You might not be all that surprised by the difference in time investment, honestly

A very similar looking screen greeted me before the end of the tutorial when I booted up Elden Ring: Nightreign, which I guess should come as no surprise to me, as it’s a bit of a tradition to die before the tutorials end in Souls games, the tutorial usually represented by whatever ugly SOB you first immediately meet that stomps you out. I suppose there was the slightest sliver of justification of a different outcome in the back of my mind that after 100’s of hours poured into the original Elden Ring, I would have stood some kind of a fighting chance, further reinforced by the notion that the tutorial boss was basically just Margit the Fell Omen, a foe I’ve gone up against multiple times in the original…but alas, even Nightreign’s intro made short work of me.

Good sign when the clown shoes you laughed at for being too ridiculous fit you perfectly

Which I suppose is for the best, after all, as I may have become high on my own supply immediately after my short lived victory, and thusly been dramatically more devastated when I got to the rest of the entire experience and discovered firsthand what all of the streamers I had been watching had tried to warn me about: Nightreign is totally fucked in terms of solo difficulty. Keeping in mind, this particular Souls game is multiplayer oriented, and any game that you are going to have to rely on your friends or strangers for is going to be an insta-headache in my book, but going it alone solo, which I’m most certainly use to in the Souls universe still effortlessly drowning me in tears of scarlet?

Just like old times! (EDIT: See also-last month)

I’m not sure if I benefited more or less by cutting my teeth on Sekiro as the first game in the series I enjoyed enough to playthrough all the way to the end, as I feel as if it gave more structure to the combat, or at least framed the series of escalation and progression one makes throughout the game in a more palatable way, at the very least in a more consumable manner. This helped to focus my efforts on how to grapple with the pedigree more, in a way other Souls game hadn’t quite clicked with a similarly satisfying sort of sensibility…the downside being that the rest of the Souls games didn’t have quite the same formulaic structure Sekiro possessed, the experience coming off as a bit more mindfully polished than the rest that had come before it had been.

Wouldn’t be Dark Souls without the need for cheese

The other day, I briefly posited the notion of whether or not FromSoftware would slowly dial back the difficulty scaling in Nightreign overtime, allowing more leeway for players to tackle the game by their lonesome, or whether or not the devs would remain stalwart, and stand by their “git gud with friends” mentality, reputation for the series maintained, the want and or ability to attract or retain players be damned.

Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing how I can best the Nightlords, and how many times I’ll have my ass kicked in the process, in the coming weeks.

-Pashford