About a year ago I went through a wild modding spree, across several Monster Hunter games. The modding spree, for me, never stops as I simply avoid writing about it. This time it is worth chronicling once again, it started a few months ago. I often completely forget what the trigger is, but in this case it was some post from Dominic Tarason. I mention this because he often indirectly sends me through these insane journeys, so it’s an excellent source to get an entrance to many different interesting spaces. You just need being curious and willingly to explore.
At the time it was probably the mention of the mod “Reforged”, for Elden Ring. He wrote that a number of people ended up criticizing the mod being way too hard and unfun, but because there was this trend of setting it at the hardest difficulty, intended precisely to be unbalanced. So he was essentially complaining that the mod got criticized in an unfair way.
But of course my brain read that in a completely different way. And it became a “what if.” I’ve never played Elden Ring. Saw it played, a whole lot, but never played it myself, not even for a minute. And even if I watched it, the game is so sprawling that all I remember is completely scattershot, there’s nothing truly coherent that I know and can effectively spoil me the experience. So, what if…
What if I play the current version of Elden Ring, expansion included. What if my very first experience of the game is directly with the mod Reforged. What if I play Reforged at MASTER difficulty.
A game that I know is great, but not enough to trigger for me the desire of playing it, right now (and I’m also a completist type of brain, so for me it would mean playing methodically from the beginning, where the “beginning” is not Dark Souls 1, is not Demon’s Souls… but is probably King’s Field). But nope. WHAT IF. This isn’t PEDESTRIAN Elden Ring. This isn’t everyone else’s experience. This is new. This is likely something never attempted.
This is something I can do. And I want to do, right now.
Oh yes. Master mode = me. Here I am. (the mod can be customized in TONS of ways, you can read about them all here)
I have to specify here. I don’t write to brag. I’m not a “good” player, I’m probably quite average or worse. But I like challenge in games and very often mod games extensively to increase that challenge. Many other people do this, but what distinguishes me is that I do it FROM THE START. Especially from the start. I’m not that kind of player who goes through the same game several times, and I’m also not the kind of player who enjoys the shallow difficulty curve, early on. My preference is for a game that starts already challenging. In most cases these games start with a very narrow space. You have close to no equipment, not much choices, and not many actions. This actually enhances the game for me because having limited tools means I can explore everything technically possible in a more “complete” way. That’s why, a quirk of mine, I spend tons of time in tutorial areas, and by the time I exit them I’m already a very competent player.
I play first and foremost with the engine itself. Get a physical feel of how it controls and behaves. I work to master it from the first second. Whatever the game offers, I exhaust. I’m the very opposite of rushing in and figuring it out later.
This type of mindset made my experience with the first two hours Elden Ring Reforged, at Master difficulty, one of the MOST FUN I’ve ever had. Just by trying to defeat the tutorial boss…
The tutorial area, I think, is somewhat similar to the one in the base game, modified to teach you specific new mechanics that exist within Reforged. But there’s a scripted boss at the end of this tutorial, and it’s built specifically to FORCE you into using the new combat moves in the mod. The boss itself is optional, but I spent close to an hour trying and failing to defeat it… And it was one hell of a fun.
The encounter is built so you don’t damage this enemy normally, but you have to instead dodge its attacks. If you dodge the boss suffers damage, if you make a mistake it gains back some health. You essentially need to go through a string of correct moves to defeat it. Seems straightforward but the way Reforged is built, you have different countermeasures to different attacks. I can’t remember exactly now, but there were four or five different ones. You can jump, you can dodge, you can duck, you can parry. I think? Each of these actions corresponds to a different button to press, and to defeat the boss you need to figure out the attack, and then press the correct countermeasure. Match the attack type with the correct defense action, without making mistakes, or as few as possible (the difference of having already set this to Master mode is that you aren’t allowed many mistakes). And so I tried, learned all the animations, all the hints and cues… and still kept dying over and over.
Funny that the first attempt is always the best one. Every time after that, you perform worse. This is actually real and has a real motivation. When you go in a fight blind, you fight with instincts. You don’t know what to expect, so you just react to what you see. And it works, somewhat. But from the second time onward, you know what to expect to a certain degree, so you start with at least an idea of what to do. You start from an expectation and a plan about it. But while you’re still “young” in this process, you just don’t have any familiarity. Just a vague strategic plan, something you intend to do, but not really knowing HOW to do it. This means that the intention to do something within a context that you still don’t control, ends up going very, very badly. It’s better to go in with just instincts because you are more reactive overall. Whereas if your mind is busy trying to match its rough plan, then you simply see the plan failing in the most stupid ways. This is somewhat helpful to understand the tutorial boss I’m describing here.
I died countless times, trying to develop a certain familiarity with the controls. I already memorized all the boss attacks, and figured out every correct counter. The problem is that some attacks were too fast to simply observe the animation and move my fingers to do the counter. I could chain two or three successes, but then something else at random would trip me, and the moment I made a mistake then produced a string of following mistakes. So try again. What’s interesting about this process is that there was a very sharp divide: on one side countless attempts and failures, and then, in just one moment, I got the complete control of it. So, how?
First I realized that the enemy was doing a certain lunge attack that very often killed me. I figured that I was “dodging in” the attack. So my counter and timing was correct, but I ended up dodging with my animation ending in the direction of the attack, and so getting killed. Testing this a few times, I realized that my intuition was completely wrong. I didn’t get killed because of the direction of my dodge. What was actually happening is that the dodge move gave the character some immunity frames. Since I was playing with full focus on reacting as fast as possible, what was happening is that I was dodging TOO SOON. The boss would start the lunge, I would dodge, but by the time the dodge animation ended my invulnerability frames also ended, before the enemy attack was complete, and so hitting me. I realized that by delaying my dodge, and so moving the invulnerability frames forward in the attack sequence, would protect me from damage. No matter the position of the character. I could dodge to end right in front of the enemy sword, but I wouldn’t get killed because the invulnerability frames were still active. I simply had to be patient and dodge at the right time, slower than usual.
This allowed me to turn what for me was one critical point in the enemy attack patterns, into a strength. But it wasn’t the tipping point, because I still kept dying. The real game changer, literally, was a relatively simple switch in my mindset. It wasn’t boss analysis, it wasn’t practice and familiarity. I just changed how I thought. Up to that point, the way I was playing, I was simply focused on reacting FAST. Clear the mind, press the correct button, don’t get distracted. Because again, this is tricky only because it’s a protracted sequence. You often do things right, then you trip on something and everything goes badly from there and suddenly you start failing even those things that were easier before. But “clearing the mind” wasn’t enough. The winning strategy was that I started to partition the controls on the gamepad. There were certain counters that were easy and automatic for me, and others that I could only execute with a small delay. The before/after sharp distinction was that, before, 100% of my attention was on observation. Observe what the boss does, so that I can figure out as fast as possible what to press with my hands, to counter. I figured that this focus on the boss wasn’t working, and it was better instead to think about my hands. I started anticipating the boss moves, rather than WAIT for them to happen. The attack patterns are completely random, but I would deliberately fantasize: ok, now the boss can do either this, or that. I’d think of two possible following attacks and “prepare my hands” to execute those two specific counters. Essentially what is called “pre-fire” in FPS. I wasn’t pressing any button, but I was preparing my mind with only two alternatives, out of the four or five.
The great aspect of all of this, and why I’m writing about it, is that it sounds completely absurd and silly: so this boss has five different attacks, requiring five specific counters, and you “solve” it by simply thinking of two of them and ignore the others? That sounds incredibly stupid. It’s like gambling on what the boss would do, and getting punished by guessing wrong. BUT IT WORKS! I went from an hour of failures to complete control and ease. In one single instant.
The idea is that I could pick those two “pre-fire” counters so that they were the tricky ones. Those that I failed more often. Preparing my brain to send my fingers that specific signal meant that I could actually act much faster, specifically for that one or two actions where I was the slowest. It really made a MASSIVE difference. Rather than keeping the mind blank, and so purely reactive, I switched to be proactive by thinking ahead, even if random chance wouldn’t allow it. I was preparing the counters, and so preparing the movement of my fingers. The winning trick in all this is that, as written above, in these five attacks/counters, certain ones came quite easy. By pre-firing two of them, and leaving out of my mind the easy ones, as if they didn’t exist, gave me a definite advantage on those counters that were hard to execute and that I failed constantly. But, on the other hand, if I was preparing for X, and the boss would execute Y, it would happen that this Y was the “easy one.” So the one where my brain has all the time to switch course. Those counters that were out of my mind were the ones that I could readjust to…
It’s hard to explain here how MASSIVE this psychological difference is. How it completely transformed the fight. In a fight where you are forced to simply observe and react to enemy attacks, so you can just wait, the winning strategy is to think ahead, even if it sounds silly. It’s counter-intuitive. And yet it works because you anticipate your own movement, shaped just so that this anticipation doesn’t turn into a weakness, by pre-firing only those counters that you know are more tricky, and leaving out of your mind the easy one that allow you a switchback. Rather than observe the boss, you fantasize an attack, and even if you guessed wrong, you win.
Now you can imagine that this experience where you keep trying winning a fight and keep losing, is precisely the kind of experience no one wants to have. Something other players won’t have and won’t see. No one is going to play a tutorial fight for an hour. Yet I was there, trying over and over. I remember that when I figured out this mental trick I was there with the boss still at 60% health, and yet I was laughing because I was now in total control. It’s the typical moment of confidence that the Souls game love to destroy, when the boss has 1% of life left, you know you won, and yet you die. But this time it was completely different. I was in confidence from the beginning. Everything FELT different. It felt like I discovered a SUPERPOWER.
I’ve never tried before this strategy, I never even thought about it. I arrived at it through a lengthy analysis that I tried to illustrate here, somewhat poorly. But imagine having this kind of experience after a life playing games. FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME. Something entirely new. And by playing a mod at its Master difficulty. During a tutorial.
This experience, of a fucking TUTORIAL enemy, was entirely unique for me. But not just for me, because it was probably unique in absolute terms. I’m playing Elden Ring, one of the most popular games ever. Yet just by slightly changing the angle you play something, can make something unique. Something FUN.
There went 2k words lost on a sidetrack. This was meant as a modding guide.
Play Reforged: https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/541
Once you get the file, the installation is quite straightforward and won’t affect the base game. It means you can launch the standard game and you can launch the modded one without any more work. Switch freely between them without any more work. The mod works outside the main game, and you simply use a .bat file to launch the mod externally.
Play it whether or not you already know Elden Ring, play it no matter your gaming skill. You don’t even need to follow my path, as already said there are tons of different mode to customize your own experience. The mod is like a massive free experience, but it also preserves the feel and flow of the original game. You can follow the story and quests just the same. It’s not an odd, wonky remix, it’s just a “better” Elden Ring, arguably.
Oh, they also recently added some bosses from… Nightreign.
That is where I went to mod, after Elden Ring. And you wonder, what is there to mod in Nightreign? It’s online, almost extraction-like. Well, this time the intention was radically different. I don’t like jumping in a cooperative game without a clue about what to do. As I said my mode of playing is to start slow and experiment. This is a game where you start fast and figure it out later. This game is my very opposite. I just can’t play it. I’m clueless.
So this time the strategy was reversed. There’s a mod called “Storm Control.”
It does what it says. In Nightreign you need to be fast because you are on a timer, and there’s a “storm” that is a circle closing progressively on the map, similar to battle royale games. Storm Control allows you to bind a couple of keys, so that you can speed up or slow down this circle. Or even entirely stop it. Meaning that now you can explore the world of Nightreign as if it was Elden Ring. Stop to sip some tea and generally have a good time at your own pace.
Obviously in single player, offline. By why? It’s obviously built to work in a different way, and removing the storm would make it wildly imbalanced. But again, the goal here for me was to have a playground to at least learn the mechanics. Not to “play.” And the other goal was to enable that specific content “only online”, that cycles through different weeks but is never available at all times.
I can’t say much here because it was a while ago and I forgot the specifics. I know I spent a whole lot of time experimenting with things. Changing calibration files, even doing some editing myself and trying different other mods. In the end I found a solution that worked without any editing, but I can’t remember what it was specifically. It was some kind of offline single-player that had all the online content available at once. I wish I could be more helpful. I still have it on the hard disk and it works. Maybe at some later point I’ll revisit and document better. I can only say that it can be done. All the game with all the online game content, all playable online, in single player, and with Storm Control active.
After Nightreign I went to… Sekiro.
I tried looking for a relatively updated content mod that would enhance the game a little bit, and found this: Sekiro Resurrection
But then I went a step further and started editing the files myself for some fun experiments.
I have another interesting anecdote here. During some of these tests I ended up not so much as reducing damage done to enemies, but completely remove it. Zero damage done to enemies. While this was an unintended mistake, what makes it funny is that close to nothing changed in the actual game. It was just as playable as before.
How is this even possible, if your weapons’ damage is zero? Well, Sekiro is a game where you don’t just heave health points, you also have a “stance.” If your stance happens to be broken, you can then make a special attack that kills the enemy, or removes “one health bar”, if the enemy has more than one. It’s basically a one-hit kill trigger. This concretely means that only the stance really matters. As long you hit the enemy, and the stance can be broken, the special attack it triggers doesn’t use the damage value in any way. It’s like you trigger a script. The special animation that you trigger after breaking stance, causes the enemy to lose one health bar. Whatever damage your sword does is irrelevant.
It’s irrelevant in general, really, even in the base game. There are occasional situations where lesser enemies can be killed by just doing them enough damage and without finishing moves, but this is so situational that it doesn’t make a big difference in practice.
So yes, you can play Sekiro even if your sword does zero damage…
In the end I only wanted to apply to the mod a further 20% nerf to enemy damage. Sekiro is a game where you are in control at all times. Hard but fair. But because of how it works sometimes you can win fights even before mastering them, because the game rewards a more “aggressive” approach. I like more protracted fights. And so I spent like half an hour trying to beat that first bigger dude straight down the first area. This was again the Resurrection mod plus my 20% nerf to damage. No particular lesson here. I sometime got hit even by the normal dudes before the encounter, because enemy patterns are erratic enough that with every different attempt something slightly different happens and so even honed timings can get completely wrong. You suddenly get massive damage from the weakest enemies that were never a threat until that point.
After Sekiro I though the modding journey was done, but then came… Dark Souls 2.
Dark Souls 2 is the unloved son among From Software games, but it is also one of those known to be more replayable. Many still remember the giant controversy when it launched, but maybe not how relevant it was. DS2 was a cross-gen game but even when it came out on PS4 and PC it was very disappointing since it didn’t even remotely look as it was advertised and shown. In tons and tons of promotional material. It felt almost like a conspiracy, as if someone had hidden the real game and replaced it with this poor imitation. Some people will tell you it was about the lighting engine being different, but the scope of this transformation was instead pervasive and much, much larger.
I remember I saw tons and tons of documentation, showing screenshots side by side between all the promotional material and the actual game. It was simply completely different. Textures, geometry, everything was radically different. Dark Souls 2 used to look better than Bloodborne. We never had that game. And you just cannot understand now, but coming after the explosion of Dark Souls, this new title was perceived bigger than whatever you can think about. This was some kind of gaming Jesus Christ because it was supposed to take everything that Dark Souls was, and push it far above. Expectations were higher than the sky, and not entirely unfounded.
It didn’t turn out that well, despite DS2 is still quite loved. It simply cracked under its own ambition, and when it was time to release a product, From decided to backpedal. At the time of release I remembered I tinkered with it quite a while, far more than playing it, but it was only at the level of screen shaders presets to make it darker and make light sources count a little more. But it was simple stuff.
The same Dominic Tarason mentioned, though the years, of a semi-secret project of some guy who was completely remaking DS2. A labor of love, but that has never been made public outside of some screenshots.
More recently he mentioned a new mod, this time adding… ray tracing. I usually don’t like ray tracing at all, but for projects that are freely available for older titles it’s a different matter. And here it counts. It’s not the stupid brand of ray tracing, about shitty reflections and flickering shadows, just adding more noise and imprecise rendering to the screen. This is about the lighting itself. And for many players it finally evokes a very similar feel of that original DS2 that never came out.
I tried it, and it works. So this will be a DS2 modding guide.
Starting from “Scholar of the First Sin” which is the version of DS2 being used here. Some prefer the original for various reasons, but when it comes to modding this is the version.
– Download “Scholar” from Steam, wait for it to complete
– Open the game directory, within “game”, delete the “shader” folder (or better, move it somewhere else, in case you want to restore the unmodded game)
– Download https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1146
– Unpacking it you notice there are some “.dll” files, and a couple other folders. Collect all this and copy it over to the game executable directory.
– Already at this point you should have a fully working DS2 with ray tracing enabled. And you can play online regularly.
But of course we go some steps further here:
– Download Seeker of Fire mod
– This comes in two files, at this time, the main version 2.1.2, and and a smaller patch version 2.1.4, you download both
– Unpack these two, and copy over the content to merge the patch with the main, overwriting those files
– Then copy over the whole to the game directory, this one adding “dinput8.dll” and “modengine.ini” at the root
– WHEN using ray tracing mod, like we’re doing, go in “SeekerOfFire_2” directory and delete the “filter” directory (I’m not sure if it’s even needed, but better safe)
– Download https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1611
– Unpack it and copy over to the game directory, but beware that this unpacks as a “FaraamPresetPT” directory, you have to copy only the two directory it contains so they merge with those from the ray tracing mod, do not copy the “FaraamPresetPT” directory itself.
– You’re essentially done. Launch the game. If installed correctly you should see a “Seeker of Fire” splash screen.
– On the main menu, set the standard graphic options, then exit back to main menu, press “F1”.
– If installed correctly, pressing F1 opens an imGui panel that lets you set ray tracing mod options specifically.
This is how I set it. Consider that the mod should actually run well, and from a 3070 and above you should be generally fine. But I try to maximize how things look without wasting performance on what’s trivial. I think by default the mod is set to use DLSS in DLAA mode, which is the most expensive as far as I know. Here I use “quality” because it works already perfectly well. In the bottom part you see that “GI Quality” is set to “HWRT – Pathtracing” this is the real deal. But I then set water reflections to “Game only” and sun shadows to “raster shadows”. I’ve run tons of different tests. Reflections and shadows look different, but they do not look BETTER. So, where I can I prefer to spare processing power. Believe me, the game looks insanely good if you follow all the above.
Under this section there’s another for motion blur and depth of field. I always turn these off in games but DS2 is built to use DoF. The assets on the distance are made to look that way. But while I’d specifically turn on DoF, in the base game, it doesn’t look like this setting works as it should in the modded version. And so I disabled both of these as well.
Again under it, there’s another important section where you load a lighting preset. It’s important to use “atmospheres_extended.ini” if you followed instructions above it’s likely that the default was switched to some “Alva_Preset_beta.ini” but do not use that one, unless you just want to experiment. Load the correct preset, and you’re done.
Enjoy the modded game. (EDIT: forgot to mention, start as Deprived and take the infinite torch as gift. It’s not even truly infinite but lasts 42 hours. You can always light up the torch at any campfire, and other places you light up. It’s quite useful with ray tracing.)
The Ray tracing isn’t perfect. There are sharp shifts in lighting as you move between different areas. There’s some pop-up of detail of geometry and textures. Especially with torches you sometimes end up bright visual glitches about things, but these usually sort themselves out after a few moments. In general it’s very much playable, and a true spectacle to see. In some cases it easily rivals with Elden ring. And the game is more fun from the beginning, as it appears a slightly bit harder thanks to the modded content. If you’re familiar with the game you’ll notice a number of different things, especially as you reach Majula.
But was I done? Well, nope. I stumbled onto this other mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1097
This is for another version of the mod above, but it mentioned a few details on how it works, in its description. Instructions really aren’t very clear, but I decided to experiment.
Goal was for me, as usual, to set “Seeker of Fire” slightly harder than it already was. When this is done by other players it’s usually by increasing damage to the player, as it is the simplest way to make a game harder, by making it more deadly. But for me the fun is in protracted fights. Shifting balance more toward observation and strategy. I like to take some time to observe and learn bosses, and I like the effort. That leads to what most people consider “damage sponges”, but it strikes a good balance for me. So the goal for me was to make enemies suffer a bit less damage from player’s attacks. Let’s say a 20%.
All From games are quite ridiculous in how they are built in their innards. It’s really tons more complex than how it should be. But in some cases there are shortcuts. The tools, though, here work in a poor way.
The editor I found for some reason is unable to load and edit a single specific file. It needs to load up the entire game. So that then you can edit a single tiny file in it, okay. I’m making it “short” here but for me this process took a while. As I went through a bunch of other tools, Yabber, BinderTool, and other stuff, to unpack .dcx regulation files, onto .bnd files, onto .param files, but then without a way to read and edit them, and then repackaging them back…
First you need a tool to unpack the game: UXM
It’s a simple tool, you point it at the game directory, and you wait until it’s done.
Then you can finally load the actual editor, DSMapStudio
Once launched you have to create a project, however empty, and for this to work the game has to be unpacked. Once you create a project, you can save and exit. It should have left, in your project directory, a “Param” directory.
Since my goal was to modify “Seeker of Fire” files, I could then pick only two of them. “ChrCommonParam.param” and “EnemyCommonParam.param” The first if you want to edit damage received by the player, the second if you want to edit damage dealt to the enemies. In my case it was the second. So you go in the “SeekerOfFire_2/Param” directory, copy that single param file over to your “Param” directory in your project directory. Then load again the editor.
Now the editing. You just browse to the correct entry “EnemyCommonParam”. In the center tab you have a list of numbers. In the rightmost tab you have all their values. Since we need to edit them all, and it takes a week if you go one by one, it’s possible to select ALL the entries in the center tab. Then with all of them selected, you scroll the rightmost tab to find the field that needs editing. There are several but all similar and easy to spot. Let’s start with “Absorption: Slash (absorption_slash)” If you right click on the label a menu appears, at the very bottom you should see “> Mass Edit”, you expand this, down below, between other options you see “? *” and a field. Click on that field and type “0.8” This because all different monster listed here, over 200, all have different values. If we multiply them, though, it means they will all retain their native balance and only scale by a certain portion. In this case (I tested this) damage to enemies get reduced by reducing this absorption values (however counterintuitively). So multiplying all of those values by 0.8 means reducing damage dealt to them by 20%. Exactly as it was intended. So you type 0.8 in that field, then click on the asterisk just above and a new menu appears, where you click on “Submit”, done. Repeat for all the “absorption” values, slash, thrust, strike. Further below there are critical fields and bullet fields that is probably wise to adjust in the same way.
It can also be tricky because the UI is coded stupidly. So when you go click on a field at the bottom of the screen, the editing menu clips down off the screen when you click on mass edit. With some effort you can work around this by dragging up the bottom of the window, opening the menu, and dragging the window back down. Alternatively, click on the field, click on the “mass edit”, then click again on the same field and the mass edit menu should be already open without clipping off.
Save it all in the editor and close it. I’ve tested this and you don’t need to recompress files or doing anything fancy. Just going in the “Param” directory of your project, fish out the “EnemyCommonParam” you just edited and copy it over to the “SeekerOfFire_2/Param” this will load correctly. Now enemies should receive 20% less damage. But remember to use again UXM to “restore” the game in its compressed state. As long you’re done using the editor, since you have to unpack it once again to use it. You can download here my own file if you don’t care to go through this whole process. Just copy over and no need for any unpacking, compressing or editing. But remember that it only works on this mod and the current version listed above, it won’t work on the base game.
Oh, by the way. I already knew that by default DS2 includes in the base game something similar in the form of “covenants.” In particular the “Company of Champions” “increases the game’s difficulty level by making every enemy deal 50% more damage and decreasing the player damage by 20%” this can be activated at the other end of Majula, within 5 minutes of starting the game. Problem is, as you can see, it mostly increases damage to the player, only a small portion the damage to the enemies. My idea instead is to turn those around. But it’s nice to have options, and you can also turn this on, on top of other changes. I died some 30 times just exploring the tutorial area. I love tutorials.
Well, enjoy. I promised myself that I wouldn’t include any screenshot to show the spectacle. I already wasted enough effort here.
At some point I also tested the Ascended mod. But… nope. Lets leave it at that. (but you can watch an Italian player going through it, if you care)
No, I don’t think even a single person will read all of this. But I write it down mostly for myself, in case I revisit some of this in some future. As seen above I’ve done stuff within Nightreign and Sekiro, but now can’t remember how or even what.
