Elden Ring Nightreign director admits the team “struggled” to balance FromSoftware’s formula with a new “novelty” 

We’re very hot on FromSoftware’s new roguelike spin-off game Elden Ring Nightreign, despite its complete lack of duos gameplay and annoying PC issues on launch. (The latter isn’t surprising at all at this point.) However, some haven’t quite clicked with the game’s new adaptation of the developer’s beloved gameplay style. 

As it turns out, gamers aren’t the only ones who are struggling with the new gameplay style. During development, Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki also struggled with balancing the game’s new format and multiplayer focus while also keeping what players love about the developer’s prior works. 

Elden Ring Nightreign wasn’t easy to make 

After coming up with the idea for an official multiplayer Soulsborne game during the creation of Dark Souls 3, Ishizaki struggled to match Elden Ring’s gameplay with the roguelike multiplayer idea. 

“I struggled with everything (laughs). In particular, when it came to revamping the game design from previous titles and changing the rules significantly, it was important to consider whether the game would work and whether it would be good or bad as a game,” Ishizaki explained in an interview with PlayStation Japan. 

The Elden Ring Nightreign director revealed that it was important for the team to “cherish” elements of the Dark Souls series, but there were a lot of small tweaks that needed to be made to make a true multiplayer co-op experience, especially as the director wanted players to be “happy and comfortable”. 

“We had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make it an experience unique to this game,” he continued. “We could have made the changes without thinking about it, but I think the most difficult part was finding the balance to make sure that the game would not end up being ‘a completely different game’ or ‘not a good one’ despite the name Elden Ring.”

One of the major differences the team struggled with was major control changes, such as moving the HP recovery from a flask on the d-pad to a face button. The director explained that there was a lot of discussion around this decision but ultimately they “rearranged the button assignments to make recovery an easy operation” due to the game’s high speed. 

Elden Ring Nightreign has only just launched, but FromSoftware is dedicated to a lengthy post-launch process with more enemies, bosses, classes and more.