While celebrating the fact that Elden Ring: Nightreign has managed to get 2 million players on its first day of release alone, producer Yasuhiro Kitao has taken to social media platform X to thank players for giving the experimental title a shot. In his post, Kitao wrote about how Elden Ring: Nightreign has “some peculiar aspects” when it comes to its overall gameplay, world design and multiplayer mechanics.
“Nightreign has some peculiar aspects to its game design and is different from our recent titles in various ways,” wrote Kitao. “Nonetheless, many of you have bravely jumped into this world, and for that we’re immensely grateful.”
In a follow-up post, Kitao also mentioned that, much like with the original 2009 release of Demon’s Souls, as well as 2019’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, players might be caught off-guard when it comes to some of the new gameplay elements that they wouldn’t have expected of FromSoftware. However, he does note that, once players get used to the new gameplay, Nightreign will provide its own unique “sense of accomplishment”.
“As with Demon’s Souls or Sekiro, it may be confounding at first, but just like those games, Nightreign offers its own challenges and experiences,” Kitao’s post continued. “Once you overcome the initial hurdle, it’ll surely provide a sense of accomplishment that’s also its very own. We hope you enjoy it.”
Elden Ring: Nightreign is FromSoftware’s first stab at a multiplayer-only title, and likely serves as a way for the studio to get some practice in and learn about any potential hurdles for its next confirmed game, the Switch 2-exclusive The Duskbloods. Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki had spoken about this last week, where he said that the title is “going to tell us how players feel about this kind of game and this kind of new challenge for us.”
Since its release on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, Elden Ring: Nightreign has immediately proven itself to be quite successful. Along with 2 million copies sold, the game has also seen a tremendous amount of concurrent players on PC, going all the way up to 313,000 concurrent players on Steam alone.
Ishizaki had spoke about how, despite the title’s roguelike-styled gameplay elements, the development team hadn’t set out to make a roguelike game right from the beginning. Rather, the title became a roguelike over the course of development thanks to all the things that were added to and removed from it as time went on.
“We didn’t start off by saying, ‘let’s aim to build a roguelike,’ or something, a game that features a lot of random elements,” said Ishizaki in an interview. “It’s not necessarily a jumping off point for the game design, is what I’m trying to say. It was more the result of a lot of feeling out the gameplay and the structure, and figuring out what the best solution to a certain problem was or what made sense in terms of where that particular gameplay element was headed at the time.”
For more details about Elden Ring: Nightreign, check out our review.
