Elden Ring Nightreign director on boss difficulty: ‘More or less the same’ as the base game
Nightrein promises to still be an incredibly difficult yet rewarding experience.
While not exactly the same, players can expect a similar level of difficulty in Elden Ring Nightreign to the base game, according to the director.
Elden Ring has lots of incredibly difficult boss fights, and the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion bumped up the difficulty even more (looking at you Radahn), so we were curious about how difficult Nightreign will be. Will it dial the difficulty back down a bit, or will it be even harder to facilitate the fact that it’s a three-player multiplayer game?
This was one of the questions we asked director Junya Ishizaki during a recent roundtable interview. Regarding Nightrein’s difficulty, Ishizaki said:
“It’s actually kind of hard to answer because Nightreign is designed to be played primarily as a multiplayer game. The balancing that has gone into making the bosses just the right level of difficulty is different from something like Elden Ring, where the intent is to fight the boss essentially by yourself. It’s hard to compare because the type of balancing and difficulty are different.”
Comparing Nightreign with Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree is admittedly unfair given how different this upcoming project is. As such, it makes sense that Ishizaki wasn’t able to fully answer, though he did say that the difficulty of the Elden Ring Nightreign bosses should be broadly similar, at least when it comes to how they ramp up.
“That being said, the bosses are still difficult, just like in any of our games, and they get more difficult towards the end. So in that aspect, it’s more or less the same,” said Ishizaki. “There is a sense of accomplishment from defeating the bosses. They will definitely not be trivial and will push players to get past them. So, you should expect similar difficulty to what you’ve seen up until this point.”
Based on Ishizaki’s answer, it seems Nightreign won’t have a boss that’s considerably harder than the ones in the base game and DLC. Of course, we won’t be surprised if there’s a devilishly difficult boss fight hidden in the game, as is the case with most of FromSoftware’s titles.
Elden Ring Nightreign will be released on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC on May 30, 2025.