The games industry has had it in for single-player games for a while now. If you'll permit this nearly-40-year-old (one year and one week, baby!) to talk about "back in my day" for a second, the very notion of having a video game console connected to the internet was something that only came about in the third generation of consoles that I actually played (which I think is typically called the fifth generation? I'm talking about the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era). The video games that I cut my teeth on, like Super Mario World, Ocarina of Time, and even games famed for their multiplayer like GoldenEye and Super Smash Bros, were built assuming no connection to that grand network of information that sits at the center of modern society.
Gamers did have "LAN Parties," where they'd connect computers to what I think stood for Local Area Network, and could play things like Quake together. But I didn't really do that much, and so for me, a multiplayer game was one that I typically played on a split-screen. Yes, those old boxy CRT TVs where what would now be considered a rather standard-sized TV would be considered an enormous big-screen, would be divided into two or even four segments for different players to occupy.
The thing is, in this era, you knew the people you were playing with. Oh, sure, you could go to a friend's house and meet someone new, obviously, but it wasn't the kind of purely random people that you get on the internet.
There is a tension in multiplayer: if you want to play with friends, you need to schedule and coordinate. You also need to calibrate varying levels of enthusiasm. You might want to play for four hours, but your friend might find their enthusiasm flagging after one. Or vice versa, you have to feel bad that you're bringing the fun to an end when you're not really feeling it anymore.
The solution of online matchmaking, then, allows for you to play when you feel like it - if you drop out, the people you were playing with can just find someone else. Or, if the people you're playing with drop out, you can find someone else.
But it's not going to be as fun as playing with people you know.
This blog started as an exclusively World of Warcraft-focused one. I had been playing WoW for a couple years before, during Wrath of the Lich King, I had a really good dungeon group and the party leader invited me to their guild. During Wrath, for the first time (having started in late Vanilla, but late enough that I didn't hit the level cap until Burning Crusade, so I wouldn't have had the chance to do any raiding in vanilla anyway) I had a guild that did weekly raid nights (actually, I think for a time we'd do two nights a week). It was great, and I gradually became one of the raid leaders (my main being a tank helped push me into a leadership role). It was great, though when Cataclysm came out and the difficulty of raiding went up quite precipitously, our momentum stalled out. Off and on, we'd have periods where we got back together to run raids, even downing the first boss of Antorus during Legion in the first week (a big accomplishment for our very casual guild). But as younger players in the guild went off to join more progression-minded raiding guilds and players sort of drifted away, the guild is a shell of its former self, rarely having more than two or three members on at a time.
Today, I still play WoW, but as the game has developed more solo-content, I've found myself focused more and more on that. Honestly, I don't really do much raiding even in LFR (the match-made lowest raiding difficulty) and primarily do Delves, a new feature that is like a dungeon that can be for 1-5 players. I could probably play WoW offline if that were an option and not change much about my playstyle.
And that's fine in some ways: as I discovered D&D, my weekly "get together with people for some fantasy game stuff" became that instead of raiding, and I find it more exciting because of how much creativity is involved.
But it comes back to the weird thing: In a lot of ways, the online nature of WoW can often be the worst part of it. It isn't always - sometimes it's really exciting to be there with other players working toward some shared goal.
So, what about Nightreign?
Well, I adore Elden Ring. It and Bloodborne both are probably in my top 10 favorite video games (I haven't made a list or anything, but that feels right). And, having thought Shadow of the Erdtree might be the last we ever see of that universe (given its success, I could imagine a direct sequel, but I also suspect that they might choose instead to develop a new IP for their next spiritual sequel to Demon's Souls - I read Dark Souls III as being a cautionary tale about the very notion of prolonging a story past its natural ending). But I can't deny the allure of discovering new things about the world of Elden Ring, even if there's a general consensus that this game is extra-canonical, in a separate timeline or something.
Like how many fans have rejected much of Dark Souls II because it wasn't directed by series creator/auteur Hidetaka Miyazaki (it's insane to me that they released DSII, Bloodborne, and DSIII as annual releases back to back,) I wonder if people will find that the ideas and lore of Nightreign doesn't truly sit as a piece with the broader ideas of Elden Ring.
But is that such a crime? After all, the auteur theory is kind of bullshit (another game I adore, Alan Wake II, is all about rejecting the idea of the auteur theory, and the man who is often treated as the auteur of Remedy Studios, Sam Lake, has emphasized how important collaboration is).
Visually, the game looks stunning, and I'm very curious about the stories it wishes to tell.
The question, though, is how effectively a game can tell a story when it is built around the short-term gameplay loop of a co-op and somewhat roguelike system.
I'm on the fence, but this is arguably movement toward Nightreign, as I had been largely convinced I was staying away from it.
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