Elden Ring is huge, the kind of huge requiring dozens of hours of play before you start sniffing its end, and the kind of huge that would be a lot of fun to run around with your friends. Elden Ring, like the Souls games before it, supports multiplayer in both co-operative and antagonistic forms, but for all the progress developer FromSoftware has made in balancing the ever-increasing popularity with its formerly niche design philosophy, it hasn’t spent enough time rethinking how and why it wants players to interact with one another.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5qmay/please-elden-ring-let-me-play-multiplayer-like-a-normal-video-game
