I played Elden Ring Nightreign
It's weird. Pretty cool, but weird. Dig that FromSoftware is doing something different like this. It's got potential.
Hard to say whether it has legs. The Network Test build was limited (only had two different seeds for the map and didn't swap between them very often), so hard to get a sense for what long-term play would look or feel like. Got me way more interested in it, though. Wasn't sure what to think when it got announced, but I came away from the Network Test wanting to play more.
Some quick notes:
-Really like how varied each character is, down to how they move. I expected them to all to mostly be just standard Elden Ring characters with different skins, but they all actually do feel unique to control. Makes it easier to try builds that are way outside of my comfort zone since they all feel distinct.
-Favorite class might be the Guardian, the anthro bird man. Not usually one for tanky builds, but the extra defense he has really makes a difference with how chaotic this game is. His abilities have a lot of good utility as well. Love to jump into the air like a Final Fantasy dragoon to instantly revive a downed party member and deal heavy damage to the enemy.
Expected Wylder, the knight on the cover art, to be the easy pick since he's more or less the standard melee build I run in these games, but his default weapon being a greatsword throws me off. Not used to the stamina cost and speed of those, especially because you start off with so little health and stamina to work with. The grappling hook is fun, though. Tons of applications for it. Seems like something that could be very strong in the right hands.
-It really feels like a game that's better with a group of people you can actually coordinate with. A lot of my time playing was spent trying to keep up with my team since one would almost always decide to run off on their own, sometimes without pinging what location they were headed toward. Not hard to imagine how much smoother things could have gone if we were more in sync.
Might write something more on this, but it feels like there's some friction between how people play these games in co-op and what Nightreign wants of you. Playing with randos in the Souls games works because of the context and the means of multiplayer is pretty low-committal. Here it feels like you need to be much more on point as a team, which always a challenge when trying to cooperate with complete strangers.
-Hoping the world has more variety. Running around the same bits of Limgrave already started getting old during what I played. No idea to what degree the map will change between runs in the full game, but it definitely needs a little more to keep repeat runs fresh.