FromSoftware shocked most of its fans with the announcement of Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone spin-off focused mainly on a new multiplayer experience that even includes some survival and Battle Royale elements. In an interview posted on PC Gamer’s February 2025 magazine (issue 405), Game Director Junya Ishizaki (formerly a Battle Director on Elden Ring) said the goal was not to chase trends.
The focus was condensing this experience down: the RPG elements, the exploration, the character building and leveling. We wanted that to feel like it was all coming together and culminating in a boss fight, but in a more concentrated form. For this new sense of accomplishment that you wouldn’t quite find with Elden Ring or our previous titles, we felt like we needed some new mechanics and some new elements to add into that mix. We’ve never really held the stance, ‘Let’s absolutely not do anything that other companies are doing or not follow any trends.’ So we didn’t really see this as chasing a trend, but we saw these as interesting elements that could work well within our multiplayer focused session-based gameplay.
Elden Ring Nightreign hasn’t been designed as a live service game, either. On this topic, Ishizaki explained:
We wanted to have a game that felt like a complete package out of the box on the day of purchase, so everything is unlockable… it’s not what we’d consider a ‘live service’ game”. We’re still in the process of thinking about the possibilities [for post-launch content].
Players will be able to approach each session differently, according to the Game Director:
We wanted the map itself to be a giant dungeon, so players have the chance to traverse and explore a different way every time they play. You have to choose the boss you want to face at the end of the third day. Once you’ve made that choice, maybe you have an idea of how you want to strategize against that boss, and this might change how you approach the map. We wanted to offer players that agency to decide, ‘I need to go after a poison weapon this time to face this boss’.
There’s no release date for Elden Ring Nightreign yet. However, a large scale network test for console users is coming later this month to evaluate the online systems and possibly get some feedback from testers ahead of the launch date.
