Supposedly, it's better to try and fail than to never try at all. I say otherwise. The first Elden Ring Nightreign beta has kicked off, and before its servers collapsed with all the grace of a thrice-parried Radahn, I managed to try my hand at a run with two randomly-matched players. It was a disaster – and because the network test servers are (at time of writing) offline for maintenance, I've got nothing to do but sit and think about everything that went wrong.
These personal failings have nothing to do with Nightreign itself, which – spoiler – feels brilliant. Nor do I begrudge FromSoftware's servers going under. "Network test" is painted over the title screen, and it would've been odd if there weren't any hiccups as the doors opened. In truth, I just didn't git gud.
Look away
It took me far too long to realize you have to stand in front of the roundtable to queue up – despite what FromSoftware-induced muscle memory may lead you to do, jumping on it does nothing – but once I was soaring into Nightreign's parallel Lands Between, everything started to click. I played a warrior with a small buckler for parrying, whilst my teammates opted for spellcasters. We landed on a grassy mound overlooking a valley, and when a mounted knight field boss trotted past us, our wordless charge revealed one thing: none of us, it seemed, had learned anything from Elden Ring's earliest rite of passage – that is, getting your ass kicked by the Tree Sentinel.
History repeats itself. Luckily, death is much more forgiving in Nightreign. You can revive fallen teammates, and "true" death sticks us back to the Site of Grace mere feet away to charge back in. The knight is hard. This feels like the first time FromSoftware has truly balanced combat around multiplayer elements, and although this boss has drastically increased health to account for being outnumbered, the real stinger is its emphasis on flexible multi-stage attacks. For example: the knight can summon a volley of magical arrows, but rather than loosing them in the single-target chain you'd expect, they stop and start, shifting its target several times. A bunch of his moves worked in a similar fashion, and led to several deaths when we were caught off guard by the reactivity. It's a significant improvement, and means that Nightreign's three-on-one combat feels a lot less predictable and cheesy than it perhaps would in past FromSoftware games.
We spent most of the in-game day fighting the knight, and although I'd estimate it took us nearly 10 deaths in total, we won. We jump up and down on the spot – a celebration that transcends language – and spend our hard-earned runes at the nearby Site of Grace. Levelling has been massively streamlined in Nightreign, so you don't have to worry about the usual intricacies of a build. Instead, you just chuck in your runes and your stats are bumped up as a whole. The speediness is appreciated, because by the time we're done there's a battle royale-style ring of blue fire hemming us in, forcing the group to sprint past a wandering Flame Chariot boss fight and into a suspiciously derelict circle of grass. A couple of Elden Ring's horrible six-fingered hand monsters lie in wait, but the main course is the Centipede Demon – a returning boss from the first Dark Souls, who we presumably have to beat to escape its fiery arena.
I say presumably, because I never get to find out. I suspect we spent too long on one boss and not enough finding runes and upgrades in the wider map, because the Centipede Demon is hard. We whittle its health below the halfway point and lop off its tail, but it's not enough. I try to gamble it all on a desperate parry, miss in front of my teammates, and we're all unceremoniously wiped out with a belly-flop. "Defeat," flashes Nightreign, an abrupt full-stop for a frankly embarrassing first run. In those 20 minutes, I died more than I did in most Elden Ring dungeons – with the added humiliation of other players seeing me do it.
As salt in the wound, Nightreign's network test has come to an unceremonious end – which means that's my first and last attempt for the day. I'll be waiting until tomorrow for a chance to redeem myself, and already have plans to see more of the Lands Between. On a brighter note, I'm in agreement with our own Austin Wood – who's played much more of Nightreign – that there's a thrilling level of chaos here, and I can't wait to see what other tricks FromSoftware has up its sleeves when the next network test rolls around.
