Elden Ring is a strange and fabulous addition to the Dark Souls series. While I was at first shocked by how similar the game is to FromSoft’s previous medieval-themed titles, I quickly settled in to a sprawling adventure laden with surprises and glorious freedom. The new recurring enemy types, like the living jars, empty bowled giants, and the large domed Cuckoo mages, pleased me immensely. I loved fighting armored mounted enemies, though there are far too few of them, though I must admit that the dragon encounters that litter the landscape were too easy for my draconic tastes. I want my dragons impervious and deadly! The landscapes, of course, are beautiful. Caelid, with its rotting pink flora and blood sky, is probably my favorite region in a Dark Souls game to date, and I loved even more that I could explore these areas by my own will. Dark Souls 1 finally has a proper sequel in Elden Ring–exploration is open and nonlinear, and the secret passages, sequence breaks, and skips are as arcane as they’ve ever been. While the open world can sometimes feel directionless or empty, the sense of travel invoked by approaching a distant tower on horseback more than makes up for these occasional doldrums.
Unless you want to play multiplayer coop with a friend.
You see, after my first playthrough I was amped to start a brand new run with a friend of mine. We picked out starting gear, planned some builds, and, after a bit of item muling shenanigans, were eventually ready to set off on a fresh tramp through Middle Earth AHEM The Lands Between. Once we figured out how to make the special item required for summoning, we set right to work exploring Limgrave anew. We decided to hit the mines first for some crafting materials, and FOG WALL.
As you can see, not much has changed since Dark Souls 1. During multiplayer sessions in older games, fog walls would pop up to keep the play area fairly limited. I assume the primary reason for this is rendering–you couldn’t just keep the entire map loaded for multiple players to travel in opposing directions in! Especially in a PS3 game. The MP fog walls could be annoying in early areas of the game due to their greater interconnected-ness, but in dungeons it became pretty much unnoticeable. In Dark Souls 3 it was not much of an issue at all because each zone was usually a massive, sprawling area. And frankly, these limitations made sense in games not specifically marketed as massive open world experiences. DS titles before Elden Ring were corridor crawlers–even the largest areas in Dark Souls 3 were broken into linear albeit vertically overlapping paths between bonfires. Elden Ring, however, is a modern open world experience, but the Dark Souls multiplayer system has not been adjusted at all to fit the new paradigm.
So, how do you explore the Limgrave mine with your friend? Well, first you have to disconnect from him. Doing this sends you back to wherever you were before being summoned., which could be very far away. You keep none of the progress you and your buddy made in his world, so you have to retrace your steps alone to the mine. Then you have to enter the the mine and put down a new summoning sign in there. After that, your friend can then summon you and finally resume the jolly cooperation. The whole ordeal is painfully clunky. This summoning sign system was charming in older DS games, but when I have to travel a couple miles just to cross a fog door, the charm is gone. I would have preferred a nice Multiplayer menu that lets me place my sign down right next to whatever bonfire my friend is waiting at. Better yet, I would have preferred a multiplayer system that lets me just teleport to my friend without him having to wait for a summoning sign to appear at all!
I understand why the fog wall is there–the game literally cannot handle rendering the underground and above ground portions at the same time. So why not have an instance gate or something (think World of Warcraft dungeon raids) that lets me and my friend choose to load up a new area together?
The problems with Elden Ring’s open world coop go further than clunky fog doors. When you spend so much time walking across fields, through forests, and over canyons with your buddy, you tend to pass a lot of bonfires and hidden items. The visiting player is not allowed to interact with these things at all. The visitor can thankfully still receive mob drops and gather plants growing in the world, but no exploratory progress carries over when visiting. This makes playing open world coop rather unrewarding for the visitor. Horses are disabled too, which discourages coop play even further. The cherry on top comes when you inevitably die. Since you aren’t activating the same bonfires as the host, you are set back a ton. In short, the fantasy of exploring Elden Ring’s vast landscape with a pal is undercut by a clunky multiplayer system that has persisted since 2010. I wish there was an option to share a world instance with another player. I want the same items, bonfires, and boss progress! You could call it Elden Ring MMO!
A Dark Souls MMO would fail, of course, because FromSoft can’t do netcode. I could ignore all of the above issues if the current system was not laden with bugs. In my play session with Mark, I probably random disconnected four different times. An invader popped into the world behind us and, as I went to confront him, I disconnected randomly. It was unplayable, literally.
I would like to highlight that my criticisms are aimed primarily at the open world segments of the game, specifically the COOP side of it. Invasions in the open world can be quite fun, offering plenty of places to hide and stalk prey (and the free teleportation items solve those instances when you just can’t locate the target). In dungeons, multiplayer gets way better, both COOP and PVP. The more linear progression and tighter play areas hide the flaws inherent in the system, and its frankly just as fun as older titles. I have had tons of fun exploring Raya Lucaria academy with friends and strangers.
I think that’s the way to do it: multiplayer in the open world is rough. If you are adventuring with a friend, skip straight to the dungeons and play those together. Raya Lucaria, Godrick’s Castle, and other zones offer unlimited fun with friends, but big fat Limgrave sucks. Of course, disregard all of this if the random disconnections hit you. You are shit out of luck there, sorry.
