I cannot emphasize enough how much more difficult Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows is compared to the base game. At first, I thought that my stumbles were just the natural outcome of playing something new where no one knows how anything works. Now, even as the community has sorted out things like boss weaknesses, routing, and strong class spreads, it’s obvious that Nightreign‘s DLC was concocted to extract as much pain as possible.
To give some context: I am good enough at Nightreign that I often reach level 10 on day one. Boss health bars sometimes get deleted in seconds, depending on my build and synergy with my teammates. After spending a weekend with The Forsaken Hollows, though, I’ll be lucky to make it to day three at all. Hell, half the time I’m dying at the Nightlord at the end of day one.
Where to even begin? One of the main castles on the new map has a fun mechanic where, the entire time you’re there, your health is halved. In practice, what this means is that, even if your character is fairly leveled up, enemies can still one-shot you if you’re playing a squishier class. Often, this area will appear near the start of your run.
The landscape itself seems arranged odiously. Unlike the basic map, where you can more or less walk a straight line from point A to B, there are portions of The Forsaken Hollows that are divided by giant chasms of death. It’s hard to tell sometimes when there’s solid ground below you — especially if you’re trying to outrun the storm. Many areas are designed so densely, you can spend entire minutes just trying to figure out how to leave. The number of times I’ve had my entire team wipe because we all confidently launched ourselves off a cliff is hilarious. I’ve yet to experience a run where someone didn’t lose a level somewhere along the line.
As if that weren’t enough, FromSoftware also introduced weather events that obscure your vision and periodically harm your character. Sometimes, these events fill the affected areas up with beefed-up monsters, too.
Don’t even get me started on the boss battles. The Forsaken Hollows loves to pit your team against two giant enemies at once. One of the most common day one fights involves a cursed duo comprised of some of Elden Ring‘s most annoying enemies, Curseblades and Divine Beast Warrior. Elden Ring players will recall that the Curseblades are nimble enemies with incredibly fast attacks who can and will mow you down in seconds. Divine Beast Warrior, meanwhile, is a sturdy combatant equipped with a giant sword. It’s difficult to break the Divine Beast Warrior’s stance, meaning that you don’t have many chances to land critical hits. Both of these enemies are aggressive and difficult to deal with on their own.
“Hope everyone involved in designing this enemy to get diarrhea for the rest of their lives,” one Shadow of the Erdtree player wrote on the Wiki page for Curseblades. “These devs should be publicly shamed and internally ashamed of themselves,” another player declared on the Wiki page for Divine Beast Warrior.
Forsaken Hollows takes these awful enemies and gives them even better powers than before. lol. lmao, even. With bosses named things like “Demon in pain,” I have to imagine someone at FromSoftware is having a good laugh at us.
I hear that Balancers, the Nightlords on day three, are weak to sleep. That’s nice. Sleep camps that give you the appropriate weapons feel rarer than madness camps, which are infamously nearly absent from the game. But I can’t even begin to worry about the Balancers when most of the time, Mohg and his bloody attacks kill my run at the end of day two. I regret ever considering his boss battle easy in Elden Ring. I will, however, admit that it was funny to experience that boss battle for the first time with a teammate named Miquella. RIP because I don’t think we even got to hear the horned monster scream his signature “Nihil!”
I want to make it clear that these aren’t complaints, per se. Like, I don’t think The Forsaken Hollows is a bad game or anything. Some of my troubles are rooted in my trying old tactics that worked in the base game. I probably have to spend more time optimizing my Relics. I also need to get better at recognizing what encounters are useful for the challenge at hand.
That, and I am genuinely having a lot of fun trying to figure out The Forsaken Hollows. I love that the map feels enchanted, not merely functional. At its best, Forsaken Hollows evokes some of the best areas in the Elden Ring. It is no small feat to be able to confidently answer the impossible plea of players wanting to experience something magical again for the first time. Special events like meteorites were surprisingly infrequent even after pouring hundreds of hours into Nightreign. Now, though? It’s like the game is constantly barraging me with unexpected circumstances. Even the basic map has new mysteries, like forges that can change your powers and castles with complex interiors. The Forsaken Hollows makes everything that Nightreign launched with almost seem like a first draft.
Players also insist that the new Scholar class and his support mechanics are actually overpowered. Did you know that the Scholar can pause and sometimes reverse revive rings? The percentages that fans are calculating are mind-boggling. Scholar can debuff enemies by nearly 20% while also, additionally, increasing your team’s damage by 20% at the same time. And the power cools down every 12 seconds. This is barely touching the surface of all the things the Scholar can do. I’m genuinely impressed with how FromSoftware took a boring class concept and turned it into a rockstar. But in my matches, the only character people seem to want to play is the Undertaker. I’ve had some Scholars here and there, but I also get the sense that the skill ceiling is high. I haven’t had a match where it felt like the Scholar made a huge difference in the outcome. Likely, I’m going to have to learn Scholar myself. That’s how it always is, isn’t it?
The Forsaken Hollows situation reminds me a lot of how the community reacted when it first had to take on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, an infamously difficult add-on rife with hard skill checks from the very first encounter. Despite all the complaints, fans did overcome the challenge. I suspect that months from now, many of us will look back on this and realize it wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it was.
But if my reaction feels outsized, it’s probably that the stakes feel higher in a multiplayer game where runs are limited. This isn’t like dying in Elden Ring, where you can simply retry something as many times as you need, even if you lose all your Runes. You can’t overlevel yourself until the challenge is negligible, either. You wipe in Nightreign, that’s it. You have to start over completely.
My strong reaction is also a testament FromSoftware’s design chops. The bolts of anger and frustration are proportional to The Forsaken Hollow‘s suspense and surprise. In the moment when I’ve managed to aggro three bosses at once while stuck in a snowstorn, I might regret my entire life. Now that I have some distance from it, and I’m not actively fighting for my life, though, all I can think of is: wasn’t that awesome?
