Don't worry about missing Elden Ring Nightreign's network test on PC—nobody could play it on console either

This weekend's Elden Ring Nightreign network test may not include us PC players, but that won't stop me from watching from the sidelines with a bucket of popcorn while the servers proverbially burn. And also, you know, installing the thing on my own PlayStation 5 to give things a whirl, only to find myself totally unable to even try the thing out during its first three-hour run.

Yeah, so first of all, Nightreign's network test is kinda weird. Instead of running for a set period of time—you know, like how most games'll run their tests or betas for 48 hours or so—instead it's choosing a sprinkling of three-hour pockets from now until February 17. That first session wrapped up at 6am PST / 9am EST / 2pm GMT today… not that it really matters, since it seems like barely anyone was able to get in anyway.

Happy Valentine day from r/Eldenring

The Elden Ring subreddit is full of folk laughing through the pain as Nightreign's servers appear to have crapped out less than an hour into the session. I gave things a try myself at around 11:30am UK time, only to be repeatedly met with login errors at the title screen. The FromSoftware player support Twitter notes that the "game server is experiencing high traffic, making it difficult to match" before shortly following it up with acknowledgement that the whole thing was borked.

"Currently, there is a malfunction on the Elden Ring Nightreign game server," the account posted. "We will restart the server to restore service." Well that happened, around 40 minutes later. Not that it seemed to make much difference, mind.

I continued to try myself between 12:30pm and 1:30pm UK time, and the furthest I was able to get was into the hub. The game never actually managed to throw me into a match, forcing me back to the title screen to start the whole thing all over again. I finally gave up shortly before 2pm, resigning myself to a session lost before crawling back to my beloved desktop.

The whole sub rn from r/Eldenring

That doesn't mean everyone was unable to play, though. There are a scattering of Reddit posts of folk who managed to successfully get through the matchmaking and take on the network test's bosses within.

But, unfortunately, for the most part, it seems like would-be Nightreigners missed out. The FromSoftware Twitter page posted one final apology as the first session concluded, added that it may rerun the test to make up for things. "We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to all players due to the game server issues," the post read. "Today's network test will end at 23:00 [Japan time] as scheduled, and we will proceed with improvement work. We are considering holding an additional test for today's session. Your understanding and cooperation would be greatly appreciated."

Ultimately, it's a frustrating situation for both sides. Of course it would've been rad to try and dive in, but I'm sure FromSoftware was having an equally bad time at trying to put out the fires as I was getting hard stuck in a log-in-disconnect loop. Unfortunately for me, the next session runs at, uh, 3am in the UK, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow's 7pm session to give things another go. Hopefully FromSoftware manages to get things a little more stable before then, and I'll be over here hoping that PlayStation and Xbox users get to be the guinea pigs so that when the network test inevitably comes to PC, we won't suffer the same issues. Hopefully, anyway.