After two solid hours of smooth Elden Ring Nightreign co-op with my friends on Discord, I confidently told them the online complaints floating around were overblown. That’s when it all fell apart.
Matchmaking suddenly started canceling on us — repeatedly — for over 15 minutes. We disbanded, re-formed, switched lobby leaders, and even resorted to FromSoftware’s clunky password system to make matchmaking work. We’d lost all momentum by the time we finally got into a session. We decided we wanted a do-over.
That’s when we learned there’s no clean way to quit a match without risking a penalty.
Returning to the title screen came with a warning: doing so could revoke multiplayer access. So we tried to game the system — literally — by dying at the same time, which would normally trigger a game over. Easier said than done. Coordinating three near-deaths is way trickier than you’d think. If even one of us survived while the others were down, we’d all revive, and the session would continue. This happened three times in a row before we gave up.
At that point, we didn’t care about penalties. We just wanted out. We all quit to the title screen… only to be dropped right back into the same cursed run we tried so hard to escape. The game had saved our “progress.”
This time, it dumped us straight into the ring of fire, pun intended. We laughed, cursed our luck, and sprinted into the flames to nuke the run ourselves.
It’s wild that there’s no way to cleanly reset a match, even when everyone in the group agrees to it. Penalties make sense when you’re punishing random players for rage-quitting mid-fight, but when you’re in a coordinated squad, it’s just another frustrating roadblock. Especially in a game that offers so few tools for coordination in the first place.
And it’s not even the only oversight. Before Nightreign dropped, FromSoftware admitted they didn’t include a two-player co-op mode to keep things balanced. You have to squad up with three players, meaning if you don’t have a full team, the game will match you with a rando just to get a match going. It’s baffling, especially considering Nightreign’s first patch of what we can assume will be many addressed the relentless difficulty for solo players.
More importantly, the game’s main bread and butter of co-op gameplay needs a polish in itself, and a veto feature that allows players to vote to go back to the roundtable would be a step in the right direction. Even more so, the devs need to improve matchmaking, because asking players to check their NAT type like it’s 2008 isn’t a solution.
