Elden Ring’s online co-op spin-off should be beginning its first big network test today, except it’s all gone rather wrong. Back in January, soon after the announcement of this three-player incarnation of FromSoftware’s adored soulslike, a series of three-hour-long testing blocks were scheduled for this coming weekend. Fans were asked to register for a chance to test things, and, well, it sucks if you were selected for the February 14 6 a.m. slot. It’s now entirely abandoned.
“We are currently restarting the Elden Ring Nightreign game server,” read a message on FromSoft’s Player Support X account. “We will provide an update once the restart is complete. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused to our players.” And via a new post in the last minute at the time of writing, it seems this first session is now entirely abandoned, as FromSoft “proceeds with improvement work.”
That’s just the latest in a string of updates, which began with reports that the “game server is congested.” Of course, the point of a network test is to—and stay with me here—test the network, and this is very much what’s occurring. However, what people selected for the trial would have been hoping for was to experience some co-op online Elden Ring goodness, rather than error messages and a broken server. Back in the halcyon days of two hours ago, at the start of the first test, FromSoft were telling players to “try matching again after a while.” And try they did.
That was until 20 minutes later, when the next notification informed people the plan was to restart the server, and asked “all players to please log out of the game.” It added that there would be no penalty for logging out “at this time.”
Since then, the entire first three hour session has been completely given up on, with the most recent update explaining, “Today’s network test will end at 11pm (Japanese time) as scheduled.” It adds,
We are considering holding additional tests for today.
The three-player co-op game is supposed to offer a new way to play Elden Ring, reshaping the game as a roguelite, facing waves of enemies in random locations from the game’s map. However, today’s main boss has been the game’s main menu, past which no player managed to reach.
The next test is due to start at 10 p.m. ET tonight, which at least gives FromSoft and Sony a chance to meddle with servers and check code ahead of the next attempt. And, as we say, this is why you do network tests of online games, and why you should never, ever charge for them (which FromSoft has not). These sorts of disasters will hopefully iron things out ahead of the official (as yet unannounced) release.
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