Some months after launch, Elden Ring: Nightreign remains the same game it was on release. FromSoftware's first almost live-service game has sure gotten its fair share of developer attention, but the type of "new" content simply isn't enough to keep things interesting.
Nightreign gets weekly updates and changes that try to shake things up a bit and break the monotony of your umpteenth 40-minute run with two randoms who have no clue what they're doing.
This usually comes in the form of Everdark Sovereign boss variants, which make the final boss of each run a "substantially" harder version of itself. I put substantially under quotes here, as sometimes (more often than not) it just ends up being the same boss, but starting at Phase Two and packing a heavier punch and more HP. Quite captivating indeed.
We need more than "harder" bosses
Everdark Sovereigns are a nice way to give players something new to try out each week. After all, this game is structured in the form of "runs," each lasting up to 40 minutes. With how it's released updates thus far, FromSoftware somewhat treats Elden Ring: Nightreign as a live-service title, providing weekly patches, balance changes, and so on.
However, this simply isn't enough. I mean, sure, Dark Souls 2 was made interesting by Ascetic burning that changed boss fights, but having only a handful of bosses, of which only one "changes" per week, is simply not a great loop. Sometimes, FromSoftware would introduce two Everdark Sovereign variants for a week, but even that gets stale eventually.
With so few final bosses in the game, it's not long before stuff starts to loop back. The same Everdark Sovereign, just a few weeks later. It's unsustainable and boring to say the least, especially since there are real ways to make this game more interesting and more fun for a wide variety of people (particularly those who play solo or duo).
Where's my God damned duo mode, FromSoft?
Two ways to make the game a lot more exciting for many would be to revamp solo and introduce a duo mode for people who just want to play with a friend and not queue up with at least one random player. It's not always that you have a three-man stack ready for taking on Nightreign's runs, and being forced into matchmaking because of that is genuinely horrible.
From my personal experience with the game, that third random, to whom we have no way to communicate properly, simply does his or her own thing, ignoring me and my friend nine times out of 10. One could argue that adding some type of voice chat feature would mitigate this issue, but if you've ever played any game with matchmaking and voice chat, you just know that isn't the solution.
The fact that we're getting recycled Everdark Sovereigns every week instead of proper feature updates that should've been in the game from the start is mind-boggling. What's more, over the past few months, you cannot tell me FromSoftware couldn't have cooked up at least one new boss. Half the bosses in Elden Ring: Nightreign are reused bosses from FromSoftware's previous games, so they could've at least rehashed some stuff, plastered a Sovereign label on it and called it a day.
But no, it's another week, another one of the same boss you have to fight, sometimes in a 40-minute run. No new features, no substantial updates.
Just recycle, recycle, recycle.
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