The Convergence is a Game Mod for Elden Ring that massively overhauls the game's balance and progression, with notable features being 27 distinct character classes that all fit within their own archetype with a far larger variety of new, unique and overhauled equipment and spells available, various Anti-Frustration Features such as almost the entire world being open from the start of the game with a special teleporter system in place to take players to even end game areas as soon as they leave character creation, and massive overhauls to the layouts of major dungeons and the overworld.
The mod is available on Nexus Mods
for the most recent version of Elden Ring.
Tropes that mainly apply to content added or changed by The Convergence.
- Adapted Out: A huge number of bosses, most notably some of the more infamous copy-and-paste bosses in the normal game such as the Godskin Duo or Godefroy (a blatant clone of Godrick's first phase) have been replaced by more unique encounters.
- Anti-Frustration Features: A huge draw of the mod is the massive amount of changes made to the base game to alleviate common community complaints with the base game:
- Torrent is available right from the start compared to having to jog all the way to the Gatefront Ruins to trigger the Melina cutscene to receive him. Additionally, he's available more leniently in areas that are otherwise excruciatingly boring to move through on foot such as the Ashen Capital or the Elden Beast's boss arena. This however is inverted in the area of Deeproot Depths preceding Godwyn's corpse, which has been reworked into an actual dungeon experience where Torrent's usage is disabled.
- Likewise, one does not need to meet Melina to level up or visit the Roundtable.
- The famous door you didn't have the right to open is now open allowing free access between the lower hall and the rest of the Hold, additionally Alberich's invasion has been removed and in his place is an invincible second gen Albinauric one can test their equipment on
- The player no longer needs to collect maps for each region, as the entire world map is revealed from the start.
- Focus now naturally regenerates at a rate of 1 per second, allowing players to more liberally use skills or spells without having to compromise their healing potential.
- Characters start with 3 spell slots by default compared to the default 1, allowing magic characters to be more flexible in the early game.
- All four talisman slots are available from the start, instead of having to collect them throughout the playthrough.
- Upgrading the Flasks of Tears capacity now only requires 1 Golden Seed each, allowing the player to reach maximum capacity in as little as 10 seeds. Likewise, there are so many Golden Seeds, base game and ones added in the mod, reaching the max amount of heals is completely trivial.
- Every single infusion is available to the player from the start, allowing players to branch out and experiment with different damage types. Additionally, there are infusions for elementally focused builds that deal purely physical damage, allowing players to deal with particularly magically resistant enemies without having to completely overhaul their build.
- Weapon upgrade costs have been truncated, removing more than half of the various upgrade material tiers making it easier for players to not only upgrade period, but also branch out and experiment with other weapons. Likewise, Glovewort for upgrading Spirit Ashes has been similarly truncated.
- Spirit Summons can now be summoned almost anywhere in the entire game, rather than arbitrarily just where Fromsoft said you could, though to compensate, Spirit Summons temporarily reduce your health, focus and stamina bars, but on the other hand, de-summoning them restores any of said resource that you lost summoning them in the first place. As of version 1.4.1, the Baldachin's Blessing item, normally a one-time use consumable that can only be obtained by giving a portion of your maximum HP to Fia, is now a more common consumable that can be found and crafted that has the much more useful benefit of removing the penalties for summoning Spirit Ashes until you die or warp.
- Every single crafting recipe is available from the start of the game, allowing crafty players to create incredibly useful tools such as Frost Jars or Perfumes provided they know where the materials are from the start of the game. In addition, many crafting recipes have been reworked to produce items in bulk for the price of one and throwing pots no longer require the player to collect the reusable pots and can carry as many of every type as they can craft. Also you can craft while in combat.
- You can now fast travel while in combat allowing you to escape from boss fights you weren't ready for provided you are quick enough to find a destination before the boss kills you. Also you can fast travel out of dungeons that you've yet to have cleared, alleviating the annoyance of wanting to mark a dungeon for exploration later, only to have to walk all the way to the grace inside the dungeon, then walk all the way back out before you can fast travel again.
- The infamous confirmation prompt that would appear after unlocking a catacomb's boss gate no longer requires you to dismiss it.
- Static ring/talisman/physick tear placements have been completely removed and have been replaced with remnants, which can be used at any grace to craft any of a particular selection of items pertaining to the remnant you obtained, allowing players to pick and choose certain items to have earlier than you would normally have them. Additionally, all "plus" talisman variants have been removed, and the "normal" ones have been buffed to compensate.
- Many keys that were required for progression have either been made more convenient to acquire such as the Sellian Spellbreaker being found in Sellia proper rather than having to follow Sellen's questline or have been removed entirely such as the Academy Glintstone Key and all Stonesword Keys and their associated gates.
- You no longer have to trek all the way to a particular demigod's tower to activate their Great Rune after acquiring it, and can use it as soon as you touch down at the next grace.
- Bait-and-Switch: Near the end of the game Gideon stands between you and the Erdtree as he does in the normal game, except he's Killed Mid-Sentence by Skarde, a Crucible Knight who served Godfrey before the Shattering, replacing him as the penultimate boss before Godfrey himself.
- Balance Buff: Numerous, naturally:
- Damage as a whole has been retuned across the board. Infusions only leave you with the damage type you're infusing into but doesn't preclude you from buffing them with an auxiliary element, and enemy resistances have been tuned to match to avoid situations such as in the base game where holy damage was effectively worthless against almost every single enemy in the entire game. On the NPC side, enemy damage has been tuned to basically eliminate "Vigor checks" unless you're just so out of your depth that you would have died there in the normal game anyways.
- Bows do considerably more damage and are now a viable main combat option rather than being a way to bypass certain enemies from out of their range.
- All armor now provides small boosts such as stat points or increased damage, etc., so players aren't completely disincentivized from wearing what they want to in fear of compromising their defense. Likewise, in version 1.4.1, the player can also transmog their armor appearance in case they do want to min-max their stats without invoking Rainbow Pimp Gear.
- Many talismans have had their effects increased and/or had their stronger tiers removed with their base counterparts being buffed to match. Special mention goes to the elemental "Drake" talismans which now increase your resistance to a particular element by a not insignificant amount to the point it trivializes certain enemies, and likewise, the talismans that previously only made you slightly more resistant to certain status afflictions now completely nullify their buildup (though not the effects, for example if a player was already poisoned, equipping the anti-poison talisman would not cure it).
- Malenia's Great Rune is no longer the underwhelming Bragging Rights Reward it was previously, where instead of reducing your Flask's healing in exchange for activating Bloodborne's rallying, it not only provides a 10% increase in maximum health like every other reworked Great Rune, it causes every hit you land to heal you for 3% of your maximum health, effectively replicating Malenia's Life Drain effect.
- Character Select Forcing: Well, more like Build Select Forcing but otherwise thoroughly avoided. Magically inclined characters who would normally be walled by select enemies or entire areas in previous Fromsoft titles have options in the mod to circumvent enemies who are particularly resistant to their damage type, and even then as noted above, enemy resistances to certain damage types never get to the point where your build completely fails against any particular enemy.
- Nerf: Played with in regards to Elden Ring's numerous
Game Breakers, as many of them have remained untouched as other equipment has simply been beefed up to match, but a few truly broken tools have been reworked:- Godrick's Great Rune's frankly ridiculous benefit of increasing all of your stats by 5 points has been replaced by a more modest 10% increase in maximum HP and runes gained.
- The Cerulean Hidden Tear only halves FP consumption in comparison to completely eliminating it, though it does last twice as long now.
- Infamous Superboss Malenia plays with this. She's mostly untouched besides from a few damage tweaks, and actually has the
original version of her Waterfowl Dance added to her moveset. She's simply comparably weaker because the player is fathoms stronger than the original game.
- Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted in a very interesting way. Many of the new skills and spells added to the game were designed in mind with recreating attacks available to enemies and bosses that the player couldn't recreate in any meaningful way, such as the skill of Godrick's Axe now firing his wind blast attacks instead of just being a copy-paste of Dark Souls III's Earth Seeker, or new spells such as Rune Shards and Golden Displacement being a player usable version of Radagon's projectiles and teleporting respectively.
