I didn’t get to talk about it much on last week’s podcast, mainly since we had so much news to get to, but I have been really enjoying the recently released Elden Ring Nightreign! It’s a game that honestly feels tailor made for me. It’s a Souls like, roguelite, coop game I can play with friends. It’s no surprise why it’s my current addiction! But that’s not the only reason why I feel like the game industry, especially the current game industry, needs more games like this.

Like I was saying before, Nightreign is a Souls like, roguelite, coop game made by the original Elden Ring developers, FromSoftware. It’s all about gearing up and taking on the Nightlords! You and two friends, or two random people, are tasked with surviving two days in Limveld, and ever shifting and random environment made up of both new and familiar locations from the original Elden Ring. While the environment will never be completely random, it’s random enough to make each run feel pretty fresh, especially when you start getting Shifting Earth events that will throw in a new challenging area on the map that’ll have it’s own reward. But this is the game play loop of Nightreign! You drop in at level 1 and have to run around the environment looting and defeating camps and bosses to gear and level up enough to take on the boss of that night. After you do defeat them it’s on to day two where you repeat this. After defeating the boss of the second night, you can take on the Nightlord! The Nightlord can change between runs as well and the players themselves can pick which ones they want to face with there being eight in total. Each Nightlord is pretty different from each other and their fights are honestly the highlight of the game! They are the most ‘new’ content the game has to offer as well, as the bosses of the nights leading up to the Nightlord are recycled from Elden Ring or one of the Dark Souls games. Which can honestly be a ton of fun for fans of the series like myself! It was pretty exciting seeing some returning faces like the Nameless King and Gaping Dragon.

The bosses, environment, and loot aren’t the only things that can be different between runs though! You’ll have your pick of eight different Nightfarers, which are the playable characters of the game. Unlike other Souls games, you don’t get to build your character up for a specific play style, instead you’ll pick one of the Nightfarers. Like the Nightlords, each one is pretty different from each other! You have the all rounder Wylder who’s pretty good at everything, the tanky Guardian who can block damage and save allies, the magic slinging Recluse who might be a little squishy health wise but provides plenty of fire power with her spells! I’m not going to go over each Nightfarer but I hope that shows you that you should be able to find one to fit your play style. It also feels like you can use any of them against any boss, and you don’t really need to pick and choose based on the Nightlord you are fighting. Meaning when you find a favorite, you can always stick to it!

And that’s a basic overview of the game! You pick a Nightfarer, a Nightlord to fight, and jump right in to loot and level up. It doesn’t sound like much when I say it like that but trust me when I say that this was more than enough to get me to rack up more than 100 hours on the game already! And I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. But I won’t lie that the game is repetitive and doesn’t provide nearly as much variety as other roguelite games. Not only that, it uses a lot of recycled content from Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series as a whole. Like I said, the Nightlords are the only new bosses, all of the bosses leading up to them are things Souls players have already fought. And while most of those bosses have been changed up and given new attacks and such, they are the same fights for the most part. And given just how often you’ll be running into them, since there are two per run, that excited feeling of seeing a returning boss loses it’s luster pretty quickly. Not to mention there seems to be a glitch currently going on where the Shifting Earth events, the ones that change up the environments in pretty major ways, leave and don’t come back. They are meant to appear randomly when you pick a run or come up again after you rest at the Roundtable Hold, the hub area of the game, but they seem to stay gone most of the time. Weapon drops and such are pretty random at least, there’s a very big pool of weapons for the game to pick from, but that pool of weapons mostly is just weapons from Elden Ring and nothing new.

It’s probably pretty clear now that the game was made mostly with recycled assets and such from past games, made on a budget, and by a smaller team in FromSoftware. This was never meant to be some new ground breaking, record setting game like the original Elden Ring was. This was meant to be a smaller, cheaper experience, maybe even a test of this style of game for the company. And while that certainly can sound like a negative, I think all of those things are very much positives! And not just for the game itself.

This post is part review, part discussion because while I do want more games like Nightreign because I adore this style of game, I also want more games like it because I think it’s what this industry needs. Everything is getting more expensive. Game development and games themselves. The more big companies try and make these insanely big ground breaking experiences with the best graphics around, the more expensive this stuff is going to get. There’s a reason why most people are predicting that Grand Thief Auto VI is going to be $100 and there’s a reason why Take-Two, the publisher of GTAVI, hasn’t come out to deny this. And here’s where I come in with a bit of a hot take. While I don’t think games should ever be $100 on their own, not including things like special editions and what not, I don’t think games should be limiting themselves because they are worried about price. Mario Kart World is an extremely fun and extremely polished game, it’s a game I don’t mind being $80. The amount of love, time, and care that was put into that game should be rewarded, it’s clearly a game made with a high budget. But here’s the thing, if we’re going to have games like Mario Kart World, we need games like Nightreign to also be a constant thing.

When I said Nightreign was a budget title, I didn’t just mean the amount of money that was probably used to make it. The game is only $40 currently, and that is a steal! FromSoft, or more likely Bandai Namco the game’s publisher, could have easily sold this game for way more and people would have still bought it. But no, they knew this game, that is made with mostly recycled content and by a smaller team, should be a cheaper priced game. And that’s exactly what we need more of.

One of the biggest problems with the game industry right now is how pricey it’s getting just to play games and how long game development is taking. And games like Nightreign can solve both these problems. We need cheaper games made by smaller teams that don’t take ages to make. Through out this generation, people have been complaining non stop about the slow output from big companies like Xbox and Sony. We’ve gone from a handful of exclusive games every year to just about one or two from these bigger companies, and smaller companies aren’t being that much faster. Indie games have honestly been what has kept the game industry going in these times of drought and deserve a massive amount of praise for doing that!

Like I was saying before though, I don’t want these massive, long in development, games to just cease to exist. I still want big games like Ghost of Yōtei that do take years to develop. Honestly, if games that massive and with that long of development want to cost $80, I think that makes sense. Having these games that rarely come out cost more isn’t nearly as big of a blow as every game costing that much. But that’s another topic! For these bigger games to keep these longer development times though, we need smaller, cheaper games like Nightreign to fill the gap between them! Another good example of this is the Miles Morales game that came out at the launch of the PS5. That game was made with mostly reused assets from the PS4 Spider-Man game and as such had a quicker development time and a lower cost over all. It wasn’t as cheap as Nightreign, but still!

I was honestly upset that we didn’t see more games like Miles Morales after it’s launch, especially given that this is when those long development times really started to plague the game industry. The game sold pretty well and also reviewed well! Granted, it didn’t do as well as the Spider-Man game that came before it, but still. The same can be said for Nightreign actually. While its reviews haven’t been extremely glowing, besides mine of course, everyone agrees that the game is fun. And the game has also been selling very well! With 3.5 million copies sold in the first week alone!

With that in mind, I just don’t understand why we don’t see more games like this. Sure they don’t review or sell nearly as well as bigger games but at the same time they don’t need to do that in order to be a success. I can’t possibly imagine the reason is that most publishers feel it’s “too lazy” given how lazy some of these bigger games can be! I know not every developer is in a position where they can spare a few team members to make smaller games while a larger team works on a larger game. That’ll usually just make said larger game take that much longer! But at this point, I think it would be a worthy investment.

Pricing games accordingly is going to be a major sticking point for this industry going forward. You can’t really price everything at $60 like you use to and expect to get away with it. With games going up to $80 and beyond, publishers are going to find out that not everyone can pay those prices. Sales are going to take a dip for big AAA games while smaller games like Nightreign and Expedition 33 probably see an increase! At least that’s what I’m hoping.

I’ve seen a number of people get honestly excited at the idea of the video game industry crashing like it did back in 1983. People assume that when the game industry bounces back things will simply just be cheaper but that’s not really how it works. Things will be very different, yes, but that can mean a lot. We might see the death of console gaming as a result and have PC gaming be the only kind. Or game streaming will be the big new thing. There would be a lot of uncertainty going into a industry crash so rather than have that happen I’d prefer to see the industry recover.

The game industry needs to change, there is no doubt about that. If games are going to be $80 they need to prove they are worth that price, and if they aren’t there needs to be games, cheaper games, that people can buy and show support for. That’s why we need more games like Nightreign. We need budget games to help this industry, to show that a game doesn’t need to be massive or have cutting edge graphics or be extremely innovative. This industry needs cheaper, smaller, budget games. Ones that don’t take 5 years to make. Ones that can still make a profit because you don’t need to take out a loan to buy it. And that’s what Nightreign is. Well, that and just a really fun game, so you should totally support it!

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Any interest in checking out Elden Ring Nightreign? What do you think the game industry needs right now to improve? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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