Elden Ring Nightreign was one of the most surprising reveals of Thursday night’s The Game Awards show. Known for making grueling boss-heavy games geared largely around a solo experience albeit with co-op a possibility, who would’ve thought that the creators of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring would next be working on a multiplayer Elden Ring game that mixes in elements of roguelikes and battle royale games, too?
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That’s exactly what we’ve gotten with Elden Ring Nightreign, and while we still have tons of questions about this multiplayer experience, we apparently won’t have to wait too long to see some of them answered. That’s because Bandai Namco and FromSoftware have already announced the very first Elden Ring Nightreign playtest which is due to take part in February. Elden Ring players will be able to sign up for it sooner than that with the pair of creators also announcing that signups will open in January for the following month’s playtest.
More specifically, the signups for the playtest will open on January 10th. Once that happens, you’ll be able to return to this page here to sign up and take part, but you can also go ahead and join the Elden Ring mailing list there if you’re not already on it to ensure that you don’t miss out on the signups. It hasn’t been said yet how limited this first technical test will be, so best not to assume that you’ll be able to get into it without issue. Given that Elden Ring Nightreign supports up to three players in one session, this playtest could also be a case where invitees get more invites to send out to their friends thus ensuring they have someone to play with.
Elden Ring itself had a technical test to make sure that the multiplayer functions in the game worked well and, more importantly, to give people a first look at the Lands Between. It’s worth noting, however, that the locations of items and inventories of vendors among other details were changed from the playtest to the full game, so don’t put too much stock in memorizing details of the playtest other than the specifics about the classes that you’re most interested in playing as.
“The network test is a preliminary verification test in which the selected testers play a portion of the game prior to the full game launch,” an overview of the Elden Ring Nightreign technical test explained. “Various technical verifications of online systems will be examined by conducting large-scale network load tests.”
While Elden Ring Nightreign will be releasing as a standalone game for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC platforms, this playtest is only for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. PC was left out of the original Elden Ring playtest as well with only the consoles focused on, but this time, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are being left behind, too. It could be that the PC version is being omitted so that people aren’t ripping apart the game via datamining to spoil all its secrets early.
