The Great Hollow Is Beautiful, Brutal, and Breaking Nightreign Players
Elden Ring Nightreign’s Great Hollow map frustrates players with deadly chasms, confusing vertical routes, and brutal navigation despite its striking design.
I've spent the last week doing something I never thought I'd do in Elden Ring: Nightreign—standing at the edge of a cliff, squinting at the minimap, and whispering, 'Please don't be a death pit.' That's the Great Hollow experience, folks. The Forsaken Hollows DLC has been out for a month and a half now, and while the two new Nightfarers and the new bosses are landing pretty well, the new Shifting Earth map is getting dragged through the mud on Steam. And honestly? I get it.
It's Not Technically a New Map, But It Sure Feels Like One
The Great Hollow is a Shifting Earth event, so it may or may not show up when you're running a DLC boss. You might get the default map or one of four other Shifting Earths instead. But unlike those other events, which usually transform one part of the map, the Great Hollow basically swaps out the entire area. No central castle. No ravine down the middle. No southern lake or northern cliffs. Instead, you get a giant crystal that looks like it crash-landed and split the land into broken cliffs and multiple vertical levels. There are ruins full of enemies, plus churches, forts, and mines scattered around. The in-game map has multiple layers, and you have to use spirit springs carefully to fall down and shoot back up. It's a lot.
The center crystal also holds a major party buff that can be clutch for the final boss. To get it, you need to find and break several smaller colored crystals around the map. Their locations change every attempt. So you can't just memorize one route and call it a day.
Why Everyone Is So Frustrated
Routing in Nightreign is usually a quick mental exercise. You fly in, pop the map open, and plan a path that gets your team a few extra flasks, a mine for a smithing stone, and a steady line of boss fights so you can collect runes and level up. In the Great Hollow, that plan goes out the window. There are too many vertical levels, too many map layers, and too many 'wait, can I jump down here?' moments. Add the crystal hunt on top, and you have a recipe for confusion.
But the worst part? The giant, gaping chasm running through the middle of the map. The chasm grins at you. It knows what you're about to do.
Nightreign famously has no fall damage. It encourages sprinting, leaping off ledges, and climbing cliffs. That's part of why it feels so different from Elden Ring. Over the last year, a lot of us have trained ourselves to run and jump without hesitation. Usually, that's fine. The Crater Shifting Earth has a lava pit, but it's easy to avoid. The Great Hollow, though, has a death pit that is annoyingly hard to see. You look over a ledge, think you're good, and then—whoops—you're falling to your death.
And the death fall behavior makes it worse. If an enemy kills you, you spawn back at the last Grace you tapped, and your runes are either dropped nearby or picked up by an enemy. If you fall, Nightreign seems to randomly drop you somewhere along a ledge near your death point. That could be above, below, or across from where you jumped. But your runes stay back on the ledge where you started. So you can spawn far away, with your runes behind you across a death pit, and no easy route back. It's the kind of thing that makes you put the controller down and stare at the wall for a minute.
The Steam Reviews Are Not Happy
The numbers tell the story. While Elden Ring: Nightreign itself has mostly positive reviews, Forsaken Hollows is sitting at Mostly Negative for the last 30 days. Only 30% of 1,347 recent reviews are positive. A lot of them are about the map.
One review says: 'The new map is poorly designed, overly difficult and boring. Takes forever to traverse... boss battle tower is a damage-sponge time-wasting chore.' Another says: 'The characters and bosses are great but the new map is absolutely horrible and is ruining the experience of the game as a whole.' 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.'
I also saw a positive review that summed it up perfectly: 'The new map is [expletive] terrible but everything's so good.'
Is It a Skill Issue, or a Design Issue?
Not everyone hates the Great Hollow. A recent Reddit thread about the Steam reviews said, 'The more I play, the more I feel like it was fantastically designed.' The replies were divided. Some players acknowledge the flaws but love the challenge. Others call it a skill issue. And honestly, I see both sides. The map is beautiful and unique. It demands a different gameplay flow and much better team coordination so you don't all end up separated and confused. But it's also hard to learn, and the only way to learn is to fail a lot. After 100+ hours in Nightreign, I'm not having the best time trying to learn new bosses, two new characters, and a new map all at once. Though, to be fair, that's kind of the FromSoftware experience.
What Works
What Hurts
Gorgeous crystal wasteland aesthetic
Multi-level routing chaos
Crystal buff is a cool risk-reward idea
Random crystal locations
Encourages tight team coordination
Hidden death pits
New bosses and Nightfarers are great
Fall death spawn/Rune loss feels unfair
What Could Fix It?
I don't think FromSoftware needs to delete the map. But a few changes would go a long way. First, fix where the game places you after a fall. If I die in a chasm, don't strand me on a random ledge with my runes across the void. Second, add a little more clarity to the minimap so I can see levels and death pits before I leap. Third, maybe make the colored crystals show up on the map after day one, so the crystal hunt feels less like a YouTube memory test. That's not dumbing it down; that's respecting my time.
The Great Hollow is a beautiful bully. It's thematically cool, visually striking, and genuinely rewarding when a team clicks. But right now, it's also a freaking chore, and the Steam reviews are trying to send a message. I'm hoping a 2026 patch smooths out the rough edges. Until then, I'll be over here, practicing, falling, and muttering, 'Please don't be a death pit.'
If the current state of the Great Hollow has you holding off on picking up Nightreign, or waiting to see whether a future patch makes the DLC worth the asking price, it helps to know when that price actually moves. FromSoftware releases and their expansions go on sale at fairly predictable intervals, but the discounts themselves are rarely advertised in advance, and bundle pricing between the base game and expansions can shift overnight without any fanfare.
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