A friend of mine has been waiting for Elden Ring details ever since the game was first announced, enduring nonstop disappointments for the last several years. You can imagine, then, his unmitigated hype when we finally got a new trailer during the Summer Games Fest the other day. But while the game has shown a sign of life, we’re still missing a lot of details. For example, does Elden Ring have multiplayer and co-op?
As a FromSoftware game that’s clearly cribbing a few notes from the Dark Souls series, there was a sort of unspoken assumption that Elden Ring would employ similar mechanics as far as multiplayer functionality is concerned. This assumption has proven to be true, at least somewhat.
Does Elden Ring have Multiplayer and Co-op?
Newly published press releases for Elden Ring say that the game does support online multiplayer, particularly in the form of co-op for up to four players at once. The press releases also mention that you can “call in allies for aid,” which suggests that the co-op functionality will work similarly to the summoning system in Dark Souls. You can see some characters glowing a spectral blue in the trailer, so it’s a fair assumption that you can call up ghosty buddies to help you out.
While the co-op elements have been confirmed to exist, though, we don’t quite know the full breadth of the multiplayer features just yet. It’s not known, for instance, if Elden Ring will have PvP functionality, either in designated arenas, or like the invading phantoms from the Souls games.
It’s also not known what restrictions, if any, are placed upon co-op play. In some of the Souls games, you needed a particular item to call up another player as a phantom. They could carry on with a similar system, or just make it a matter of a button press for the sake of brevity. Whatever it ends up being, it’s probably a safe bet that when this game comes out, everyone and their grandma will be playing it, so you’ll have no shortage of folks to figure everything out with.
