Elden Ring: Nightreign is going to be a very different Soulsborne game. Three-player co-op runs with no PvP, no summons, no invasions, and as Nightreign’s director Junya Ishizaki told IGN Japan in a recent interview, no player messages.
“You can still see the ghosts of other players,” Ishizaki said, via Google Translate, “but the ability to leave messages has been removed. The reason we removed the message feature is that in this game, where each session is about 40 minutes long, there is no time to write your own message, and no time to read messages written by others.”
Soapstone messages have been a recurring element in the Soulsborne games, with players allowed a select vocabulary to leave warnings and hints for each other. And, inevitably, to troll them, leading our Morgan Park to declare that Elden Ring message griefers were breaking his spirit. And fair enough. Putting messages at the bottom of ladders to make it harder for people to climb them is bloody annoying.
Other players will still be able to have an impact on your game, though in a purely helpful way. As Wes Fenlon reported in December, Nightreign players will leave behind some of their loot when they die, which can then be picked up by other players who find their ghostly remains.
Nightreign will be out some time in 2025, and is having a network test on consoles in February. If you’ve got other questions, here’s everything we know about Nightreign.