Elden Ring Nightreign is being lauded by critics and fans alike as an ambitious reinvention of everything that made the original game great, now tailored to fit the needs of a roguelite. In runs that vary between 40 minutes and one hour, players are invited to explore a map filled to the brim with hard-as-nails boss fights, hidden loot, and insurmountable challenges to overcome. By stripping away the methodical exploration of FromSoftware’s landmark titles, Elden Ring Nightreign focuses on fast-paced battle to reveal the depth of the combat systems the studio has perfected over the years. However, while Elden Ring Nightreign is unquestionably a fantastic game, it still needs more polishing to become a masterpiece.
While venturing in Limveld and facing the Nightlords, you’ll slowly realize that Elden Ring Nightreign is missing some key features to smooth things out. Fortunately, FromSoftware has signaled it will keep working on the game post-release to improve the experience. We already know the features we would most like to see added in upcoming patches, tweaks that could increase replayability and keep bringing us back for more.
1) Allow Replayable Shifting Earth Events
Every run of Elden Ring Nightreign unfolds in the same map, Limveld, an extensive landmass the game populates with randomly positioned buildings and bosses. It takes some time to remember the basics of Limveld’s geography, but once you do, the map loses some of its novelty. That’s where Shifting Earth events come in. When one of these events is active, Limveld’s geography is revamped to include a major challenge area. Among the events available, there is a chilling mountain top populated by frost dragons, a crater filled with boiling magma, and even a forest of rot.
It’s incredibly fun to explore these alternate biomes in Elden Ring Nightreign. However, the conditions for a Shifting Earth event are too limited. They have a chance to appear after you defeat a Nightlord, and after a couple of runs, they vanish. That means it takes too long for new Shifting Earth events to occur, and the appearance of these events is too random. It would be best if, once a specific event is unlocked, players could simply toggle the option to add it to a particular run. That would allow players to make each cycle unique by varying the Shifting Earth event they want to tackle next.
2) Make Weapon Class and Spell Type More Visible in the UI
The only elements of permanent progression in Elden Ring Nightreign are the Relics, objects you can equip before a run to grant your character advantages. Each character can only equip three relics at the same time, meaning you must choose carefully which advantage you need to tackle specific challenges. The effects of the Relics can grant you a stat boost or improve stamina regeneration, for example. A lot of Relics, though, are focused on specific weapon classes of spell types, things like increasing the damage of Dragon Cult Communion incantations.
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The problem with this system is that, during the runs, there’s hardly any way of telling which class a new weapon belongs to or which school of magic a spell belongs to. You can press the inspect button on a weapon in your inventory to pull up the weapon class in small text above the weapon’s artwork, but when you’re on the run from the ring, that’s hardly a convenient option. That means you must rely too much upon memorizing the vast catalogue of armaments and spells available in Elden Ring Nightreign to ensure you are stacking the benefits from this type of Relic. It’s a straightforward addition to incorporate this information into the UI, enabling players to make decisions more quickly when choosing which equipment to prioritize in each run.
3) Allow Players to Change Relics After Matchmaking
In the current implementation of the Relics system, players must choose which three Relics they wish to equip for each specific character before a new run begins. Once the run starts, you and your teammates are thrust directly into Limveld with the equipment you had previously decided upon. However, some Relics are better to use when you have a specific team setup, as you can get particular bonuses related to the Character Skills and Ultimate Art of teammates. Furthermore, some Relics are better suited to deal with specific Nightlords, exploring their weaknesses or shielding players from their attacks.
When playing online, you can queue up to face multiple Nightlords at the same time. That’s incredibly handy to speed up your matchmaking, but it means you can’t know for sure which boss you’ll face next. Plus, unless you are playing with teammates you can coordinate with through a call, you can’t tell which characters your randomly selected teammates will choose until matchmaking is complete. Adding the option to tweak Relics after matching would allow you to streamline your strategy depending on the current team configuration and target.
4) Add an Option to End Run in Solo Mode
As a FromSoftware game and a roguelite, Elden Ring Nightreign expects its players to fail. Sometimes, you can have bad luck on your first day and fail to collect rewards that help your character thrive. Surprisingly, however, there is no menu option to throw in the towel and end a run. You can only return to the title screen, which means losing any reward you would get by simply dying. That’s even more bothersome when you are chasing Remembrance objectives that can move a character’s story forward, which almost always involve starting a run and killing a specific boss.
While it’s essential that Elden Ring Nightreign prevents players from quitting on teammates while playing online, there’s no reason to stop a solo player from ending their run whenever they want. That would even speed up the process of completing character stories, as you could fulfill a secondary objective and just give up after. It’s a simple option that would make solo play more satisfying, as you can quickly retry a run you feel is already lost, instead of waiting for the night to fall to die permanently. Just to underline how this feature is essential, setting your controller aside for too long kicks you out to the title screen automatically, meaning you can’t even stop playing once you have decided to give up a run, lest you lose the currency you would get after you die.
5) Make Unlocked Remembrance Objectives Always Available
The lore of Elden Ring Nightreign is told primarily through Remembrance missions. After completing runs with specific characters, additional pages will be added to a book, providing more information about their backstory. Sometimes, these pages come with side quests, almost all of which involve reaching a specific point on the map and killing a boss. Completing Remembrance missions also unlocks special Relics and rewards that you can’t obtain otherwise, making them critical for progression.
The problem with these Remembrance missions is that, for a side objective to spawn in Limveld, you must start a run from a specific memory. This memory is activated by interacting with the character book. Changing characters takes you out of the memory, forcing you to restart the process once you are ready to try again. It’s a cumbersome back-and-forth that can be streamlined if Remembrance objectives that you unlock simply pop into the run, regardless of how you start it. It’s another quality of life feature that would improve the overall feel of Elden Ring Nightreign.
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