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Elden Ring Nightreign Libra on purple background looking at camera with goggle eyes

15 attempts in, I actually love that Elden Ring Nightreign’s Everdark Libra is the first FromSoftware boss who’s harder to beat in co-op than solo

by admin August 19, 2025

The handshake deal in FromSoftware games, the obfuscated difficulty option that’s always been there since Demon’s Souls, is co-op: Summoning phantoms controlled by other players or the computer⁠. In OG Elden Ring everybody’s best friend was the Mimic Tear, a powerful summon to make a copy of yourself to fight by your side.

This has held true in the co-op centric, roguelike spinoff Nightreign, with the sturdy tripod of a full party clearly being what the experience was catered towards. The new duos mode is nice enough but still slightly compromised, while even with post-launch patches, solo is still the worst way to play.

But now they’ve gone and turned all that on its head: The latest Everdark superboss, the ultra instinct version of Baphomet dealbroker Libra, only gets more challenging the bigger your posse is. I managed to take him down solo after just three runs, while I’m somewhere north of 15 attempts deep in duos and trios, a W still evading me at every turn.

Everybody hates Everdark Libra. My peer, Austin Wood at GamesRadar, thinks he’s “100% getting nerfed.” Just like with the similarly loathed Everdark Augur, I disagree. I love this sick freak of a boss and how he turns all the rules on their heads.

To make Everdark Libra easier would compromise the beautiful vision at his core, the product of a sensitive, poet’s soul that’s clearly been hurt by this cruel world of ours and wants to inflict that pain right back. We’re all letting Libra down. Champions adjust. Spoilers for Everdark Libra below.

Make your choice

Yeah man, we get it. (Image credit: FromSoftware)

Libra’s already a real piece of work in his base form, tied with end boss Heolstor as the hardest in the game by my reckoning. He has an arsenal of unusual, difficult-to-read projectile attacks that all build up the madness status effect, which does huge damage and a stun if you manage to survive the initial burst.

His signature move is a delayed blast sigil that brutalizes you with madness build-up after a quick beat. It comes out fast enough that you can’t exactly respond to it carefully and can get royally screwed if you’re in the middle of an animation, while a slight delay punishes immediate panic rolling. It is deliciously evil.

Libra’s Everdark form ups the ante by summoning invader clones of the player party with all the same abilities and a number of potential weapon loadouts thoughtfully constructed to inflict the most pain and frustration. Some of my favorites:

Mini Malenia Executor: Equipped with the Hand of Malenia Sword and can perform a weaker, but still potentially instant-death version of Waterfowl Dance. Yes, that Waterfowl Dance.
Terminator Ironeye: Possesses the Jar Cannon and One-Eyed Shield (which has a built-in cannon), as well as a seemingly-permanent buff resembling the Ironjar Aromatic: He walks extremely slowly but is extra tanky and can’t be interrupted.
Sniper Wylder: Uses a greatbow to spam the Rain of Arrows ash of war, doing crazy damage in a huge AoE from long distance.
Rot Duchess: Dual wields Scorpion’s Stinger daggers for fast Scarlet Rot buildup.

Much like the player-style NPC enemies of FromSoft’s previous games, they don’t play by the same rules that you do: Malenia-Executor is particularly difficult to interrupt out of his signature move, while all of the clones are capable of dodge rolling out of attack combos a normal player could not.

The pièce de résistance is how they shuffle in: It does not feel like Libra has a consistent timer for summoning a fresh wave of evil twins. Wiping them out is not a guarantee of breathing room to DPS the boss, while it’s far more likely for them to start piling up as you fail to clear out old ones before the new clones spawn in.

The final indignity is that Libra summoning a new wave heals any surviving invaders, buffs their defense and damage, and the buffs stack. A veteran six rounds deep Executor spamming Waterfowl Dance is who I wish I was playing as.

All of this while Libra has new, more aggressive madness-inflicting AOE attacks to fling at you. A mature Everdark Libra fight is pure chaos, a field of evil clones glowing gold with layered buffs, some attacking each other, but most chasing you around like it’s Yakety Sax while Libra turns the field into a bullet hell screen. It’s utterly deranged. I don’t know how a group of randos with no coordination is supposed to beat it. It’s hilarious.

The time is ripe

The Gamer’s Gambit. (Image credit: FromSoftware)

Whether fully intentional or not, FromSoft’s classical deferred difficulty system works in reverse with Everdark Libra. It’s like a martial arts movie thing or Bruce Wayne climbing out of Bane’s house without the dang rope or something: If the enemy draws its strength from you, make yourself weaker.

Not only is one evil twin far more manageable than triplets, the singleplayer mode’s adjusted health values mean they go down quicker too. Even in the solo runs I failed, I didn’t experience the chaotic pileups of a three-player slugfest.

This inversion is another example of how flexible and surprising FromSoft’s well-worn systems can still be. Yet another boss in Nightreign is challenging in a way that took me off-guard, that wasn’t just another really tall, sad guy with a sword who moves super fast.

That has me even more excited for what the studio does next: After Promised Consort Radahn in Shadow of the Erdtree, I was worried there might be a ceiling to FromSoft’s arms race with itself to make ever greater twitch reflex challenges in its bosses. In Nightreign, the studio sidestepped this issue, proving there’s nothing stopping it from delivering spectacles, challenges, or sheer curveballs we just won’t see coming.

As for the fight itself, it’s a new favorite. Everdark Libra feels like a joke at my expense, a prank played on us players. That’s one of my favorite things to see in a game, and FromSoft is the master when it comes to this rare art.

Could they ease off the gas with the clone spawns just a touch? Maybe, it depends on how soon you ask me after a failed run. Is it kinda bullshit that Vyke’s War Spear, the only melee weapon Libra is weak to, is such a rare drop that I’ve only seen it twice in 111.8 hours (but who’s counting)? Perhaps.

I hope they never nerf Everdark Libra. He’s so stupid. It’s all so meanspirited. I love him like a son.

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August 19, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe

by admin June 9, 2025

Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations.

However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can’t be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. “The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,” Kauffman said. “Not only do we not know what will happen, we don’t even know what can happen.” Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, “We need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.”

The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution “generates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.”

“An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms.”

Marcus Heisler, University of Sydney

Mathematically, a “phase space” is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it’s as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the “incompleteness theorems” devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can’t be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms.

Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel’s theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn’t the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential.

“An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,” said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, “goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.”

Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments “in their heads”—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. “Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,” he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind.

Back to the Bench

If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information—in effect, complexity—does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is “utterly improbable.” After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life?

Mayr’s evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot.

Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine

But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new “law of increasing functional information” is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn’t have to rely on some highly improbable chance event.

What’s more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo’s (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds.

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June 9, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Watch Live as Japanese Startup Attempts Moon Landing After Failed First Mission

by admin June 5, 2025

The Resilience lander has spent the past six months traveling to the Moon, with plans to touch down in its far northern region. Japanese company ispace is aiming for a Thursday landing—its second attempt to reach the lunar surface.

Resilience is set to land on June 5 at 3:24 p.m. ET, aiming for a smooth touchdown near the center of the Mare Frigoris region (which roughly translates to the sea of cold). The landing attempt will be streamed live on ispace’s YouTube channel, beginning around one hour before the scheduled touchdown. You can also tune in through the feed below.

Tokyo-based ispace launched its second mission to the Moon on January 15. Resilience hitched a ride along with another lander headed to the Moon. Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost landed on the Moon on March 2, while Resilience took a much longer route. Resilience first operated in an elliptical transfer orbit before using a lunar flyby to move into a low-energy transfer trajectory that will then enable it to attempt a soft landing. The lander has successfully checked off all of its orbital maneuvers and will remain in a low lunar orbit until the big day, according to ispace. For its landing attempt, Resilience will automatically fire its main propulsion system to gradually decelerate and adjust its altitude to begin descent from its current orbit toward the lunar surface.

The Resilience lander is carrying a small rover, named Tenacious, to Mare Frigoris, located in the Moon’s far northern regions. It’s also packed with science instruments, mainly from commercial space ventures in Japan, designed to explore the lunar surface.

This is ispace’s second attempt to land on the Moon, although the first was unsuccessful. In April 2023, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) Lunar Lander plummeted towards the Moon and crashed on its surface. The company later revealed that, during the lander’s descent toward the lunar surface, Hakuto-R estimated that it was very close to zero altitude when it was roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the surface. As a result, the lander slowed itself down during its descent, eventually running out of fuel and free-falling onto the Moon. Hakuto-R M1 was carrying both commercial and government-owned payloads, including a tiny, two-wheeled transformable robot from the Japanese space agency.

Members of the Japanese startup are optimistic about their second go at a Moon landing. “We have leveraged the operational experience gained in Mission 1 and during this current voyage to the Moon, and we are confident in our preparations for success of the lunar landing,” Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, said in a statement.

The Moon has claimed a number of landers in the past few years as more commercial companies attempt to touch down on its rough surface. Texas-based startup Intuitive Machines crashed not one, but two landers, with both Nova-C and Athena ending up lying on their sides.

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June 5, 2025 0 comments

Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang on stage during the GTC 2025 keynote

Gaming Gear

Nvidia’s CEO says attempts to control chip exports to China are a failure: ‘If they don’t have enough Nvidia, they will use their own.’

by admin May 21, 2025

Attempts by the US government to put a cap on China’s development of AI technologies by limiting exports of GPUs has been a “failure”. So says no less an authority on the subject than Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang.

The New York Times quotes Huang at the ongoing Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan denouncing GPU export controls. “AI researchers are still doing AI research in China,” Huang said on Wednesday. “If they don’t have enough Nvidia, they will use their own,” he said. All of which means, “the export control was a failure.”

He may have a point. But then Nvidia does rather have a dog in this fight. Huang himself says that restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 GPU will cost the company $15 billion in sales. So, it’s not hard to understand why he might prefer those limitations to be lifted.