Developer FromSoftware and publisher Bandai Namco have announced Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone cooperative spin-off set in a world parallel to that of 2022’s Elden Ring.

Revealed with its debut trailer at The Game Awards 2024, Elden Ring Nightreign allows players to team up with two co-op partners and embark on a condensed map based on Elden Ring’s Limgrave area, with enemies and Buildings randomly selected at the start of each game session.

From there, players must rush to defeat enemy camps and find more powerful weapons so that they have a better chance of surviving a challenging boss encounter when night falls. If players survive three days in the game, they will have to take on a major boss, with there being eight major bosses to find and defeat in the game.

Elden Ring Nightreign is designed to be accessible to both existing players and newcomers. There are eight playable characters to choose from, each with unique abilities and ultimate attacks. Nightreign is a “session-based” role-playing game intended to be played online with three players, but solo play is also supported.

While Elden Ring was led by venerable FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki, Nightreign’s development is led by first-time game director Junya Ishizaki. However, Ishizaki is no newcomer to the Soulslike genre, having been a member of the FromSoftware team since 2011’s Dark Souls and holding key roles including level/combat designer on 2015’s Bloodborne and combat designer on Elden Ring”.

“As a developer, I’ve had a lot of ideas for potential new games during the development of previous titles I’ve worked on, including Elden Ring,” Ishizaki told IGN.

“This time as a new director, I got the opportunity to direct this idea for Nightreign. We’ve always been viewed as a company that makes these Soulslikes or this kind of traditional formula of Soulslike games, and so I saw this as an opportunity to do something different. I want to challenge both myself and the company to build something new while leveraging what we have cultivated with our previous titles. Personally, I also like co-op multiplayer experiences and wanted to do something with Nightreign that focused heavily on that.”

Elden Ring Nightreign – First screenshots