I've always been content to admire the Dark Souls games from afar, rather than get particularly into them myself, and part of that is probably a crumb of leftover resentment from trying to wrangle the multiplayer features in those early games. Love it or hate it, it's esoteric at the best of times and not terribly consistent. If you've a mind to mod those annoyances out of Dark Souls 2, now's your chance.
That's thanks to Yui, a soulslike modder who made similar mods for Elden Ring and Dark Souls. Her latest creation, Dark Souls 2: Seamless Co-op, just released into alpha last week and promises a straightforward co-op experience with up to five other players. "With this, it's theoretically possible to play the game from the tutorial up to the final boss completely in one co-op session," the release blog on Patreon notes. I'm sure one of you will be doing just that with a DDR mat or something.
While you could try to do a full playthrough with a buddy in the original Dark Souls 2, it'd involve a lot of stopping, starting, summoning, and fog walls. With this mod, there are no fog walls, progression is synced up, and the session won't end when someone dies—instead, they respawn at their last bonfire.
If you're worried this will take all the sexy mystery out of Dark Souls' purposefully friction-heavy online play, you may be glad to know the mod's features are accessed via a bunch of unique items with titles like "Pharros' Heliograph" and "Petrified Fingers." It's a very different—and as Yui's release blog notes, a much easier—way to play DS2, but a welcome way to enjoy it with your friends, especially if you've been exploring its every corner since its release.
Yui has been aggressively supporting the mod since release, already patching out a major performance glitch that affected players with Intel processors (including PCG associate editor Ted Litchfield, if you want to get specific). If you run into problems while playing, be sure to check back on the Nexus page or Yui's Patreon—she may have already fixed it.
