Does the bird warrior of Elden Ring Nightreign have a human face beneath his beak? I'm glad you asked

Facing the facts

Does Elden Ring Nightreign's bird-bodied Guardian have a human face hidden somewhere on his feathery body? It's a question people have been thinking about, and by "people" I mean a small subset of Elden Ring obsessives who like to watch the game being picked apart 3D model by 3D model.

Thanks to a prolific Souls modder/dataminer, I can provide you with an answer. In their latest video, Zullie The Witch - who's previously solved various Souls mysteries and modded an Armored Core into Elden Ring - has unmasked Nightreign's crop of nightfarers like they're Scooby-Doo villians. Most of their faces look how you'd expect, but there are a couple of noteworthy cases that I think it's worth you knowing about.

First of all, it's worth noting that due to the switch from custom characters to eight established archetypes, Nightreign's playable characters don't use facedata - by my understanding, this the character creator values that spit out a specfic face - in the same way Elden Ring did, though Zullie does note: "there is technically facedata in Nightreign, but it seems to be just a copy of the existing data from Elden Ring."

With that established, I'm gonna jump to the bit of the video that discusses the Guardian, the game's halberd-wielding Pinionfolk captain. Some folks had been wondering if his birdy visage might have mean FromSoft having to hide a human face somewhere on his model, presumably so he'd conform with the rest of the playable models. Thankfully for all of our dreams, Zullie has checked under the backs of their knees for stray mouths, and says they've not found a weird human face hiding anywhere on the Guardian.

Meanwhile, the only nightfarer they couldn't find any kind of proper face for (of the human or birdy variety) was Wylder. Removing the armour from each of his skins has just revealed a featureless "silhoutte", which Zullie notes leaves his appearance a bit of mystery, though folks have inferred that he likely looks similar to the Dutchess. Cue some commenters joking that of course the character they've dubbed John Nightreign, similarly to Helldivers 2 players making a meme out of the name John Helldiver referring to some legendary everyman figure, is faceless.

One asserted that this confirms that "Wylder is the true John from all Fromsoft games", which is certainly a theory.

If you've not given Nightreign a go yet, make sure to check out Nic's review of it and the stuff FromSoft recently confirmed is coming to it down the road.