I’m one of the many Elden Ring Nightreign players who’s been begging for DLC for months. Once it was finally revealed, I was a bit disappointed at how small it seemed. Fortunately, three new pieces of information have convinced me that I have been underestimating FromSoftware’s upcoming The Forsaken Hollows DLC. According to a new interview, it’ll be harder than the main game, feature a bigger reworking of the map than previously thought, and include the introduction of the Dark Souls studio’s signature poison swamps.
Since the summer, it’s felt like the only way to really revitalize Nightreign was by giving players a new map. When The Forsaken Hollows was finally announced, publisher Bandai Namco’s description suggested the Limveld sandbox everyone had become accustomed to would be tweaked but left pretty much intact by the new content. According to a new preview at GameSpot, Bandai Namco actually undersold their new content. The new Scholar and Undertaker classes aren’t the only big additions. There’s also the Great Hollows, which is technically still a Shifting Earth event, but is also a much more expansive one than players have previously encountered.
Players will glide into a separate section of the map with its own fields, city ruins, and sprawling mines. There will even be side-quests where players have to visit side-objectives to alleviate a special new curse. The Great Hollows will apparently be much more vertically focused as well, with caves and tunnels and also points higher up that require light platforming. It definitely sounds like a bigger deal than any of the existing Shifting Earth events players usually just spend the last five minutes of a run zooming through.
No new map, but the next best thing
Also, there are swamps now. Not just in the Great Hollows, but the whole of Limveld. These new areas will slow movement and build up poison, scarlet rot, frenzy, and other ailments if you stay in them too long. It sounds simple, but Nightreign is all about navigation, time management, and risk assessment. I can already see many runs succeeding or failing based on players getting too greedy or overly cautious when it comes to traversing these new hazards.
Director Junya Ishizaki told GameSpot he’s aware of the poison swamp meme, and while there’s no strict rule about every FromSoftware game needing a swamp, it just “always seems to be [that before you realize] someone’s come up with the idea, it’s already sort of in there, and it’s just sort of taken a life of its own.”
All of these new elements, including new field bosses and some re-worked points of interest, seem aimed at giving seasoned Nightfarers the feeling of playing the game for the first time again, back when they were utterly confused by its mechanics and constantly getting punished for it. This is exactly what fans have been waiting for.
Hard enough to feel like you’re playing Nightreign for the first time again
“Obviously, we don’t want it to be so hard that new players can’t get into it, but I think the original idea is that when the game initially had come out, there were even players who are veterans of some of the other games trying to figure out the new systems, trying to figure out how the game works,” Ishizaki said. “I think [we want our] ideas when we’re working on the DLC content to be a reflection of that.”
He continued, “So whenever people who have played the main game extensively go into the DLC content, they’ll be able to have a bit of that feeling like they had when they first played Nightreign, where there’s still a bit that they’re trying to figure out. [The Forsaken Hollows is] definitely a little bit harder, but it’s not ridiculous or anything like that, but that’s still within what we would consider to be a fair challenge.”
I hope he’s lying and players get absolutely wrecked. Like Everdark Sovereign Equilibrious Beast except fun.
