Elden Ring Nightreign Channels the Spirit of a Forgotten God of War Game

ign.com:

This past weekend saw the first round of network tests for Elden Ring Nightreign, the upcoming standalone multiplayer game spun out of FromSoftware’s magnum opus. Unlike last year’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, Nightreign resembles Elden Ring in name and appearance only, trading its parent game’s open world structure for a streamlined survival format in which three-player teams have to drop into gradually shrinking maps to fight off groups of enemies and increasingly challenging bosses. It’s a design that undoubtedly suggests the developers were inspired by the hugely popular Fortnite – unsurprising, considering Epic’s battle royale has been enjoyed by no less than 200 million players this month alone.

But Nightreign bears an even greater resemblance to another game, one not nearly as famous and much more disliked: 2013’s God of War: Ascension. And that’s a good thing.

Released between 2010’s God of War 3 and 2018’s Norse-flavored God of War reboot, Ascension was a prequel set before the original Greek mythology trilogy that followed Kratos as he tried to break his oath with his soon-to-be-predecessor, Aries. Unable to live up to the initial trilogy’s epic finale, and fueling desire to shake up a tried-and-tested formula, God of War: Ascension quickly became known as the black sheep of the franchise. A half-decent appetizer to an amazing main course.

It’s an understandable reputation, but also unfair. Although Kratos’ confrontation with the Furies in Ascension obviously didn’t reach the same heights as his five-stage fight with Zeus, this divisive prequel still had some truly jaw-dropping set-pieces, including the Prison of the Damned, a labyrinthine dungeon carved into the skin and bones of an immobilized, 100-armed giant. But, more importantly, Ascension also deserves credit for trying something the franchise had not done before, and hasn’t since: multiplayer.

As you make your way through the Prison of the Damned in Ascension’s story, you encounter a chained up NPC