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Play Elden Ring: Nightreign together with friends in 2025

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FromSoftware
Key art for The Game Awards 2023.
This story is part of our coverage of The Game Awards 2024

Elden Ring: Nightreign looks like the already-wild world of The Lands Between mashed up with Monster Hunter for a bit of casual kaiju-slaying, and it looks absolutely amazing. Announced at The Game Awards 2024, Nightreign came as a surprise announcement that sent fans into a fervor as soon as everyone realized what it was: a truly multiplayer Elden Ring.

The three-minute-long cinematic trailer depicted magical combat, huge weapons, and even bigger monsters. Some of the foes are so fearsome that you won’t be able to defeat them alone; instead, band together with friends to take on waves of enemies and gargantuan beasts. But the game isn’t just fighting huge creatures.

ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN – REVEAL GAMEPLAY TRAILER

The trailer shows a variety of weapons including daggers, staves, and almost comically large bows. Vast landscapes demand you to explore to uncover their secrets, with a variety of traversal options that include flying mounts to help scale the gothic ruins littered throughout the land.
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Other details are scarce. The trailer doesn’t give us too many details of what to expect, but the combat is just as frenetic and visceral as the first game — except now, there’s more people playing at one time. (That means I might be able to finish the game if someone helps me.) However, the small snippets of story the trailer revealed hints at a similar dark-fantasy tone as the original game.

Elden Ring: Neightreign is slated for release in 2025 and will be available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Steam. Sadly, we don’t have a more narrow release window than that — but when this game does launch, it’s going to be huge.

Patrick Hearn
Patrick Hearn writes about smart home technology like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smart light bulbs, and more. If it's a…
Elden Ring Nightreign feels like a PS3 multiplayer game in the best way
Fighting enemies in Elden Ring Nightreign.

In a night full of surprises at the Game Awards 2024, Elden Ring Nightreign may have been the biggest shocker of them all. FromSoftware built its reputation on the fabled Dark Souls series and single-player games. While games like Elden Ring and Bloodborne include co-op, the studio has never taken its award-winning formula into full-on multiplayer territory. That changes on May 30.

Digital Trends spent four hours playing Elden Ring Nightreign ahead of its release date reveal. FromSoftware’s latest borrows elements from various genres like battle royale and roguelikes to create a unique experience that’s more than the sum of its parts. The already established systems have been retooled to fit a multiplayer experience, and the newly introduced ones still complement it. It feels like the kind of multiplayer extra that was attached to so many PS3 and Xbox 360 games in their era, but in the best way possible.
Where we droppin’ boys
The objective in Elden Ring Nightreign is to survive three days. There’s exploration to be done, loot to be found, and bosses to be slain during that time. At the start of a session, players have the choice between eight classes, but I was only given four in the demo: Wylder, Duchess, Guardian, and Recluse. That batch includes your typical melee character focused on being an all-rounder, a speedy glass cannon, and a tank. Most of these are straightforward as they solely rely on physical hits.

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Is Elden Ring: Nightreign cross-platform?
Three soldiers fighting a fire monster in Elden Ring Nightreign.

One of the major surprises revealed at The Game Awards 2024 was a stand-alone spinoff of Elden Ring called Elden Ring: Nightreign. Unlike the base game, this new game will not be a typical action RPG but more of a roguelike co-op experience where teams of up to three players attempt to survive three in-game days while gathering new gear and facing bosses from multiple FromSoftware titles. Elden Ring was notorious for not being a cross-platform game, unlike Monster Hunter Wilds, but with this new game being built around jolly cooperation, has FromSoftware gotten with the times and included this feature? You may want to prepare to cry, Tarnished, as we give you the hard truth about Elden Ring: Nightreign cross-platform support.
Is Elden Ring: Nightreign cross-platform?

As shocking as it may be to hear, Elden Ring: Nightreign will not have any cross-platform support. That means this multiplayer-focused game will only allow PlayStation players to team up with other PlayStation players, Xbox players only with other Xbox players, and the same for PC players. This is exactly how co-op worked in the original Elden Ring, which Elden Ring: Nightreign is built on, but still sad to see it wasn't changed for a game that relies so heavily on co-op. It is possible to play the game alone, but the experience is clearly built for teams. If you and your friends don't happen to have the same platform, you sadly won't be able to play together.

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Lucia and her partner rob a store in GTA 6.

A lot of long-awaited video games will finally release in 2025. But don’t let them be the only ones to grab your attention this year.

If all goes according to plan, 2025 will contain the launches of Nintendo’s Switch successor, Metroid Prime 4:Beyond, and Grand Theft Auto VI. Other high-profile games like Elden Ring: Neightreign, Doom: The Dark Ages, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, and Ghost of Yotei flesh out Digital Trends’ most anticipated games of 2025 list. It’s likely that these AAA adventures, and whatever Nintendo decides to deliver with its new console, will dominate gaming conversations throughout the year.

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