Some people have already beaten multiple Elden Ring Nightreign bosses, or indeed the entire game, totally solo. It is perfectly playable alone. But I agree with Will's Elden Ring Nightreign review: it is miserable alone.
My god, Nightreign is so much better with friends. Granted, in my experience shoveling thousands of pounds of mulch on a humid summer day is also much better with friends. Everything is. The friend buff is real. But the gulf between the solo and team experience in Nightreign is so massive, from coordinating abilities to sharing loot to managing aggro, that it's got me thinking about the merits of explicitly building your game with teams of three in mind, especially when you have limited in-game communication and no crossplay. Betting your game's experience on the player's ability to recruit two friends feels like a mistake.
Looking for one
This has been on my mind since the recent alpha for Marathon, which is also designed for teams of three. I actually had a lot of fun with the alpha when – here it comes – playing with two friends, but where Nightreign is simply grueling solo, Marathon feels completely unplayable alone. You would have to pay me to play that game with two randoms. It's like herding cats. In Nightreign, going alone is hard; in Marathon, it's standing in a field with your ass in the air and asking for a team to take your guns.
While both of these games have matchmaking that will put you in a team of three – and I'm frankly impressed with how stable the Nightreign servers have been in my limited experience – they do very little to help those teams coordinate and succeed and, you know, have fun. Adding matchmaking is the bare minimum. It's surviving. But I don't want to survive; I want to thrive, and other multiplayer games do this stuff so much better. You can ping things in Marathon, and Nightreign lets you put a marker on the map to suggest where to go, but playing either game with two random players still feels like trying to staple rain to a tree.
Maybe – okay, definitely – some people have more patience for this than I do, but I hate rolling the dice on whether my LFG teammates are going to enhance my evening or sabotage it. I'll let you guess the impact of the random mage who joined a buddy and I last night, and who seemed incapable of using their skill or ultimate but kindly gave us a lot of practice on how to revive downed teammates. I have an easier time tolerating that gamble when games help me steer the ship, but the matchmaking and communication in these two is a crapshoot.
There's been a lot of noise about Bungie omitting solo and duo queue (and also proximity chat) in Marathon, among other deserved noise around the game. FromSoftware has openly admitted it goofed up and forgot that people might want to play Nightreign with just one friend, though it's considering adding bespoke duos in the future. And any raid leader can tell you that booking one friend is exponentially easier than getting two or, horror of horrors, more online at the same time. Why do you think so many people are specifically begging for a third in the Nightreign Reddit community? Your average gamer is an adult, the world is by and large hellacious, and life gets in the way. Game nights are hard to coordinate!
On top of that, not everyone likes Souls games. This is a different formula for FromSoftware, but it's still Elden Ring. My Destiny and Monster Hunter buddies don't translate well to Nightreign. And that goes double for extraction shooters like Marathon. How did two of the most intense and demanding genres in gaming both decide that they'd be just fine without multiplayer features that infinitely more approachable games figured out years ago?
Marathon, I realize, is an unfinished and unreleased game, but its intended launch is not far away and its established direction feels like a misread from Bungie, which should know better after 10 years of shepherding Destiny players and probably five years of studying other extraction shooters. Nightreign, to FromSoftware's credit, is already planning a patch that should make the solo experience more fun. But I'm really hoping for more. Duo balancing, crossplay, in-game chat, smarter pings – I don't know how difficult or feasible it would be to add these in future patches, but I reckon they'd go a long way to making this game more fun on average.
For my money, that's what good matchmaking and multiplayer design does. Playing with friends sets the ceiling for fun. Playing with randoms is the floor. Good multiplayer systems narrow the gap between those two scenarios and give players a better average experience, ideally while helping them make and find lasting friends within the game. There are absolutely merits to multiplayer-first design – the co-op-only game Split Fiction is one of the best games of the year – but if studios are going to push teams of three this hard, they're going to have to do more to cultivate and support those teams. For the time being, when I can't wrangle some Nightreign buddies, I'll be playing Fantasy Life i instead.
