Seamless Coop for Elden Ring is Supreme

I think most of us will agree that Elden Ring is truly something special. To take the Dark Souls’ formula and add the layer of open world to it, was something I think a lot of us had our doubts about. Would it even work? How big would the world be? Would size create issues with performance? And other than some hiccups on release day (at least speaking from personal experience on the PC version), the game went off without many issues. Balance aside, the game was gorgeous, was absolutely jam packed with content, and could easily fill anywhere from 80-100 hours for a single playthrough, which is bonkers to think about even today. However, there was one system that marred it from being a true masterpiece, like all other games by From Software: the online and coop functionality. If there is one system in these games that is grossly outdated and in desperate need of a complete fundamental rework from the ground up, it’s the online functionality of the Souls’ games. At this point, whether or not the systems make sense from a lore standpoint, I couldn’t really care less. I would like these systems to be simple, intuitive, and hassle free. And sadly, that’s not the case for any of the games. Again, Fromsoft ties the online features of these games to lore, and to have it make sense within the story they are trying to convey. Use a certain item, make sure you are in the area you want to explore, use a password, don’t die otherwise you gotta do the process all over again; it’s tedious. It really is. Luckily, for all you PC players out there (sorry console goers, this doesn’t apply to your situation, sorry), there is a remedy for this. And it honestly should be how all these games going forward work.

Seamless Coop: a fan mod by LukeYui on Nexus Mods, allows players to really bridge the gap between worlds; and just join in and out as we please. No phantoms, no timing the items correctly to get the search to catch instantly. You pick a place, open your world, and people can join. And the best part? They stay, even if you die. And if you are a cooperator for someone and you die, you just respawn at the last rested sit of grace; it’s phenomenal. With this mod comes some changes to the world. Firstly, the enemies have more HP and it scales the more allies you have in your world. Very similar to how it works with boss fights in the vanilla game. Speaking of bosses, they also get their HP pool increased as well. Making some of the fights go from fairly easy, to somewhat of a decent challenge, at least early game. Because your low damage is now really off set by bosses having much more HP than you are used to. Again, this only applies if you have people in your world helping, and scales the more allies you have helping. Now every enemy is affected by this modifier. And, should you die, there are random debuffs that are applied to you to help prevent players from potentially messing up your world and not actually contributing. Which are also removed when you rest at a grace. It’s a really well thought out mod, and while it is still technically in beta, and I have run into some silly glitches and more serious bugs playing with my friends, it works really well.

Progression is something interesting to note too. I can’t exactly explain how it works, but progression in one world is somewhat carried over in another. And what I mean by this is, if you join someone's world and work together to kill a boss, you get the credit for it. And if they have a great rune, you unlock it. But if you go back into your own world and haven’t killed the boss yet, not only can you fight the boss again, but doing so grants the runes it normally does, but NOT the great rune. The game knows you already have it, so it doesn’t drop upon defeating a shard bearer. This has caused some interested and unfortunate issues, where I joined someone’s world with my friends, and one of them who also joined got the outfit for Jerren; the guy that starts the Radahn festival. Which meant in his world, the game thought he was dead and couldn’t fight Radahn in his own world. It’s kind of hard to explain and understand, but basically a lot of the time, when you joined a world, you would just get random loot and runes without having actually done anything. It’s strange, and definitely one of those beta things that will hopefully be ironed out over time. Another oddity that happened a lot was sometimes enemies and especially bosses, would stand still and not do much for a few seconds. Something about their AI definitely didn’t like having four people beating its ass at the same time, but this was definitely on the more minor side of bugs and issues I came across. And to be fair, besides the Radahn bug, we really didn’t run into many issues. Other than some de-sync with players on Torrent, things were running smooth. Load times if you weren’t the host were a little longer as well. I mean at this point other than the major bug with Radahn, I’m trying to find things to point out. This experience was something special. However, the existence of this mod raises two different concerns: invasions and PvP as a whole, and how FromSoft should potentially handle online in future titles.

One aspect to all the souls’ games is the invasion and subsequent pvp systems. They’ve been there since demon’s souls and are honestly kind of an integral part of these games. Having your world be invaded by another player adds a level of stress that wasn’t there before they invaded. It can create some interesting sceneries where not only are you fighting against the world, but now another player who’s using the world against you. And while there are people who wish the invasion systems didn’t exist at all, I still find them an important part of the game. But the seamless coop mod removes this entirely. You can’t be invaded. It was already difficult enough before in the vanilla game because you had to have a friendly phantom in your world. But now that is removed entirely. Some love it, and some worry that it helped kind of facilitate the kneecapping of pvp in Elden ring.

I don’t think that was the case however. Because it was already restricted even more than previous games, invasions were just happening less often. Unless you used a taunters tongue to allow invaders into your solo world, you could only get invaded if you were cooping with someone. But this mod begs the question of how FromSoftware should create future online modes for their games. Part of me loves how the items and the mechanics are tied into the lore, but at the same time, I feel as though it is an ancient relic of the past, and is way overdue for some modern quality of life changes to make it more streamlined and easier to use them. This is something that I feel as though a lot of people have opinions on, so let me know in the comments how you feel about the online mechanics of souls’ games.

Seamless coop is a fantastic mod. Because it allows people to play with their friends easily, and explore the entire world of The Lands Between, which is what I imagine we all thought when we first played the game: “Man, I can’t wait to explore with my friends”, or “I wish we could all ride around on Torrent and explore the game”. I’d guess we’ve all had one of these two thoughts. But, now we can, and it’s great. If you have Elden Ring on PC, get this mod from Nexus Mods and give it a try. It’s easy to install and will give you another reason to play through once more. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to watch this video, and if you enjoyed, please subscribe for more videos on topics that we all enjoy, such as this. I hope to see you in future ones.