Six years ago, CouchJockey was a small-time Twitch streamer, broadcasting Hearthstone in an attempt to make a name for himself. Today, he's the creative director for The Convergence, one of the most popular and acclaimed Elden Ring mods, which adds many new bosses and magic spells to the game, as well as overhauling many of its more controversial aspects. It's been quite a journey for the modder, and he says it all started with a simple "magic mod" for Dark Souls 3, a project that blossomed into something far more ambitious.

During his early streaming days, CouchJockey was inspired by no-hit runs of Dark Souls 3 in the style of mavens like HappyHob and Distortion2, who popularized the concept. He completed a number of magic-focused hitless challenges over the next few months, gaining quite a few fans in the process. However, after hundreds of hours playing Dark Souls 3, a fellow player named TigerG92 heard him complaining about the lack of spell options in a certain mod on-stream, and Tiger suggested that they try making new spells themselves. That was the beginning of the Convergence.

The Souls series on PC has come a long way from the infamously broken Dark Souls 1 port, which couldn't even run higher than 30fps. A small but dedicated modding community has formed around each game in the series, and there are a handful of well-known, well-regarded mods for each entry, such as Daughters of Ash for Dark Souls 1 (as well as the upcoming Nightfall). If you're familiar with Dark Souls 3 modding, you've certainly heard of the Convergence before, and that's for a good reason: It's a shockingly polished product, even by the high standards of From Software itself. However, these days, the Elden Ring incarnation of the mod is arguably better-known, even if it's still in development.