Elden Ring Nightreign's not debuting to the best of review scores from users—which is hardly surprising. I'm really starting to rather enjoy myself after 19 hours, but it took a minute to get adjusted to the sheer, unrestrained chaos of FromSoftware's most experimental game to date.
That hasn't stopped it from hitting the Steam concurrent charts like Radahn doing his terrifying meteor move, though. Per SteamDB, Elden Ring Nightreign debuted to a massive 300,000 players. It's since dwindled to 150,000, though some fluctuation is to be expected.
Mind, that is a pretty considerable drop. If I'm to compare that to Helldivers 2 at the peak of its heyday, it took over a month for the game's concurrent player count to halve. So what gives?
In our Elden Ring Nightreign review, PC Gamer's Tyler Colp aptly calls it one of FromSoftware's most peculiar and abrasive games since the '90s—and I'd concur with that assessment. Nightreign doesn't permit the slow, patient, methodical digestion of mechanics you'd get in any mainline souls game, where you're given the blessed opportunity to to fight, die, repeat against a mountain until it finally crumbles before you.
Instead it's more of a pressure cooker—especially if you're playing solo, which I don't recommend unless you're a complete masochist. My first few games of Nightreign were infuriating, confusing, and felt like a complete mess. It took me a few goes around on FromSoftware's wild ride before I started to actually get it. I'm not shocked that 150,000 people have (temporarily) bounced off.
It doesn't help that a lot of the things that help the game's progression make sense—new bowls for your relics, remembrance challenges, and so on—are gated behind knocking over the first Nightlord.
Whether they dust themselves off and go in for another round, though, remains to be seen. I reckon the proper soulsian sickos will come back for another chew—I certainly did, and I've been rewarded for my thirst to understand this bizarre, unpredictable, messy, stressful concoction.
I'm not the only one on the PC Gamer team that's been bitten by the bug, either, which is why we have an Elden Ring Nightreign tips article to help you through those growing pains. Don't say we never gave you nothin'.
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