Elden Ring Nightreign director didn’t want to ‘encroach too much’ on the lore fans hold sacred by including Dark Souls bosses, but admits ‘I thought it’d be kind of fun’

There’s no end to the lore-driven theorizing that the most devoted FromSoftware fans can spin out of the characters, item descriptions, and cut content of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, and the developers know it. As I detailed in my big Elden Ring Nightreign explainer after playing the game in December, the new roguelike spin-off of Elden Ring is not connected to that game’s story—it’s an “alternate universe” take, with that justifying FromSoftware’s decision to play fast and loose with its established lore… and even the lore of the Souls series, too. As spotted in Nightreign’s reveal trailer, somewhere in this roguelike awaits The Nameless King, a boss from Dark Souls 3.

What other bosses from its older games is FromSoftware sticking into Nightreign? What does it all mean for the lore? Well, on the first point, FromSoftware’s not talking. But on the latter, it’s given a pretty straight answer: Don’t worry too much about it.

“The primary reason for these existing bosses in Nightreign is from a gameplay perspective,” Nighteign director Junya Ishizaki told Gamespot in a recent interview. “Of course, with this new structure and with this new style of game, we needed a lot of different bosses… so we wanted to leverage what we deemed appropriate from our previous titles. We obviously understand that our players have a lot of affection for these characters and they have a lot of fond memories of battling them in these games, so we didn’t want to encroach too much on that lore aspect. We wanted them to make sense within the atmosphere and vibe of Elden Ring Nightreign.”

Reading between the lines, I think Ishizaki’s point about not encroaching “too much” means we won’t be seeing a ton of Dark Souls bosses pop up in Nightreign; Elden Ring already gave them more than 100 to pull from. But if the developers already put two in the reveal trailer (in addition to The Nameless King, Dark Souls’ Centipede Demon popped up), I think we can expect a few more to show up, too. I wouldn’t mind another crack at the Dancer of the Boreal Valley.

PC Gamer’s Morgan Park recently went hands-on with Nightreign and came away with the same appraisal that I did—the game feels an awful lot like a mod, which isn’t an insult. It’s FromSoftware in looser form than usual, more experimental than it’s been in the last decade. But the studio has a history of this approach from its pre-Souls days, particularly with its Armored Core spin-offs.

With the news that Nightreign will have post-release DLC including more characters and bosses, I’m looking forward to seeing just how wacky this thing can get.