Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki has revealed what FromSoftware has planned in terms of allowing one player or two players to play the game.
Elden Ring Nightreign is designed in such a way that you have to form teams of three to play together online. While it’s certainly true that gamers have gotten used to playing in even bigger teams, it’s also true that it’s a huge redirection from FromSoftware’s single player titles. Of course, FromSoftware is deliberately challenging themselves here, in the same way that they are doing so with Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods. But Ishizaki made it clear that fans who really wanted to can still play Elden Ring Nightreign as a single player game.
Ishizaki said this in an interview with IGN:
Seeing as this game is built around three players, we understand the concerns of those solo players, but essentially a lot of the time in Nightreign you will be acting and behaving on your own. Even in a group as three, you’ll be going off and challenging different areas of the map and collecting different things before you accumulate together at the boss fight.
So solo play is generally encouraged and is a natural part of the game loop, but also in general for those solo players — and this might be something that’s difficult to notice in multiplayer — but the activeness and aggressiveness of enemies towards any one single player has been adjusted so that you don’t find yourself in any unreasonable multi-foe fights. And just generally, when you’re playing single player, the parameters adjust dynamically depending on the number of players in that session. So we hope that this will alleviate that feeling somewhat.
Of course there are no revives when you’re solo, there are no teammates to revive you, so it is definitely a more challenging thing for the player to face. But we have also incorporated a self-revive feature which is possible to discover around the map just to allow them some more chances to continue that learning of the patterns and learning of the bosses without having to restart all over again.
And so players who aren’t comfortable with playing FromSoftware games with a team can choose to play solo. But IGN also raised an interesting question: what about two-player multiplayer? It would obviously be considerably easier to get a second player to go with you. Lords of the Fallen Version 2.0, as well as Josef Fares’ entire gameography, is built around two players. Ishizaki’s answer is expected, but a little disappointing:
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.
While Ishizaki opened the door for a two-player mode in the future, clearly Elden Ring Nightreign is going to have to see some success first. They will need to put in some work to enable the rebalancing to make this possible, but if this title turns out to be successful, there will definitely be motivation to add this and any other modes that players would want. Maybe they could add an option for four players as well, to match up (and maybe even compete) with Monster Hunter. So there’s a lot of interesting possibilities for Elden Ring Nightreign, assuming it turns out to be a hit.
