Elden Ring Nightreign will, in fact, pit you and your friends against enemies from the Souls series, game director Junya Ishizaki has confirmed.
In a Famitsu interview (spotted by Eurogamer), Ishizaki says that some Dark Souls enemies will appear to fight you in Elden Ring Nightreign, although it seems like there won't be too many; the game's enemy roster will largely be made up of Elden Ring enemies, Ishizaki says.
He goes on to say that he got permission from Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki and Dark Souls 2 director Yui Tanimura to include enemies from their respective works in Nightreign, so it looks like you can expect Dark Souls 2 enemies alongside iconic foes from the other two games.
Eagle-eyed observers had already spotted Dark Souls 3's Nameless King boss in the Elden Ring Nightreign debut trailer, as well as a boss that looked suspiciously like Dark Souls' Centipede Demon, and now it looks like those won't be the only Dark Souls callbacks in the game.
Ishizaki doesn't mention whether any Demon's Souls enemies will be appearing in Nightreign, but given that the Demon's Souls IP is owned by Sony and not by FromSoftware or Bandai Namco, it's unlikely.
As for why Dark Souls enemies turn up in Nightreign, Ishizaki's answer is rather amusing; he puts it down to the influence of the game's villain, the Night King, which rather smacks of "a wizard did it" to me.
If you're not familiar with Elden Ring Nightreign, it's an upcoming co-op survival action game created by FromSoftware and based on the 2022 smash hit Elden Ring.
Announced during the Game Awards ceremony last week, Nightreign eschews FromSoftware's typical Soulslike formula, opting instead for a sort of Monster Hunter-inspired roguelite approach that sees players banding together to survive three days and nights of increasingly difficult encounters.
The game's announcement came less than two weeks after FromSoftware head Hidetaka Miyazaki said there were no plans to expand the Elden Ring IP in the future, but then his games are well-known for featuring duplicitous or obscure NPCs, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.
Elden Ring Nightreign launches next year for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
