I’ve never been a huge Souls guy, and I’ve found the most hair-tearing-out element of FromSoftware’s acclaimed series has always been the fussy, esoteric multiplayer. Things are definitely simpler in that regard in the hotly anticipated Elden Ring follow-up Nightreign, but it comes with a catch. While it’s the first game in FromSoft’s catalog to emphasize seamless multiplayer as the focus, director Junya Ishizaki is careful to point out that it works best if you have exactly two friends to play with.
In an interview with IGN, Ishizaki said: “We are trying to cater to a fun experience with three people. So making sure the experience is fun at its core with a group of three, but it also doesn’t collapse if it’s a solo player as well … in putting all our efforts into that aspect, we kind of overlooked and neglected the duos aspect, but this is something that we are looking at and considering for post-launch support as well.”
Of course, you can still play Nightreign with a single friend; it’ll just matchmake you with a random solo player and send you on your way. Ishizaki noted a duos mode just wasn’t a priority during development—and as you might expect, it has a lot to do with balance.
Any given Dark Souls boss becomes a hell of a lot easier with the right co-op partner, but FromSoftware didn’t want to lose that hard-fought sense of accomplishment that keeps people coming back to its singleplayer games. Ishizaki told IGN: “For more solo play oriented games such as Elden Ring, of course we’re taking a lot of things into account such as the stages, how the enemies are laid out and designed, the wide breadth of player builds and equipment as well … [The bosses] are supposed to be very imposing, and challenging, and fearsome when you face them.”
If you’re worried this is all sounding pretty different from the Elden Ring you know, Ishizaki told IGN the game changes dynamically to account for solo players. That goes for both players who are off and isolated in a three-player session as well as for single players with no teammates at all: “The activeness and aggressiveness of enemies towards any one single player has been adjusted so that you don’t find yourself in any unreasonable multi-foe fights. And just generally, when you’re playing singleplayer, the parameters adjust dynamically depending on the number of players in that session.”
It all provides a hint as to why a duos mode might take some extra consideration; it seems like a lot of work has gone into preserving the meticulous difficulty scaling of its solo-minded predecessors. Ishizaki said in the IGN interview that players coming from Elden Ring and all the games before it may find Nightreign more familiar than they expect.
“We understand the concerns of those solo players, but essentially a lot of the time in Nightreign you will be acting and behaving on your own. Even in a group as three, you’ll be going off and challenging different areas of the map and collecting different things before you accumulate together at the boss fight.”
