Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
When you find yourself trapped in one of the internet’s endlessly recurring arguments about From Software’s Dark Souls franchise, you inevitably wind up wandering in the land of intangibles. Push past the standard “Is it hard like that for a good reason, or just for perverts?” conversations, the salvos from the Bloodborne and Sekiro partisans, or the general ennui with the way the gaming industry has gorged itself solely on the franchise’s most easy-to-copy bullet points, and you wind up using a lot of words like “vibe,” “feel,” and “mystery.” These things are a real part of From’s design playbook, which tries, like few other studios do, to capture the feeling of being a lonely explorer in obscure and dangerous lands. But those same factors are also irritatingly hard to quantify—at least, they used to be, until From apparently did us all the favor of making a version of 2022 Game Of The Year Elden Ringthat had all those artistic and emotional elements hacked right out of its skull—making their absent value impossible to miss.
This is brought to you by six hours spent with the recent closed network test for Elden Ring: Nightreign, the studio’s wildly off-model effort to inject some Fortnite Slurp Juice into its elegiac worlds of rot and decay. Although I can’t speak to Nightreign‘s full release version, the experience rolled out for players who signed up for the network test that went live this past weekend had the feel of a student experiment that had somehow gotten away from its creators. Yes, you could take Elden Ring‘s vast map, fill it with lootboxes and standing monster encampments, fly teams of three players over it in a battle bus bird, and create something playable, and even occasionally kind of fun. Yes, you could replace Elden Ring‘s careful character-building system and equipment drops with pre-generated classes with Overwatch-esque special moves. Yes, you could chase your players with a big life-sucking wall to steadily pen them into one particular circle of the world. But should you?
The irony is that, if Nightreign was a fan-made mod, rather than an official release, I’d probably be hooting and howling for it. The initial moments with the game are genuinely thrilling, as your chosen character—now with their run speed jacked up to compensate for nobody getting a horse—goes sprinting across those beautiful landscapes, collecting runes and equipment as quickly as possible. Coming across a squadron of enemy knights and taking it apart with teammates, only to get rewarded with a high-end weapon or perk, carries an inarguable thrill. It’s interesting to see how the designers have shoved various esoteric elements of the original game, things like wizard towers or subterranean mines, into the fast-paced structure they’ve imposed on themselves here. The boss fights that end each of an hour-long round’s three “days” are a blend of interesting challenges and callbacks to old From material—and the game-ending ones that have been specifically crafted for Nightreign take smart advantage of the game’s multiplayer nature. It’s all clever, in that same “let’s see what the weirdest thing we can make with these assets” kind of way that many such experiments can be. But I come to From expecting better than clever.
Because the longer you spend running around Nightreign‘s version of Limgrave—and I’m measuring this on the scale of the network test time, so it’s not like we’re talking “after dozens of hours”—the more you can feel how devoid of deeper meaning it all seems to be. Elden Ring already struggled with this in places, with its vast tracts of incident-free terrain sometimes conveying a beautiful and lonely sense of space, and sometimes feeling like “We couldn’t think of anything to stick here.” Nightreign has plenty of stuff to stick in, but little sense of artistry in how it’s done; its encounters and areas don’t feel authored so much as blogged.
Above all else, the game—at least in its demoed form—lacks those all-important intangibles. Part of what makes Elden Ring a genuine masterpiece is that few games have ever created the feel of moving through a dying world so thoroughly; I can still remember coming over certain ridges for the first time and having my breath taken away at the resulting vista, at the sense of grandeur tarnished. (If you’ll pardon the pun.) Nightreign‘s worst sin is that it takes a world, and renders it back down into nothing more special than a video game map. In playing it, I couldn’t help but think about all those things you’re not supposed to be thinking about while immersing yourself in a video game: Which compromises were made that left this as the end result? What did From buy for itself by bending to gaming trends, after spending decades cheerfully operating independently of them? What am I missing here, that caused some of gaming’s most talented artists to bend their talents toward creating something that feels so artless? Nightreign is, at least in the form we’ve gotten so far, an interesting diversion that occasionally rises to the level of “fun.” But its greatest value may end up being the way it highlights the importance of all the beautiful things it lacks.
