Junya Ishizaki dreamed about working on a game like Nightreign since Dark Souls III – here are all the details!
All FromSoftware video games are famous for their incredibly high difficulty level, with one exception – Elden Ring: Nightreign.
This standalone spin-off of the wildly popular Elden Ring offers a more beginner-friendly experience, focusing on co-op play for up to three players. It turns out that the audience loved this innovative idea, as the title managed to gather a whopping 313,593 concurrent players on PC one hour after launch!
https://twitter.com/FromSoftUpdates/status/1928228900594721184
This number doesn’t surprise when we know one more piece of information about this successful launch – that its director Junya Ishizaki came up with the concept of Nightreign while working on Dark Souls III.
Origins of the Concept
As Ishizaki shared in an interview with GamesRadar , “It was a long time ago. I had this very vague image from this kind of game I wanted to make while in the company, and I think maybe even around the time of Dark Souls III development, I had these very fragmented ideas and concepts going.”
At the time, Ishizaki was working at FromSoftware as a combat and level designer, so the idea for Nightreign didn’t take an actual shape until Elden Ring’s development process. It was just a creative concept that had to wait nearly a decade for its grand day!
“Of course, it wasn’t until Elden Ring was in full production that these ideas cemented and things started to take shape in my mind. Seeing the scope of the world of Elden Ring, the enemy variety, the weapon variety, the build variety of the players, and this felt like a really good place to expand on and to develop these ideas with. So that’s kind of the timeline of the conception of this game,” he said.
Director History
It was FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki who encouraged Ishizaki to accept the role of Nightreign’s director. And who knows whether the title would have been as great as it is today without that encouragement? Looking back, Ishizaki noted, “I didn’t really have any idea that I might be the director at that time. I just thought this could be something interesting for us to pursue.”
After joining FromSoftware leadership, Nightreign’s director feels more than confident that he will expand the studio profile with similar projects in the future. As he added, “Of course, for Nightreign, Elden Ring was a big cornerstone for this project. So in the future, I’d love to try maybe a different approach going forward.”
That’s fantastic news for both seasoned and new FromSoftware enthusiasts eager to see more creative influences like this in the industry. There’s something magical about this story – it proves that even dusty, forgotten ideas can see the light of day with just a bit of encouragement and creative inspiration.
Sources:
- https://www.radiotimes.com/technology/gaming/elden-ring-nightreign-player-count/
- https://www.gamesradar.com/games/action-rpg/the-director-of-elden-ring-nightreign-has-been-thinking-about-this-game-since-dark-souls-3-and-seeing-the-scope-of-elden-ring-finally-made-it-click-in-his-mind/
- https://gamerant.com/elden-ring-nightreign-director-idea-dark-souls-3/
- https://gamingbolt.com/elden-ring-nightreign-director-came-up-with-the-concept-during-dark-souls-3s-development