In Remembrance

M any of the design choices concerning matchmaking in Nightreign have been made to maintain consistency with the mysteries and vagaries of online play in Elden Ring. It seems the development team decided that the kind of traditional lobbies seen in most online games – those that come with selectable player profiles, chat channels and latency indicators – would spoil the game’s ambience. To retain the atmospheric abstraction that has long been one of FromSoftware’s hallmarks, Nightreign simply matches you according to hidden criteria with whomever it pleases. If you’re not playing online with friends (the game uses From’s familiar password system to allow for a smooth rendezvous in these cases), you relinquish all control over the makeup of your squad.

This means you cannot, for example, pick a teammate who has a proven track record, who has bested certain Nightlords, or who has even shown a basic respect for teamwork. There is no guarantee your squadmates will know how to, say, reach the cliffside tunnel that leads to a crucial upgrade merchant, or that they will avoid aggroing the mini-boss you were trying to sneak past. In some runs, this produces a sense of camaraderie and improvisation: it’s enjoyable to show a newcomer the ropes, to use map markers and gestures to build an understanding where words are absent. But at a certain point you crave competence, simply because victory becomes improbable without it.