Well, well, well, Elden Ring Nightreign just passed Elden Ring‘s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC in terms of Steam player ratings. FromSoftware’s latest experiment with a co-op roguelike formula seems to be a big hit among the gaming community. But is it really better than last year’s Game of the Year contender?
Well, it’s subjective. We’re comparing a full game to a DLC, so there’s an imbalance there. But looking at just the reviews, we do have to remember that the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC faced a lot of negative reviews when it came out because of its difficulty and performance issues. So the numbers may not be everything.
Elden Ring Nightreign is now on par with Shadow of the Erdtree
As of June 14, Elden Ring Nightreign has over 92,000 reviews on Steam, with roughly 77.7% of them positive. In comparison, Shadow of the Erdtree stands at 102,000 reviews, but only about 69.7% are positive. The reason this is so surprising is that Shadow of the Erdtree was considered FromSoftware’s best DLC at launch.
Nightreign now has better reviews than SoTE
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So, how exactly has Nightreign surpassed it in ratings so easily? Well, the answer might not just be about how good the new co-op roguelike title is. You see, when Shadow of the Erdtree first came out, it had a lot of performance issues that resulted in a lot of negative reviews.
On top of that, the DLC bumped up the difficulty of the game a notch, and while that was an expectation from a FromSoft DLC, a lot of players didn’t like it and review-bombed the game on Steam. But that’s not to say that Nightreign had a smooth launch.
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Nightreign came out just two short weeks ago, and it initially had a problem with balance in terms of the solo mode. And as you’d expect from a FromSoft title, there were a lot of server issues, and the game didn’t even have a duo mode. This resulted in the game receiving Mixed reviews on Steam at launch. But two weeks later, it seems like there has been a full recovery.
Nightreign is looking better and better
So, despite the slight stumble at the start, Nightreign’s fortunes have reversed more quickly than many anticipated. FromSoft immediately responded to the launch issues with an update that fixed the solo play issues and the matchmaking/server issues.
On the dawn of the fifth day, 3.5 million Nightfarers took up arms against the Night in #ELDENRING #NIGHTREIGN.
We are ever grateful for your passion. pic.twitter.com/WZm830eXgs— ELDEN RING (@ELDENRING) June 3, 2025
As we’ve started to get used to this new multiplayer structure, things are turning around. Be it while waiting for our friends to join, or anything else, many players began to appreciate Nightreign’s fresh spin on FromSoftware’s Soulslike formula. And that’s exactly what the studio has been doing lately.
FromSoft has already found success with Elden Ring and its DLC, so with its new projects like Elden Ring Nightreign and The Duskbloods, the developers are exploring new ideas. Nightreign’s sales have passed 3.5 million copies, and it shows the success of this new approach.
So why did Shadow of the Erdtree fare worse in the long run? In part, its sky-high expectations worked against it. Being nominated for Game of the Year and its super-high critic ratings meant that we all had impossibly high standards for it. But with time and second playthroughs, players found issues with the DLC, too.
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