Dark Souls 2, like all the Souls games, focuses mostly on singleplayer. But for players who need a little help or who just want to engage in some jolly co-operation, there's co-op. In Dark Souls 1, summoning another player was a mysterious affair. You had no clue who they were, had no way other than gestures to communicate with them (in fact on Xbox 360 the game didn't allow you to be in a party chat while playing in online mode), and you might never see their summon sign again. It was also down to chance if the peer-to-peer connection system would even let you connect. I wasted sometimes fifteen minutes in one spot just trying to summon two people for a difficult boss.
Die with your friends!
Dark Souls 2 took a step in the right direction for those of us who would like to play with our friends instead of random players across the internet. Most exciting for us Dark Souls 1 fans was that they made dedicated servers for matchmaking. This means summoning is many times more stable, but there's still peer-to-peer connection in the game itself. So for PVP'ers that means faster connection times but still enough lag to make some fights downright broken. Anyways, FromSoftware decided this time to include things like the Name Ring, which allows players to choose a "god" (basically choosing a server) so they can more easily find their friends who chose the same god, and included voice chat. Nobody really uses the voice chat, but if you're into yelling at random people over the internet to help you against that giant lava demon you're fighting, you can do that.
A big problem with the matchmaking, co-op and PVP alike, is that the server matches players up based on their total souls collected, called "soul memory", and not their actual level or the strength of their gear. This means if someone doesn't lose any souls and puts it all into boosting their stats and upgrading one set of equipment, they become overpoweringly strong compared to a newer player who loses souls to deaths and spends a lot on upgrades and trying out a variety of items. Also, if you want to co-op with a friend both of you have to keep your soul memories close or you won't be allowed to connect. If it were me, I would have based matchmaking on a combination of equipped gear strength and character levels.
The Bro-Op
I did an entire playthrough of the game co-op, and we had a great time with it. He took on the role of the squishy mage, who would stand back and throw dark magic and fireballs at the enemies, while I quickly fell into the classic tank class, covered in armor, swinging a mace, and eventually becoming a wall with a giant stone greatshield. We powered through the game, though mages aren't that effective early on, and our complimentary builds made short work of any boss. Because one of us was dealing magic damage, the other could focus on pure physical destruction.
Because we could focus on our roles, we became pretty overpowered pretty quickly. Another upside to co-oping the entire game is each character gets twice the souls they would playing solo, because due to the host/ summoned phantom system we had to basically play the game twice, once for each of our games. It felt less like a dangerous Dark Souls experience and like a MMO dungeon raid, which was a good change of pace from the over-cautious play the game demands when playing solo. Overall, I can say that co-oping the game is an awesome thing to try out, but it's easy to tell that the game wasn't designed around two players.
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| Double fist-pump selfie! Note FromSoft's hilariously bad name censorship here: I'm supposed to be "Bro Knight" |
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