I'd love to review Elden Ring Nightreign. But I can't play it

On being stuck in Australian PlayStation matchmaking hell with a brand new AAA game.

The game’s hub area has become a prison for my characters.

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We waited about 90 minutes before we called it. After getting a taste of what Elden Ring Nightreign had to offer, playing with one other random online, we were sitting in the lobby area waiting to be matched with one other player for another game. The game pulled together our first party almost instantaneously. After all, it was the launch night of the title—surely interest in it would be close to its peak.

Thirty minutes elapsed. We just assumed it was a bug in the system, so we reset the party. An hour went by. That led to us both searching Reddit to see if others had similar issues. Then, at the 90-minute mark, I pulled the pin. I've played enough online games to know when a party won't come together, no matter how long you wait.

Sadly, this wasn't a one-off experience. As I'll explain, my biggest foe in Nightreign hasn't been some powerfully chunky boss, but rather its clunky online matchmaking system.

For those unfamiliar: Nightreign is an interesting new foray by FromSoftware—makers of the notoriously difficult Elden Ring, Dark Souls and Demon's Souls series—into online multiplayer. All of their earlier games had an element of this; you could summon in other players to help with bosses. But none of them were designed from the ground up as a pure multiplayer experience.

The ambitious goal was to marry the tension and difficulty curve of Elden Ring with the teamwork and collaboration required of a typical multiplayer game. Curiously, each match requires three players. That's an odd number for co-op play. It's easy to get one other person to play on the spur of the moment, but two? That can require a bit of logistics. Anyone who plays any number of online-only games knows that anything past just one other person can be tricky to coordinate.

Staring into the distance, wondering if a party will ever load…

I'm not writing this piece lightly. It comes off the back of 16 separate attempts to play the game with friends or solo over the past two weeks. Of those, I've only experienced three successful runs of it. And by success, I mean the game actually worked as intended. Even when I managed to find two other friends who could play via PlayStation 5, the game would not let us form a party.

Meanwhile, the solo runs I attempted felt unbalanced and unfair, largely because the game puts you on a clock from the minute you spawn in and gives you very little time to experiment and learn. This is coming from someone who has beaten all Dark Souls games, and Elden Ring twice and its latest intensively difficult DLC. I know my way around Soulslike games.

Not easy, but not impossible: How Elden Ring redefined game difficulty

When it once matched me with two other random players online, they both abruptly quit on me when we couldn't defeat one optional boss. They were both entrenched in the game, playing a later unlockable character, the Revenant. Due to my inability to contact them in-game—another curious quirk of Nightreign—I couldn't communicate that I was new here and needed some guidance.

Stories about online multiplayer issues on Reddit or in the broader press really hit home in Australia. The pool of players is generally smaller. A game that works in the US, Japan or Europe may need to be rethought for this market—or similar ones—in order to have their intended effect. This may be why I'm personally having issues, but others aren't.

At a bare minimum, I’ve gotten very good at beating up the training dummy.

To their credit, FromSoftware realises there's a problem here. They've released statements thanking those who have played the game to date and saying they are addressing the balancing of it for single player and solving matchmaking issues. Patches have followed.

They later suggested that a certain internet setting, NAT 3, may be the cause of the issue for PlayStation players. This forces many online players into their least favourite activity: resolving connection issues. That's especially the case for console players, who on the whole just want to set and forget, not fiddle around with settings—especially dense router-based internet settings. I braved this over the past weekend, spending an hour setting my PS5 Pro on a NAT 2 internet connection, but sadly this didn’t change my prospects for finding a match.

I can't help but contrast this online onboarding experience to that of Fortnite. Some may complain that their earlier matches are filled with AI-controlled bot players, but this does two things: it ensures you can quickly find a match without waiting and controls the early player experience, ensuring you don't feel over your head with new mechanics. It helps make what could be a game with a high skill-based barrier to entry a bit stickier. Nightreign has a tutorial level, but it's short-lived and doesn't really explain much to the player. Playing solo isn't helpful either.

What we're left with is yet another cautionary tale for the industry about launching online games. There's a long list of them that failed in their first inception and needed to be relaunched at a later date. From what I've seen, as opposed to having played, that's not the case here. Nightreign has a lot of potential, and I hope its connectivity and balancing issues can be addressed in patches rather than an overhaul.

For balance's sake, I hope to be back here with a more detailed review at a later date. I'm just as keen as anyone to see what this game has to offer. But, on the same logic, accounts like this need to balance the otherwise positive coverage and creator content where, for whatever reason, those players have been able to easily play this game. Waiting an hour and a half in hope for a game, when there's so much out there to play, can't become the norm.

I’ll post an update to this piece and a link in it to a full review of Elden Ring Nightreign if its ever fixed to the point where its easily playable on PlayStation. But for now: Are you actively playing Elden Ring: Nightreign? Have you also had any issues with the matchmaking? Or any frustrations with any other online games? Let me know in the comments below.