FromSoftware’s Elden Ring Nightreign launches next week. Ahead of the much-hyped debut, IGN interviewed Game Director Junya Ishizaki to dive deeper into the multiplayer spin-off game.
One of the main criticisms levied at Elden Ring Nightreign so far is that, according to FromSoftware, it is tailored either for playing solo or with a party of three players. Ishizaki-san admitted that duo groups have been overlooked during the development phase, but added that it is being looked and proper support may be added after launch.
The simple answer is that this is simply something that was overlooked during development as just a two-player option, so we’re very sorry about that. As we said before, we set out to make this a multiplayer co-op game for three players, balanced for three players, so that was the main focus and it’s at the core of Nightreign. Of course, I myself as a player understand that and often want times where I’m just playing myself, so this is something that we considered from the start. And so we did put a lot of effort into creating this experience that was playable for solo players in as much as the rules and new systems allowed. So in putting all our efforts into that aspect, we kind of overlooked and neglected the duos aspect, but this is something that we are looking at and considering for post-launch support as well.
There’s also no PvP whatsoever in Elden Ring Nightreign, unlike Elden Ring itself. Ishizaki said that it was never even considered:
From the start, PVP was not something that we very actively considered for Nightreign. We wanted it to be a co-op multiplayer experience at its core and we found that as we developed these character actions and these unique abilities for each character, balancing them and tweaking them around PVP as well proved to be very… Not only very difficult, but took away from those ideas and that scope that we’d established for each of these characters. So we really wanted the focus to be on PVE and on co-op, and so we knew where our priorities were. So no, we didn’t consider PVP in Nightreign.
Elden Ring Nightreign is launching on May 30 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. Check out our latest preview here.
