Elden Ring Nightreign director reveals he dreamt up the game during Dark Souls 3, which explains a lot of the Dark Souls content

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Elden Ring Nightreign may be a spin-off of FromSoftware’s open-world game, but it’s not entirely an Elden Ring game. In fact, the upcoming multiplayer co-op game brings back numerous Dark Souls enemies, including bosses, costumes from across the Souls series, as well as classes based on the iconic RPG series.

As it turns out, Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki dreamt up the concept for the roguelike co-op game back when he was working on Dark Souls 3. However, it wasn’t until the game director saw the huge scope of the team’s open-world successor that it made sense to make the co-op spin-off.

Elden Ring Nightreign has been a concept for years

Speaking to GamesRadar, Ishizaki explained that he originally thought of the concept for Nightreign “a long time ago”.

“I had this very vague image from this kind of game I wanted to make while in the company,” the director explained. “I think maybe even around the time of Dark Souls 3 development, I had these very fragmented ideas and concepts going.”

Development on Dark Souls 3 started back in mid-2013, creating a Greatest Hits-style send-off for the series which gave Ishizaki a boost of inspiration. However, it wasn’t until FromSoftware starting working on Elden Ring that the idea for this spin-off started to come together. However, he “didn’t really have any idea that I might be director”.

“It wasn’t until Elden Ring was in full production that these ideas cemented and things started to take shape in my mind,” the director said. “Seeing the scope of the world of Elden Ring, the enemy variety, the weapon variety, the build variety of the players, and this felt like a really good place to expand on and to develop these ideas with. So that’s kind of the timeline of the conception of this game.”

Of course, Elden Ring Nightreign only exists with the foundations of the base game, no matter how much the base game may end up diverging from the structure of the open-world game. However, If the game’s director gets to try their hand “at directing another title in future”, they would like to try a “different approach going forward”.

Ishizaki’s inspiration from Dark Souls 3 absolutely makes a lot of sense for what we know of Elden Ring Nightreign. There’s a tonne of returning Dark Souls content in the base form of Nightreign, and there’s even more returning content planned for the game’s post-launch support.

About the Author

Lewis White is a veteran games journalist with a decade of experience writing news, reviews, features and investigative pieces about game development with a focus on Halo and Xbox.