If you've gone Hollow waiting for Elden Ring's actual expansion, tide yourself over with with this expansion-sized mod that transforms the entire game

To borrow the parlance of Dark Souls, I have absolutely «gone Hollow» awaiting further word on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It'll come when it comes, but I can only replay Elden Ring and the rest of the Souls series so many times in anticipation. Enter The Convergence, an Elden Ring overhaul mod that might be just the thing to tide freaks like me over. Here's a quick overview of everything on offer from the mod page:

The new classes and starting points are something that really intrigues me⁠—I'm reminded of the ubiquitous alternate start mods for the Elder Scrolls games. In this Convergence playthrough by YouTuber GinoMachino, he starts out as a rot-themed class focused on inflicting the damage over time status effect. Appropriately, this stinky guy class begins the game in hellish Caelid instead of the idyllic Limgrave.

The Convergence team also adopted FromSoftware's creative sensibility when it comes to new weapon designs: a Scarlet Rot-themed curved sword with a teleport slash ash of war seems a bit OP to my eye, but it's the exact sort of gleeful experimentation I hope to see out of Shadow of the Erdtree's additions to the arsenal.

Convergence also introduces some exciting new level design ideas: reshuffled warp gates join the modified starting points in breaking up the typical flow of an Elden Ring playthrough, and I particularly appreciate what the team did with the subterranean Lake of Rot. Building on the vertically-oriented ruins already present in the base game, Convergence adds a veritable city rising out of the zone's iconic pink muck.

Convergence is fairly easy and safe to use⁠—similar to the excellent Seamless Co-op mod, it runs off a separate .exe with its own save files, keeping your installation and vanilla saves protected from the long arm of Easy Anti-Cheat.

There's been a bit of a renaissance of these Souls series romhack-style mods, with fans creating total conversion unofficial sequels of their own. I'm still eagerly awaiting the