Elden Ring: Nightreign will support singleplayer, but it might not reward it

FromSoftware seem mighty keen on this "co-operative multiplayer" concept

Great was the adulation last week when FromSoftware announced a new Elden Ring game, Elden Ring: Nightreign - and great the lamentation from certain quarters when it was revealed to be a co-op-focussed experience. If you missed the reveal, perhaps because you value sleep over the spectacle of Geoff Keighley's fashion friends, let me catch you up: in Nightreign, you pick one of eight preset characters and explore a parallel-universe version of Elden Ring's Limgrave map, fighting lesser foes and levelling up quickly so that you can fight a boss battle at the end of each 15-minute in-game day.

The map is surrounded by murderous weather that closes in as night approaches, shrinking the navigable area to a boss arena - a nod to the battle royale genre. Each round lasts three days, culminating in a clash with one of eight unlockable headline antagonists. In between rounds, you can spend a currency called Murk on cosmetics at the Roundtable fort, and equip relics that provide permanent character upgrades.

It feels like it's heavily based on observation of how more dedicated fans play and tinker with Elden Ring - a speedrunner remix with the seamless co-op mod, and some confusing allusions to the wider Fromverse in the presence of Dark Souls 3's Nameless King. The map's buildings and terrain hazards change between visits - larger surprises include volcanoes and invading field bosses, like our old chum Margit the Fell Omen - so it's more replayable than it might sound for a game with "only" one map and eight tacit "chapters" that (going by my back-of-napkin mathematics) you could theoretically finish in a single day.

From have made plenty of multiplayer games, of course. The Souls series, Bloodborne and Elden Ring have intricate co-op and PvP functions by means of in-game guilds, together with asynchronous online features like player phantoms and graffiti. But this is the first time they've made anything Soulsy where multiplayer is a menu option, rather than something slowly peeled back and investigated while travelling alone. So is there anything here for people who'd rather not squad up against the hordes?

The immediate good news is that you can play Nightreign both alone and offline. During solo play, the game also scales down enemy health pools, and there's no PvP invader element to interfere with your meanderings.

It's also not a "live service" game - as in, one that is openly designed to expand over time by means of regular, perhaps separately sold DLC injections and a season pass model. "Once you buy Nightreign you get the complete package, everything is unlockable out of the gate," game director Junya Ishizaki told Ian of the Games Network, shortly before the reveal. "So we want it to be clear that this is what we wanted to make. It's not intended as a live service game."

Beyond that, though, the picture grows muddled. According to Ishizaki, Nightreign is very much co-op-first. It's balanced primarily around three-player teams (somewhat arbitrarily, there's no two-player support), this being the "sweet spot" that avoids Nightreign becoming "too overwhelming or too busy", with players splitting up to farm the map and reuniting at sunset.

It's also missing certain key handholds for solo Ringers. For one thing, there are no Spirit Ash items to let you summon helpful NPCs, though according to Ishizaki, one of the preset heroes does have "a sort of spiritual buddy as a gameplay mechanic".

As you might expect, given the ever-changing map, there's also no longer the ability to leave soapstone messages on the geography. This might sound trivial, but those messages add so much to FromSoft's worlds, even when they're calling everything a dog. You will, at least, be able to harvest treasure dropped by other slain players via asynchronous online.

Chuck these morsels of insight into the blender of reckless deduction, and you might come away with the speculation that Nightreign supports solo player but doesn't especially encourage it. Play alone, and by the sounds of things, you'll be cutting against the grain - which, admittedly, is the norm for certain dedicated Soulsers, with their nightmarish talk of completing whole games without levelling up once or wearing any clothes.

If the above has you down in the dumps, the best news of all is that Nightreign won't necessarily be the first of many multiplayer-centric games. "We don't really have a plan in terms of, oh we're going to make more spin-offs or this is going to be a one-off time one-time thing," Ishizaki told IGN. "This was purely sort of happenstance of me wanting to direct my own game and wanting to use Elden Ring and that battle design that I took part in as a base to this game, and my interest in online co-op games as well."

All that notwithstanding, the Nightreign concept does seemingly fit in well with Hidetaka Miyazaki's comments earlier this year about working on smaller projects in future. Perhaps they'll find a way to ship a whittled-down singleplayer offering next?