I have over 150 hours in Elden Ring Nightreign, and as I have admitted before on this website, I am not very good at it. Over the course of that 150 hours, I think I’ve spent a lot of time being carried by both my partner and our trios pal, who plays Guardian consistently and is great at making sure my wimpy Recluse/Scholar-ass doesn’t die (or, when dead, gets revived promptly). Together, we have taken 150 hours to very slowly kill almost every regular Night Boss in the game, leaving just the DLC’s Dreglord unslain at this time. It is likely due in no small part to my lack of skill that it has taken this long, though I also somewhat blame our busy lives and the fact that we often take long breaks and forget how to play.
But earlier this week, I have found another culprit to pin this on, and her name is Nat. NAT Type.
What the hell is NAT type? I’m still not 100-percent sure despite it being explained to me repeatedly. From what I can gather, it’s some mysterious, internet-related setting that determines how online games connect to the internet and to other people playing those games on the internet. I had literally never heard of it prior to Monday of this week, and I wish I still didn’t know about it.
The reason NAT type came up is because both my partner and I have been having constant issues with disconnects in Elden Ring Nightreign for several months now, for seemingly no particular reason. Almost every single match, one or both of us would disconnect. First, there would be up to 20 seconds or so where our characters would be stuck running around the world, unable to do damage or affect anything in them. Then, we’d actually get kicked out, and have to go through the grueling process of getting back to the menu screen, clicking through some menus, and then reloading back into the game. And because it’s Nightreign, this would be a huge disadvantage. We’d end up wasting something like a full minute of time, and when we got back in we’d either respawn somewhere vaguely near where we disconnected, with all our runes (including one whole lost level) dumped somewhere else for us to go waste time picking up. Or, if we were at the end of a night, we’d just respawn dead, and whoever was still connected would have to maneuver over to us while still fighting the boss and try to get us back up.
This has been infuriating! I tolerated it for a long time, because I enjoy Nightreign, but it really, really feels bad to be the one dragging the group down in this manner.
We tried everything to fix it. Whatever solution you’re about to suggest, we did it. We checked our connections. We reset the router so many times. We changed who hosted the match. We screwed around with all sorts of settings. We made sure we were on wired connections. Etc etc etc. None of it worked.
Finally, my partner did some dedicated research and discovered that something called our NAT type was the problem. Apparently, our NAT types were set to Moderate, which can cause issues with online multiplayer. From what I can figure out, you can change your NAT type properly by following a bunch of complex steps dealing with your router. Or for us on Xbox, we were able to spam the “Test NAT” function in the settings until eventually it swapped our NAT type to Open. When we played hours later, my partner’s was fixed, but mine was not. We checked the settings again, and mine had reverted back to Moderate. We spammed Test NAT again, got it to Open, and we’ve had uninterrupted matches ever since.
So I guess now before I play Nightreign, I have to check this setting every time? This is ridiculous! Why does stuff work like this? I feel like I shouldn’t have to do deep research into an obscure-for-most-people internet setting just to play an online game as it’s intended to be played. I’m not trying to do anything wacky here, I’m literally just getting into a co-op game with two other people, all of whom have excellent internet connections. Most people should not have to know about NAT type, or UPNP (whatever that is) or IPV6 or any of the other weird acronyms I saw while researching this. Like yes, I could probably work this out with time if I sat down and messed around with it long enough, but I don’t have time to do technological research just to bonk a stupid death goop monster around a giant arena without making my friend solo him for 60 seconds at a time at random.
If you’re having trouble with disconnections in Nightreign or Elden Ring PvP stuff or anything like that, consider melting your brain and learning about NAT type. I don’t recommend it, but it did result in me being able to play Nightreign without (unnecessary) frustration, improving my evenings dramatically. However, as soon as I beat up Dreglord, I intend to forget everything I know (very little) about NAT type again for the rest of my life.
