Elden Ring Nightreign: Everything You Need to Know

Elden Ring Nightreign is a standalone co-op roguelike from FromSoftware, published by Bandai Namco Entertainment and released on 30 May 2025. It keeps Elden Ring's combat, weapons and bestiary and throws out the open world: a squad of up to three Nightfarers drops into Limveld, survives three in-game days while a ring of Night closes the map inwards, and finishes the expedition against a boss called a Nightlord. You do not need to own Elden Ring to play it, and there is no Nintendo version.

That is the game in four sentences. The version you would buy today is considerably bigger than the one that launched — a rotation of harder Everdark Sovereign bosses, a Deep of Night difficulty ladder, a paid expansion in The Forsaken Hollows, and balance work that has continued into 2026. This page is the map of all of it.

• Everything we have written about the game sits on the Elden Ring Nightreign hub.
• Installing tonight? Start with the Nightreign beginner guide and come back here for the wider picture.

What is Elden Ring Nightreign?

It is a spin-off, not an add-on. Bandai Namco's product page describes it as a standalone adventure set within the Elden Ring universe and organises the pitch around three ideas — Rise Together, Become a Hero, Take on the Night — which, for marketing copy, is an unusually honest summary of what the design actually does (Bandai Namco).

FromSoftware developed it and Bandai Namco Entertainment published it, but the director is Junya Ishizaki rather than Hidetaka Miyazaki (Wikipedia). That matters less for the feel of a fight — the animation weight, the stamina rules and the enemy tells are unmistakable — than for the shape of the whole thing. Nightreign is built around repetition and session length, not around one long journey you take at your own pace.

The practical consequence is that almost nothing carries over between runs. You start each expedition near the bottom and rebuild, which means the early minutes of every session look similar and the late minutes never do. What does persist is Relics, passive effects you slot onto a Nightfarer before you leave, and the knowledge in your own head: the map's patterns, the bosses' movesets, what your class can survive.

What platforms is Elden Ring Nightreign on?

PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One (Bandai Namco · IGDB). There is no Nintendo version: neither a Switch nor a Switch 2 release has been announced.

On the European Steam storefront the standard edition is €39.99 and the Deluxe edition €54.99, checked on 20 September 2026 (Steam). Store prices move and regional pricing differs, so treat that as a snapshot rather than a fact about the game.

The PC build is the one that comes with an asterisk. It runs at a hard 60 fps cap and ships without DLSS, FSR or frame generation, which turns PC tuning into a question of frame consistency rather than headline numbers. If you are choosing a platform on performance grounds, that is the thing to weigh.

How does an expedition work?

An expedition is three in-game days long. You land in Limveld, a reshaped version of Limgrave that rearranges its points of interest between runs, and you spend each day levelling, looting and clearing camps while the Night shrinks the playable area around you (Deep of Night wiki).

Days one and two each end in a mandatory Night Boss. Day three ends at the Nightlord. The Field Bosses scattered across the map are optional, and that is where the tension lives: every detour is time you did not spend somewhere else, and the ring does not wait for you to finish looting (Fextralife).

Traversal is built for the clock. Spirit hawks carry Nightfarers across a valley in seconds, and the map rewards crossing it rather than combing it.

That is why routing matters more than thoroughness. Three well-chosen camps and a Night Boss reached with levels in hand beats a run that looted everything and arrived underpowered.

Who are the Nightfarers?

Nightfarers are fixed archetypes, not build templates. Each one carries a Character Skill on a cooldown and an Ultimate Art, and those kits never change; what changes from run to run is the weapons you find and the Relics you brought. Eight shipped at launch and two more arrived with The Forsaken Hollows (Fextralife).

Two footnotes on that table. Executor's Cursed Sword is renamed Suncatcher once his Remembrance quest is complete, so you will see either name depending on where you read (Fextralife). And the Undertaker's Character Skill is blank on purpose: sources disagree on what it is called, and a gap is better than the wrong word.

Which Nightfarer you should play is a separate question, and it has no official answer — FromSoftware has never published a class ranking. Our Nightfarer tier list collects what high-Depth players currently rate, what patch 1.03.2 changed, and where the disagreements are.

Who are the Nightlords?

Nightlord — one word, which is the spelling the wikis, Wikipedia and IGDB's own description of the game all use — is the boss that caps an expedition. There are eight in the base game, finishing with Heolstor, the Nightlord (Fextralife).

The Forsaken Hollows added two more day-three bosses, Traitorous Straghess and Weapon-Bequeathed Harmonia. Bandai Namco's press release calls them third day bosses; the community wikis catalogue them as Nightlords, which is where the frequently quoted total of ten comes from (Bandai Namco).

Each Nightlord has a damage-type weakness — Holy, Poison, Fire, Lightning, Madness — and reading it before you choose a class and a weapon is the biggest preparation decision in the game. Those weaknesses are documented by the community rather than published by FromSoftware, which is worth remembering when two charts disagree. Our guide to beating every Nightlord has the full table, expedition by expedition.

Above them sit the Everdark Sovereigns: harder variants of the Nightlords that FromSoftware rolled out in rotation between 19 June and 20 August 2025, starting with Adel and ending with Gladius (Wikipedia).

Is Elden Ring Nightreign playable solo?

Yes. Single-player is a supported mode, and two-player expeditions were added in patch 1.02 on 31 July 2025, so the game now covers solo, duo and trio (Bandai Namco · patch notes).

Supported is not the same as good, and the critical consensus is unusually consistent here: reviewers praised trio play and flagged solo as the weak point. IGN's review, as listed on OpenCritic, singles out the punishing solo mode while calling the three-player game one of the best examples of the form (OpenCritic). If you have two friends who will commit, that is the game as designed. If you do not, weigh that caveat before you buy.

What is the Deep of Night mode?

Deep of Night is a free update that arrived on 11 September 2025. It is a difficulty ladder rather than a new place: Depths 1 to 5, each one stronger than the last (Fextralife).

The trade is that you give up Nightlord targeting — what you face is decided for you — and your rating moves with wins and with losses. It is where experienced squads spend their time, and it is emphatically not where a first expedition should happen (Deep of Night wiki).

What does The Forsaken Hollows DLC add?

The Forsaken Hollows is Nightreign's paid expansion. It launched on 4 December 2025 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, and it adds two Nightfarers — the Scholar and the Undertaker — two new third-day bosses, new field bosses and one new Shifting Earth, The Great Hollow (Bandai Namco).

It is an addition, not a replacement. The base eight are untouched, the two classes newcomers are most often pointed at are both base game, and nothing about the expansion is required to finish the original Nightlords. No further expansion has been announced.

Is Elden Ring Nightreign still worth playing in 2026?

Here is where the game's reception sits, with every figure checked on 20 September 2026.

Read those together and you get a good game with a specific shape. Critics landed in the high seventies and low eighties (OpenCritic · Metacritic); Steam players, who self-select for the co-op the game is built around, sit at 87% positive across more than 75,000 reviews. The gap between those two numbers is the solo experience and the PC port, not a disagreement about the combat.

Support has been real rather than token: the Deep of Night ladder in September 2025, the expansion in December, a substantial balance pass in January 2026, and Hotfix 1.03.5 on 31 March 2026 — the most recent update listed on Bandai Namco's news feed as of 20 September 2026 (Bandai Namco EU).

Our own verdict, the score we landed on and the method behind it are in the Elden Ring Nightreign review.