Supposedly, it's better to try and fail than to never try at all. I say otherwise. The first Elden Ring Nightreign beta has kicked off, and before its servers collapsed with all the grace of a thrice-parried Radahn, I managed to try my hand at a run with two randomly-matched players. It was a disaster – and because the network test servers are (at time of writing) offline for maintenance, I've got nothing to do but sit and think about everything that went wrong.
These personal failings have nothing to do with Nightreign itself, which – spoiler – feels brilliant. Nor do I begrudge FromSoftware's servers going under. "Network test" is painted over the title screen, and it would've been odd if there weren't any hiccups as the doors opened. In truth, I just didn't git gud.
