Dark Souls 2 finally gets Seamless Co-op - and it's a modder, not FromSoftware, fixing it again

Twelve years. That's how long Dark Souls 2 players have been dropping summon signs, beating a boss together and then watching their partner evaporate the second the fog wall stuff is done. Every co-op run of Drangleic has been a relay race of re-summoning. Now one person has fixed it, and yet again that person doesn't work at FromSoftware.

Yui - the modder whose Seamless Co-op for Elden Ring basically became the default way a huge chunk of the PC crowd plays that game, and who did the same for the original Dark Souls - has pushed a Seamless Co-op release for Dark Souls 2. The pitch is the one you'd hope for: you and your friends stay in the same world from start to finish. Die, and you respawn at your last bonfire instead of getting booted home. Kill a boss or clear an area, and the session keeps going. In theory you can run the whole thing from the tutorial to the final boss without a single disconnect.

The lobby cap goes up too - up to six players total, you plus five others. And under the hood it swaps in a new peer-to-peer layer built on Steam's newer networking tools, which, if you remember what Dark Souls 2's original netcode felt like on a bad night, is arguably the bigger deal. I'd happily trade a bit of feature list for connections that don't die when someone's router sneezes.

Two caveats before you go install it. First, it only works on Scholar of the First Sin, not the original 2014 release. That's not Yui being picky: vanilla Dark Souls 2 is a 32-bit executable, SotFS is 64-bit, and that's the build the mod hooks into. If you're still somehow on the old version, this is your excuse to move on. Second, it's explicitly an alpha. Yui is releasing it now to gather bug reports, not claiming it's polished. Expect crashes, desyncs and weird edge cases, and don't bet your one careful SL1 character on it.

It's up on Nexus Mods, with Yui's Patreon for anyone who wants to back the work.

Here's my actual take: this is embarrassing for the people who own the IP. Dark Souls 2 has always been the black sheep - the one with the ganky level design, the adaptability stat nobody understood and the reputation as "the weird one." But it's also the one with the most build variety in the trilogy and a PvE flow that honestly suits a party of friends better than the tighter, lonelier design of the first game. A mode that lets you just play it together should have shipped with SotFS. Instead, the community has once more done the engineering work that a studio with record revenue didn't bother with.

As a guy who tunes netcode settings for fun, I'm mostly curious how the new P2P layer holds up with six players and phantoms getting hit by Drangleic's famously generous enemy tracking. If the alpha is even half as stable as Elden Ring's version was early on, the "worst Souls game" discourse is about to get a lot more crowded with people who just had a great time with five friends.

Image: Thomson200 / CC CC0 1.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=174724436