Elden Ring Nightreign inherits practically everything from its predecessor, and by extension, older FromSoftware games, despite its wildly different gameplay loop. The developer’s action RPGs have long featured compelling co-op and PvP, but they also make consistent use of asymmetrical multiplayer elements. The messages that players can leave for others to read and rate are the most famous, but the translucent phantoms (sometimes referred to as ghosts) that appear can be just as helpful, and these are undergoing a major change in Nightreign.

Like many FromSoftware multiplayer features, phantoms originated in 2009’s Demon’s Souls. They’re nearly real-time recordings of other players in the same area, letting you see where people go and potentially hint at obstacles they run into. They go hand-in-hand with bloodstains, though bloodstains have to be interacted with to see how that person met their demise. Phantoms have been a passive feature for their entire existence, but Nightreign reinvents them to be actively useful.

Touching A Phantom In Elden Ring Nightreign Makes Your Ult Charge Faster

Ultimate Arts Can Devastate Enemies

Considering Elden Ring Nightreign‘s incredibly fast pace, seeing a phantom sprint by for a few seconds may not be particularly insightful. So much variance between Nightreign runs also mostly defeats their purpose from earlier FromSoftware games, where dungeon crawling can be a slower, more methodical venture. It seems that with this in mind, the developer has added a new wrinkle to phantoms. According to the Elden Ring Nightreign Starter Guide on publisher Bandai Namco’s website, released prior to Nightreign‘s Closed Network Test, “Sometimes, you will see players from other worlds moving around as Phantoms. Touching them will increase your Ultimate Art gauge.“

An Ultimate Art is a powerful ability unique to each Nightfarer, i.e. the eight playable characters that will be available when Nightreign releases on May 30. From the four confirmed Nightfarers – those that were playable in the CNT – Ultimate Arts are generally either attacks that deal significant damage, or buffs that provide the caster or the whole team with an advantage. They’re incredibly useful when fighting bosses, and combos that string Ultimate Arts together can often make quick work of certain encounters.

Nightfarer
Ultimate Art
Description

Wylder
Onslaught Stake
Fires a metal stake from Wylder’s wrist-mounted hookshot, dealing high damage and stun

Guardian
Wings of Salvation
Guardian flies into the air before descending on the targeted enemy, dealing high AoE damage and temporarily boosting nearby allies’ defense

Duchess
Finale
Cloaks Duchess and teammates, making them temporarily invisible to enemies

Recluse
Soulblood Song
Marks an enemy with blood sigils, causing damage dealt to that enemy to restore Recluse’s HP and FP

Every Nightfarer also has a unique passive ability and a second character skill which is on a shorter timer than the Ult.

On the surface, a slight boost to recharging your Ultimate Art doesn’t really seem like a huge boon, but running into a phantom at the right time might be exactly what you need to keep a run going. Phantoms didn’t seem all that common in the Closed Network Test, but they’ll conceivably concentrate in high-traffic areas. Getting your Ult slightly sooner might let you finish off a boss early, giving you a head start on the Night’s Tide and letting you make some important stops on the way to the end-of-day boss.

Nightreign Has The First Significant Phantom Changes Since Demon’s Souls

Previous Iterations Weren’t Interactable

When I first played Dark Souls, I remember being a bit confused about the phantoms at first, not realizing that they were essentially recordings of other players. These kinds of asymmetrical multiplayer elements have given FromSoftware’s games a sort of novelty that I find fascinating, helping to bring players together in subtle ways, and I was delighted to find that a lot of these elements, including phantoms and messages, had their origins in Demon’s Souls when I later went back to play it.

Despite how much I enjoy FromSoftware’s sometimes unnecessarily obtuse multiplayer mechanics, it’s easy to point to phantoms as one that hasn’t really evolved since their inception. Demon’s Souls, all three Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring all have sorts of loosely defined parallel realities that help hand-wave the multiplayer elements into being diegetic parts of the game world. It’s pretty interesting to think about, but the phantoms in particular have just kind of been there in each FromSoftware action RPG prior to Nightreign.

It’s nice to not only see the evolution of phantoms in Nightreign, but also that they’re included at all. Nightreign looks and feels a lot like Elden Ring at first, but very quickly into your first run, it’s obvious that the game is weird, relatively speaking. Especially with the game’s pace and the amount of terrain variation expected in the full release, it would have been understandable if phantoms simply weren’t included in Nightreign, so it’s a pleasant surprise to have them be even more functional than before.

Keep An Eye Out For Red Phantoms Too

They May Drop Good Loot

There’s a second kind of phantom in Elden Ring Nightreign too: red phantoms. Here the terminology gets a little confusing, because red phantoms were typically invaders in past FromSoftware games, and they don’t really operate like the phantoms discussed above. In Nightreign, you’ll find red phantoms crouched on the ground where another player died. If you interact with a red phantom (Triangle on PlayStation/Y on Xbox), “you can obtain the equipment they were carrying before they died in that same spot,” according to Bandai’s Starter Guide.

Red phantoms aren’t exactly the actions of other players slipping into your game world; they operate more like FromSoftware’s bloodstains, albeit less informative but more lucrative. Bloodstains would let you witness how another player died in games prior, and that information could be valuable, especially on a first playthrough for discovering hidden enemies or traps. Red phantoms in Nightreign, though, just signal that someone has died, not necessarily how. Some of these are easy to parse; I found quite a few near the Royal Carian Knight in the Network Test, one of Elden Ring Nightreign‘s returning bosses from previous FromSoftware games, which many players tried to fight while under-leveled.

In Nightreign, however, how another player has died isn’t as important (to you) as the items they died with. Finding increasingly better loot is a major component of a run, and finding a red phantom, especially during the second day, might mean you’ve stumbled across an incredible new weapon. Elden Ring Nightreign is an asset flip in the best sense of the term, and it’s nice to see such FromSoftware staples not only carry on into this odd spin-off, but be reinvented to have new and interesting purposes.