Elden Ring Nightreign Launches Thursday For $40, And You Should Buy It
For everyone else, how's this sound: a fast-paced third-person action game for one or three players, with RPG and Rogue-lite elements. After selecting your character, you try to survive in a vicious open world for three days and three nights. Roaming the land, you'll encounter random spawns that can include normal enemies as well as reimagined bosses from across the Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring games. Defeating these spawns will earn you stat boosts as well as randomized equipment.
Unlike the rest of the games in the "Soulsborne" genre, you don't make a character in Nightreign. Instead, you pick from a list of pre-defined "Nightfarers". To be very clear, these are not just character class presets like in previous titles. Elden Ring Nightreign's Nightfarers are highly unique, with special abilities that recall MOBA or hero shooter mechanics. For example, the nimble Duchess' "Restage" power lets her "replay" the last few seconds of damage dealt to an enemy, while the bird-like Guardian can use his "Wings of Salvation" power to crash down on enemies from the air.
Nightreign—which is a stand-alone game, not a DLC for Elden Ring—is a fascinating and ambitious blend of genres. Upon starting a "run", you drop down onto the battlefield from a Spectral Hawk, similar to the glider mechanics in Fortnite or PUBG. Players are strongly encouraged (but not required) to stick together, and while you don't get the benefit of the spectral steed Torrent in this game, the overall movement speed is considerably faster than in the original Elden Ring, and players also have radically improved vertical mobility including the ability to hike up walls quickly.
The references to previous FromSoftware games don't stop with the monsters or equipment; characters can earn and equip cosmetic skins, and while we don't know a lot about how many skins will be available, we do know that at least some of the skins will be direct callbacks from the Dark Souls series. It also seems like there may be story elements and possibly even whole characters that are pulled into this mysterious, shifting landscape from previous games.
If you're curious, but not convinced, there's another merit to Nightreign that might push you over the edge toward a purchase: it's only $40 US. Publisher Bandai Namco hasn't given any particular reasoning for the discount pricing on what seems to be quite a fleshed-out game, but it could be due to the experimental nature of the game design, or perhaps the fact that the overwhelming majority of the title is, admittedly, re-used assets. Still, that's more to the benefit of the customer, because in a world where Doom is $70 and Mario Kart is $80, a new $40 FromSoftware spinoff feels like a pricing error in our favor.
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Elden Ring Nightreign is available for pre-order right now on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam, and folks who pre-order will get a unique in-game emote as well as the ability to pre-load the game 48 hours before launch. Notably, Nightreign is actually coming to last-generation PS4 and Xbox One consoles, likely being one of the very last big-ticket releases for that hardware. While PC players can jump in on Thursday due to a simultaneous worldwide launch—as early as 3:00 PM on the West coast—console players will mostly have to wait until midnight (29th-30th) to play.
