Yay for jolly cooperation!

It finally happened! I was getting worried she wouldn't make it before the release of Dark Souls 2 in March 2014, but Claire finally finished her first playthrough of Dark Souls. I'd make fun of how it took her a whole extra week or 75 extra hours of game time, but she tends to read this blog and strawberry week is coming up, so I'll just congratulate her and celebrate her long overdue success.

Now we can finally team up like this:

and do that:

Our coop-experience in Dark Souls is a lot like Rainman. You know, it's pretty amazing and does some really cool things, but you just can't deny that it's retarded.
Remember when games had a multiplayer option right on the title screen and you'd get to choose whether you want to join or host a game and whether you're in the mood for a coop-session or a deathmatch? What the fuck happened to that? Whatever the hell they were thinking when they made this game, Dark Souls simply doesn't work like that. At all.

Let's say Claire has to fight a dragon and I want to help her. So we both launch the game solo, we both have to stand in the exact same spot at the same time and then I have to scribble summoning runes on the ground. Claire now has to wait a minute for them to appear in her game, before she can activate them to summon me. Because that's so much more convenient than a join/host or adhoc-join via buddy list option. There is also a chance that some other player will find my summoning runes before they appear in Claire's game, meaning that any random fucker could force me to join their game, instead. I have no influence over who ends up summoning me - the first player to activate my rune summons me to their game and that's that.
It's a bit like sneaky outdoor sex. You gotta find some dark, deserted alley where nobody will find and interrupt you before you get to have any fun. Then she has to wait for me to get it up (the rune!) and jump it before anybody else does. I can appreciate that they wanted to encourage play with random strangers, but making coop with friends so awkward as a result is a major oversight.

It's annoying, but not annoying enough to stop teaming up from being fun. So let's stick with that dragon from our example, Claire summons me into her game and we battle our way through a dungeon to get to said dragon. And on the way there, we get invaded by enemy players. Because that's just one of those things about teaming up: If you open your game up to friendly players, you may also get invaded by player killers at any time. Which was fun in our case, because we kicked our invader's ass, but if the hosting player (Claire) gets killed by an invader, it will automatically terminate our session and teleport both of us back to our last respawn point ('bonfire'). Solo.
To make things a little more awkward, a summoned helping phantom (me) cannot use their healing potions ('Estus Flask'). When Claire heals herself, the game will restore some small portion of my health, but that's about it. If I'm defeated, I get kicked out of her game and transported all the way back, meaning we'll have to meet up again for another summoning attempt.

Sure - it makes sense in the spirit of the game's insanely tough difficulty level. It makes the whole experience seriously challenging for 'player two'. It's also anything but user-friendly and convenient. But eventually we made it, fought invading players, zombies, basilisks and lag and ended up fighting (and beating, yay!) that dragon. What happens is that I get some small portion of Claire's reward for helping out, then the game kicks me out of her session and teleports me back to where I placed my summoning rune, because the area boss is dead and my job is done. Oh and here's a fun detail: The dragon is only dead in her game, but it's still alive and kicking in mine, meaning we have to meet up again, Claire has to place a rune and I have to summon her as a phantom to help me kill the dragon in my game.

Basically, the idea behind this whole coop feature is to make people say, "I can't do this bit alone, let's summon another player to help me for a minute." There will be parts of the game, which Claire and I are going to play solo for the sake of only doing them once. We're probably gonna team up for every boss fight in this playthrough, which means we'll have to kill each and every one of them twice. Which sounds a lot more annoying and time-consuming than it really is. It's more enjoyable to beat the same boss twice as a team than failing a dozen times solo. And most boss battles are fun enough for us to enjoy them several times.
I think we'll manage to beat the first half of the game today and get through the rest as we get closer to the weekend. I hope lag, crashes and player killers won't prove me wrong.

- Cat