Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows is the worst-rated Steam release in FromSoftware history. At the time of writing, the new DLC for the studio’s exciting multiplayer roguelike is sitting at a pretty poor 46.86% reception on Steam.
Resting 9% lower than Dark Souls III’s underwhelming Ashes of Ariandel DLC, The Forsaken Hollows has simply not connected with a large portion of the Elden Ring fanbase.
While the team behind Nightreign’s first DLC did explain that it would be harder than the main game, the new expansion has not only been called a “miserable experience” due to its difficulty, but also underwhelming due to its lack of new content.
Elden Ring Nightreign: The Forsaken Hollows gives players a new map, two new classes, new bosses and more to play with. The new map, Limveld, combined with the Shifting Earth event has left a lot of players frustrated at the game, although others will likely just tell you to get good.
“The DLC map is a miserable experience,” one player said on Steam. “I gave it a fair chance, nearly 20 hours, and it doesn’t get better, it’s just THAT badly designed. The entire experience is like running around a house filled with broken glass. It’s not fun learning how to not step in broken glass, it’s tedious and painful.”
Alongside the new map, the game’s new Sundered Tricephalos event has caused a lot of frustration. When the event turns up, players take unavoidable damage over time unless three Tricephalos bosses are killed. Killing a boss buffs the remaining bosses, and the game spawns a large number of respawning fire wolves while you fight. It’s annoying, frustrating, and quite unfair.
Furthermore, Nightreign’s £13 DLC simply doesn’t add enough in terms of new weapons and armour to justify the price. While some fans are upset at the new map, new events and the usual bugs and glitches, the lack of a considerable expansion in the loot pool is a massive disappointment.
“This is just a bit of a joke,” one fan said. “How are there no new weapons besides the two signature weapons the new characters come with? And those are just a reskin of a basic hammer and a basic thrusting sword.”
Another claimed they were “genuinely heartbroken” by the lack of any weapons introduced in the original Elden Ring’s DLC. With those weapons, such as Ashes of War, already developed by FromSoftware, there should’ve been a larger addition of weapons with simple balance tweaks to make them fairer for multiplayer.
Nevertheless, the new DLC has been a huge jolt to the player base with player counts skyrocketing over the last few days. Prior to the DLC, concurrent Steam player counts for the game jumped from 11,000 to over 33,000 as players prepped for the new content. However, once that content dropped, player counts jumped even higher up to a peak of over 133,000.
Hopefully, there will be even more Elden Ring Nightreign content in the coming months, but FromSoftware’s next major release is a new version of the original game. Delayed until sometime in 2026, Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition is releasing on Nintendo Switch 2 with the port’s new content coming to other platforms as a new DLC.
