Elden Ring Nightreign may be co-op, but I'm having a blast solo

Imagine playing Fortnite, but instead of fighting other players, all you want to do is break into houses to look for caches of slurp juice. Yes, the storm is closing in on you, and there's a bunch of enemies waiting to kill you, but all you want to do is take a walking tour of Tilted Towers. Then when the match is over, instead of queueing again, you start reading the in-game lore for Peely and Sabrina Carpenter. You can count your number of player kills on one hand meanwhile your number of deaths is in the hundreds. You've never achieved a victory royale, but you've never had more fun.
That's how I play Elden Ring Nightreign.
Nightreign is FromSoftware's first Elden Ring spinoff, and it's unlike any Souls game that the developer has done before. Nightreign has the conceit of so many battle royale games — multiplayer combat focused on acquiring resources across a large map that slowly shrinks over time — wrapped in the narrative, visual aesthetics, and combat of Elden Ring. Instead of the Tarnished, you are a Nightfarer. Instead of the expansive Lands Between, you are sent to Limveld, an island with an ever-shifting landscape. And instead of becoming the Elden Lord, your goal is to defeat the Night Lord and end the destructive storm that scours the land.
Elden Ring Nightreign aura-farming exhibit A.
In Nightreign, gameplay sessions are broken up into expeditions, each of which is divided into three day-night cycles. During the day, you — either solo or with two other players — explore the world looking for weapon upgrades and fighting bosses for the enhancements they reward. You'll be forced to move as the deadly Night's Tide slowly consumes the map, whittling your health to nothing if you're caught in it. When the map is at its smallest, you face a tough midboss. Defeat it to commence day two of the expedition or die and start it all over. Then, on the third day, you face the expedition's final boss. There are several expeditions to conquer each with different bosses, mid-bosses, weapons to collect, and all kinds of events that make each run unique.
I had the opportunity to play Nightreign once before earlier this year (and during a more recent network test) , and it wasn't the best preview, as the game was plagued with all kinds of issues that didn't allow me to experience it the way the developers intended. Those technical issues have been ironed out but I still haven't completed the game's most basic objective: beat the first expedition. This isn't because of any technical or gameplay issues I had. For the times I wanted to play as intended, my colleague Jay Peters stepped in to help me and I had no problem finding party members to tackle expeditions with on my own… I just never really wanted to. And part of the reason why I'm enjoying Nightreign so much is because the game lets me play it in a way that's completely counterintuitive – slowly and alone.
Collaborative gaming doesn't always feel good to me. I want to take things at my own pace, and that's hard to do when there's a group of people frustrated with me because they need my help to kill a boss while I'm still delving into a dungeon a mile away. But the ability to solo queue does come with a significant catch – you're not gonna get very far. I died often and to everything from random enemies to bosses. It's not often that I even make it to that first boss fight without dying to the warm-up battles that precede it. This should frustrate me, but I don't care in the slightest. I'm just so pleased that I can go at my own pace to explore more of Elden Ring 's visually gorgeous and narratively sumptuous world.
Which brings me to my favorite part: its characters. Nightreign has eight new classes, each with their own unique abilities. The classes can still use every weapon you find (with some locked behind level requirements) so there's an option to tailor a character to fit your playstyle. There are certain kinds of classes I gravitate toward, specifically ranged combat, but for the first time in a class-based game, I love every one of them. It is so much fun shredding enemies to ribbons with the Duchess, using her Restage ability to replay the attacks done to an enemy essentially doubling the damage they receive. I love the Raider's powers of just being a big fuckin' dude, slamming things with big ass great weapons. And true to my ranged combat loving heart, Ironeye's specialty with bows makes it so nice when I wanna kill things without putting myself in danger.
Then there's the Guardian. Look at him. He's a giant armored bird-person with the busted wing and the huge-ass halberd and shield. His story involves being a protector who failed his flock and has found a new one in the other Nightfarers. I fell to my knees reading one of his codex entries and seeing how the Recluse, the mage character, helped him with his damaged wing. Every character has a codex that updates with their personal story the more expeditions you attempt. This is the shit I get out of bed for.
I thought I was going to hate the concept of Nightreign. I want more E lden Ring: I love that world, so any chance I can have to go back, I'll take but… I just don't like multiplayer games. Describing Nightreign makes it sound like the reason why it exists is because an out of touch CEO looked at the popularity of Elden Ring and at all the money Fortnite prints and went 'Yeah, let's do that.' Even if that's the case, Nightreign has been constructed so that it still appeals to lore freaks like me and I can ignore the less savory bits around multiplayer with relative ease.
If I can take a moment and borrow a pair of words from my Gen Z niblings to describe Nightreign it'd be 'aura' and 'aura farming.' Aura is used to describe a person's general coolness or badassery while aura farming is the activities one can engage in to increase one's aura. John Wick has aura. In the first movie, when he performs his monologue about getting back in the assassin business spitting and screaming – that's aura farming.
And between the cooperative nature of the game, its rapid-paced combat, and the new characters, abilities, and story, Elden Ring Nightreign has a ton of aura that I'm having a lot of fun farming – just not in the way I expected.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Android Authority

41 minutes ago

• Android Authority

Watch this person play The Witcher 3 on their Galaxy Watch Ultra

TL;DR A Redditor has shown off GeForce Now running on the Galaxy Watch Ultra. The user's uploaded video shows them playing The Witcher 3 on the smartwatch. The smartwatch isn't actually doing any of the heavy lifting, but it's still a cool showcase. We've already seen people running retro games on their smartwatches thanks to emulators, but it turns out that you can also play full-fledged PC games on your Wear OS watch. Then again, I'm not sure why you'd want to do so in the first place. Redditor BranaMitrovicFloyd posted a video online showing GeForce Now running on the Galaxy Watch Ultra. The user was specifically playing 2015's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with the aid of on-screen controls and a stylus. community on Reddit Posts from the galaxywatch community on Reddit It's worth stressing that this isn't actually running locally on the smartwatch, as GeForce Now is a game streaming service. That means NVIDIA's servers perform all the heavy lifting, and the gameplay is then streamed to your device via your internet connection. So, while this isn't a demonstration of the Galaxy Watch Ultra's horsepower, it does highlight the possibilities on this hardware. Of course, I'm not sure you'd actually want to play PC games on a smartwatch in the first place. The small screen makes things tough to see, while the virtual controls are simply too tiny for your fingers. On the upside, you can connect a Bluetooth controller to your watch if you're really committed to this endeavor. This also comes a few months after a Redditor got the PPSSPP emulator running on their Galaxy Watch 5. This was all running locally on the smartwatch, and the user was apparently able to play most PSP games at 60fps. Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at Email our staff at news@ . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.

Yahoo

6 hours ago

• Yahoo

Hideo Kojima has been hard at work editing the final Death Stranding 2 trailer – one he says will make people go, "What?!"

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. As the wait for Hideo Kojima's long-awaited sequel Death Stranding 2 continues, the iconic director has been preparing the upcoming action-adventure game's final trailer – one he says might leave fans surprised. As translated by Genki in an online post, a recent Koji10 episode on YouTube sees the lead reveal that he's been hard at work recently on the last trailer before the Death Stranding 2 launch on June 26. Not only has Kojima been finalizing what's almost sure to be a cinematic masterpiece of a video while on land, however, but also while mid-air – that's right, he's been editing during flights on the plane by selecting clips to use on his iPad. Kojima promises new information regarding Death Stranding 2 to come to light once the big trailer releases later this month, but that's not all – he also hints that a moment about halfway through the video will leave viewers in awe, asking, "What?!" While he doesn't specify what that moment is or what shocking things it might unveil, it's exciting to think that an even more thought-provoking Death Stranding 2 trailer than the last is arriving. There are more exciting creations to come from Kojima than just the Death Stranding sequel, too. His upcoming project OD, which he describes as "a bit risky" and "a game like no other," is being produced in collaboration with comedian and filmmaker Jordan Peele, and the Death Stranding movie, which Kojima states is "not just a direct translation of the game," is also underway, presenting a "universe that has never been seen before."If Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid ever crossover, Kojima knows who should be a porter, even though they "won't be able to carry things so much"

Yahoo

6 hours ago

• Yahoo

Hideo Kojima throws a watch party for Death Stranding 2's launch trailer, which sounds increasingly like a short film as it features "180 shots"

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Hideo Kojima has finished the final trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and he's thrown a watch party for the Kojima Productions staff. Death Stranding 2 is just under a week away from releasing, and despite a massive 10-minute long trailer which released earlier this year and showed us a ton of the game's story and action moments (and the guy who looks like Solid Snake), we've got one last trailer coming out for the game. Kojima claimed that this trailer will be shorter than the last, and won't feature story details within it, but at the same time claimed that it will make people go, "What?!" Kojima now says on Twitter that he has completed work on the trailer, which is set to arrive when Death Stranding 2 launches on June 26. Although considering it's one of those games that has a "pay more to play early" version launching on June 24, some players will have been exploring Death Stranding 2 for days by the time its launch trailer releases. In celebration of the trailer being finished, Kojima Productions hosted a watch party for it. This new trailer is set to also be pretty big, as Kojima touts that it has "180 shots this time," meaning we should be seeing a lot of the game next week. Unless he meant that there were 180 shots at the Kojima Productions watch party, in which case there will be a lot of developers with sore heads in the morning. Even if he's just finished a new game, we already know about two more upcoming Hideo Kojima games still to come: OD, an upcoming horror game and Physint, a spiritual successor to Metal Gear.