I’m Obsessed With What Is Arguably Elden Ring’s Worst Feature, & DLC Won’t Fix It (2024)

My first run through Elden Ring took about 115 hours, but it probably could've been a bit quicker if it weren't for my obsession with the game's co-op. Unfortunately for me, the cooperative multiplayer is clunky and ill-suited to the advancements Elden Ring made over its FromSoftware predecessors. It doesn't make it any less fun necessarily, but it's perhaps the one area I wish could be improved in what I consider an almost flawless game. Anticipation for Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree expansion has already dragged me back to the game, and I'm once again embroiled in constant co-op, a situation I expect to find myself in once again when the DLC drops.

My obsession with FromSoftware's particular brand of co-op multiplayer started with Dark Souls (I wouldn't go back to Demon's Souls until a couple of years later), where I went into the game knowing nothing aside from its daunting reputation for being "tough but fair." I didn't even know Dark Souls had multiplayer when I started, and its obtuse method of matchmaking with different colors of items called Soapstones was just one of many bizarre design choices in a game that would fundamentally change my understanding of how video games can be fun.

Elden Ring Co-Op Lets Me Be The Helpful Stranger In A Blizzard

Or Useless, Depending On How Quickly I Die

Despite the crushingly lonely atmosphere of games like Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, there's a peculiar sort of life given to their game worlds by the players. Messages cobbled together from preset words and phrases litter the ground, ghostly apparitions of other players pass you in dimly lit dungeon corridors, and bloodstains all around show how some unfortunate player met a violent end. Glowing summon signs are the most tangible signs of life, though, especially once the monochrome phantom bursts through the floor and gives a courteous bow.

The inspiration for such a system, which has remained largely unaltered since its debut in Demon's Souls, actually came from a real-life experience Hidetaka Miyazaki shared in an old Eurogamer interview:

The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill... That's it! That's how everyone can get home! Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely.

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But I couldn't stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I'd have just got stuck again if I'd stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we'd met in another place we'd become friends, or maybe we'd just fight....

You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. Simply because it's fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer... like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much.

It's a story that highlights a fascinating part of the human experience, the transience of others and their ability to enter your life for one fleeting saga, perhaps never to be seen again. This inspiration has given Elden Ring (and its predecessors) a facsimile of that feeling you get when you suddenly start thinking about how everyone around you has a life just as complex as your own. Putting down my summon sign in Elden Ring lets me be one of the strangers in the car, pushing Miyazaki up the snowy hill.

But it's also more than that – not always triumphantly cooperative, but endlessly entertaining, partly due to the inherent silliness of video games. Elden Ring has a large variety of emotes, and they certainly get put through their paces without voice chat, but there's also a strange sort of universal, rudimentary communication that's emerged. More often than not, I pop into someone else's world and I instinctively switch to two-handing my weapon and start mashing L1, making my blade wiggle back and forth in front of my character. People almost always respond in kind.

Who knows how many hours I've wasted in Elden Ring crouching repeatedly, jumping up and down, rolling through destructible set dressing, or trying to parkour around the environment with players I've never spoken a word to. It's like Miyazaki says: "It's a simple concept. But you don't know whom you will meet." It's the kind of serendipity that leads to Let Me Solo Her, a player who wears a loincloth and a ceramic jar on their head, dual-wielding katanas into battle against one of Elden Ring's hardest bosses, Malenia, on behalf of struggling players. "That kind of encounter forms part of the larger storyline. There are constant surprises," said Miyazaki about Demon's Souls.

Elden Ring Has Stretched The Limits Of Demon's Souls' Multiplayer

It Wasn't Designed For A Massive, Open World

Despite my infatuation with and continued participation in such multiplayer systems, it's clear that they were not designed with a game as ambitious as Elden Ring in mind. These fleeting encounters were tailor-made for Demon's Souls, where the game world is segmented into levels, not a contiguous environment. If I'm struggling with a level, I can summon a phantom cooperator for help, and once we beat the boss – or one of us dies – we go our separate ways.

This works well enough in Dark Souls, its two sequels, and Bloodborne as well, where even though the game worlds are largely interconnected, they're still clearly segmented by bonfires and boss rooms. In fact, part of what hooked me on the multiplayer system in Dark Souls was how well it was integrated with the game's setting. According to the White Sign Soapstone's item description, "In Lordran, the flow of time is distorted, and the White Sign Soapstone allows Undead to assist one another."

Lordran's (and Drangleic's and Lothric's) convoluted flow of time adds a fascinating, in-universe explanation for all the messages and phantoms, alongside an implication that players are canonically occupying parallel worlds. This idea is adequately grafted onto Elden Ring and its array of severed fingers used in matchmaking, but they're the first indication that FromSoftware's multiplayer system might not mesh perfectly with the true open-world game. Dark Souls' Soapstones are writing utensils for creating summon signs; Bloodborne's Bells ring out across worlds; Elden Ring's Fingers and Effigies feel hand-waved as magic.

Elden Ring's multiplayer is serviceable – and that's apparently been good enough for me – but the cracks are starting to show. The popularity of Elden Ring's Seamless Co-op mod, created by Nexus Mods user LukeYui, proves that FromSoftware's brand of multiplayer is moving from genuinely interesting and diegetic, to cumbersome and compulsory, especially for those who play Elden Ring on console, like myself.

Limiting freedom of movement when there's an invading phantom is arguably a nice touch, creating a sense that you're trapped somewhere with someone that wants you dead. But the not-quite-arbitrary barriers that are set up in a co-op session are antithetical to Elden Ring's expansive design. The game already includes matchmaking passwords, so it's easy to find your friends' summon signs, but every time an area boss is defeated, the multiplayer session ends, with no progress carrying over to the summoned player's game aside from any Runes collected.

Shadow Of The Erdtree Won't Fix Elden Ring's Co-Op

Maybe I'm Okay With That

To FromSoftware's credit, slapping Demon's Souls' multiplayer wholesale onto Elden Ring keeps its original intent intact – interactions with other players are fleeting, serendipitous, and often slapstick. A less unwieldy method of matchmaking would certainly be welcome, though. It's a drawback to the game that almost assuredly won't be addressed with Shadow of the Erdtree. Although the expansion will have a new level scaling system to help balance enemy encounters, reworking the co-op is simply not feasible in DLC.

For me, someone whose chief enjoyment of these games stems from FromSoftware's multiplayer, this is effectively negligible – nothing will stop me from playing Shadow of the Erdtree on release. The launch of FromSoftware's RPGs has become my most cherished gaming opportunity, simply because the player base is active and naive, the perfect recipe for the co-op elements to shine. Elden Ring's explosion in popularity helped make it my favorite game of 2022; I woke up at 3am to play during the game's first closed network test period, but even that initial, revelatory glimpse doesn't compare to my memories of uncovering the secrets of the Lands Between alongside everyone else at launch.

But I feel for people who want to enjoy the journey uninterrupted alongside a friend or loved one. Without a mod, partners have to essentially play through the whole game twice, and while that prospect is of little consequence for the most die-hard Souls fans, it's an unnecessary hurdle for many.

I'm almost certainly going to sink dozens of hours into Shadow of the Erdtree co-op, helping others clear dungeons and fight bosses, or summoning strangers to figuratively push my car up the snowy hill when I'm stuck. I'll while away minutes wagging my sword at other players and standing in goofy places with my character's arms forming a ring around their head. Perhaps it's a testament to Elden Ring's brilliance that even its most flawed aspect has me enthralled, but if FromSoftware's co-op system is ever replaced, I'll give it a solemn bow before we go our separate ways.

Sources: Eurogamer, LukeYui/Nexus Mods