When I got back in town from vacation, it was a top priority for me to hit Elden Ring Nightreign’s latest rotating “Everdark” superboss, the Augur, aka. Maris, Fathom of Night. “Don’t spoil yourself on it, it’s amazing,” PCG contributor Tyler Colp warned me before we queued up, but with the added caveat that “people hate it.” Spoilers for the Everdark Augur fight below.
Solo Souls challenge runner Ongbal called it “The Worst Everdark Boss” in the title of his no-hit video beating Maris, while GamesRadar has compiled a rogues’ gallery of Redditors complaining about the design. Respectfully (to Ongbal) and disrespectfully (to the Redditors), I disagree.
Stormy high
When you reach phase two (the new stuff) of Everdark Augur, the celestial jellyfish greatly increases in size and adopts a fresh kaleidoscope of colors, resembling a living nebula and filling the sky of your arena beyond time and space.
Maris now attacks with strafing runs of exploding bubbles, with her delayed wave attacks becoming slow-moving tsunamis rolling across the arena, too large to i-frame dodge through, and now requiring that you run around/away from them like they’re true natural hazards.
Maris has always favored ranged characters like Ironeye with her keepaway tactics and high-flying antics, but her Everdark form sidesteps this exclusionary tendency by providing a unique weapon at the beginning of phase two. I was elated to discover that it’s functionally Storm Ruler, a 16-year recurring mechanic in FromSoft games, first appearing in the Storm King fight of Demon’s Souls.
Storm Ruler attacks slowly, but sends out cataclysmic wind slashes to take down kaiju-sized bosses your normal weapons can’t scratch, like Yohrm, the Giant in Dark Souls 3 or Elden Ring’s Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy (with the similarly-functioning Serpent Spear). The Maris fight becomes a game of avoidance, like a slow-motion bullet hell, dodging her bubbles and waves to get enough space to charge up Storm Ruler.
I adore this fight for its sheer spectacle, killer music (something Nightreign’s nailed overall), and the lizard brain “hey, remember this?” nostalgia play of the surprise Storm Ruler appearance.
Maybe I’m a hypocrite for always loving this sort of thing when FromSoft does it, while I find it pandering elsewhere, but I’d argue it almost always feels earned when the studio indulges. Storm Ruler showing up here is both a 16-year running joke, and a complete left field surprise out of nowhere, upending the usual rules of Nightreign. And my favorite part of FromSoftware games is their propensity to surprise and delight.
Reject revisionist anti-Augurism
From what I’ve read, there are two primary criticisms of Everdark Augur:
- Being built around a guaranteed weapon drop invalidates the roguelike buildcrafting Nightreign revolves around. Once you reach phase two, your weapon, character, and relic choices largely don’t matter.
- The fight can be a slog, with Augur hard to hit from a distance, and individual Storm Ruler swings not denting her health bar all that much.
I’m more sympathetic to the second critique: The fight is slow, and attrition slugfests, when they don’t go in your favor, magnify how bad it already feels to fail a run in Nightreign. But the things I like about the fight outweigh this frustration for me.
I’m less willing to give ground on the buildcrafting gripe. First, the fight itself still offers its own opportunities to build for: The fact that the Storm Ruler regenerates your FP bar gives healing spells a ton of extra utility—effectively infinite healing—while magic damage-increasing items will help the Storm Ruler’s damage output.
Those are admittedly supplemental considerations, but the fight’s build-agnostic nature has a hidden advantage. For once, you don’t have to worry about tailoring your whole build for the boss. Nightlord elemental weaknesses typically have me prioritizng relics to put those elements on my starting weapon, then upgrading that weapon while ignoring any other options I find on a run. With this pressure removed, I’ve experimented with alternate weapon and relic setups in my Everdark Augur runs.
But I also think there’s something exciting enough about the surprise, the experiment of effectively throwing out Nightreign’s progression system for one fight, that it would have been worth doing even without any secondary benefit.
Nightreign isn’t fully a live service game like Destiny, but it’s the closest FromSoftware has come to making one. Often, I find live service games can become enslaved to their own rules, mechanics, and resulting player expectations.
The tyranny of competitive balance and adequately rewarding player investment into progression systems is the enemy of that sense of surprise and delight I crave from not just FromSoftware, but games in general.
Everdark Augur is yet another example of FromSoft bending or breaking development conventions to do its own thing, and I love it. Super Maris probably won’t remain my Everdark favorite for very long, though.
The Ultra Instinct version of Baphomet deal broker Libra is on the horizon, and I’m already president of that nasty little freak’s fan club. I can’t wait to see the unfair, infuriating bullshit he’s about to pull in his Everdark form.