Elden Ring Nightreign’s Patchwork Nature Actually Makes for a Better Game

Summary

Elden Ring Nightreign is a melting pot of ideas from different games and FromSoftware titles.
Despite recycling content, Nightreign avoids being labeled as an asset flip due to FromSoftware’s unique design approach.
The game shows promise for future updates, potentially adding more nods to previous games while maintaining its own identity.

It’s no secret that Elden Ring Nightreign draws most of its assets and inspiration from many different places, creating a patchwork game that works with surprising cohesion. Built on the framework of Elden Ring, it changes the formula through roguelike mechanics, while adding more than a few nods to FromSoftware history. While some aspects, such as the network, can feel a bit like it’s held together with spit and string, there is an endearing quality to how FromSoftware was able to repurpose a patchwork of elements from many games as another.

This stitched-together nature causes Elden Ring Nightreign to become a melting pot of ideas, with many ways the game could move forward in future updates. In a way, it is the realization of many mods that had already reimagined Elden Ring’s mechanics as a roguelike, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Nightreign works as well as it does. The fact that it can marry some very different mechanics together just goes to show the strength of FromSoftware’s design.

elden ring nightreign dark souls nostalgia

Elden Ring Nightreign Could’ve Kicked Open the Door to Nostalgia, But Only Left It a Crack Open

Elden Ring Nightreign caused a lot of discussion when its Dark Souls content was revealed, but its inclusion flies in the face of industry trends.

Elden Ring Nightreign Is a Melting Pot of Ideas, and It’s Better for It

Nightreign marks one of the largest departures for FromSoftware in a very long time. Armored Core 6 was obviously a very different game from Soulslikes, but it was the continuation of a long-running series. Nightreign is new without being completely new, reusing many aspects of past FromSoftware design ideas without feeling like it is plagiarizing itself. With most of the content returning from Elden Ring, it is augmented by mechanics from Sekiro, the speed of Bloodborne, and topped off by a little nod to the past of Dark Souls. But those are only the FromSoftware influences, as it shares many traits with battle royales and roguelikes, integrating them seamlessly into Elden Ring’s robust mechanics.

Despite its Reused Content, Nightreign Avoids Being an Asset Flip

Many developers trying this sort of thing would likely be accused of making a cheap asset flip, but FromSoftware doesn’t seem to attract this kind of criticism. Maybe it is because the developer’s games typically have the sort of heart that many players have personally felt connected to in the past, and so many FromSoftware fans are far more willing to see the same things again if it means they get more games to play. The studio is hardly a stranger to reusing things from game to game, as Elden Ring repurposed animations from Dark Souls, yet it feels like it stands alone as the culmination of the developer’s Soulslike design philosophy.

FromSoftware has established a long history of making games that borrow elements from one another and build off each other, refining them into an experience that feels unique to that game. This is what makes Bloodborne and Sekiro such beloved, standalone experiments. They took the broad Souls formula and refined it down to a point, each emphasizing different approaches to a genre made famous by Dark Souls. Nightreign is like the ultimate culmination of this. Where various developers in the past have described games as “love letters to the fans,” like how DICE did with Battlefield 2042, FromSoftware doesn’t need to. It is obvious that this is a grand experiment, made with love, and that understanding is left implicitly for players to understand.

There’s a lot of promise for the game’s future, and while Nightreign may be dogged by technical issues at the moment, it does not take away from the fact that it is a synthesis of many old ideas working in concert. Future updates could add more nods to previous FromSoftware games, which would surely be welcomed by many fans, but it seems like it still wants to make an identity for itself, with new Nightlords and possibly locations to explore. Nightreign is a textbook example of how to acknowledge the past without being swallowed up in a pit of nostalgia.