Elden Ring: Nightreign offers a "sporty" reimagining of the enormous scale of its predecessor, and its director says it's a faster, looser, almost rough-and-ready experience by comparison.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, Elden Ring: Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki says "there's a lot of undulation to the structure and to the game flow." Much like actually making the game, "there are a lot of lows and highs, and peaks and troughs," which means that "it's really about the route you take through the map and the journey, and what sort of changes and obstacles you're going to run into on the way."
That new sense of 'game flow', Ishizaki says, "was a big part of what sets [Nightreign] apart from Elden Ring." It's got "a sort of sporty feel to it, almost a bit of a rough and loosened and fast tempo to it." That's true of the gameplay, he says, but also to his team's development style on this particular project."
Whether that new style has entirely panned out, however, Ishizaki "really couldn't say." The eventual result of the Nightreign experiment, he says, is "going to tell us how players feel about this kind of game and this kind of new challenge for us." As a smaller, cheaper project - particularly when compared to Elden Ring itself - Ishizaki acknowledges that Nightreign is unlikely to feel exactly the same as its predecessor.
"This is a condensed RPG. There's a short time-span in which a lot of exhilarating and dramatic events can happen. We wanted this to be the focus of Nightreign, to create these dramatic and dynamic play sessions, and to have all of these emotions and these peaks and troughs occur during any one single session. This was a challenge for us to make in this short time-span [...] but we hope that users will appreciate this new challenge and appreciate this new game flow."
Check out our Elden Ring: Nightreign review to discover what we thought of this new FromSoftware experiment.
