Elden Ring Nightreign director promises difficulty tweaks following beta feedback, and updates for Nightlord Gladius

At the end of this month, co-op spin-off Elden Ring Nightreign will make its debut. Back in February, developer FromSoftware hosted a network test for the upcoming release, before later revealing some stats which suggested many players actually struggled to finish it.

According to figures shared in March, the final boss Nightreign testers came up against in the cycle – Nightlord Gladius, Beast of Night – was only defeated 58,615 times. To compare, the mini bosses strewn across the world were defeated from between 99,000 times to 195,000 times, depending on how often they appeared over the day cycle.

So, what has FromSoft learned from the playtest? Well, speaking with PlayStation, Nightreign’s game director Junya Ishizaki said the team had “received a lot of helpful feedback regarding the difficulty”, and as a result has made some adjustments to the final build.

These adjustments will “strike a balance that makes the game challenging as you progress, but still manageable”, Ishizaki said. The director added Gladius “will also receive some updates”, although he did not elaborate on what exactly these updates will include. These, Ishizaki said, will be something for players to look forward to on Nightreign’s release.

Ishizaki added that some of those who took part in the network test “found it difficult to understand what elements were visible on the map, and said it was hard to identify next steps or how to use some of the character movesets”. Therefore FromSoft has made some tweaks to the final version of the game, which will ensure this information is presented more clearly.

Nightreign’s director additionally said that on the game’s release, players will be able to determine a boss’s weakness before heading on into the fray.

“So, if poison is effective against an upcoming boss, you may proactively search for and loot items that inflict poison more often in that run. Taking advantage of their susceptibility will give you an edge in the fights,” Ishizaki explained. “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.”

Nightreign will be released on 30th May across PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC. You can check out the PC requirements for Elden Ring Nightreign here.

Our Ed has already been hands-on with Elden Ring Nightreign. “Nightreign provides a delectable hit of Elden Ring in a repeatable microcosm,” he wrote in Eurogamer’s Nightreign preview.

“It’s got the difficulty, the levelling, the boss battles, and the sense of discovery, but all at high speed for a new type of challenge, while its grim enemy selection is like a best-of Souls mixtape I’m itching to replay.”