As we know all too well at this point, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki freaking loves a poison swamp. They've become a staple of FromSoftware's environments, a lovely poisonous debuff enveloping you while scraggly little creatures try to chip away at your health even further. Back in 2022, he said he "rediscovered" his love for a good old toxic bog, adding "I know how people feel about them but I suddenly realize I'm in the middle of making one and I can't help myself. It just happens."
He then admitted last year that maybe he went a little overboard with chucking them in every single game, though of course there was still one in Shadow of the Erdtree. One upcoming FromSoft game that notably doesn't include a poison swamp, however, is Elden Ring's roguelike spinoff Nightreign.
That's probably because, as Kitao Taidai joked, Miyazaki isn't the one rubbing his purple-tinged hands all over the game. As reported by Famitsu, Taidai approached the subject of Nightreign's poison swamps, or lack thereof, during a livestream of the game over on YouTube. "There aren't any," Taidai told viewers (via a machine translation). "This time, the director is not Miyazaki, but [Junya] Ishizaki, who has been the battle director of Elden Ring, so maybe no one wanted to include it."
Ouch, a devastating blow to Miyazaki's neverending love for bubbling, venomous marshlands. It does make a lot of sense that if any Souls game was going to be missing one, it'd be Nightreign. The game's focus seems to be leaning a lot more heavily towards being a fast-paced slashfest—hell, our Morgan Park surmised it was closer to Fortnite than it was to Elden Ring when he had a hands-on with the game earlier this month—and I can imagine forcing players to trudge through toxic sludge isn't the kind of thing you need when trying to pull that off.
It does feel like a tiny bit of a shame though, but I'm sure Miyazaki's DNA will be running through Nightreign even without him at the helm. I would love to tell you myself, but, uh, I haven't had much luck trying to get into the (unfortunately non-PC) network test that's currently running this weekend. Either way, I'm sure Miyazaki will make up for Nightreign's missing poison swamps with plenty of dastardly creations in whatever creation he'll be cooking up next.
