If early impressions and the foreboding announcement trailer weren’t enough, Elden Ring Nightreign’s first DLC, The Forsaken Hollows, is “definitely a little bit harder,” according to director Junya Ishizaki. However, he insists that it’s “not ridiculous or anything like that, but that’s still within what we would consider to be a fair challenge.”
Speaking to GameSpot in a new preview, Ishizaki discussed the challenges post-release in reaching the right balance. It was seemingly a “lot of trouble.”
“I think balancing is just so subjective, so a lot of our thoughts post-release working up to the DLC were how can we get the balancing in mind with what we were initially envisioning, and also with that balancing set, how can we take a different approach and devise new enemies, new characters, and stuff like that to play into that and utilise the new balancing that we are working with.”
An uptick in difficulty is to be expected – look no further than Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring’s expansion. However, the Nightreign team doesn’t want The Forsaken Hollows to be “so hard that new players can’t get into it.” In that sense, he also feels that even veterans of the base game will have plenty to figure out.
“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,” he said.
Elden Ring Nightreign – The Forsaken Hollows launches on December 4th and introduces two new playable Nightfarers: The support-focused Scholar and the damage-heavy Undertaker. It also adds two Night 3 bosses, including the Balancers, seven winged warriors that attack all at once. There’s also a new Shifting Earth type, The Great Hollows, with its own objectives.
