For as tremendous as FromSoftware games are, none of them are particularly good at co-op. You can’t just invite your friend and join a party in Elden Ring. You need to be in the right place, with the right password, while the right stars in the universe align just to hit monsters with your friends. If it wasn’t for the seamless co-op mod by Yui, Elden Ring’s co-op would be borderline unplayable.
A few months ago, Yui went back and fixed co-op in Dark Souls 3. And now she’s fixed the most important game in FromSoftware’s history: the original Dark Souls.
The first version of the seamless co-op mod for Dark Souls Remastered was released on Thursday. With it, you can play the action RPG that kicked off a whole genre with up to six players. “Simply put, the mod allows you to play with friends throughout the entirety of the game with no restrictions,” Yui wrote in the description on Nexus Mods.
In the announcement video, you can see that it works like the Elden Ring version: You use a custom item in your inventory to summon people into your world at any time. Defeating bosses won’t disband the group like it does normally, and everyone won’t be prevented from interacting with NPCs. It just works.
“Dark Souls 1 was my first Dark Souls game and it has a special place in my heart,” Yui told Polygon over DMs. “I also believe that the interconnected world of the game makes it a truly great candidate for seamless co-op.”
Yui said it was much easier to make than the one for Elden Ring, but that there were a few issues that had to be worked out. Dark Souls came out 11 years before Elden Ring and wasn’t designed to be truly open-world, so players are gated by fog doors during regular co-op. Yui had to work around the game unloading parts of the map when people get too far away from the host, which “took a good amount of reverse engineering to get down,” she said.
Even with those roadblocks, it only took her a week to get the mod running. It’s fully functional right now, but Yui said she’ll continue to fix any reported bugs until its flawless.
Installing the mod requires unzipping some files into the right place and choosing a unique password for everyone to use. Then you’re free to roam around Lordran with your posse of Chosen Undead. And don’t worry about getting banned. The mod doesn’t touch FromSoftware’s servers and uses separate save files. Your co-op crew is safe.
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