Elden Ring’s co-op mod has renewed the adventure
On what was to be our 10th attempt against Elden Ring’s first big boss, Godrick the Graft, the big guy froze. A friend and I used the Smooth co-op mod (opens in a new tab) and Godrick, despite literally having a fire-breathing dragon’s head for an arm, decided to surrender. My fellow Tarnished got roasted a second earlier, so it was just me and Godrick the Frozen. Cautiously, I turned to him, ready for his brain to turn on. This has never been the case. I cut off the last half of his health bar and returned him to the ether. LEGEND SHOT. The mod may have broken it, but we also made several attempts and just wanted to move on. A victory is a victory.
The Seamless Co-op mod fixes all the problems with Elden Ring’s terrible multiplayer summoning system, but it also introduces a whole host of new ones once you play with it. Sometimes they’re funny: my friend often saw my character riding an invisible horse. Sometimes they’re useful: when one of you dies, enemies don’t reset, so you can cheese harder dungeons. And sometimes they’re legitimately game-changing: your ability to lock disappears in the fight against Radahn, essentially preventing anyone playing a caster from doing damage.
The mod sits right in the middle of being unplayable and glorious. As Ted Litchfield wrote in his first impressions (opens in a new tab) it’s simply the best way to play Elden Ring with a friend. Nothing could be worse than the normal method where you have to set a multiplayer password, drop a summon sign, wait for your friend to find it, and then be summoned long enough to defeat the area’s main boss. In the Seamless Co-op mod, you set a password, ask your friend to open their world, and then you can join them for as long as you want. You could play the whole game and never get kicked out.
On top of that, the Seamless Co-op mod lets you both Torrent ride (normal co-op prevents any overlap) and, as part of a recent patch, you can both summon spirit ash allies where you want. In some ways, playing with the mod is like playing in New Game+. There are a few challenges here and there, but you have enough tools to get through as you wish. Because my friend was new, I let her lead the way through catacombs and castles. She’s experienced all the little tricks FromSoftware plays on you with ambushes and puzzle-like combat scenarios. And, if things got hairy, I could help using what I learned from my own parts.
New rules
The best times with the Seamless Co-op mod are when things go wrong. When the challenge is at its highest, the mod changes your approach to the game. Normal enemies are extremely susceptible to being knocked down when two of you defeat them. We figured it out pretty quickly in the early parts of the game, so to keep things interesting, we’ve taken on the toughest enemies. The Tree Sentinel patrolling the opening area is a little more manageable when you have two people hitting it on horseback, but it can still pulverize you in one hit. For this fight, I equipped the talisman that kept its attention on me while I tanked it on the ground. My friend played as DPS and wore him out while he was distracted. It took us a few tries, but once she landed the final blow, it was like beating a raid boss in an MMO: going in with a plan and adapting on the fly based on the behavior of the enemy.
We also decided to skip most catacombs and optional dungeons until we absolutely needed an upgrade or an item they offered. This method starved us enough runes to make some fights a real hindrance. For Castle Morne, we had to take turns advancing when one of us was killed, using the fact that enemies didn’t respawn unless someone was resting on a grace. The player who ate it can run back with a small penalty to their stamina regeneration. There were times when I intentionally rushed into a group of enemies and dispatched the strongest. I would probably die in the process and leave it to my friend to stay alive while I ran back.
Under these new self-imposed rules, you are forced to come up with strategies that differ from single-player play. On my own, I slipped through the dungeons and learned where enemies spawn. I would wait until they were separated from the pack almost like a stealth game, or I would bring them back to a safe place. The wrong moves would be the end and I would have to try again. In co-op, the goal is to cycle between them long enough to reach the next grace. To my surprise, Elden Ring works well as a glove if you have someone who finds the fly thinking just as exciting.
road trip
While not necessarily unique to the co-op mod, reliving the open world of Elden Ring with a friend who has never seen one before is a delight. It’s like watching someone play your favorite game for the first time, but you can be there with them.
I completely forgot until the locked door behind us that Keeper Gostoc traps you in a dark room with a brutal knight at the start of Castle Stormveil. Nothing is scarier for my friend than when something like this happens and we both freak out. The same thing happened when she led the way towards a group of enemies in the middle of a swamp in Limgrave and the gigantic dragon flew up and fried her and everyone. I’ve always said that the open world of Elden Ring is basically designed to emulate the popular Dark Souls Memes (opens in a new tab) where a person or animal gains a health bar and a dramatic chorus begins. With persistent cooperation, you can run into all sorts of trouble, which is what Elden Ring is really all about.
The Lands Between also remain absolutely stunning to look at. I thought some of that would be lost playing with a friend, but there were a few times where we both ran over a hill or came out of a cave and just stood there staring at the scenery. With two people, you have time to appreciate the day/night cycle and how it can create the kind of images you usually see in staged screenshots. I desperately wanted a photo mode when all I could see on my screen were our silhouettes as we galloped through the grassy hills of Limgrave, or when we stood in the middle of Radahn’s battlefield, drenched in rain crimson.
The Seamless Co-op mod’s biggest weaknesses are in the more scripted sequences, which end up being the main Shardbearer boss fights, like Radahn and Rennala. You can’t respawn in a Marika stake near them, so in addition to the AI and mechanics not working, you have to do the full respawn. I imagine that as we get deeper into the game there will be some fights that could be legitimately infuriating. But we’re halfway there and the worst we had to deal with was the lockout issue and one of us wasn’t getting runes correctly as a reward for killing a boss – luckily minor bosses are pretty easy to cultivate to relieve this.
Otherwise, the mod reverts to playing on a new difficulty mode. It’s still Elden Ring, but with pockets of new challenges that in turn create new surprises. The mod’s creator keeps updating it as FromSoftware rolls out new patches. It is possible that at some point most of the bugs we have encountered will be fixed. When this happens, I will have no caveats when recommending people try the game with a co-op partner. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Elden Ring is purely best with friends, but it’s easily the best way to relive it if you know someone who’s willing to join you on the journey.
You can download Seamless Co-op from Nexus Mods (opens in a new tab).
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