Elden Ring: Nightreign will support singleplayer, but it might not reward it
Great was the adulation last week when FromSoftware announced a new Elden Ring game, Elden Ring: Nightreign - and great the lamentation from certain quarters when it was revealed to be a co-op-focussed experience. If you missed the reveal, perhaps because you value sleep over the spectacle of Geoff Keighley's fashion friends, let me catch you up: in Nightreign, you pick one of eight preset characters and explore a parallel-universe version of Elden Ring's Limgrave map, fighting lesser foes and levelling up quickly so that you can battle a boss at the end of each 15-minute in-game day.
The map is surrounded by murderous weather that closes in as night approaches, shrinking the navigable area to a boss arena - a nod to the battle royale genre. Each round lasts three days, culminating in a clash with one of eight unlockable headline antagonists. In between rounds, you can spend a currency called Murk on cosmetics at the Roundtable fort, and equip relics that provide permanent character upgrades.
It feels like it's heavily based on observation of how more dedicated fans play and tinker with Elden Ring - a speedrunner remix with the seamless co-op mod, and some confusing allusions to the wider Fromverse in the presence of Dark Souls 3's Nameless King. The map's buildings and terrain hazards change between visits - larger surprises include volcanoes and invading field bosses, like our old chum Margit the Fell Omen - so it's more replayable than it might sound for a game with "only" one map and eight tacit "chapters" that (going by my back-of-napkin mathematics) you could theoretically finish in a single day.
From have made plenty of multiplayer games, of course. The Souls series, Bloodborne and Elden Ring have intricate co-op and PvP functions by means of in-game guilds, together with asynchronous online features like player phantoms and graffiti. But this is the first time they've made anything Soulsy where multiplayer is a menu option, rather than something
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