It's not just you: Elden Ring Nightreign's matchmaking is taking forever if it works at all, and there doesn't seem to be a fix⁠—aside from queueing with a full group

First reported by Eurogamer, FromSoftware has acknowledged long matchmaking times for Elden Ring Nightreign despite having 2 million players and counting. The studio's initial suggested fixes are not particularly helpful, especially on PC, and the best solution right now is really just queueing with a full team of three.

In an initial tweet about matchmaking, FromSoft suggested restarting the matchmaking process if it's taking too long⁠—I and the commenters on Twitter thread can tell you right now, that hasn't helped. FromSoft's only other suggestion has been changing your NAT connection type on PlayStation.

NAT type is something you can also adjust on PC, but I'm sorry: I'm not going to be messing with my router on account of one game's borked matchmaking. This looks to be an issue across all platforms: Commenters on Twitter mention Xbox as well as PS5, and there are threads on the Elden Ring subreddit and Steam forums mentioning long wait times as well.

And I'm honestly just feeling relieved: PCG contributor Nova Smith and I snagged a single rando for a run across two hours of waiting for matchmaking last night. I was terrified I'd somehow earned an EAC shadowban of some extraction, but nope, the game's just in shambles for everybody right now.

It's a fairly confounding set of server woes, judging solely by the symptoms: I can log in fine and connections have been rock solid once in a game⁠—none of the excruciating log-in queues or dropped matches you'd usually associate with a bad live service launch.

Matchmaking just takes forever despite the game having between 200,000 and 300,000 players online on Steam at any given time. Hopefully there's a fix, but until then, your best bet is securing a third player or trying out Yui's Seamless Co-op mod for Nightreign to unlock duos.