Elden Ring Nightreign is here, and the early verdict is in: it’s a blast… if you have the right crew. While some dedicated Tarnished are already conquering bosses solo, or even the entire game, my experience echoes a sentiment shared by many: playing Nightreign alone is, frankly, a miserable affair.
Let’s be clear: my god, Nightreign is so much better with friends. Then again, as I’ve found, even shoveling mulch on a humid summer day is improved with company – the “friend buff” is undeniable. But the chasm between the solo slog and the synergistic thrill of team play in Nightreign is vast. From coordinating devastating abilities and strategically sharing loot to desperately managing aggro, the game truly comes alive with a coordinated trio. This has me pondering: is betting your game’s entire experience on a player’s ability to consistently recruit two friends, especially with limited in-game communication and no crossplay, a fundamental misstep?
This isn’t an isolated concern. The recent alpha for Bungie’s Marathon, also designed for teams of three, hammered this point home. With friends, the Marathon alpha was genuinely fun. But where Nightreign is merely grueling solo, Marathon felt utterly unplayable alone. You’d have to pay me to brave that with two randoms; it’s like herding cats with laser pointers. In Nightreign, going solo is a tough challenge; in Marathon, it feels like presenting your backside in an open field and inviting enemy teams to take your loot.
Both games offer matchmaking – and credit where it’s due, Nightreign’s servers have been impressively stable. But simply dropping players into a team is the bare minimum. It’s survival, not thriving. Other multiplayer titles handle team cohesion far more elegantly. Sure, Marathon has a ping system, and Nightreign lets you drop a map marker, but playing either with two strangers often feels like trying to staple rain to a tree.
Perhaps some possess more patience for the LFG lottery than I do, but I dread rolling the dice on whether my random teammates will elevate the evening or torpedo it. Last night, a random mage joined my buddy and me. They seemed allergic to using their skills or ultimate but kindly offered us ample practice in reviving downed allies. This gamble is easier to tolerate when games provide tools to steer the ship, but the current matchmaking and communication features in both titles are a crapshoot.
There’s been significant community feedback regarding Marathon’s omission of solo/duo queues and proximity chat. To its credit, FromSoftware has acknowledged they might have “goofed up” by not initially considering that players might want to tackle Nightreign with just one friend and are considering bespoke duo options. Any seasoned raid leader can attest: coordinating one friend is exponentially easier than two, let alone more. The Nightreign Reddit is already awash with “LFG for a third” posts for a reason – adulting is hard, life intervenes, and game nights are precious, complicated affairs.
Furthermore, not everyone’s gaming circle universally adores Souls-likes. Nightreign, while a new formula for FromSoftware, still bleeds Elden Ring. My Destiny and Monster Hunter comrades don’t seamlessly translate to Nightreign’s demands. This is doubly true for intense extraction shooters like Marathon. How did two of the most demanding genres in gaming both decide they could skimp on multiplayer features that more accessible games mastered years ago?
Marathon is still in development, but its current trajectory feels like a misread from Bungie, a studio with a decade of Destiny community management under its belt. Nightreign, thankfully, already has a patch planned that should improve the solo experience. But I, and many others, are hoping for more: true duo balancing, crossplay, robust in-game chat, and smarter ping systems. The feasibility of adding these post-launch is debatable, but their impact on making the game more consistently fun would be immense.
Ultimately, that’s the goal of good multiplayer design. Playing with friends sets the ceiling for enjoyment. Playing with randoms often defines the floor. Effective multiplayer systems should narrow that gap, fostering a better average experience and ideally helping players forge new, lasting in-game friendships. There’s immense merit to multiplayer-first design – the co-op-only Split Fiction is a testament to that. But if studios are going to lean so heavily on teams of three, they need to do more to cultivate and support those teams.
For now, when my Nightreign buddies aren’t online, you’ll find me enjoying the simpler pleasures of Fantasy Life i.
Despite these multiplayer growing pains, Elden Ring Nightreign has impressively sold over 2 million copies on its first day, even with “Mixed” Steam reviews and some of FromSoftware’s lowest critic scores in recent memory – a testament, perhaps, to the sheer power of the Elden Ring name and the underlying potential players see.
