Don't worry about missing Elden Ring Nightreign's network test on PC—nobody could play it on console either

pcgamer.com:

This weekend's Elden Ring Nightreign network test may not include us PC players, but that won't stop me from watching from the sidelines with a bucket of popcorn while the servers proverbially burn. And also, you know, installing the thing on my own PlayStation 5 to give things a whirl, only to find myself totally unable to even try the thing out during its first three-hour run.

Yeah, so first of all, Nightreign's network test is kinda weird. Instead of running for a set period of time—you know, like how most games'll run their tests or betas for 48 hours or so—instead it's choosing a sprinkling of three-hour pockets from now until February 17. That first session wrapped up at 6am PST / 9am EST / 2pm GMT today… not that it really matters, since it seems like barely anyone was able to get in anyway.

The Elden Ring subreddit is full of folk laughing through the pain as Nightreign's servers appear to have crapped out less than an hour into the session. I gave things a try myself at around 11:30am UK time, only to be repeatedly met with login errors at the title screen. The FromSoftware player support Twitter notes that the «game server is experiencing high traffic, making it difficult to match» before shortly following it up with acknowledgement that the whole thing was borked.

«Currently, there is a malfunction on the Elden Ring Nightreign game server,» the account posted. «We will restart the server to restore service.» Well that happened, around 40 minutes later. Not that it seemed to make much difference, mind.

I continued to try myself between 12:30pm and 1:30pm UK time, and the furthest I was able to get was into the hub. The game never actually managed to throw me into a match, forcing me back to the title screen to start the whole thing all over again. I finally gave up shortly before 2pm, resigning myself to a session lost before crawling back to my beloved desktop.

That doesn't mean everyone was unable to play, though. There are a scattering of Reddit posts