The Forsaken Hollows Brings Some Much-Needed Variety to Elden Ring: Nightreign
Prepare for pain.
Elden Ring Nightreign is a game with a myriad problems, and one that I have my own list of personal frustrations. But it’s also one of those games that I just can’t put down — I get singularly obsessive about it in a way that I often don’t with multiplayer games. I simply cannot rest without beating every boss in Nightreign, and it’s a testament to how strong the game’s core formula is, despite the laundry list of of issues (such as a lack of meaningful progression across matches). And the game’s new expansion, The Forsaken Hollows, fits that idea to a tee — a new batch of content that’s simultaneously frustrating and riveting. If you already like Nightreign this expansion is a must-play, and, in my mind, fully cements this game as the most engrossing multiplayer experience of the year.
Calling The Forsaken Hollows an “expansion” is a little strange, mostly because of the game’s nature as a multiplayer game. This is more of an incremental update that adds a variety of little tweaks to the full game, along with some more sizable pieces of new content.
The first and biggest addition, of course, are two new playable characters — the Scholar and the Undertaker (both of which are fascinating). Apart from this, the expansion adds new bosses to each day, including the iconic Artorias as a third-day boss, new field bosses and locations, and a new Shifting Earth that drastically changes the layout of the map — so much so that it basically feels like adding a second map to the game.
That’s probably very confusing if you haven’t played Nightreign, but to put it frankly, Nightreign is an exceedingly hard game to describe succinctly. Essentially, think of The Forsaken Hollows as adding new characters, a new map, and then enriching pretty much every other aspect of the game. However, it’s those new elements that really stand out, leaning into the core tenets of what made Elden Ring such an unforgettable experience — daunting bosses that feel like events, a sense of wonder to exploration, and hilariously broken character builds.
Hitting that third point first, Scholar and Undertaker might genuinely be my favorite Nightfarers in the game now. Each is a sort of hybrid class that has a tremendously unique specialization.
Undertaker is a character that feels deliberately made for the melee sickos — the players who run right up to enemies without a care in the world.
Undertaker is a sort of glass cannon that can cause tremendous melee damage, and absolutely ravage any enemy, even bosses ,with its skills. This character is almost singularly focused on using its Ultimate Ability, Loathsome Hex, as frequently as possible. A passive skill lets the Undertaker use their ultimate any time an ally uses their Ultimate. At the same time your character skill, Trance, lets you enter a bloodletting mode that increases your speed, and can then lead to another free use of your Ultimate — and it helps that Undertaker is drastically faster than any other melee-focused class. In the right hands, Undertaker is a frenzied character that darts around the battlefield, and can knock off half a boss’ health in the blink of an eye. And, as you might expect, it’s an absolute blast to play because of that.
But hilariously, while Undertaker is flashier, Scholar is arguably the more broken of the two (and I mean that as lovingly as possible). Scholar is absolutely the most bizarre character in the game, and it took me a good five hours to really understand how the character even works. Scholar’s character skill, Analyze, puts you in a mode where giant ring appears on the screen, marking both enemies and allies. Essentially when you hit the trigger again to end Analyze, any enemies you’ve “observed” will get debuffed, and allies buffed. Effiecient use of this skill can have a drastic impact on combat, especially when you pair it with the Communion Ultimate. This links every enemy and ally in the immediate area together — meaning any damage you cause to a single enemy is inflicted on everyone, and the same for healing allies. If used correctly, this Ultimate can be absolutely devastating, destroying entires bases of enemies in a single go. But again, it’s hard to get the timing right — and requires a ton of practice.
The Scholar is incredibly hard to learn, but can be devastating in the right hands.
Still, I love how specialized these two characters feel, and how distinctly different they are from anything else. That feeling only gets bolstered by the new Shifting Earth event, The Great Hollow. All of the other Shifting Earth events change a part of the map, but this one plops a giant crystal at the heart of the map that splinters out and drastically changes the entire landscape of Limveld. Now great chasms rip through the area creating countless falling hazards, while poisonous undergrounds sprout out of crumbled ruins.
Navigating this map feels different than every other instance of Limveld, requiring serious careful planning from you and your team. But there’s also a tantalizing mix of secrets you can find, including a handful of smaller crystals that, when shattered, break open that massive gem at the middle of the map, and a vital buff if you get to it in time. But I also think this map has a much better sense of variation as well, with events and enemies that pop up that can integrally change your route planning. In regular Limveld, you, inevitably, end up rinsing and repeating the same routes — one of my biggest issues with the game. The Forsaken Hollows doesn’t just add a new “map,” it genuinely tries to address that variety complaint, and mostly succeeds at it.
This is then reflected in the two new Nightlord bosses, both of which quite literally throw hordes of enemies at you. These battles test your teamwork in ways the game hasn’t up until this point, using teams of enemies to smartly break up your team and isolate you. It feels like a more natural gimmick than most of Nightreign’s bosses, testing you strategy and cooperation in remarkably ways.
Both of the expansion’s bosses require a drastically different approach than anything in the game, emphasizing teamwork to the extreme.
The Forsaken Hollows is everything I needed to get back into Nightreign, and I quite litereally spent ten hours beating my head against the new map and boss — and don’t regret a single second of it. But part of me also wonders if this is too little, too late, especially if this is the only “major” update the game is going to get.
Nightreign was always a fascinating experience, but it clearly really grows when FromSoftware uses it as a foundation to experiment. These new additions are almost universally fantastic, but I can’t help but feel the game won’t ever live up to its full potential, because of how sluggish post-release content has been. But I’d also love to be proven wrong. For now, I’m just happy to explore the depth of Limveld again.
