How will I play with a friend?

[キング Kent ♔]

If we both buy this game right now, can we play Co-op throughout the game? And how?

[Donixs]

There is a way to summon your friend or he summon you to play in a level together and fight a boss. I suggest getting the mods and DSCFix, both of you get them, which gives your friend a higher priority to summon.

[zero]

you have to kill at least 2 bosses to help one another, you need the white soapstone, DSCfix will also help you connect

[キング Kent ♔]

So we can't just invite each other to our games? That sounds complicated, and how do we even summon each other?

[zero]

Originally posted by Heisenberg:

So we can't just invite each other to our games? That sounds complicated, and how do we even summon each other?

soapstone, as a whole, dark souls isn't designed to be a multiplayer game, it's a solo game in which you get help every once in a while by a phantom.

[Ginseng]

ok, theres a handy guide you can google on one of the wikies called the "CO OP guide" but ill give you a run down of some basics.

Soul Level, you have to be in level range, there are calculators you can google but in general its your level + or - 10 + 10% of your level. So if you are level 100 you could play with some one 20 lvls above you or 20 lvls below you.

Multiplayer area, you can only do multi player within areas that contain a boss you have not yet killed. once you kill a boss the area goes dead for MP.

Human, you have to be human to summon a player, this means you have to have an active humanity(where the 00 is to the left of your HP and stamina(so an 01)) go to a bonfire and reverse hollowing.

The sign, your friend needs to have a white soap stone sign for you to summon him, you need it for him to summon you, you will get the sign by talking to an NPC after the 2nd boss the taurus demon(say yes to everything he says).

The actual summoning: your in range and meet all the other stuff ive said your friend needs to place his sign anywhere you know to look for it you agree on a place and wait, it can take a while to show up. Generally multiplayer is really restrictive until you have been in game for about 20 minutes, Dark Souls does peer to peer connections so it pulls people who are available(on the same server) and makes a list of them and then they tend to jump around ever 30 seconds or so. To aid you in this we recomend you have the dsfix and subsequent dscfix installed this will make anyone that is on your GFWL friends list who also have dscfix immediately on the same server as you and their sign should appear in a few seconds as well as preventing the summon from failing.

Even without dscfix once you make the first summon you will forge a temporary connection when you break after a boss or whatever and within 5 minutes or so you should be able to immediately summon your friend again with no trouble so once you pick it up just keep going. If you do have the dscfix you wont have to worry about it.

Originally posted by zero:

you have to kill at least 2 bosses to help one another, you need the white soapstone, DSCfix will also help you connect

you dont actually with the master key you can run all the way around but...advanced stuff...

[Valkrex]

First off, love the name and avatar. Breaking Bad is fantastic!

As for co-op, you can help eachother out quite a bit, but not 100% of the game.

First, one of you (eventually both) will need to find an item in the game called the "White Sign Soapstone."

This is THE co-op item in Dark Souls. How it works, is that when you activate the item, it will place a white summon sign on the ground where you were standing. Other players who are within a certain range of your current in game level, who have not killed the area boss, and who have restored their humanity, will be able to see the sign, interact with it, and summon the player who placed it into their game as a friendly phantom spirit. (you do not need to be human to place the sign)

The spirit will stay in your world until they die, you die, they use the Black Sepreation Stone (which is an item that lets you return to your own world or banish friendly phantoms back to theirs), or the area boss is killed.

Spirits will gain 50% of the souls (souls double as money and experience in this game) that the host gets. So if the host gets 100, the phantom will get 50. The host does NOT lose anything for having a phantom in their world. Along with this, when the boss is defeated, the phantom will return to their world with an extra point of humanity as reward for their efforts.

So basically, for co-op you can help each other with each new area to kill the boss, so long as you have enough humanity to stay in human form.

HOWEVER.

BE. CAREFUL.

When you are in human form (which is required for summoning friends) you open yourself to invasion from other players as well. An invader will appear as a Dark Spirit, and their objective is to KILL YOU. So be ready for a fight whenever you are in human form.

For more info check this out http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/Online


Also, both you and your friend should download the DSCfix mod, which allows friends to instantly connect to each other, as the servers in this game can be... odd.

http://darksouls.nexusmods.com/mods/334/


Welcome to Dark Souls, and I hope you and your friend have success!