What if From Software’s next title is designed with co-op in mind from the outset, without all the limitations of the past?
One of our favorite rituals after completing a From Software game – be it Dark Souls, Bloodborne or Elden Ring – is starting it again and playing it with a friend. These titles are notoriously very difficult but, in the second playthrough, you already know the world and the enemies in an almost intimate way.
Bringing along a friend who has similar knowledge of the game in this second run makes everything much easier, and this allows you to remove all the frustration from that world as fascinating as before lethal at every step.
While it’s easier with a friend, it’s still a painful experience with the way multiplayer works in these titles. To play with someone, you need to have roughly the same level of strength, and that you summon them through a summoning sign. Now, in older games like Dark Souls, there was also another barrier – the one doing the summoning had to be in a human form, which was lost with every single death. You can recover your human form by using limited items or by defeating a boss.
A History of Limitations —
Other than that, sometimes the summon mark was not appearing in your instance of the game. “Honestly, man, I put it at the foot of the stairs, next to the rotting corpse. No, not that rotting corpse, the other one with the sword sticking out of his mouth. Still nothing? Ok, I’ll put it back again. Ah heck, I moved a little too far and it removed my sign. Which means you accidentally pressed dodge and rolled off the map and now you have to recover your human form again?” The process is about as fun as fighting Ornstein and Smough in a shed.
With the more recent Elden Ring, however, the process is much more straightforward. You don’t have to worry about recovering human form, and you can even set a password to make it more likely that your summoning mark will appear in your friend’s world. Yes, there is still one item to use to be able to see the summon marks, but they are unlimited and can be bought in shops or even crafted from a plant found in large quantities throughout the open world.
Better but not great —
Playing Elden Ring co-op is a brilliant experience. It’s like you two are the pesky mobs now – both with two-metre swords. Happiness. There’s little else more satisfying in video games than jumping in a dragon’s face and bludgeoning it on the head while a friend jabs its ankle with a cutlass.
But stay a finger where the sun doesn’t shine. Only one of the two players carries progress with them once they leave the game, so there is a sort of yo-yo effect, where you make your way to a boss, beat it, and then get transported back again into their own world to discover that the boss is still alive and well there. Then your friend has to come back to you and repeat this whole process to catch up. Oh, and you can’t travel on horseback when you’re with a co-op partner. Sure, this whole process is vastly simplified compared to From Software’s previous titles, but it still takes a master’s degree in patience to endure it.
Elden Ring 2 co-op? Why not –
We wish the next souls-like game had a true drop-in, drop-out co-op system where you simply join a friend’s game and play until they like (or don’t). All progress made would be shared across both profiles. That’s all. That’s all we want. Good co-op games are never enough.
We can already see people complaining in the comments about how this could spoil the fantasy of From Software’s worlds, which are haunted by the ghosts of other players, linking the single-player and multiplayer in the story, but we have four words for these people: try finger, but hole. We’ve all made the worst havoc in From Software’s worlds since the beginning, and if you like reading 100 messages that just say “dog” placed next to every turtle, you can survive with us going “co-op” in the main menu.
Written by Kirk McKeand for GLHF
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