Off the Shelf Media

Elden Ring is the greatest game I suck at. The level of difficulty is a barrier to entry for so many people to truly experience one of the greatest games put out in the last decade. The biggest flaw the game has is making playing with friends tedious, confusing, and temporary. 

That is, until the introduction of the Seamless Co-Op mod on Nexus Mods. Someone took the time to go through everything necessary to essentially make the game Co-Op with very few issues or bugs from doing so. This innovation truly changes the experience for the better, and I wanted to highlight why everyone should download it and start exploring the lands between with friends. 

The installation is actually fairly easy. You just search up the mod on Nexus Mods and download the latest updated version, and you can set up a password so only your friends can join your session. Once you get that all squared away, you are ready to explore this game as it should have been intended, with a full party of warriors, mages, and everything in between. 

Elden Ring’s single-player is a much more difficult game for many reasons. Every enemy is only targeting you, versus having a group to distract their attention for one. Also, in single-player, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to focus on a support build based around healing and buffing a party, but in Co-Op, you can really succeed with this style. Single-player is a masochistic battle against some of the most complex and unforgiving enemy AI ever built, whereas multiplayer feels like a proper dungeon crawler where you aren’t penalized for playing the way you want to play, especially early on. 

What truly impressed me about this mod is how well it deals with character and story progression when playing in your world instead of a friend’s. For example, if you are only in the starting area of Limgrave, but join a friend in Caelid and kill off Radahn in their world, it will count as progress towards your character when you return to your world. The same goes for any items, trinkets, or spells you unlock by exploring the lands between; the progress sticks with your character. You will still need to go find the maps/sites of grace in your world, but that gives you a reason to explore again, which is where the game really shines. 

Where this gets really fun too is the ability to play a boss or certain fight multiple times on the same character. If I go in single-player and kill Melania by myself, I can still join a friend’s world and fight them again on theirs. This is a great way to experience some of the best battles the game has to offer without having to roll into a new game plus, and it gives you the runes of a great boss like that. 

Speaking of runes, this does make the game a lot easier to level up as well. The game gives every player the max runes for an enemy and doesn’t split them, so you earn them a lot quicker. Factor this in with multiple boss fights, and you will be leveled up in no time at all. You can also use some exploits, like each person individually killing the massive dragon in Caelied for 80 thousand plus runes to help speed level up your friends if you are sick of the early grind. 

You can adjust and customize the experience, but the game defaults to make enemies have a little more health when playing with more players to help balance it, and I find it to be very fair. It is a lot of fun to have a level 200+ character on New Game Plus join a newer character and annihilate enemies with endgame gear, taking out the aggression of all those deaths needed to earn it. I would also recommend turning off invaders in the settings as well. While it can be a lot of fun to fight three or four of your friends against one enemy, it’s a bit buggy in that sometimes people invade every two minutes and then hide, preventing you from being able to travel to a site of grace and progress the game. This is certainly an area I would hope they could put a cooldown or more guardrails on, as it is fun, but not all the time. 

The mod also flawlessly works with the downloadable content (DLC) as well. It really is amazing how well-maintained it is that we can just run right into the DLC Co-Op without any problems, and it’s a great way to experience one of the better DL’s I’ve played. Being able to take on some of the game’s most iconic fights like Messmer and Radahn together can help people who are struggling to get over the hurdle of these insanely difficult boss fights and be able to complete the game. 

This is truly the main reason I would strongly recommend this mod for anyone who has hit a wall with Elden Ring. It’s no secret that there are no difficulty sliders or ways to skip past certain bosses that are challenging. The biggest issue many have with this game is that there are certain parts of the game that, if you lack the skill and knowledge to beat a boss, you simply can’t progress the storyline. The ability to have friends hop in and give you that extra strength to finish off that boss that’s giving you trouble truly changes this game for the better.