After two stable hours of easy Elden Ring Nightreign co-op with my pals on Discord, I confidently informed them the net complaints floating round had been overblown. That’s when all of it fell aside.
Matchmaking all of a sudden began canceling on us — repeatedly — for over quarter-hour. We disbanded, re-formed, switched foyer leaders, and even resorted to FromSoftware’s clunky password system to make matchmaking work. We’d misplaced all momentum by the point we lastly received right into a session. We determined we needed a do-over.
That’s after we discovered there’s no clear option to stop a match with out risking a penalty.
Returning to the title display screen got here with a warning: doing so may revoke multiplayer entry. So we tried to recreation the system — actually — by dying on the identical time, which might usually set off a recreation over. Simpler stated than finished. Coordinating three near-deaths is approach trickier than you’d assume. If even considered one of us survived whereas the others had been down, we’d all revive, and the session would proceed. This occurred thrice in a row earlier than we gave up.
At that time, we didn’t care about penalties. We simply needed out. All of us stop to the title display screen… solely to be dropped proper again into the identical cursed run we tried so onerous to flee. The sport had saved our “progress.”
This time, it dumped us straight into the ring of fireside, pun supposed. We laughed, cursed our luck, and sprinted into the flames to nuke the run ourselves.
It’s wild that there’s no option to cleanly reset a match, even when everybody within the group agrees to it. Penalties make sense if you’re punishing random gamers for rage-quitting mid-fight, however if you’re in a coordinated squad, it’s simply one other irritating roadblock. Particularly in a recreation that provides so few instruments for coordination within the first place.
And it’s not even the one oversight. Earlier than Nightreign dropped, FromSoftware admitted they didn’t embrace a two-player co-op mode to maintain issues balanced. You have to squad up with three gamers, that means in the event you don’t have a full crew, the sport will match you with a rando simply to get a match going. It’s baffling, particularly contemplating Nightreign’s first patch of what we will assume will probably be many addressed the relentless problem for solo gamers.
Extra importantly, the sport’s major bread and butter of co-op gameplay wants a polish in itself, and a veto characteristic that permits gamers to vote to return to the roundtable could be a step in the precise route. Much more so, the devs want to enhance matchmaking, as a result of asking gamers to examine their NAT kind prefer it’s 2008 isn’t an answer.
