Elden Ring Nightreign was one of the most interesting and surprising debuts at The Game Awards, a co-op multiplayer survival game that is unlike anything we’ve seen from the IP so far. And the third Elden Ring release in three years. Impressive.
IGN interviewed Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki and asked him about the recent failures of big multiplayer games like Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, shuttered after two weeks and one year, respectively. As you might expect, a FromSoft director is not exactly basing his decisions on things that that. Here’s what Ishizaki said:
“We don’t tend to look at the industry and base our game design or our concerns on what’s going on in that sort of, more general sense. We feel like if we’re making something we’re passionate about and that we want to make and that we enjoy playing, we trust the users will share in that experience and hopefully enjoy it as well.
Also, we want to be clear that Nightreign is not like a live service game. Once you you buy Nightreign you get the complete package, everything is unlockable out of the gate. So we want it to be clear that this is what we wanted to make. It’s not intended as a live service game.”
The Concord and Suicide Squad comparisons are…not the most relevant, Concord was a multiplayer shooter meant to run for multiple, changing seasons with new additions. Suicide Squad was the same thing except co-op, rather than PvP. Elden Ring Nightreign is co-op with a roster of eight characters with different kits but…the similarities end there with a survival loop unlike anything in those games, and the (what I thought was) obvious fact that this was not going to be something cranking out seasons and new characters all the time. Malenia-themed battle passes. Radahn armor skins sold in a store for Platinum Runes. Yeah, not happening.
Still, there are some Elden Ring players that think this is a poor direction for FromSoft to go and accuse them of trend-chasing. In reality it doesn’t seem like that at all, and they just wanted to do something interesting with the IP to focus on the somewhat minimal co-op aspects of the base game, and turn it into something more interesting.
I’ll say right now, which will not be a terribly bold prediction, that Elden Ring Nightreign will be a hit unlike those other disasters, and who knows, could even secure Elden Ring’s third GOTY nomination in three years, which would be pretty unprecedented. Even two was unprecedented, right?
This will do well. This is not trend chasing. At this point, it’s a safe bet to trust FromSoft knows what it’s doing.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
