The Night has fallen, and Nightfarers have risen. After months of anticipation, Elden Ring Nightreign finally launched on May 30th, and what a week it’s been. From explosive sales numbers to day-one patches, character reveals to community controversies, the past seven days have delivered more twists than a Nightlord’s attack pattern.
If you’ve been too busy dying repeatedly in Limveld (we feel you), here’s everything that happened during Nightreign’s landmark launch week.
Launch Day Triumph: 2 Million Nightfarers Answer the Call
The numbers speak for themselves—and they’re speaking loudly. Within 24 hours of launch, Elden Ring Nightreign sold over 2 million copies worldwide, a figure that includes both pre-orders and day-one purchases across all platforms. Bandai Namco celebrated the milestone with a social media post declaring: “Darkness fell over Limveld, and two million Nightfarers rose up against it. Thank you for your support.”
The game also reached over 313,593 concurrent players on Steam just one hour after release, making it the second-highest maximum peak for any FromSoftware game on the platform, behind only the original Elden Ring. What makes these numbers particularly impressive is that Nightreign isn’t available on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass, meaning the 2 million figure closely reflects actual copies sold rather than subscription access.
For context, this puts Nightreign ahead of many major 2025 releases in terms of immediate commercial impact. Launching a spin-off to these heights demonstrates the incredible hunger for FromSoftware’s brand of cooperative masochism.
The Final Nightfarer Reveals: Executor and Revenant Take the Stage
The week leading up to launch delivered the final pieces of Nightreign’s character puzzle with two crucial character trailer releases that completed the eight-Nightfarer roster.
Executor: The Cursed Blade Master
Released on May 24th, the Executor character trailer provided the most detailed look yet at what FromSoftware described as a “condemned warrior who wields a cursed katana blade”. The trailer went into more detail than previous character reveals, including proper text and voice-over descriptions of abilities.
The showcase revealed the Executor’s core mechanics center around precise parrying and deflection, offering a Sekiro-inspired playstyle that rewards timing and positioning over brute force. Most dramatically, the trailer showed the character transforming into a large beast during boss encounters, significantly changing their playstyle mid-combat.
This transformation mechanic represents something genuinely new for FromSoftware—a character whose fundamental approach can shift during a single encounter. Early player reports suggest the beast form trades the Executor’s precision for raw damage output, creating fascinating risk-reward decisions about when to transform.
Revenant: The Spirit Summoner
The Revenant character trailer dropped on May 29th as the “final Nightfarer to be revealed”, introducing what’s essentially Nightreign’s dedicated support character. Born of sorrow and shaped by the Night, the Revenant raises the dead to answer the call of vengeance.
Unlike other Nightfarers who focus on direct combat, the Revenant’s kit revolves around summoning spirits and providing team support. Her unique mechanics include passive ghost creation when defeating enemies and a powerful ultimate ability that can instantly revive fallen teammates while granting temporary damage immunity to the entire squad.
The launch trailer also featured the Revenant summoning a giant skeleton around the 42-second mark, confirming earlier speculation about her Spirit Ash-focused gameplay. For players familiar with Elden Ring’s summoning system, the Revenant essentially transforms that solo mechanic into a cooperative advantage.
Mixed Reviews and Community Feedback: The Reality Check
While sales numbers painted a rosy picture, player reception told a more complex story. Elden Ring Nightreign currently holds mixed reviews on Steam, with only 66% positive user reviews. The criticisms weren’t about the core gameplay—most players praised the combat and cooperative mechanics—but rather about design decisions that felt out of step with modern multiplayer expectations.
The Trio Mandate Controversy
The biggest complaint centers around the game’s rigid three-player structure, with many players expressing frustration over the lack of a two-player mode. Nightreign forces players to choose between punishing solo play or finding exactly two friends, with no middle ground for duos. This design choice has created practical matchmaking headaches and left many potential players unable to enjoy the intended experience.
FromSoftware has acknowledged this oversight, stating that the lack of duos “was an oversight” and suggesting they might add a two-player mode in future updates. However, the damage to launch perception was already done.
The Solo Struggle
Players attempting solo runs consistently reported that the experience feels “much harder going it alone,” with the general consensus being that Nightreign is significantly more challenging without teammates. This isn’t simply a matter of missing cooperative benefits—the game’s balance assumes three-player coordination for optimal experience.
Technical Turbulence
Performance issues plagued some players, particularly those with high-end graphics cards experiencing frame rate drops. FromSoftware confirmed these issues and recommended lowering graphics settings from the default “High” to “Medium” or “Low” while they investigate the cause.
Developer Insights: Ishizaki’s Origin Story
Amidst the launch chaos, a revealing interview with director Junya Ishizaki published by GamesRadar on May 28th provided fascinating context about Nightreign’s conceptual origins. Ishizaki revealed that the idea for a cooperative-focused FromSoftware game first emerged during Dark Souls 3’s development, when he was already thinking about concepts that would prioritize the cooperative experience.
The director explained that these ideas only crystallized during Elden Ring’s full production phase, when the scope of that game’s world, enemy variety, and weapon diversity provided “a really good starting point to build on these ideas and develop them further”.
This revelation reframes Nightreign not as a quick cash grab or experimental side project, but as the culmination of nearly a decade of thinking about how to make FromSoftware’s signature design philosophy work in a fundamentally cooperative context.
Patch 1.01.1: FromSoftware Responds to Solo Concerns
On June 2nd, FromSoftware deployed Patch 1.01.1 following a three-hour server maintenance window, directly addressing the most common player complaints about solo play difficulty.
Key improvements included:
Automatic Revival for Solo Players: The effect “Automatic Revival Upon Defeat” now allows solo players one revival per night boss battle, significantly reducing the punishment for solo attempts.
Increased Solo Rune Rewards: Solo expeditions now provide more runes, allowing players to level up more effectively before facing major encounters.
Enhanced Day 3 Rewards: Players reaching Day 3 of expeditions earn more high-rarity relics, improving progression for successful long runs.
Small Jar Bazaar Improvements: Higher probability of obtaining rare relics from Scenic Flat stones purchased at the merchant.
The rapid response—just three days after launch—demonstrates FromSoftware’s commitment to addressing community concerns. The studio has also confirmed that patch 1.02 will arrive next week with additional improvements for solo expeditions.
Twitch Integration and Community Events
To celebrate the launch, Twitch partnered with FromSoftware for a week-long experience featuring unlockable badges, collaborative co-op streams, and a Global Death Counter extension that tracks collective deaths across all Nightreign streamers.
The partnership included special badges for viewers who tuned into co-op streams during the launch window, plus a Wylder Class badge unlockable by downloading and sharing Elden Ring clips between May 29th and June 3rd. The Global Death Counter extension became an instant hit, letting the community collectively track their shared suffering as the death toll climbed throughout launch week.
Launch Week Technical Notes
Day-One Patch 1.01
Even before the official launch, FromSoftware released Patch 1.01 to improve gameplay stability and address balance issues identified during the network test. The update included balance adjustments, bug fixes, and improvements to character handling, with many players assuming climbing mechanics were enhanced based on beta feedback.
File Size Reality
Early estimates proved accurate—Nightreign requires approximately 30GB of space according to official system requirements, but datamined evidence suggests the actual install is closer to 21GB on consoles. This makes it roughly half the size of base Elden Ring and about a third of the combined Elden Ring + Shadow of the Erdtree package.
Looking Forward: The Road Ahead
Despite launch week turbulence, the foundation for long-term success appears solid. The Steam Deluxe Edition promises additional DLC with “additional playable characters and bosses” arriving by Q4 2025, suggesting FromSoftware has substantial post-launch content planned.
Community sentiment seems to be settling into cautious optimism. While the mandatory three-player structure and solo balance issues remain genuine concerns, most players acknowledge that the core cooperative experience delivers something genuinely special. As one review put it: “For friends playing together, this spinoff is dangerously addictive and fiercely rewarding”.
The rapid deployment of patch 1.01.1 also demonstrates FromSoftware’s willingness to iterate quickly based on player feedback—a promising sign for the game’s evolution over the coming months.
The Verdict So Far
Elden Ring Nightreign’s launch week has been a masterclass in both the promise and perils of ambitious game design. On one hand, you have explosive commercial success, genuinely innovative cooperative mechanics, and a unique take on the roguelike formula that feels distinctly FromSoftware. On the other, you have design decisions that feel out of touch with modern multiplayer expectations and balance issues that significantly impact the solo experience.
What’s clear is that when Nightreign works—when you’re coordinating with two friends to take down a Nightlord, when you’re perfectly timing a cooperative revival, when you’re adapting your strategy based on randomized encounters—it creates moments unlike anything else in FromSoftware’s catalog.
The question now is whether FromSoftware can address the rough edges quickly enough to maintain momentum, or whether Nightreign will become a fascinating experiment that never quite achieved its full potential.
Either way, with 2 million Nightfarers already committed to the journey, we’re all about to find out together. The Night has only just begun.
As always, don’t forget to check out our other Nightreign News as well.
Have thoughts on Nightreign’s launch week? Managed to defeat your first Nightlord? Drop your experiences in the comments—we’re all learning how to survive Limveld together.
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