Elden Ring Nightreign’s story structure sounds weird, I’m just not sure if it’s the good kind yet

Anyone that’s played a FromSoftware Souls game knows how it tells its stories. You meet a wide range of characters, all of which mostly just talk at you in varyingly cryptic ways. There’s also tiny bits of lore offered up from weapons and items too, all of which build up a messy picture. But in something like the upcoming Elden Ring Nightreign, where the main focus is gameplay that encourages you to constantly be on the move, I’ve been left wondering how its story will play out. As it turns out, it’s quite different from the original Elden Ring.

Speaking to IGN, game director Junya Ishizaki set the scene a little bit explaining that “Nightreign shares essentially the base setting and the world of Elden Ring, but it’s played out on a different stage so to speak. So there’s this concept called the Night Lord, which is a sort of abstract phenomenon or calamity that has befallen The Lands Between in this alternate timeline, and much like a real-life calamity, it’s something that it’s not done by design or intention – it’s just something that has occurred naturally and it’s befallen the lands between and it needed some sort of opposition.”

That opposition comes in the form of the Nightfarers, the preset characters you play as. As opposed to Elden Ring, where there is a main plot so to seek, you’ll mostly be trying to learn about the Nightfarers’ respective pasts through Remembrances.

In Nightreign’s version of the Roundtable Hold, you can check out the character you play as’ Remembrances through a journal. Sometimes these are just logs, other times you’ll be taken to specific areas to live out memories. Once you’ve spoken with an NPC within a Remembrance, you then get a task to complete. These vary from character to character, like how Wylder might need to go find a particular item in a cave, or how Raider has to win 1v1 boss fights.

Personally, I’ll have to wait and see how I feel about this structure when actually playing the game. I’m confident all the Nightfarers’ backstories will have that classic FromSoft appealing vagueness, I just worry that they’ll just feel a bit tacked on rather than properly woven in. Happy to be proven wrong, I do like the sound of each character needing to do different things, so I’ll cross my fingers that it works out.