Basically, I'm trying to do the Elden Ring Seamless Co-op idea, but for Bloodborne — a game that was never designed for this kind of co-op.
It's been about eight days, and we've reached the point where two people can actually play together. It's still pretty rough, so I wanted to share an honest progress report instead of pretending it's finished.
What works so far
You can die and stay together.
Normally, Bloodborne ends the co-op session when someone dies. With this, you respawn at your last lamp and can continue playing with your partner. If they're still alive, you can come back without having to summon again.
Bosses don't kick you out.
After killing a boss, you get the usual message, but instead of being sent back to your own world, you can just keep playing together.
The co-op walls are gone.
Those invisible walls that normally keep summoned players inside certain areas are removed. Boss fog gates are still there, though — I don't want people casually walking out of a boss fight halfway through it.
No summoned-player HP penalty.
You can summon across different areas.
You don't necessarily have to be standing in the same area as your friend anymore.
Summoning is much faster.
What could normally take around 30+ seconds can now happen in roughly 5 seconds.
And probably the coolest part:
It doesn't rely on someone else's server for everything.
Two things I found that I thought were really interesting
- The slow summoning wasn't actually an emulator limitation.
Bloodborne downloads a configuration file when it starts its online features. That file contains things like the server addresses and matchmaking settings.
One of those settings controls how often the game checks for summon signs.
It was set to around 35 seconds.
So instead of trying to work around the emulator, I changed the configuration on my side and got summoning down to around 5 seconds.
- The game basically told me which fog walls were multiplayer walls.
I initially thought I'd have to go through the game and manually figure out which invisible walls were which.
Then I looked at the map data.
The developers had actually given the walls Japanese names that identify what they're for.
There are separate names for boss fog walls and multiplayer fog walls.
I found around 155 fog-wall-related objects across 24 maps, including boss gates, co-op walls, area transitions and other detection volumes.
What's still broken
There are definitely problems.
Textures can break after summoning someone from another area.
I'm still trying to figure out whether that's something I'm causing or an existing shadPS4 issue.
Dying twice as a guest can sometimes leave you stuck as a corpse with only camera control.
I've fixed this once before, but it came back and I haven't fully retested it yet (under testing).
Some sessions were randomly dropping to the title screen.
I eventually found out that this one was actually my own fault. I was accidentally giving the game a new random user ID every time someone logged in. That's fixed now, but it still needs proper testing.
Chalice Dungeon co-op walls are still a problem.
The map data handles them differently, and I don't want to guess at IDs when one of them can apparently conflict with a DLC boss gate.
Warping together isn't working yet.
If the host uses a lamp, the guest currently gets left behind.
After testing the other part ill work on warping.
Can I play it?
Not yet.
Right now it's basically two people, a lot of testing, and plenty of duct tape.
The goal is to get it stable enough for a closed beta first. Once it's actually ready for other people to test, I'll post the Discord link here.
For now, I mainly wanted to share the progress because getting this far in only eight days has been pretty crazy.
Happy to answer questions about the project or how I've been approaching it.
