FromSoftware has acknowledged matchmaking issues on Elden Ring Nightreign during its first weekend, and offered suggestions to players affected.
Today, May 31, FromSoftware tweeted to address players who were struggling to find other players when launching an expedition in the multiplayer Elden Ring spin-off. If you do, try restarting the matchmaking process, FromSoftware suggested. That’s not a great help, admittedly, but at least we know the developer is aware of the problem. “Thank you for your patience and understanding,” it added.
FromSoftware followed that social post with another, this time acknowledging issues on PlayStation consoles specifically. Those on PS4 and PS5 who are having difficulty matchmaking should check their NAT type, FromSoftware said. “NAT type 3 may affect matchmaking on PSN,” it explained.
Check your NAT type with the following steps:
Home > Settings > Network > Connection Status > Check Connection Status
There is no specific advice for Xbox at this time.
“Nightreign has some peculiar aspects to its game design and is different from our recent titles in various ways,” Kitao said. “Nonetheless, many of you have bravely jumped into this world, and for that we’re immensely grateful.
“As with Demon’s Souls or Sekiro, it may be confounding at first, but just like those games, Nightreign offers its own challenges and experiences. Once you overcome the initial hurdle, it’ll surely provide a sense of accomplishment that’s also its very own.
“We hope you enjoy it.”
So, what might this tweet be about, specifically? Well, Nightreign is still on a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam, with much of the negative sentiment revolving around its brutal solo experience, its lack of duos co-op, lack of voice chat, and other archaic mechanics. That age-old multiplayer struggle to find enough friends to make up a coordinated three-player group is very much a part of the Elden Ring Nightreign experience, too. A patch to make solo play easier is due out next week.
As explained in IGN’s Elden Ring Nightreign review: “Let’s get the most important caveat out of the way first: if you are hoping to tackle Nightreign entirely solo, and are anything less than a hardcore Elden Ring player that actively seeks out ways to make that already difficult game even more challenging, Nightreign isn’t for you. Yes, there is technically a single-player option, but it is so poorly balanced that I would be shocked if it isn’t patched and adjusted within the first month of release. And this is coming from someone who lives and breathes these types of games.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
While there may not be as many sales today as last weekend for Memorial Day, there are still many deals to be had. Whether you’re after a plug-and-play mic to take your streaming game up a level or want a new controller for your PS5, we’re seeing some deep discounts. With Father’s Day only a couple of weeks away, maybe you’re looking to snag a great gift for the father figures in your life? Portable chargers, a grill set, or even new lawn mower might be right up their alley. Check out all the best deals we’ve found today:
TL;DR: Deals for Today
Pokémon Destined Rivals is here, and we’re already seeing chase cards crash in value, leaving some with pre-order regrets. But that means you can just grab some single cards rather than shelling out a ton on booster packs. Still want a sealed pack? We’ve got you. Plus, there’s a Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy Bundle pre-order available from Walmart that’s not a bad deal.
PlayStation DualSense Controller
The controller that comes packaged with the PlayStation 5 is at its lowest price of the year, setting you back under $55 for 27% savings. This wireless gamepad is comfortable to use, compatible with a range of gaming devices, and full of reliable controls. Haptics and adaptive triggers are baked in, amplifying your playing experience further. Plus, you can remap buttons, customizing the controls to give you a leg up in certain games.
JLab Talk Pro USB Mic
Kick your game streams up a notch, as the JLab Talk Pro USB Mic is on sale for over 77% off on Woot, making it just $34.99. This plug-and-play microphone is easy to set up and features four directional patterns. Whether you’re looking to record podcasts and music or take phone calls and do ASMR, it’ll be the perfect partner. Sound quality will even be optimized for whatever you’re recording, and the mic features volume and gain controls, ensuring you come across crystal clear.
Cuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool Set
Summer means it’s grilling season, so it’s always a good idea to have a grill tool set on hand. Right now, Cuisinart has a great deal on a high-quality set for just $23.99. The reputable brand includes all the barbecue essentials in the kit, like a spatula, grill fork, cleaning brush, and tongs. Each of the tools features a sturdy wooden handle and stainless steel for a premium look and feel, while a case is included for safe storage. If you’re on the hunt for a Father’s Day gift, it also makes a great gift for those hard-to-buy-for dads and father figures.
Metaphor: ReFantazio PS4 & PS5
PlayStation’s Days of Play sale is still in full swing, offering discounts up to 75% on top games. While countless titles are included in this sale, we’re particularly excited about Metaphor: ReFantazio. This action-packed adventure takes place in the medieval fantasy realm of Euchronia, where you’re on a journey to save a cursed prince and determine a new king in a Royal Tournament. It deals with social and political issues, mirroring the real-world issues we’re facing. Right now, you can grab it for only $45.49, saving you $24.50.
bella PRO 10.5-qt. Touchscreen 5-in-1 Indoor Grill & Air Fryer
Whether you live in an apartment or just don’t have a way to grill outside, bella PRO offers an airfryer that brings the grill inside, and it does a whole lot more than that. It has a spacious 10.5-qt capacity, five cooking modes, and eight presets to make everything from fish and chicken to bread and fries. When it comes to grilling, the temperature is adjustable up to a toasty 500°F, allowing for the searing and char-grilled marks you expect from a BBQ. Best of all, $100 has been knocked off the price tag, so it’s only $69.99 for a limited time.
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1
If you’re a fan of the horror video game, Five Nights at Freddy’s, a new graphic novel series from the creator, Scott Cawthon, is already discounted to the low price of just $8.90. This volume brings some horrifying and detailed comics to the story from the bestselling series Five Nights at Freddy’s: Tales from the Pizzaplex, featuring the under-construction section of Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex, a Tube Maze, and some chaos.
It’s lawn mowing season, and battery-powered lawn mowers are beginning to take the reign from their gas-powered counterparts. You might think that these electric mowers offer less oomph, but the EGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower Kit will prove you wrong. It’s self-propelled, has a multicut blade system, and runs for 60 minutes on a single charge. A second battery is even included, so you can keep mowing while the other battery charges. Right now, you can grab this kit for its lowest price ever, $599.99. That’s 43% off.
Charmast Portable Charger with Built in Cables
Portable chargers are great and all, but if you forget the right cord, they’re pretty useless. Charmast fixes this problem by offering a 10,000mAh power bank with USB-C, Lightning, and MicroUSB cables built in, so it’s ready to top off just about any device. Plus, there’s a USB-A cord for charging up the power bank. Each of the cables also has a slot for storage on the portable charger, preventing anything from getting snagged when on the go. Now is the time to buy, too, as it’s back to its lowest price, costing just under $20.
Pokémon Destined Rivals Sealed Products and Single Cards
After the best market value on Pokémon Destined Rivals sealed products? Some great deals are available from TCG Player, as big box stores continue to hike up the prices.
Don’t want to deal with the ripping open boosters to find a chase card? TCG Player has a bunch of single cards available, and the prices continue to fluctuate as I write this.
MTG Final Fantasy Pre Order
Pre-orders for MTG Final Fantasy continue to pop up occasionally at retailers, but selection is pretty limited at the moment. However, this bundle from Walmart is an excellent deal ahead of the launch in a couple of weeks.
Yesterday, ZeniMax Workers United-CWA, the union made up of more than 300 quality assurance workers at Microsoft via its subsidiary ZeniMax Media, reached a tentative contract agreement with Microsoft. The union was formed back in 2022, and has been bargaining with Microsoft in the intervening years since. Last month, the union was preparing to potentially strike against Microsoft, but now it seems like this may be avoided.
Earlier this week, EA did the thing they oh so frequently loves to do, which is making a bad decision. This time, it was cancelling Marvel’s Black Panther, alongside shutting down the two year old studio that was making it, Cliffhanger Games. As every single announcement like this over the past few years has been, it was an incredibly frustrating one that can’t be justified. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed a bit of light on why it was cancelled, as well as what the game might have been like.
Last year, we were kindly sent a sample of ‘The Most Relaxing Video Games’ from Ryan Janes, a lovely book that delved into a collection of games handpicked to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Now, Janes is back with another book, this time looking at some of the best PvP games ever made – in fact, it’s straight up called ‘The Best Competitive Multiplayer Games’, how about that! Much like the first book, this one doesn’t merely list out a bunch of games and have done with it, but instead incorporates a lot of Janes’ own personal history and anecdotes, making for a pleasant read from start to finish.
Elden Ring Nightreign is, to the surprise of no one, off to a bit of a flying start (even if not everyone is completely in love with it just yet). I have no intention of diving into it just yet, in part because the solo experience doesn’t interest me all that much, and I don’t really want to be matched up with two other randos that would surely abandon me the moment I forget what my character can do. There isn’t a duos option either, the thing I’m actually after, something that was a bit forgotten about during development, but might be coming further down the line. The power of modding always comes through however, as despite only launching yesterday, there’s already a seamless co-op mod that allows for duos.
Sega launched a new brand campaign recently which plans to dedicate an entire year to Sonic the Hedgehog‘s trademark characteristics of “speed and attitude”. As part of this, there’ll be all sorts of racing-inspired partnerships and the latest one is now live.
Sonic has teamed up with Gameloft’s free-to-play racer Asphalt Legends Unite (formerly known as Asphalt 9: Legends), which is available on the Switch eShop as a free download.
Late last month, mega publisher EA fired 300 workers, including around 100 at developer Respawn. The studio, founded by ex-Call of Duty developers, is responsible for Apex Legends and the Star Wars Jedi games, and was reportedly working on a third game in its beloved Titanfall series before its staff roster was cut. Now cancelled, the rumours suggest that this Titanfall project was an extraction shooter – a difficult-by-design PvPvE genre that currently only enjoys niche popularity. But an extraction shooter set in the world of Titanfall and Apex Legends could have been the genre’s ticket to the big leagues. So if not EA, who will take the “Tarkov-like” beyond its enthusiastic niche and into the mainstream? The answer may be just months away.
“As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth,” an EA spokesperson said of the layoffs that cut away at Respawn. It’s a sentiment EA employees have heard before. This move follows a rash of downsizing in other segments of EA’s portfolio, including at developers Codemasters and BioWare, and a more general 670 company-wide employees back in March of last year. This trend has many decrying the state of the games industry as unsustainable and calling for unionization.
But what of that rumored Titanfall extraction shooter? Naturally, its apparent cancellation has many fans disappointed; the existence (and lack of public appearance) of a new Titanfall game has become something of an in-joke in recent years. Further, rumors of a new extraction shooter from a triple-A studio has shone a spotlight on a style of game that has struggled to garner a significant audience thus far. And whether or not the cancelled Respawn title was indeed an extraction shooter, more people are discussing the potential of a genre that is in its infancy.
“This is an enthusiast genre which has, thus far, not significantly broken out to the mass market player,” Mat Piscatella, Video Games Industry Advisor at Circana, tells IGN.
Last month, developer Bungie finally revealed gameplay footage for Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter that some predict will launch the genre into the mainstream. It’s a game that’s already found itself in hot water, accused of plagarising art assets. But while there are ethical questions around Marathon’s production, the response to the game itself after press went hands-on with it seems largely positive. Perhaps this is to be expected from the studio with a reputation for stellar first-person shooter experiences like Halo and Destiny. But, come September, Marathon will be launching into a very different market, and the extraction shooter is a relatively untested genre. Will pedigree and tight FPS design be enough to carry the game to success? Analysts say: perhaps.
“If I were to bet on any developer being able to bring this genre to the mass market it would be Bungie,” Piscatella says.
For those unfamiliar, extraction shooters tend to be made up of a combination of player-versus-player and player-versus-environment gameplay loops. Small squads of players are dropped into a world, where they fight AI enemies and sometimes other player-controlled squads, to complete goals and gather resources, then escape the map. The genre was popularized by Escape From Tarkov, an incredibly unforgiving take on the formula characterized by its high-risk, high-reward firefights, which garnered a respectable audience during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
If I were to bet on any developer being able to bring this genre to the mass market it would be Bungie.
Since then, a number of other developers have tried their hand at the genre with varying degrees of success. One of the most prominent is last year’s Helldivers 2, developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony. It leans heavily on a campy schtick, community engagement, and in-game events, which has made it a standout among extraction shooters. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a co-op only affair, with none of the tense PvP encounters that make games like Escape from Tarkov so challenging. According to Piscatella’s data, Helldivers 2 was the eighth most-played game on Steam in April, and ranked 34 on PlayStation.
“Helldivers 2 is the outlier success among this group,” Piscatella explains. “In April, approximately 9% of US active Steam users played Helldivers 2, while around 3% of PS5 players engaged with the game at least once. No other [extraction shooter] reached more than 2.3% of active players on any platform on which that particular game was played.”
It’s immediately obvious that these stats are small when compared to more popular genres like battle royale or multiplayer FPS games. As hugely popular as Helldivers 2 seems to dedicated PlayStation owners, the mainstream is Fortnite, Call of Duty, and EA’s FC – games that garner much, much larger audiences. But Piscatella is quick to point out that the extraction shooter is a burgeoning genre with a great deal of potential, and it faces the same challenges as any other genre does in its early days.
“Small or developing genres often only get big after one game makes it so,” he says. “The dance/music genre was a pretty small niche until Guitar Hero showed up. Console FPS games didn’t usually sell all that well at all until Halo. MMOs comprised a relatively small portion of the market until World of Warcraft became the biggest thing in the world. Maybe Marathon does that for extraction shooters. Maybe it doesn’t. Nothing is guaranteed for any new game in today’s market.”
Other popular games in the extraction shooter genre include Deep Rock Galactic, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Delta Force. The latter is a free-to-play title launched late last year and has been enjoying a steady rise in popularity in recent months: as of this writing, it ranks 15th in daily players on Steam, with somewhere around 135,000 players at peak. This is a respectable number, but nowhere near the numbers consistently put up by the battle royale genre and its titans. And let’s face it: executives have exhibited a certain amount of tunnel vision chasing the high monetization bars set by the Fortnites, Warzones, and PUBGs of the world.
There’s an argument that this sort of fixation has led to a certain amount of creative stagnation in the development space, and studio heads are less willing to take a chance on an unproven genre such as extraction shooters (it’s perhaps telling that Call of Duty’s attempt at it was an under-supported, now abandoned mode added to Warzone, rather than its own flagship release). In that way, Marathon represents the first significant triple-A effort to bring the genre to the masses. And it’s going to need all the help it can get along the way.
“Bungie being the developer certainly does not guarantee Marathon success,” Piscatella says. “In order for [it] to break through it would certainly help if the game could win over dedicated fans of the genre so they could advocate for the game among family and friends.”
The biggest challenge facing Marathon is the untested nature of the extraction shooter genre as a whole.
Beyond word of mouth, Bungie will need to ensure smooth onboarding for prospective players. In particular, converting core players familiar with first-person shooters will likely figure into Bungie’s rollout strategy, but long-term retention will all boil down to the gameplay.
“It would…be helpful if Marathon were to have a ramping path for people that are more familiar with the big FPS titles like Call of Duty to help initiate trial and conversion,” Piscatella explains. “It would also have to nail the whole ‘easy to pick up, difficult to master’ trick that many mass market hits are able to pull off.”
The reality is that these are all the same problems faced by any new title, and the one true decider of success or failure is the market, which, as Piscatella points out, is extremely unwelcoming.
“It is a very fickle market at the moment. People have their favorite long-running games that are constantly being updated, are familiar, have significant social and monetary hooks, and many of these titles are free-to-play or easily accessible without an upfront purchase price. So, the challenges facing Bungie and Marathon are not dissimilar to those facing any new game.”
Fickle market notwithstanding, the biggest challenge facing Marathon is the untested nature of the extraction shooter genre as a whole. Escape From Tarkov has enjoyed its accolades, but that game benefitted from an audience inflated by pandemic lockdowns, as well as a gameplay loop that appealed to the core gamer segment. Subsequent titles have only seen middling performances (with Helldivers 2 being the outlier), so it’s easy to understand why studios have been reticent to devote significant resources to such a project, especially when the battle royale genre has proven its dominance.
In that way, Marathon should prove to be a useful litmus test for the rest of the industry. It’s surprising to see a studio like Bungie going all-in on an extraction shooter in this environment, and if it receives a strong reception you can expect other developers and publishers to take its lead. Of course there are dozens of factors to account for – things like monetization and market trends – and nobody can predict how things will unfold. But Bungie certainly has the clout and design chops to make something special. And it’s going to take something special to take the extraction shooter genre from niche to mainstream. You can be sure that, come September, the industry will be eagerly watching the launch of Marathon.
It’s finally upon us, the last weekend before Switch 2. We have one last chance to throw our backlogs a concerned look before a line-up of launch games gets added to the pile, so let’s go out with one last hurrah, shall we?
Well, here’s a weird listing – Monolith Soft’s Wii U epic Xenoblade Chronicles X has popped up on a Microsoft PC webpage covering “enhanced games for Microsoft Edge Game Assist”.
We’ve taken a look ourselves and can confirm it’s featured. It’s listed alongside PC releases like World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2. Here it is, along with the attached description:
