Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki has revealed that the upcoming co-op RPG will feature boss fights of similar difficulty to what we saw in the original Elden Ring. Speaking to Ungeek, Ishizaki revealed that, because it’s a multiplayer game, the balance has to be just right.
“It’s actually kind of hard to answer because Nightreign is designed to be played primarily as a multiplayer game,” said Ishizaki when asked about the difficulty of Elden Ring Nightreign‘s bosses. “The balancing that has gone into making the bosses just the right level of difficulty is different from something like Elden Ring, where the intent is to fight the boss essentially by yourself. It’s hard to compare because the type of balancing and difficulty are different.”
It is worth noting that while the base release of Elden Ring was praised for its excellent design and relatively gentle difficulty curve, several players found DLC Shadow of the Erdtree much more difficult. Even developer FromSoftware agreed with this assessment, with several updates released to balance things better, including one that buffed great swords and backhand blades, while another nerfed the final boss of the DLC.
Despite its steep difficulty, however, Shadow of the Erdtree still managed to be an incredible success, selling more than 5 million copies in the first three days of its release.
Ishizaki does bring up, however, that while not as difficult as in Shadow of the Erdtree, challenge is still going to be an important aspect of Elden Ring Nightreign, and its bosses will still be quite difficult. He compares the difficulty to other FromSoftware games, emphasising the accomplishment players feel from beating bosses in these games.
“That being said, the bosses are still difficult, just like in any of our games, and they get more difficult towards the end, said Ishizaki. “So in that aspect, it’s more or less the same. There is a sense of accomplishment from defeating the bosses. They will definitely not be trivial and will push players to get past them. So, you should expect similar difficulty to what you’ve seen up until this point.”
While this means that the base release of Elden Ring Nightreign will be well-balanced, with a similar difficulty curve to that of Elden Ring, we don’t know if future content released for the game will maintain the same idea. FromSoftware has previously revealed that there will be post-launch support for Nightreign, with DLC planned for Q4 2025.
Elden Ring Nightreign is slated for release on May 30, and will be coming to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Players will have to keep in mind, however, that it won’t feature cross-play support. Players on Xbox consoles will only be able to play with other Xbox users, for instance.
The game has also been designed strictly for three players, and will not feature duos or solo support. While players can still queue up for a run at some bosses alone or with a friend, other players will fill the empty slots.
