Remember when From Software’s Hidetaka Miyazaki said they weren’t thinking about Elden Ring 2, but the continuation of Elden Ring in general? Well, who had “three-player cooperative musou” on their bingo card?
Just announced at the annual winter Geoff Awards, Elden Ring: Nightreign is a multiplayer-focused spin-off that pits a trio of Elden Ringers against hordes of enemies in a world that changes every time you play. It’s coming out in 2025. Here’s a trailer.
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According to a press release from publisher Bandai Namco, Nightreign is set in a parallel version of the Elden Ring universe. Players can choose from eight preset characters, each with different abilities, and the goal is to survive three nights in Limveld while fending off both regular enemies and bosses. It’s okay that the map also gets smaller at night. Failed runs grant you relics, which you can use to customize and upgrade your characters so you can avoid dying such a gruesome death in the future.
The press release accurately notes that Nightreign is “unlike any experience previously created by FromSoftware” as it is a “condensed action RPG” in which the map and enemies alternate between runs. “Defeating bigger enemies and entering the more dangerous parts of the map will reveal more powerful weapons and bigger Rune rewards,” it continues. “Find Sites of Grace to give every hero the opportunity to level up and gain crucial power.”
In moment-to-moment terms, it looks faster and more acrobatic than Elden Ring, with characters crawling up walls like ninjas and taking to the skies with the help of summonable bird creatures. The trailer features a lot of bosses, including a few you might recognize from other FromSoftware games.
The “condensed action RPG” part lines up with Miyazaki’s suggestion earlier this year that Elden Ring represents the upper limit for project scale at From Software, and that smaller games could be the “next phase.” You can read more about Nightreign on Steam.
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