FromSoftware, I love thee dearly—but I think we can all agree that your multiplayer elements are always a little goofy. In the Dark Souls games and Elden Ring, the laborious process of summoning phantoms to your world is kinda part of the charm: a diegetic way to invite spirits beyond the rift into your RPG.
Elden Ring Nightreign, on the other hand, has straight-up matchmaking. And even then, FromSoftware found a way to make it more complex than it needs to be, with two-player games completely overlooked because of reasons, I guess.
While good ol’ FromSoft is busy “considering [it] for post-launch support” or whatever, the genius behind Elden Ring’s game changing seamless co-op mod, LukeYui, simply waltzed on in, took one look at Nightreign, and said: Yep, I can fix ‘er up.
On a blog post to their Patreon, LukeYui writes: “Elden Ring: Nightreign was released today. I played a little bit this evening and managed to get together a functional multiplayer system without connecting to the matchmaking servers (and therefore not needing to run EAC).”
I want to take a moment and note that this blog post was, at the time of writing, made 12 hours ago. Nightreign was released approximately 16 hours ago on PC as of me penning this article. That means it took LukeYui all of four hours to get a working prototype for a seamless, EAC-free multiplayer mod up and running.
“The benefit to this of course is you can opt to play with just 2 players (instead of matchmaking with a random) and also being able to play mods when they are eventually made for more replayability and customisation,” then, to put a cherry on top, LukeYui hints at a banger upgrade that I’d love to play someday: “There’s also potential for a player cap increase in the future.”
The elephant in the room is that, while FromSoftware isn’t actively opposed to stuff like the seamless co-op mod in Elden Ring, its tune might change a tad for Nightreign. It’s not a competitive multiplayer game, mind, but I can imagine the studio will want to keep its online elements free of hackers who might spoil the intended sense of progression for others. There’s a reason why the game has an anti-cheat.
LukeYui isn’t “committed to making this a public mod as of yet, however if people would like it just let me know and I’d get a release ready. If not, then I’ll just keep it as a WIP project on the side.” I, for one, would love to attend a Limgrave rave with 50 Guardians dive-bombing the everloving crud out of Margit. It’s what he deserves.
Read the full article here
