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Elden Ring is going to be one of those games that never dies. Sure, it’s nigh a hundred hours for your first playthrough, and the fantastic Shadow Of The Erdtree expansion was bigger than most mainline Dark Souls games. But beyond that, it has a bustling mod scene, and few projects exemplify that better than The Convergence. Probably the game’s biggest mod to date and it just rolled out its largest update since the expansion.
If you’re new to this mod: Expect everything to be different. This is a top-to-bottom remix of the entire game. Just look at all the changes here, like the dozens of distinct classes, multiple selectable mounts, the boss re-fight system and mountains of new weapons, including stance-shifting Trick Weapons borrowed from Bloodborne.
Convergence feels almost like a solo counterpart to the upcoming co-op spinoff Nightreign. It’s similarly focused on picking a character class and sticking to that archetype, but does it in a more meandering, solipsistic sandbox kinda way.
Each of the 27 classes has their own starting point in the world (yes, some even start in Caelid) and their own intended progression route dotted with new loot, gear sets, spells and arts that play into their specific mechanics. Familiar locations have been radically reworked too, as you can see in the (slightly outdated) trailer below.
Returning players who’ve been waiting on this update for months have a lot to look forward to in version 2.2, with specific patch-notes here. Three of the game’s later ‘legacy’ dungeons (the really big ones) have been completely redesigned, so expect new paths, encounters, bosses and loot to be found across Mohgwyn Palace, Miquella’s Haligtree and Crumbling Farum Azula. There’s four all-new bosses, eight more reworked, and a new tutorial that introduces the many new mechanics and concepts of this mod.
Weirdly, the part that impresses me the most is that the mod’s major boss fights all have their own music now, along with a main menu theme. Expect to hear the new tunes when you throw down with these heavily redesigned villains. You can get a peek at most of them in their pre-update, pre-soundtracked forms (I especially like the Scion of the Sealed God) in this showcase video here.
Eagle-eyed Souls-likers might pick up from that video that a lot of Convergence’s bosses are clever kitbash projects. While many have all-new art assets and gameplay mechanics, their animations and behaviors are often patched together from bits borrowed from across FromSoft’s other games, from Dark Souls to Sekiro and even Bloodborne. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s easy to see what they’re pieced together from, but for those who started with Elden Ring, they’ll be largely new experiences.
Despite its ambition, installing and launching The Convergence is shockingly simple. All you need is Elden Ring (with the Shadow Of The Erdtree expansion) installed on Steam. Just grab the mod’s automated downloader from its Nexus page and set it to install to anywhere you like that’s NOT your Elden Ring game directory. That part is important.
Once it’s done, just run ‘Start_Convergence.bat‘ wherever you installed it to, and it’ll launch the modded game while also disabling online multiplayer (so you don’t have to worry about getting banned from the main game) and creating a separate Convergence save file, so it won’t even mess with your regular characters. Simple as can be.
Then comes the hard bit: Picking which of the 27 classes to play as. That part, I can’t help you with.
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Kurt Indovina
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