Elden Ring Nightreign

From

It was a bit eyebrow-raising to see Elden Ring Nightreign arrive with a 77 metascore, quite low for a FromSoftware offering, particularly one with the Elden Ring name attached. But now that the game is in the wild, fans are finding the same faults, and as a percentage, their scores are even lower.

As it stands, Elden Ring Nightreign has 66% “Mixed” reviews on Steam. Again, that’s low for FromSoft, and even though actual concurrents were stellar, with a peak of 313,000 yesterday night, but it’s unclear how many will stick with it longer term.

I don’t blame people for not reading a bunch of reviews before launch, but if you didn’t, you might be logging in expecting some pretty basic functionality that does not exist in Nightreign at all.

• No Comms – There is no in-game comms system at all to communicate with your teammates in a co-op game. No voice chat, no text chat. It’s a baffling decision for a game that’s entirely about teamwork, so playing with randoms this way can be exhausting. The best way to play is then with friends talking on Discord or something like that, but that leads to…
• No Duos – You cannot play this game with only two friends without a third random being matchmade into your party. So, if you want to just load in with a buddy, you cannot work together with that third teammate who can either be a help or run off and die and do nothing. And the game is not balanced for duo play regardless, as FromSoft admitted a lack of duos was an “oversight” in production.
• No Crossplay – This is self-explanatory. It will be even harder to play with friends because the game lacks crossplay, unlike practically every other modern title these days.

Elden Ring Nightreign

FromSoft

There are other issues in Nightreign. Solo play, though accounted for in development, is a sort of ultra-challenge mode that most players are not going to be able to do at all, especially with no inborn self-revive, even one instance. The game has also had performance issues on PC, where a single stutter in fights can result in death and an entire lost run.

It’s not all bad, of course. Two-thirds of players are giving positive reviews; it’s just that the level of positive reviews are much lower than a game from this developer would ever get. Many of these issues seem somewhat fixable, but how long in the future? That remains to be seen. We will see how player retention is over the long term.