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Elden Ring Nightreign, as a condensed RPG spinoff reusing many assets, was built much more quickly than Elden Ring itself. But the ideas behind it, simmering away in the mind of director Junya Ishizaki, are years and years old. He's been thinking about this game since he was working on Dark Souls 3
"It was a long time ago," Ishizaki explains via interpreter in an interview with GamesRadar+. "I had this very vague image from this kind of game I wanted to make while in the company, and I think maybe even around the time of Dark Souls 3 development, I had these very fragmented ideas and concepts going."
Ishizaki has been at FromSoftware as a combat and level designer since the original Dark Souls. Dark Souls 3 was released in April 2016 worldwide, so Nightreign has been marinating for about a decade.
"Of course, it wasn't until Elden Ring was in full production that these ideas cemented and things started to take shape in my mind," Ishizaki adds, "seeing the scope of the world of Elden Ring, the enemy variety, the weapon variety, the build variety of the players, and this felt like a really good place to expand on and to develop these ideas with. So that's kind of the timeline of the conception of this game."
FromSoftware president and Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki pushed Ishizaki to assume the director's role, but when he first had the idea, Ishizaki says he "didn't really have any idea that I might be the director at that time. I just thought this could be something interesting for us to pursue."
After this directorial debut, he says he'd "absolutely" lead another game – perhaps one that isn't so firmly entrenched in an existing world and IP.
"I'd love to try my hand at directing another title in future," he says. "Of course, for Nightreign, Elden Ring was a big cornerstone for this project. So in the future, I'd love to try maybe a different approach going forward."
As an outspoken fan of multiplayer, would Ishizaki ever push for something with the structure of Nightreign, or a similarly out-there break from FromSoft's normal RPG philosophy, that isn't a spinoff?
"I do wonder about that, and I'm the sort that plays and feels out what the game wants to be as I'm developing it, I've found with Nightreign," he answers. "So this is something I'll definitely be looking at, but it might end up being – I'm not sure when or what my next director role will be, but I'm sure it'll end up being something quite different."
Naturally, a lot can and will change when you start implementing ideas and sharing them with teammates. How did Ishizaki find the game that Nightreign wants to be?
"There are a lot of difficulties," he begins, "and there's a lot of points you have to overcome in order to accept that. So you have to go into these things being prepared to explain your ideas to the team and to sort of overcome these difficulties. But during that process, there come these moments where you find something that just feels pure fun, and you just have to try to lock into that.
"It's an ongoing process that occurs every day. Every day you try to find something new and something fun to lock into, something that's giving you that idea and that motivation to keep going. So this is kind of how I feel the process went with Nightreign, and we'll see how it pans out for a future project."
