FromSoftware says Elden Ring's popular Seamless Co-op mod is "certainly not something we actively oppose" and might even "consider ideas like that with our future games."

The week before my trip to Tokyo to play Shadow of the Erdtree for PC Gamer’s next cover story, I knew I had to brush up on my Elden Ring skills. Instead of picking up the game solo, I decided to recruit a friend and try the Seamless Co-op mod, which turned out to be awesome. I recommend it to anyone returning to Elden Ring after their first playthrough.

Co-op has always been my favorite way to experience FromSoftware’s games, and in some ways, Elden Ring makes it easier than Dark Souls to summon friends to take on bosses and dungeons together. But it also has frustrating limitations, like not being able to use Torrent in the open world. So when I interviewed FromSoftware President Hidetaka Miyazaki for the cover story, I explained how Seamless Co-op makes it possible to play the entire game in one uninterrupted multiplayer session, and I told him I asked what he thought of this way of experiencing the game.

“It’s definitely not something we actively oppose or want to downplay, because we want to experience the whole match together,” Miyazaki said. “When it came to Elden Ring, it was just about wanting a more laid back, casual style: go in, beat a boss, give up. It doesn’t put any technical restrictions on the player, it just allows sorting. It allows them to finish that concentration and then move on, so to speak.

Elden Ring made this aspect of the cooperative experience a little more user-friendly than it was in previous FromSoft games; in Dark Souls, for example, you had to use a consumable item to be able to summon another player for help, a limitation that Elden Ring greatly alleviated thanks to its crafting system. It also introduced the concept of “summon pools” to concentrate players’ summon signs, making it easier to quickly find someone to help in a difficult battle.

These are interesting changes for players who only want to dabble in co-op occasionally, but for me it’s quite a different experience than going on a full journey with a friend, which I’ve done for all the Dark Souls trilogy (and now a good chunk of Elden Ring). So I was pleasantly surprised by what Miyazaki said next:

“That doesn’t mean we won’t consider other ways to play, like you and your friend, from start to finish, in full cooperation – that doesn’t mean we won’t consider such ideas in our future games.”

This is obviously not a promise; Miyazaki hasn’t revealed any secrets about what FromSoftware will do next. But the studio has tends to make co-op in its games more and more accessible over time, and he must have noticed that the Seamless Co-op mod is by far the most popular on the Elden Ring Nexusmods page, with 3.6 million downloads to his credit (the second most popular has ⅓ as many, or 1.2 million). Even for a studio known for following its own vision, that has to count for something.