Presumably much to Miyazaki's dismay, Elden Ring Nightreign is decidedly void of poison swamps_ 'May

As we know all too well at this point, 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 , 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 with chucking them in every single game, though of course there was still one in Shadow of the Erdtree. One upcoming FromSoft game [[link]] that notably doesn't include a poison swamp, however, is Elden Ring's roguelike spinoff .

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 , 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 [[link]] focus seems to be leaning a lot more heavily towards being a fast-paced slashfest—hell, our Morgan Park surmised 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 [[link]] 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) 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.