to behold, but expect a lot of reused assets in the game. It’s not lazy, given the short turnaround time from announcement to release (and their packed release schedule) it’s safe to assume Nightreign’s development was done at rapid speed. And this is just them working smart. Think of it as using leftover Thanksgiving turkey dinner to make a casserole the day after. Or using those leftover rice to make fried rice the next morning. It’s not inherently wrong to do this, especially the leftovers were already excellently cooked food to begin with.
Performance can be a hit-or-miss on consoles. On base PS5, the prioritise frame-rate setting does its best to run at 60 FPS (as my eyes perceive it) but it does regularly drop to a choppy sub-20-ish frames. And yet, there’s a good amount of destruction that can happen in the many outposts dotted around Limveld. Those military camps, in particular. You can demolish the whole thing down in messier encounters, which really adds to the experience, that you’re just three people wrecking havoc on a time limit.
Nightreign does carry a new UI, rather than carrying over from Elden Ring directly. Given the game’s pacing here, it makes sense for the UI to be more streamlined. The map is workable, with a ping system to allow some coordination between random players.
Sound and music-wise, Nightreign is still top-notch. Even if I can’t tell if the music’s new or lifted from a previous FromSoftware soundtrack, they all sound as grandiose, epic, and slightly eerie as you’d expect from an Elden Ring game.
That said, due to the nature of the game, it can feel a bit overwhelming. Well, a lot, actually. With dozens of enemies spawning, a towering boss doing some sick-ass move as you struggle to parse what are all the sound and visual effects popping off (is it an enemy attack or your buddy’s sick-ass ability they got randomly?) it can be information overload. So do be weary of this. Nightreign is a higher, stronger dose of Elden Ring.
Overall, Elden Ring Nightreign manages to match the high bar Elden Ring set. Sure, it does by repurposing a lot of Elden Ring assets, but the fact that this multiplayer title with a large open map where you can somehow aggro dozens of enemies into one place and still have it not have too terrible of a performance drop is impressive. The performance isn’t perfect, but it’s mostly playable, at least on PS5.
Gameplay
Elden Ring Nightreign is FromSoftware’s take on a multiplayer title for Elden Ring, with the focus on co-op play. And they’ve done by incorporating various elements of game design and mechanics that’s been in the zeitgeist. And if you’re unfamiliar, let me run you down the specifics:
- Predefined characters with specific stats, skills and kit (a character skill and ultimate attack) ala hero shooters such as Overwatch
- One big map with plenty of hot spots but gets smaller as time goes due to a looming circle of death (outside the circle is a night rain that’ll slowly kill you) ala battle royales such as Fortnite
- Hot-spots contain loot in the form of weapons, trinkets and items that can be picked up and discarded and are not instanced per player ala extraction games such as Escape From Tarkov
- Clearing hot-spots by defeating bosses or tough enemies grants you a pick-one-of-three (sometimes one-of two) random drops that can be in the form of buffs, weapons, or stat boosts ala any typical roguelike
- Per-match character progression with levels where tempo is important and a 40-60 minute match/run length ala MOBAs such as Dota 2
Combine all this using Elden Ring assets and gameplay and behold, Fort, Night!
But Nightreign hasn’t taken those disparate ideas on face value. There fundamental tweaks to create this specific vision the devs had for a multiplayer Elden Ring game. For one, there’s no PVP, only PVE. It’s the three of you (or just you, if you’re that bold) against the enemies dotted around Limveld.
At first, it feels too open-ended and unclear what do you have to do to. And add time limit (which you don’t see the exact timer ticking, but you can tell by how much daylight is gone for the day) and it becomes tense.
Give it like 10 runs or so and you’ll be like any sweaty comp player in a battle royale. This isn’t a leisurely 3D2N trip to Limveld with your homies (or matchmade randos). This is an intense vacation rush where you have no time to dilly-dally and have to stick to an itenary, and at least one of the three has to have said itenary in mind, or at least know how to point a location on the map, and lead the way. And that intensity is less of a jolly fun outing with the bros and more like having to cram study for the final exam, and there’s a chance that all exercises you completed, the prep you did for the Final Day will go all for naught. Sometimes by chance (there’s no poison camps when we supposed to fight a Nightlord weak to poison!). Sometimes by poor planning. Sometimes, it’s that one person died mid-match during a crucial field boss fight the team engaged in and that snowballed into a washed run.
It’s not that you can’t make any mistakes. It’s just that the mistakes will compoundly be punishing the longer in the run you are. You drop all your runes and lose one level when you die, which doesn’t seem that bad since you can get back the runes, but the opportunity cost of clearing one more outpost or kill another field boss for that sweet pick-one-of-three random drop is lost because of one of you didn’t lock the hell in. And it’ll bite you come exam time, should you even make it that far, that is. You and your team must snowball yourself if you ever to succeed in Nightreign, as any setback and loss of momentum in the mid-game will greatly affect your chance in the final boss fight.
Is Nightreign hard? It would be sacrilege if it wasn’t. This is the game series from the developer that makes its stance clear that difficulty is not an option you can tweak at an options menu, but something you can adjust via getting the right gameplay bonuses.
But we shouldn’t be discussing it in the form of difficulty. As I always say, soulslikes aren’t hard, they’re punishing.
And in that regard, Nightreign is even more punishing in that you have one shot at the end-of-day bosses per run. When the squad wipes, that’s game over. Run’s done. Start back from scratch. For those who beat soulslikes through perseverance—by attempting the same boss fight over and over until it is done—this is real pain.
As someone who gotten into soulslikes rather late, and only played Elden Ring after it won way too many Game Of The Year Awards, I come to play each session knowing that I’ll end up being the deadweight in a random trio most of the time. So fumbling the last boss of a run over and over is more or less expected.
The Nightlords can be really, really punishing. There was a run where we got through the days and nights without problems but basically died within five minutes of a Gaping Jaw because we all got caught into that wide, gaping jaw of that monster that could fit into a Monster Hunter’s monster roster. That attack can be dodged, the power of i-frames remains absolute. But we were caught lacking.
And of course, this particular Nightlord gets all aggressive and starts throwing temper tantrums one after another in its second phase, forcing everyone to get out of dodge and adjust how to approach them and get those final few hits. Because you never want to get a squad wipe when the boss has literally one pixel of a health bar left. It’s agony, I tell you.
So more often than not, most players will come out short in the final boss fight, forcing them to go back and do the 40-minute grind for another chance.
Not all fights are like this, though, having beaten four of the eight Nightlords available at launch, Gaping Jaw is the exception rather than the norm. These are all-new bosses, not rehashes, and they all have unique gimmicks that make their fight spectacular. At least one of them plays like a boss in a raid where you have to figure out mechanics to deal damage to what seems like an enemy that can never be reached with a melee weapon.
If you love how grandiose, epic and absolutely terrifying the proper bosses of FromSoft soulslikes have been, you love the Nightlords. Some of these are truly breathtaking fights thanks to beautiful skyboxes, ridiculous attack patterns and how rewarding it feels to finally surpass what looked like an insurmountable challenge. But it is a pain that you have to repeat the 40-minute prep of a new run if you fumble at the last hurdle, and have to grind your way to earn another shot at the Nightlord fight.
Thankfully, the grind is pretty fun. With the right team, you can clear out outposts quick, coordinate where to go and improvise plans should the circle closes in toward an area against your initial plan. If you love the looting aspects in a battle royale or an extraction game, Nightreign offers a similar experience. Elden Ring and its expansion already have a long list of weapons and all of them are repurposed as loot. It’s wild that one can be excited for getting a Rivers Of Blood to drop, or even wilder, two Rivers Of Bloods. But given how many weapons that are in Elden Ring, I can see this being quite the information overload for those who don’t know Elden Ring inside out, or somehow played Nightreign first before Nightreign. So at least they are coloured in rarity.
And since Elden Ring has so many weapons types that have different movesets, it makes it perfect for them to be randomised loot drops. You could get lucky and get only katanas or whatever your preferred weapon type, or be so unlucky that you have to stick to the starter weapon until the end of the run. Imagine getting a Legendary baby rattler when you’re not even playing a sorcery character like a Recluse or Duchess.
So it’s nice that every weapon drop also has a random passive attached to it, some of which triggers just by having them in your slot. Don’t mind the Executor holding multiple giant hammers in their inventory when they clearly don’t have the stats to use them effectively. It could be that they have buffs like improved Attack Power when wielding a weapon two-handed, for example. And these little buffs add up and stack, as you need every advantage you have to press through the two mandatory boss fight at the end of each night, and the Nightlord waiting at the end of the run. I swear the multiple non-katanas I picked up in my Executor run with buffs towards stance-breaking, as well as a passive that made me less targeted, sealed the team many good chances in that one run. I may not be good at dodging boss attacks, but I like to believe that my effort in engaging with the loot system was rewarded. Buildcrafters can have fun, too.
And that’s another thing, Nightreign might be the first time any regular soulslike player tried a different playstyle that’s not a sword-and-shield combo. Elden Ring and past soulslikes do offer different playstyles, but for players like me who struggle to like the game to begin with until I figure out the fundamentals of blocking and dodging attacks this combat system relies heavily on, we probably too scared to branch out and try magic or use bows.
Nightreign’s pre-built characters allows players to experience Elden Ring in a different way, and engage with the content they otherwise skip over. Being able to not manage aggro all the time during boss fights is a whole different game for me, and I finally get to play it as someone else in the team is on tanking duty. I never give thought to the katanas in Elden Ring, as I was too deep into my strength-faith build using colossal weapons, greatshields and incantations. So being able to just zoom in, get one good combo and dodge out with a high chance of proccing status effect by playing Executor has let me explore more aspects of Elden Ring’s breadth of content. Yes, Elden Ring Nightreign is built with tons of reused assets and content, but how much of it have you actually engage with directly? For me, barely much, so it still feels like a whole new game. Albeit a familiar one.
But with what I assume a short development time also meant that Nightreign had to carry over quirks and esoteric qualities of its foundation. And most unfortunately, the online infrastructure. It’s 2025, and we have a highly-touted multiplayer game without cross-play, wild. There’s no server issues that stopped players from logging in on launch week, thankfully, but matchmaking was borked. A recent update seems to have alleviate the issue somewhat, but it is wild to see a 2025 game having network issues due to a PlayStation’s NAT Type. I understand these things take time and resources to develop, which we can assume the team was not afforded to, so it’s a shame that an online game has this rather archaic backbone tied to it.
And on the topic of quirks, now that I played a soulslike adjacent game with a good camera system, I can’t help but feel the jank that is Elden Ring’s lock-on system. The camera doesn’t frame the action well which left with many struggles of depth perception as I keep missing my sword swings. Changing targets feel finicky, it’s painful to adjust it when there’s so many ads on screen. And sometimes it just fail to work as intended, at least one Nightlord boss fight it’s better you don’t lock on or your character will home in to attack thin air instead of a long squishy tentacle thing it’s supposed to be locking on to.
All in all, Elden Ring Nightreign allows players familiar with Elden Ring to experience something different through a different, yet also familiar, set of gameplay mechanics and systems. The PVE battle royale-esque extraction-based roguelike runs have cobbled together into something that you don’t really get in any other multiplayer game, despite all these mechanics and systems not being entirely brand-new. That said, I shudder to think how someone not familiar with Elden Ring playing Nightreign feels like. And I understand if they ended up not liking it. This isn’t FromSoft wooing battle royale players to play Elden Ring, it’s the other way around.
Content
Elden Ring Nightreign, at launch, has eight different Nightlords to face against. Eight bosses sound not that much, but when you factor in that a run takes around 40-60 minutes, and you’ll likely going to squad wipe the first few attempts, it takes longer than you would expect to “finish” the story. Yes, there is a story, cutscenes and all, but they are sparse. But the Remembrance Quests that each character has is cool. That’s a new way of character development in the form of completing personal objectives.
And even when you’re done with the story, there are reasons to keep coming back for one more run. You can unlock new characters (six available from the get-go, two are locked), earn costumes (including outfits from Dark Souls) and unlock more relics, permanent gems you can slot into characters that give you passives. Beating a Nightlord also gives you relics, and these special ones are good enough to make your next run against them much easier. So more virtuous players might find value in carrying randos to victory with the buffs they have.
While the map of Limveld is static, it has a few variations in the form of Shifting Earths. I’ve seen three variants of the map, and they only change a portion of the map but it’s enough to change how your typical run flows.
Nightreign will have more content, though disappointingly, they’re selling DLC bosses, releasing later this year. Selling DLC characters is fine, you’re just locked out of playing a specific character. Locking out bosses behind a paywall, in the context of Nightreign, means a smaller matchmaking pool for these DLC bosses. I thought everyone got the memo already that selling maps, or anything that segregates the playerbase, is a bad idea? Why are we still gentrifying the matchmaking pool in the year 2025? I hope the online matchmaking is properly sorted before that DLC drop, it won’t be a good time for paying customers not being able to play what they paid for if they don’t.
At the time of this review, I have spent 20 hours into Nightreign, not counting idle time waiting for matchmaking and spending time in the hub. I have yet to beat the final boss and only cleared half of them. But this should show that the game has enough content at launch. Yes, it’s a casserole or a nasi goreng from last night’s dinner. But when the dinner was good, it makes for a good leftover meal.
Personal Enjoyment
I’m not a big soulsliker, I admit, but the nature of this job has given me the opportunities to continue to experience this subgenre of action-RPG I used to loathe. My personal vendetta against them has subsided now that Armored Core has returned. And there’s plenty enough of one of these that I have found the ones that I like.
Coming into Nightreign, I was curious how the game turned out being, and I’m blown away at how the devs have twisted, pulled and pushed pegs of different shapes that are conventional multiplayer game mechanics into an Elden Ring hole. And it turned out pretty good!
I admit I got immensely lucky with my runs having able to beat four Nightlords thus far. I’m not really good at this types of games (even if I did beat Young Radhan 1.0 pre-nerf that I had an article about it made). No really, At least half of the 35 runs I did ended because it was me choking as I couldn’t revive the squad, or me foolishly get close when I should’ve dodged. Yet each of the four Victory Royales I had felt earned. And the many close attempts felt satisfying.
(Except Gaping Jaw. Screw Gaping Jaw. All my homies hate Gaping Jaw and that wide, gaping, jaw.)
Most of my time with Nightreign was fun because I found myself in company of people who knew how to play Nightreign. Unlike in PVP games where it’s going to be harder to get into later as player skill grow high, it’ll be much easier to beat Nightreign with more players getting better and better and can start carrying weaker and newer players to their Chicken Dinner. My luck improved as we reach closer to end of week 1 of release at the time of review, as the community has slowly figured out the game.
That being said, when a run is washed, where in the first 20 minutes we all die staggeredly and made no progress, it feels awful. There’s no way to comeback from a fumble, the game relies so much on the squad having perfect momentum throughout the run, acing every prep class, to even stand a chance to properly take on the final exam that is a Nightlord boss fight with a chance to win.
I wish there’s an option where we every player can make the vote to forfeit the run, and have it end with no penalties which sends the team on their separate ways (unless they’re grouped together) back into a new matchmaking queue. Having everyone to ragequit is not an ideal experience. But we’ll see if the devs can sink in more time and resources into making Nightreign better. Though I won’t hold my breath for it.
Verdict
Elden Ring Nightreign remixes Elden Ring with familiar multiplayer mechanics and systems to create an experience you just won’t get in any other game. The blend of battle royale, extraction, roguelike and MOBA within the mechanical confines of Elden Ring is a sight to behold.
The game does rely heavily on reused assets, and there was not enough effort in making the online infrastructure up to standards gamers have in 2025, but when it works, the game is such a rush. It’s a concentrated dose of 2022’s most critically acclaimed video game, best experienced with friends.
The modders who’ve been tinkering with Elden Ring and adding RNG mods and full co-op were right, there is fun to be had with jolly cooperation in this way. FromSoftware embraced the right ideas for Elden Ring Nightreign and it turned out to be a good multiplayer game. Let’s see how FromSoft gets on with their next multiplayer title.
Reviewed on base PS5. Review copy provided by the publisher.
Elden Ring Nightreign
Elden Ring Nightreign remixes Elden Ring with familiar multiplayer mechanics and systems to create an experience you just won't get in any other game. The blend of battle royale, extraction, roguelike and MOBA within the mechanical confines of Elden Ring is a sight to behold.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 9
- Content 8.5
- Personal Enjoyment 9