Re: Elden Ring Nightreign

On 5/30/2025 8:19 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
 >
 > So... no excitement for Elden Ring: Nightreign, the stand-alone
 > expansion to Elden Ring?
It's not really an expansion to ER.  If it were, I'd have 0 interest. It's a boss-rush co-op action fighting game with all the bosses of all the souls-like games. It's not even an RPG like ER, there's characters to choose from, you don't make builds from what I gather.
 >
 > I myself am not a fan of the games. Well, that's not quite accurate.
 > It's not that I dislike the game, it's just that I /never liked it
 > enough/ to actually get around to playing it. I can appreciate the
 > "Dark Souls"-esque experience (I've even played a few games of its
 > ilk) but it's not the sort of game I usually seek out unless there's
 > something else to attract me (e.g., like with "The Surge", which had
 > neato exo-skeleton battle-armor). So I skipped "Elden Ring".
 >
 > But I know there are a number of fans of the original in this
 > newsgroup (you guys created one of the longest-running threads here in
 > years talking about the game! ;-)
 >
 > Apparently Nightreign is much more multiplayer focused than the
 > original, which is putting off some fans. But the core gameplay is
 > apparently very true to the original experience. It will be
 > interesting to see what you all think about it.
 >
 > Maybe you can top your last thread discussing it ;-)
Only if PW starts playing it.  It was mostly helping him :)
I doubt that's going to happen as it's not a solo friendly game, and he expressed not liking any kind of multiplayer.
I've been following it closely, but haven't clicked 'buy' yet. It's mixed reviews on Steam (which really means bad).  Apparently it's lacking any in game chat or voice, seems to require some coordination between players, and is almost impossible to solo - not having others to revive you, and something about putting you in something like a debuff spiral when you die.  Also it's currently not able to start a run with 2 players, it's solo or 3.  So you need 2 friends you can set up a discord with before you play a session to have much hope.
I don't have any friends that play souls games, except here, well and my son now, but he's never interested in playing with me (not to mention we'd need 2 copies so double the price.)  And haven't managed much play in ER with them (one person one time for about 30 minutes which ended in failure.)
I watched a short bit of Fighting Cowboy streaming playing it, but it didn't do anything for me, I'm waiting for a more 'highlight' video from someone instead of streaming.
Now given all the negative I'm hearing, there's counters to the negatives.
+ Fromsoft put out a message they're working on improving solo play and will have the first patch doing so out within a week!  And Fromsoft always delivers a lot of patching, so that's not just Bethesda style patching random things.  I do prefer the co-op in their games though, so don't particularly care about that.
+ Some people are finding others on the ER Discord so they can communicate.  I expect someone will have a Nightrein Discord up soon, or even already do, I've just not seen a link yet.  I'm not a fan of Discord, I'm fine with text chat, but don't like voice.  I'd be willing to try it for this, maybe.  I'd probably try it just randoms without Discord first, and some people are refuting it's bad doing that.
+ It's not open world and runs are fairly short (hearing 30 min per run?) Which are my main complaints with ER being open world and interminably long and repetitive (my other complaint of difficult/easily broken quests applies to all Fromsoft games.)  On the downside, people have already beaten it, so it may be just be very short overall (or they're insanely good and have other insanely good people to play with.)
I'm still very tempted to buy it, and they have a lot of goodwill from me considering I've played over 6k hours when you stack up all their games.  It's not terribly expensive for a new game either, only $40. It's also best to get in early with Fromsoft games if you want to co-op as eventually the player base dies down, and you miss the opportunity to do a lot of it.  I'm just not sure about a boss-rush co-op game with pre-made characters, I like my Rpg builds.  I think I'm a bit burned out on souls games (well I'd pick up DS3 again at the drop of a hat, but other ones not so much.) But then this isn't really a souls game either.
I'm just not excited yet.
Lies of P 2 I'm excited about, but that's going to be a long time.
--
-Justisaur
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