Elden Ring: Nightreign players won't be able to troll each other with messages

1 day ago 4

Knight cocking crossbow with other character in background in Nightreign

(Image credit: FromSoftware)

Elden Ring: Nightreign is going to be a very different Soulsborne game. Three-player co-op runs with no PvP, no summons, no invasions, and as Nightreign's director Junya Ishizaki told IGN Japan in a recent interview, no player messages.

"You can still see the ghosts of other players," Ishizaki said, via Google Translate, "but the ability to leave messages has been removed. The reason we removed the message feature is that in this game, where each session is about 40 minutes long, there is no time to write your own message, and no time to read messages written by others."

Soapstone messages have been a recurring element in the Soulsborne games, with players allowed a select vocabulary to leave warnings and hints for each other. And, inevitably, to troll them, leading our Morgan Park to declare that Elden Ring message griefers were breaking his spirit. And fair enough. Putting messages at the bottom of ladders to make it harder for people to climb them is bloody annoying.

Other players will still be able to have an impact on your game, though in a purely helpful way. As Wes Fenlon reported in December, Nightreign players will leave behind some of their loot when they die, which can then be picked up by other players who find their ghostly remains.

Nightreign will be out some time in 2025, and is having a network test on consoles in February. If you've got other questions, here's everything we know about Nightreign.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.