Over the past couple of weeks since the game’s recent Beta I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Elden Ring: Nightreign. A faster paced co-op focused spin on the gruelling boss battle filled open world RPG, perhaps the most surprising aspect of the game is that I walked away from my time playing with a laundry list of thoughts about the ways the spinoff is more cognitively accessible for me than its predecessor.
I won’t pretend there aren’t tradeoffs, but on balance I have a lot more praise than critique based on my first seven hours playing Nightreign with random players online.
So, let’s get the basics out of the way – What is Elden Ring: Nightreign? Well, put a little bit reductively, it’s Elden Ring Fortnite Turbo. Drop players into a large open map, force them to flee from the edges of a forever shrinking circle of damage, and when the circle stops shrinking fight for your life in a small enclosed zone.
The big difference when compared to Fortnite or similar battle royale titles is that Elden Ring: Nightreign is a mandatory co-op adventure, where the shrinking circle is forcing you to approach an inevitable boss fight rather than duels with other players. I believe in the full game you’ll have the option to play solo with two computer controlled NPC companions, but in the beta three player online co-op was mandatory, with the only way to play truly solo being joining an online match where your two companions drop out due to connection errors. This is, fundamentally, a game meant to be played with other people supporting you.
Nightreign’s shift toward enforced co-op, alongside its faster gameplay pace, clear objectives, and reduced statistical and build complexity really do make a big difference to the types of cognitive accessibility barriers present compared to base Elden Ring, in ways that for me personally were largely positive. There are cognitive tradeoffs we will discuss, but the fact I have as many positives as I do feels important to give some focus.
Perhaps the most immediately apparent area of Elden Ring: Nightreign to have seen an increased accessiblity shakeup is that, rather than building your own highly tuned player build by manually selecting how to assign levels across a variety of stats, Nightreign instead gives players a small handful of starting character builds to select from, complete with starting weapons and special abilities. Rather than needing to decide which stat to put your points into each time you’re ready to level up, you now just instead simply increase your character’s level, which will automatically behind the scenes upgrade specific stats in ways predetermined for your character.
Each class’s two special abilities also give you a really clear role in multiplayer combat, further clarifying how you’re most useful to the team. Are you the one juggling enemies into the air to get everyone breathing room and hitting enemies with big arial strikes? Are you the one making everyone invisible and causing recent damage to reactivate? Are you the one casting highly damaging spells, but who needs time to prepare their damage setup? Each character’s skills give a clear idea of what the character is designed for, and helps make it easy to understand how best to make use of your unique quirks.
A lot of the process of understanding weapon strength has also been simplified – Gone are the days of mulling over weapon scaling letters and how quickly a weapon will strengthen compared to specific stat spreads, now there’s just a single number telling you how strong a new weapon is. If the number is higher, then it will do more damage per successful hit. Don’t overthink it too much, just see the number and roll with that.
There’s also no longer encumbrance to worry about, meaning that picking up heavy weapons will no longer cause your dodge roll to be slower and less effective. Sure, you have fewer slots to hold extra weapons in reserve, but the weight of your gear is never a factor that needs considering.
Additionally, Nightreign does away with fall damage, as well as making it easier to sprint at high speed and to parkour up relatively steep cliffs. In combination, this means it’s a lot easier to just point yourself toward the direction of a desired location or teammate and run directly toward them as the crow flies, rather than staring at your map to work out an optimal route to get to your your destination.
If you’re someone who found the open world nature of base Elden Ring somewhat overwhelming, you’ll be glad to know that some of that is simplified in Nightreign. Sure it’s still a large open world, but it’s not as large, and you’ve now got two clear objectives to reduce choice paralysis – Run away from the approaching storm, and run toward your co-op teammates. You’re incentivised to stick with your team and follow their lead – You’ll take down enemies faster together, and be better positioned to support each other too.
In Nightreign, running out of HP isn’t an automatic setback, you don’t automatically drop your Runes and get sent back to the last bonfire, losing progress on the boss’s health bar. If your health runs out your teammates have time to revive you, by running up to you and smacking you as hard as they can with their weapons. Sure, this gets more difficult the more times you’ve been knocked down, so it’s not a guarantee they’ll get you back up, but by sticking together you have a chance to avoid those kinds of setbacks and keep going at a fast pace.
The only times you can actually get a true game over in Nightreign and see your run end are when fighting each of a run’s three end of night bosses, in which all three players being downed at the same time is a game over. Until then, as long as one of you stays alive, the other two players can always find themselves back in the fight and able to help out again.
Outside of these three fights per run, your whole team can get wiped out by a boss at once and, while you will experience a bit of a setback, you will all get to keep going. You can even all run back to the boss, grab your dropped runes, then run away from the boss rather than fight them again, because you’re not locked into a boss arena in most cases.
Most bosses encountered in the overworld, outside of each night’s final boss, are entirely optional. Unlike the base game of Elden Ring, where getting stuck fighting a boss you can’t defeat means your playthrough essentially can’t progress in a direction, in Nightreign you can very much avoid any bosses that you particularly struggle with.
Additionally, you still gain runes toward levelling up whether or not you personally contribute to the defeat of, or kill, of an enemy or boss. In a worst case scenario where you fear you’ll be a hindrance against a specific enemy, you can hang back and still gain runes and any boss defeat rewards your team as a whole earned.
Beyond running away from the storm and toward your companions, Nightreign’s map is also fully visible from the start of play, and features a number of marked locations with predictable rewards visible from the start. If you need more flask charges, head to a church for example. If you need to level up, your nearest site of grace is already marked on the map. These changes to the game’s map visibility can also help with reducing some of the previously mentioned decision paralysis with the game’s large map – It’s rarely an issue to know where to head to if there’s a specific broad category of reward you’re looking to farm.
Nightreign being a run based roguelike also means that, compared to base Elden ring, it lends itself to smaller bitesize play sessions with convenient exit ramps, which can be particularly useful for those of us, like me, who can struggle with obsessive gameplay loops becoming addictive. While I might in base Elden Ring waste a couple of hours without meaning to fighting the same boss over and over, telling myself just one more try, in Nightreign my run will be over within around one hour if I make it to the final night’s final boss, but the run will probably end sooner than that in most attempts. There’s no one more try, just a convenient end point where continuing to play feels like a sizable enough commitment that, in my experience, it’s easier to walk away from if needed.
Lastly, and most importantly, Nightreign’s co-op focus means there’s always someone else available to help draw aggro from a boss for you. I know this could also be true in base Elden Ring if you were to use something like the Mimic Tear Ash, and summon in NPC support for a single boss fight, but here that co-op support is something you’re always going to be able to rely on being present, and it does pretty fundamentally alter how the game feels. You’ve always got a pretty safe ability to back away from a boss, breathe, use a healing item, and get your bearings. There’s rarely as much sustained pressure on you as an individual player, and that does make a lot about the combat less intimidating.
This all said, Elden Ring: Nightreign isn’t all accessibility wins when compared to the base Elden Ring, with at least a small handful of areas where I personally find the game more cognitively taxing to play than the game that it was spun off from.
In Nightreign, you’re forced to process what new weapons and items do incredibly quickly, making snap decisions about whether to grab things or not. Of course there’s the approaching storm preventing you from hanging around making thoughtful decisions, but there’s also your fellow players. While boss rewards aren’t first come first serve, offering a degree of breathing room to make a selection, regular items found in the overworld and when opening chests are single instance items. If you want an item for your build, you need to grab it fast, particularly if playing with random players online, because someone else might grab it first if you’re not quick.
This is exacerbated by the fact that Nightreign throws infinitely more items and weapons at you than the base game does, as part of its accelerated game pace. Additionally, weapons don’t only come with their own unique moveset and damage numbers, but they also often come bundled with special abilities that are active even if the weapon is sat in your pockets rather than in active use. If a sword has low damage but inflicts increased bleed damage, maybe that works well with your bleed focused dagger build. There’s additional benefits to consider, and if you’re not quick a cool item might be on someone else’s build because you needed a moment to process what was on offer before committing. You don’t have encumbrance to worry about, but your limited item slots mean that you can’t just grab everything and consider later, you have to think fast.
Additionally, you can’t take your time patiently learning enemy attack patterns from a distance the way you might be able to in the base game of Elden Ring, everything about your play needs to be faster and more aggressive. Yes, you have your squadmates to help draw Aggro and give you some breathing room, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can’t afford so easily to stand back, dodging, and learning one enemy’s moveset at a time in depth. If you don’t have existing knowledge of these bosses from fighting them in prior FromSoft games, there’s an uphill climb to learning these bosses in this setting.
You also can’t predict what your big end of night bosses on days one and two will be, so you can’t make a build purpose designed to exploit their weaknesses the way you might in the base game of Elden Ring. You can sort of do that for the night three boss, as the third night boss is one that you select at the start of a given run, you know what’s coming in that regard, but for nights one and two your build needs to be versatile enough for unpredictable threats.
You also can’t rely on overlevelling your character to carry you through a boss fight that you struggle with, because every run you have such limited time to grind for levels before being forced to take on these progression blocking encounters. There’s a limit to how much you can trivialise an encounter by hanging around trying to gain extra levels.
Beyond that, you can’t guarantee making your dream build every run, because so many weapons are randomised in their availability. You can maybe plan to pick up some specific weapon types from known vendors around the map, but you’ll ultimately have to get comfortable with either using your default weapon, or hoping you get a weapon you like along the way.
Lastly, while I did compliment Nightreign on being a smaller and more condensed version of Elden Ring compared to the full game, with more reliable exit points, that’s not the full story of how its session length interacts with cognitive accessibility. A full run of Nightreign is going to last most of an hour, with no ability to quit, take a break, and resume play without losing progress in a run. This means you need to be prepared to be focused and playing for upto an hour without breaks, giving fewer opportunities to pause and accommodate physical or mental health needs. Nightreign demands a larger minimum time investment to hop into playing, and is going to be less accessible for those who need to play in smaller bursts with more frequent and perhaps unpredictable breaks.
On balance, I do think there’s a surprising amount of positives to be said for Elden Ring Nightreign in terms of comparative cognitive accessibility. To be clear, a lot of these moments of praise are comparative, it’s still a FromSoftware game with all the inability to pause, aggressive enemy design, and fast paced dramatic action that those games tend to entail. This is a developer whose titles have historically been pretty inaccessible for several groups of disabled gamers, and seeing one of their titles take positive steps forward feels worth celebrating, even if it’s celebration of progress from an inaccessible starting position.
While I’m not going to say the game is overall accessible for a wide range of disabled players, I do think that there are many players with cognitive accessibility needs who may find this more approachable than From Software’s prior work. That’s praise I didn’t expect to have, and I’m excited that I get to feel this way about a studio whose work often feels purpose built around barriers to accessible play.