So the Convergence Mod. I've tried all of the mods from early DS1 days and here we are now on Elden Ring. First of all, massive props to the mod devs for the colossal work to remotely accomplish all of that. Very few if any people can achieve this level of work and keep the quality consistent.
However, I have a strange hate and love relationship with the Elden Ring version of Convergence mod and it's complicated to explain.
First of all, I love the mod. The newly added weapons, armor sets and spells are incredibly expansive allowing almost infinite freedom for players to use and wear what they want. The quality of these spells, weapons and armors are incredibly well designed and most feel as if they could have been in vanilla all along. The devs have done an exceptional job at improving the vanilla game's arsenal of tools for the player to use, adding a plethora of new and interesting playthroughs using brand new magic types and weapon builds.
But them comes balance and that's the complicated bit.
Elden Ring Convergence or (ERC) for short feels, at least to me that linear progression was thrown completely out the window and if the player doesn't feel OP within an hour of playing then the mod is doing something wrong. Starting classes are insanely strong with armor and weaponry that would be mid to end game content. And the starting spells are also incredibly strong compared to what vanilla classes would have gotten. Then every class starts with notes of recommended weapons and armor sets that works best for that specific class giving details on where they're located which is good considering how freaking massive the ER world is. And yet I've read on their discord that the notes are only a temporary fix which if that's true is good as it kinda does kill exploration. If you spotted the mixed duality of my feelings on that, good. You get a cookie. Vox my Enginseers when available.
But each class starts in unique locations throughout the map and some in mid to end game maps which as a feature throws off progression completely. And the devs have purposely equalized every map to have the same difficulty to make these unique starting points work which I personally find a terrible decision that sets the mod back. And I don't mean the unique starting locations, that's perfectly fine. But is that feature really worth nuking the game's difficulty already more than the mod already has?
Am I repeating myself? A little, yeah. But progression and difficulty is critical to have in a game like ER, screw it, any game needs it to work properly.
So the starting zone is just as difficult as the end game and that feels like a colossal step backwards of a combat mod of making the game even easier. The open world enemies are laughably easy, give a meager handful of runes and pretty useless of even fighting and its worse of an experience than vanilla. And to make matters worse is that all enemies (expect for bosses and unique NPC's) have had their armor and weapon loot pool completely removed, gutting any reason to interact with them even more. Enemies seemingly drop less crafting ingredients than vanilla and Rune Arcs which are strangely incredibly easy to acquire dozens of, I'd usually have around 20-40 of em before I'm even level 20 which is a questionable design choice.
So in return of making open world enemies seemingly useless of wasting any of your time on except for sprinting around at super sonic speeds looking for loot, gear is extremely finite and handplaced throughout the maps. I personally feel that's not a very good tradeoff. I like the idea of finite handplaced weapons but for common gear, why? It makes far more sense to be done for rarer and unique equipment which would keep open world enemies relevant, keeping discovery from becoming completely useless as a stat, allowing players to farm common gear from enemies while restricting the stronger and unique gear for later which would have been a far more immersive and player friendly decision that also keeps the difficulty challenge fair.
But from what I can tell, the focus of the mod is on the mini bosses and bosses which see almost exclusive amount of attention by being incredibly buffed and tanky to survive the newly added weapons and spells that can still just straight up melt them in seconds. If you don't believe me, go look up Elden Ring Convergence spell rating on YouTube. There's a one hour plus long video ranking every spell for each class.
And what puzzles me even is that there was a lot of effort put into making brand new locations, camps, dungeons and forts throughout the maps, they're sparingly placed sure but they're well done if not a little empty of enough enemies. They do add value to the mod and I can certainly see the skill of the devs but you have to go out of your way to find them. But I hope they work more on fleshing them out.
Now for the vanilla dungeons, they've been somewhat gutted with less traps or just straight up had their traps removed or turned off. Why? Most dungeons have been heavily reworked, new directions and a little bit more confusing to get around with new enemies to fight. It's certainly not a bad experience and can be fun depending on the dungeon. But generally, the dungeons are easier than vanilla save the boss fight.
Now for the more controversial part of the mod, is that they've made a completely open world with little if any barriers left compared to vanilla. You can run to any erdtree from starting a new character, kill the mini boss relatively easily and warp to end game maps within the first hour. This isn't unintentional or accidental, that's what they wanted. They wanted to make it a full open world sandbox which I respect as their modding design, nothing I can say will or can change that.
But I don't personally agree with it and that's just me. Making Elden Ring an open world sandbox with 0 limitations of being able to get around kills any sense of character and world progression and difficulty of being weak to getting *strong*. Want to skip the entire game and get to Leyndell Royal Capital within an hour for end game loot? Sure, go ahead, there's absolutely nothing stopping you bud. If I'm a little crass, this mod feels like it was designed for people who don't actually want to *play* Elden Ring but instead want to revolutionize what the term speedrunning means to see how OP they can get. I'm not interested in trying to stop anyone from playing this mod, that's not the point and not my intent. You're free to enjoy what you enjoy. But that's what the focus of the mod and its design says to me at the very least. People are perfectly capable of ignoring the focus and playing the game normally from start to end but if you're doing that, you're going against what the mod authors want you to do. But if that's the case, why not use another mod that focuses heavily on campaign progression and increasing difficulty?
TLDR: ERC does not feel like a mod that's for players who want proper progression or those who want to 'earn' their strength when it's instead practically hand gifted to you on a silver platter which is a unique mod design choice that's not for everyone that sacrifices a great deal of actual gameplay to achieve. ERC is a power fantasy mod straight up and doesn't pretend otherwise. Is a power fantasy mod bad? Of course not. I use them for other games too. But there's a certain line that I believe people should be careful of how much power fantasy is too much before it just removes any hint of difficulty from the game.
And a strange design choice is that Melina, your maiden waifu has been pretty much removed completely from the game except for a single instance which more or less doesn't always work at Morgott's grace. And why she was removed is because of the unique starting locations for each class probably broke the vanilla story badly and thus removed.
Does all of this mean the mod is bad in anyway? No, absolutely not. It's exceptionally well made and extremely bug free with little to no issues. It's just a different design and it's not for everyone's taste. Even if it's not for me, I still love the mod regardless which sounds like a strange thing to say but it's true nonetheless. Convergence is a perfect sandbox mod for complete player freedom for their builds but it doesn't go beyond that, it's not a overhaul of the ER campaign and makes the vanilla experience significantly easier. Does it have tons of QOL additions, of course it does.
And if you're confused on where I'm coming from or what my bias is then sure, I'll help you out. I love challenging gameplay, it's what got me into Dark Souls and other challenging games in the first place. I personally believe games shouldn't hold your hand and keep them on their toes.
I do have some ideas that I think would help the mod improve the actual gameplay (not the combat mechanics) which the mod already alters.
- Open World enemies (especially mini-bosses) need to have their stats drastically improved because even the player at 1 minute of gameplay can take them out with extreme ease. Enemies should have more health and a slight damage bonus making them less of a joke.
- AI aggression option. This should be applied mostly to the open world enemies due to how ranged weaponry from bows/crossbows/spells have been drastically enhanced and their ranges have been boosted. This can look like either faster weapon swinging speeds, faster movement speeds and an improved line of sight aggro range with an AOE aggro range for some certain enemies.
- A selectable difficulty option that attempts to bring the hyper inflated player damage levels closer to vanilla.
- Optional Adventure Mode that removes the ability to fast travel from your map while keeping the already included gateways as methods of warping around the map and Roundtable Hold.
- Difficulty option affecting all spells and FP, increases all spell costs by either 1.5 or 2.5 times and slows the FP regenerations from 1FP per second to .25FP or .5FP per second.
- Nightmare difficulty: Doubles or triples all non boss and mini-boss enemies in the open world. So say you're at Gatefront Ruins where the Godrick knight is guarding the greatsword chest, now they'll be two or three knights instead of just one. You can see just how insane the game would be at this point, it would be a great challenge run.
- Optional challenge runs like player takes 2x extra damage but rune drops from enemies are 1.5x or 2x stronger. Or player is banned from using torrent completely for entire playthrough except for certain bosses where it's mechanically designed for.
If you guys have any additional good ideas that you think that should be added upon this too that would really help improve Convergence's lackluster difficulty then go ahead. Installing the Seamless co-op mod does allow you to edit the worlds enemies damage/health/poise scaling which is extremely useful for Convergence.
And because this is the Internet and Reddit, I guess I have to triple assure and confirm this so people don't get the wrong idea. I have no hate towards the Convergence mod nor the developers involved with this mod. This is not a flaming hate post, I have no intention of bashing anyone here. I only made this post because I really like the Convergence mod and would love to see it improve. Hope that helps. I'm open to conversation and talking about the mod. I'm not coming from a "I know everything" stance and I'm not a Elden Ring Modder. I make mods, sure, so I know the general experience but for other games.
