Elden Ring: Nightreign's DLC, The Forsaken Hollows, has been out for a month and a half now, which means players have had plenty of time to get used to its two new Nightfarers, two new end bosses, and numerous new night bosses. But one element of the new content that everyone is still really struggling with, even after weeks of practice: the new DLC map. It's really difficult, really confusing, and seemingly no one likes it that much, leading to a rash of negative Steam reviews and a lot of failed runs.
The new map is technically not even a new map, though it may as well be. It's a Shifting Earth event, meaning it may or may not be active at any given time when you're playing a DLC boss, with other options being the default map or one of four other Shifting Earths available. However, unlike the other Shifting Earth events, which only transform one part of the map significantly, the Great Hollow shifting earth essentially is a totally different area. Nothing is the same. There's no castle at the center, no ravine running down the middle, no lake in the south or cliffs up north.
Instead, the Great Hollow is centered around a giant crystal in the middle which seems to have crashlanded, splitting the land around it into broken up cliffs separated into multiple levels. Built into and scattered around the cliffs and canyons are various ruins full of enemies, alongside the more familiar structures such as churches, forts, and mines. The actual in-game map of the Great Hollow has multiple levels with different points of interest on each level, and it's necessary to use the game's spirit springs carefully to fall down to lower levels and shoot back up to higher ones so you can actually get around effectively.
Additionally, the Great Hollow's center crystal contains a major buff for the party that can be seriously clutch for a round's final boss fights. But in order to obtain it, you need to find and break several smaller, colored crystals scattered around the map, whose locations change on each attempt.
So why is this causing everyone so much pain? Well, for one, because of the multi-level map, it's far more difficult to tell at a glance what route you should take on a given run. Normally, as you're flying into a new game, you'll pop the map open and give it a brief scan, mentally planning out a route that will ideally give your team a few extra flasks, a mine for a smithing stone, and a gradually more challenging line of boss encounters so you can collect runes and weapons and level up. In the Great Hollow, there are so many different vertical levels to account for, plus multiple map levels to swap between, that it's even more difficult to route a run and make a plan that will actually see your team effectively get stronger over the course of two nights. And that's only exacerbated by the need to account for breaking crystals as you go, without knowing where they're going to end up until the second day.
But by far the worst thing about Great Hollow is the giant, gaping chasm running through the middle of it.
Unlike Elden Ring, Nightreign doesn't have fall damage. This was a big point of difference in gameplay style when it first launched, as Nightreign encourages players to sprint across maps, leap off ledges, and even climb up the sides of cliffs. Elden Ring, by contrast, favors a somewhat slower, more cautious playstyle. So over the last year, a lot of Elden Ring players have slowly adjusted to Nightreign's rhythm of running and jumping without a lot of hesitancy, and by and large, that's worked out well for them, because there really aren't many places where falling in Nightreign is dangerous. You can technically fall off the outside edge of the map, and the Crater Shifting Earth does have a big lava pit that's not great to fall into, but both of those are fairly simple to avoid.
Great Hollow, by contrast, has a death pit running down parts of the middle of the map, and it's annoyingly hard to see. Because of how the ledges are positioned, it's easy to look over a ledge, think you're good to jump down, and end up falling to your death. What's worse, for some reason Nightreign doesn't treat death falls the same way it treats deaths to enemies. If an enemy kills you, you just spawn back at the last Grace you tapped, and your leftover Runes are either dropped near where you died or picked up by a nearby enemy. But when you fall, Nightreign will seemingly randomly drop you somewhere along a ledge near your death point, which could be above, below, or across from where you jumped off. But then it leaves your Runes back on the ledge where you started. Which means it's possible (and even likely) that you'll spawn on a far ledge, with your Runes somewhere behind you across a death pit, and no easy route back.
Whew! All this is to say that the Great Hollow, while aesthetically beautiful and thematically cool, is kind of a pain in the neck, and Steam reviewers are trying to let FromSoftware know. While Elden Ring: Nightreign itself has mostly positive reviews, Forsaken Hollows is currently sitting at Mostly Negative reviews for the last 30 days, with only 30% of 1,347 reviews this past month being positive.
"The new map is poorly designed, overly difficult and boring," reads one review from today. "Takes forever to traverse, interesting points of interest are often too deep into the edge of the map to get through completely, boss battle tower is a damage-sponge time-wasting chore. New dlc pois in new and old map are full of enemy encounters designed to cheese you like it's darksouls. Spend hours learning and memorizing crystal locations from youtube videos just so you can try to not lose in a bad map. Underground ruins filled with a dozen rot kindred that homing one shot you."
Another reads: "The characters and bosses are great but the new "map" is absolutely horrible and is ruining the experience of the game as a whole."
And a third: "Love the bosses and new classes but the new map is just trash. There was Zero NEED to add gaps in the map to kill YOU. You might as well add fall damage to the game.
"That map is NOT FUN!!! It's a freaking chore. I avoided it completely until I am forced to play it to compete certain story lines.
"I am now forced to spend hours memorising the bloody thing because you will literally end up locations you cannot get out because the only bridge is light years away.
"An otherwise great DLC ruined by this nonsense map. EITHER GET RID OF THE MAP, MAKE IT OPTIONAL OR COVER THE GIANT HOLES."
I also spotted a recent positive review that simply read, "the new map is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible but everything's so good."
Not everyone hates the map, and some FromSoftware fans are pointing out that this may be a bit of a skill issue. A recent Reddit thread about the Steam reviews states, "The more I play, the more I feel like it was fantastically designed." And the replies themselves seem divided between acknowledging its flaws and celebrating what they love about it.
As someone who spent last night falling into chasms on this map, I can see both points here. Great Hollow really is beautiful and unique, requiring a very different gameplay flow and better team coordination so you don't all end up separated and confused. But it's pretty challenging to learn, and the only way to learn really is to fail at it a lot. After already putting over 100 hours into Nightreign, I'm not having the best time simultaneously trying to learn all the new bosses, two new characters, and the new map simultaneously - though, I guess you could argue, that's just the FromSoftware experience.
Probably a fix for where the game places you after you fall, and maybe a little bit more clarity on the minimap would solve some of this. We'll keep an eye out for a Nightreign patch to address it. But in the meantime, just keep practicing.
This isn't the first time Nightreign players have used Steam reviews to express their displeasure. Last November, a wave of review bombs complained about the lack of DLC content, just weeks before Forsaken Hollows was announced and released. A more recent patch last week has given some of the Nightfarers who were struggling much-needed buffs. You can check out what we thought of the Elden Ring: Nightreign base game right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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