As it tinkers with game balance "until the last minute," Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki says the FromSoftware team is paying close attention to a few strategies that proved "way too strong" in the game's network test, including two notorious status effects.
"There are two main areas that we are looking at for user feedback, and in particular the network test," Ishizaki tells GamesRadar+ via interpreter. "We came away with a lot of great feedback from players, mainly due to game balancing, of course.
"We had one area of status effects we felt to be way too strong from the network test. This is something that we were generally aware of during development. So to have that affirmed by players, and have a lot of high detail and a lot of high data on that available to reference, was really valuable. We have to figure out these many different methods of attack and many variations of players playing through on every session. So it's a great reference for balance, doing things like the network test, going forward to release."
Naturally, I immediately asked Ishizaki if he was talking about bleed.
"That is correct," he replied. Producer Yasuhiro Kitao, who also sat in on the interview, said they'd looked at "frostbite as well," which functions very similarly to bleed in terms of lump-sum status damage.
These statuses have always been popular in Elden Ring because they deal a set percentage of enemy health, making them comparatively more effective against high-health enemies encountered later in the game or on deeper New Game+ playthroughs. Where most builds get proportionally weaker as enemies scale up – suddenly a 500 damage swing is only 5% of a boss health bar on NG++, not 8% – bleed and frostbite eating a big, fixed percentage is as inevitable as daylight.
Even in the network test, Nightreign seemed to rebalance how much health a bleed or frostbite proc would shave off a boss, lest beginner weapons chunk them for thousands in the multiplayer scaling, but they were still enormously powerful and popular. I'd wager they'll still be quite strong in the live game, just a bit less potent after these changes.
Ishizaki said they have also been working on "menus and UI and onboarding. This is always something that is helpful to get feedback on, how players are understanding the various systems. We had some feedback, in particular, that characters' abilities were a little hard to read, a little hard to understand from the get-go. So these sort of menu and onboarding areas where we're introducing these new characters and these new skills has been very valuable feedback to us during the network test."
With an optimistic look toward launch this Thursday, May 29, Ishizaki later said that the studio is bracing its servers as best it can.
