As a roguelike-flavored PvE gauntlet, Elden Ring Nightreign is designed to keep you on your toes with unpredictable shifts in the gear you're using and the enemies you're facing. In a new interview posted to the PlayStation Blog, Nightreign game director Junya Ishizaki of developer FromSoftware explicitly says that you'll have no choice but to change your strategy because bosses won't put up with your crap for long.
"The same strategy won't always work when fighting the bosses," Ishizaki begins. "Your initial strategy may be effective for a while, but the bosses will gradually evolve and your tactics will no longer be viable, forcing you to rethink your approach."
Ishizaki highlights a big difference in the final game compared to the Elden Ring Nightreign network test. "You'll be able to determine the weakness of each boss before heading out" on a new session, so if you see that a boss is weak to something like poison, you can "proactively search for and loot items that inflict poison more often in that run."
He continues: "Taking advantage of their susceptibility will give you an edge in the fights. We intentionally designed the game so that you'll need to adapt and evolve your strategies along with the changes that happen in the game."
We will, of course, see players beat Nightreign with ridiculous limitations on their gear, level, and also their very controller. But this arms race of player tactics and boss weaknesses sounds interesting on paper, the pendulum of balance swinging back and forth as challenges progress and players try to control their loot RNG as best they can. It's also a little terrifying to hear that ol' reliable may not be so reliable anymore.
There are few things FromSoftware fans love more than forcing the same build in every encounter, from Strength builds bonking physical-resistant enemies to wizards out-lasering magical bosses. If it ain't immune to my build, it will die. Call it stubbornness, but sometimes using the sub-optimal thing you know and love is better than changing your whole build for one boss. Or at least it feels better, dammit.
I've been in the FromSoftware trenches since Demon's Souls, and at least on my first playthrough, I've basically always used the same one strategy for these games: the coolest magic sword I can find, which is often the recurring Moonlight Greatsword.
It's a foolproof plan: if the magic won't cut it, surely the sword will. The magic swordsman life served me well in Elden Ring itself as well as all the Souls games, and even Bloodborne had the good grace to add its own Moonlight Greatsword.
I don't expect Nightreign bosses to pull a Monster Hunter and suddenly change elements entirely – though that might actually be fun – but this news has come as another reminder that, instead of just Souls habits, I'll also have to tap into the roguelike section of my brain for Nightreign. Horror of horrors, my favorite magic sword probably won't be available every run.
This is going to take some buildcrafting. I got a taste of this in an early preview, and it sounds like late-game bosses will double down. I'll inevitably end up falling into the magic swordsman archetype, but I can bring some pinch hitters along for the ride. I guess. And yeah, it will probably be fun to figure out which Elden Ring weapons, from the Star Fist to Death's Poker, are still taking names in Nightreign.
