When Elden Ring Nightreign was first shown off, many were not expecting a multiplayer game from FromSoft, and in the explanation that followed, players learned about its intent.
Nightreign was built around teams of three using various classes to farm maps and defeat bosses for XP and loot over the course of three nights before fighting a super-boss, a Nightlord. However, players were quickly reassured that the experience would also be playable solo, and it’s possible to do that even offline.
However.
While many may have assumed this was the case, there is no option for duos to play together. As in, if you go in with another friend, the game will automatically match you with a third teammate you won’t know. Even though you can opt not to fill for solo, you can’t do so for duos. The explanation? FromSoft effectively just…forgot.
In an interview with IGN, Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki addressed the issue:
“The simple answer is that this is simply something that was overlooked during development as just a two-player option, so we’re very sorry about that. As we said before, we set out to make this a multiplayer co-op game for three players, balanced for three players, so that was the main focus and it’s at the core of Nightreign.”
“Of course, I myself as a player understand that and often want times where I’m just playing myself, so this is something that we considered from the start. And so we did put a lot of effort into creating this experience that was playable for solo players in as much as the rules and new systems allowed. So 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.”
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It’s a very strange omission given that in almost all other games you can opt to not “backfill” another teammate if you want to go in with just you and a friend. It’s hard to think of many games in this style where you can’t do this.
He goes on to explain how the game is balanced for solos, where enemies are less aggressive to a single player so you don’t get fully overwhelmed. Solos can also discover a self-revive feature on the map given that they have no teammates. But the experience is meant to be harder.
For duos, however, that would be an entirely different kind of balance between threes and solos. Simply doing the threes balance may not work for some sections or bosses, and it needed to be a third pillar of design. And they just…didn’t do it, unfortunately.
Nightreign is not going to be a “live” game in the traditional sense, but adding more features including this? It seems likely, even if unfortunately it won’t be there for launch.
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