FromSoftware has been on a tear recently, with Elden Ring outperforming the studio’s past games by a landslide. Elden Ring was so successful that it spawned a spin-off, Elden Ring Nightreign, and potentially also a movie down the line. It wouldn’t be where it is without Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice laying its groundwork, and all of them performed exceptionally well by FromSoftware’s historical standards already. Although the studio seems intent on branching out more now, its momentum should carry it through any immediate missteps.
Elden Ring Nightreign is the largest deviation from FromSoftware’s recent body of work, greater than even Armored Core 6, but it seems to be an earnest creative experiment. FromSoftware took partial inspiration from Elden Ring fan videos and mods to create Nightreign, ensuring that, in spite of its reuse of existing assets, it will still feel like its own thing. Nightreign is altogether too unusual to become a new norm for FromSoftware’s projects, but one aspect of it inspired by a popular Elden Ring mod needs to stick around, especially since that mod has become a series of its own.
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Seamless Co-op Is Elden Ring’s Most Popular Mod For A Reason
A sizable portion of Elden Ring’s PC player base will already be familiar with the Seamless Co-op mod headed up by Yui. Having launched just a few months after Elden Ring itself, Seamless Co-op has proven to be wildly popular. In essence, it removes the technical and design limitations Elden Ring places on its co-op, allowing for groups of players to explore and beat Elden Ring without any interruptions. Complete with other compatible mods like randomizers, the seemingly small changes that Seamless Co-op makes to Elden Ring transforms it into a new experience that caters to different tastes.
Dark Souls Recently Proved Just As Apt For Seamless Co-op
Elden Ring Nightreign’s smaller open world was designed to serve those tastes, as retrofitting Elden Ring itself with a total co-op feature would take too much time. Seamless Co-op is still in open beta for a reason, though that hasn’t prevented its creator from pursuing other work. Yui has been on a tear of their own in 2025, with Dark Souls 3 getting a Seamless Co-op beta, and Dark Souls Remastered having its own advertised shortly afterward. Co-op in Soulslikes is clearly more popular than the genre’s creator anticipated, and leaning into that should be FromSoftware’s next move.
FromSoftware Can’t Ignore What Seamless Co-op Has Done For Its Games
Normalizing Seamless Co-op In Soulslikes Seems Like The Right Play
Promoting online cooperation has been central to FromSoftware’s Soulslike design ever since Demon’s Souls, but the existence of so many Seamless Co-op mods suggests that there’s still one obvious step left for its games to take. Future FromSoftware Souls projects with multiplayer components should treat the co-op present in Elden Ring Nightreign and the Seamless Co-op mods as a standard feature, removing the need for fans to mod it in themselves. It will take some work to implement, but that’s easier to do in a new game, and Nightreign should provide some valuable experience for building it.
It feels like there’s no other option at this point, as a Seamless Co-op mod, or something like it, could be available for every PC FromSoftware title if the current pattern keeps up. Even Armored Core 6 and Sekiro have had mods that added multiplayer in places it wasn’t before, so even approaching a Soulslike format should be grounds for FromSoftware to add full campaign co-op. Hopefully, Elden Ring‘s Nightreign spin-off is this particular bandage being ripped off, and future FromSoftware titles will need one less mod to give fans the multiplayer adventures they’re looking for.
- Released
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February 25, 2022
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
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