Tunic is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve only played it once. I bought it again on the Nintendo Switch. I’m scared to play it again, because I’m worried there’s a chance I’ll start to see the cracks next time. When the rose-tinted glasses come off, there’s a chance I’ll see a good game – a great game, even – but I’m worried it won’t be the same.
Tunic was my second favorite game of 2022. Elden Ring was my Game of the Year in 2022. Elden Ring is NOT one of my favorite games of all time. Dark Souls IS one of my favorite games of all time. I feel really conflicted about all this.
I’ve played Dark Souls 1 around ten times at this point. I know it practically like the back of my hand. The last time I played Dark Souls 1 was on my Nintendo Switch, because it was cheap and because playing Dark Souls on the go sounded like fun. I brought my Switch with me to work and played it every now and again, I showed it to my coworkers. Usually, I’d only ever play a Knight character and focus on Strength and Endurance to use heavy weapons and armor. This time, I decided to switch it up, started as a Pyromancer and tried to branch out into different sorceries and miracles.
I got really far, actually. I got all the way to Seath the Scaleless, the Duke’s Archives. And then I just kinda petered out. The corpse run back to Seath through the crystal cavern was more of a pain in the ass than I remember. And I’d basically seen everything I’d really cared to experience in that playthrough, so I guess I lost interest and quit going back to it.
Anyways, I’m playing Elden Ring again now, this is my second “real” playthrough. I started another on the PS5 so I could play with my friend Garrett, but he eventually outpaced my character and got to the Mountaintops without me – he quit after the Fire Giant.
This time I’m playing with my friend Collin. We’re using the seamless co-op mod. This is more a review of the seamless co-op mod than Elden Ring itself.
Seamless co-op (or “Scoop,” as Collin calls it) integrates a seamless drop-in/drop-out co-op function into Elden Ring. Exactly what it says on the tin.
The vanilla cooperative experience is good. It’s probably the most accessible cooperative experience in any Fromsoft Souls game to date, but it’s still marred by a lot of really bizarre and restrictive creative decisions.
In vanilla Elden Ring, summoning another player only allows them to be active within a specific “zone,” i.e. if a player is summoned in the overworld, fog walls appear that separate certain areas of the map, including dungeons, caves, etc. This makes it so that if a player finds a dungeon they want to explore in the overworld with their partner, they first need to disconnect from that world and be summoned again once the player has entered the dungeon.
Additionally, when a player enters another player’s world, neither of them can use Torrent, which impedes progress and exploration in certain areas. I think these are the most egregious examples, but even if the cooperative experience is more accessible, these “balances” feel unnecessary at best and downright bad at worst.
Seamless co-op removes a lot of these limitations and, as a result, kinda feels like the ideal co-op experience. The caveat is that it basically disables all other online features, severing players from the larger summoning pool of allies, invaders, and most importantly, user-generated messages.
Dying doesn’t send you back to your world, but it’s balanced with a stackable debuff known as “rot,” which feels appropriately punishing. This forces players to sit down at a Site of Grace to remove these debuffs, which leads to some interesting situations in larger dungeons where one player needs to remove a debuff, but knows that resting at a Site of Grace would allow enemies within the dungeon to respawn which makes the return trip difficult, and might even put the other player at a disadvantage. I think it’s a good system and I wish that the vanilla game considered something similar.
Both players can ride horseback at the same time now, fog walls no longer obstruct passage into dungeons or caves, players don’t need to be in the same area to join the other’s world, and progress now synchronizes between player's worlds which is a nice touch. You no longer need to finish the same boss twice to make progress.
Honestly, and this is just a suggestion, but I would’ve liked the option to tweak some of the vanilla game’s cooperative settings as well. I think that some of the base game’s balancing in co-op is overtuned, specifically damage scaling. I don’t know of any definitive number for how damage scaling is handled in cooperative play, but from a purely subjective POV I really do believe total weapon damage is reduced by around 50%. I think the purpose is to split total damage between the amount of players in a given session, but I still think it would be greatly appreciated to offer that kind of modular difficulty tweaking.
Note: as of my writing this, the creator of the seamless co-op mod (Yui) has revealed they intend to introduce customizable enemy scaling into the next update. The new version is slated for release tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll be tweaking enemy values as I play through the DLC. The fact that enemy scaling can be customized is a very appreciated accessibility feature, though!
A lot of my gripes with Elden Ring I think are present in the base game, and eventually I’ll replay the game solo, but one thing I struggled with in this playthrough that I also struggled with in my first (vanilla) playthrough was never having enough HP to tank hits.
I seriously think Dunkey was right about this one. There are so many bosses (and even some regular enemies) that deal a (frankly) stupid amount of damage. Not leveling up your Vigor early on is setting yourself up for failure, which just feels (frankly) really annoying.
Some criticisms I have with the mod are that “rot” cannot be removed by respawning at a Stake of Marika, which can add some tedium to boss fights if players need to return to the nearest site of grace. Additionally, although I have no idea how this would work, I would’ve liked for messages to be available in some capacity – again, I have no idea how this would work, but it would’ve been nice. I really like reading player messages but it seems like a necessary tradeoff.
Finally, some technical issues which seem to come with the territory: Torrent sometimes appears invisible when another player rides them, some NPCs float above the ground making it hard (or impossible) to interact with them, multiple crashes to desktop (to be expected), sometimes Torrent would not be able to respawn at all (which required a full restart), sometimes map/fast travel would break completely (which required a full restart), and sometimes after being disconnected it would be impossible to rejoin my friend’s world (which required a full restart). These bugs were pretty common, guaranteed more than one would occur every play session.
Let me be clear, though: none of these issues render the game unplayable. If anything, the convenience afforded by seamless co-op makes these issues feel superficial. Annoying, sure, but eliminating the tedium of vanilla co-op makes for an overall much better experience.
Put it this way: although vanilla Elden Ring would require players to constantly banish one another from each other’s worlds, place their summon signs down, and beat the same boss twice to make progress in both worlds. There was also the added peril of network stability, sometimes my friend’s summon sign just wouldn’t appear. There was also the added peril of invasions, which only occurred if players summoned another person – and I like invasions! I just wish there were an easier way to opt in or out of them during a regular co-op playthrough.
Because seamless co-op has its own save files, you cannot bring your seamless co-op characters into the vanilla game or vice versa. So I would recommend playing the game regularly and trying vanilla co-op first before giving seamless co-op a try. But honestly the improvements are so significant that I think this will be my new preferred method of playing through Elden Ring with a friend moving forward.
Still a phenomenal game in its own right. I’ll forego a rating and save further thoughts on the base game and DLC once I finish them solo.
Tunic was my second favorite game of 2022. Elden Ring was my Game of the Year in 2022. Elden Ring is NOT one of my favorite games of all time. Dark Souls IS one of my favorite games of all time. I feel really conflicted about all this.
I’ve played Dark Souls 1 around ten times at this point. I know it practically like the back of my hand. The last time I played Dark Souls 1 was on my Nintendo Switch, because it was cheap and because playing Dark Souls on the go sounded like fun. I brought my Switch with me to work and played it every now and again, I showed it to my coworkers. Usually, I’d only ever play a Knight character and focus on Strength and Endurance to use heavy weapons and armor. This time, I decided to switch it up, started as a Pyromancer and tried to branch out into different sorceries and miracles.
I got really far, actually. I got all the way to Seath the Scaleless, the Duke’s Archives. And then I just kinda petered out. The corpse run back to Seath through the crystal cavern was more of a pain in the ass than I remember. And I’d basically seen everything I’d really cared to experience in that playthrough, so I guess I lost interest and quit going back to it.
Anyways, I’m playing Elden Ring again now, this is my second “real” playthrough. I started another on the PS5 so I could play with my friend Garrett, but he eventually outpaced my character and got to the Mountaintops without me – he quit after the Fire Giant.
This time I’m playing with my friend Collin. We’re using the seamless co-op mod. This is more a review of the seamless co-op mod than Elden Ring itself.
Seamless co-op (or “Scoop,” as Collin calls it) integrates a seamless drop-in/drop-out co-op function into Elden Ring. Exactly what it says on the tin.
The vanilla cooperative experience is good. It’s probably the most accessible cooperative experience in any Fromsoft Souls game to date, but it’s still marred by a lot of really bizarre and restrictive creative decisions.
In vanilla Elden Ring, summoning another player only allows them to be active within a specific “zone,” i.e. if a player is summoned in the overworld, fog walls appear that separate certain areas of the map, including dungeons, caves, etc. This makes it so that if a player finds a dungeon they want to explore in the overworld with their partner, they first need to disconnect from that world and be summoned again once the player has entered the dungeon.
Additionally, when a player enters another player’s world, neither of them can use Torrent, which impedes progress and exploration in certain areas. I think these are the most egregious examples, but even if the cooperative experience is more accessible, these “balances” feel unnecessary at best and downright bad at worst.
Seamless co-op removes a lot of these limitations and, as a result, kinda feels like the ideal co-op experience. The caveat is that it basically disables all other online features, severing players from the larger summoning pool of allies, invaders, and most importantly, user-generated messages.
Dying doesn’t send you back to your world, but it’s balanced with a stackable debuff known as “rot,” which feels appropriately punishing. This forces players to sit down at a Site of Grace to remove these debuffs, which leads to some interesting situations in larger dungeons where one player needs to remove a debuff, but knows that resting at a Site of Grace would allow enemies within the dungeon to respawn which makes the return trip difficult, and might even put the other player at a disadvantage. I think it’s a good system and I wish that the vanilla game considered something similar.
Both players can ride horseback at the same time now, fog walls no longer obstruct passage into dungeons or caves, players don’t need to be in the same area to join the other’s world, and progress now synchronizes between player's worlds which is a nice touch. You no longer need to finish the same boss twice to make progress.
Honestly, and this is just a suggestion, but I would’ve liked the option to tweak some of the vanilla game’s cooperative settings as well. I think that some of the base game’s balancing in co-op is overtuned, specifically damage scaling. I don’t know of any definitive number for how damage scaling is handled in cooperative play, but from a purely subjective POV I really do believe total weapon damage is reduced by around 50%. I think the purpose is to split total damage between the amount of players in a given session, but I still think it would be greatly appreciated to offer that kind of modular difficulty tweaking.
Note: as of my writing this, the creator of the seamless co-op mod (Yui) has revealed they intend to introduce customizable enemy scaling into the next update. The new version is slated for release tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll be tweaking enemy values as I play through the DLC. The fact that enemy scaling can be customized is a very appreciated accessibility feature, though!
A lot of my gripes with Elden Ring I think are present in the base game, and eventually I’ll replay the game solo, but one thing I struggled with in this playthrough that I also struggled with in my first (vanilla) playthrough was never having enough HP to tank hits.
I seriously think Dunkey was right about this one. There are so many bosses (and even some regular enemies) that deal a (frankly) stupid amount of damage. Not leveling up your Vigor early on is setting yourself up for failure, which just feels (frankly) really annoying.
Some criticisms I have with the mod are that “rot” cannot be removed by respawning at a Stake of Marika, which can add some tedium to boss fights if players need to return to the nearest site of grace. Additionally, although I have no idea how this would work, I would’ve liked for messages to be available in some capacity – again, I have no idea how this would work, but it would’ve been nice. I really like reading player messages but it seems like a necessary tradeoff.
Finally, some technical issues which seem to come with the territory: Torrent sometimes appears invisible when another player rides them, some NPCs float above the ground making it hard (or impossible) to interact with them, multiple crashes to desktop (to be expected), sometimes Torrent would not be able to respawn at all (which required a full restart), sometimes map/fast travel would break completely (which required a full restart), and sometimes after being disconnected it would be impossible to rejoin my friend’s world (which required a full restart). These bugs were pretty common, guaranteed more than one would occur every play session.
Let me be clear, though: none of these issues render the game unplayable. If anything, the convenience afforded by seamless co-op makes these issues feel superficial. Annoying, sure, but eliminating the tedium of vanilla co-op makes for an overall much better experience.
Put it this way: although vanilla Elden Ring would require players to constantly banish one another from each other’s worlds, place their summon signs down, and beat the same boss twice to make progress in both worlds. There was also the added peril of network stability, sometimes my friend’s summon sign just wouldn’t appear. There was also the added peril of invasions, which only occurred if players summoned another person – and I like invasions! I just wish there were an easier way to opt in or out of them during a regular co-op playthrough.
Because seamless co-op has its own save files, you cannot bring your seamless co-op characters into the vanilla game or vice versa. So I would recommend playing the game regularly and trying vanilla co-op first before giving seamless co-op a try. But honestly the improvements are so significant that I think this will be my new preferred method of playing through Elden Ring with a friend moving forward.
Still a phenomenal game in its own right. I’ll forego a rating and save further thoughts on the base game and DLC once I finish them solo.