My friend and I made our wives play through Elden Ring, here are the results
This is the sequel to this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/wub2rf/my_friend_and_i_made_our_wives_play_through_dark/
The Setup: We played for about 2 hours every Monday evening. Each player shared their screen on discord so the husbands can watch both and so they could help each other. Because of this, they ended up staying pretty close together in what areas they did. The way they play, I don't think they actively monitored each other's playthrough, so they still ran into a lot of traps the other had done.
Here is a link to the raw spreadsheet
The first page shows how many deaths each player had in the area / boss. The Co-op column shows how many deaths they had co-oping that particular area / boss. The order column shows the order the bosses were killed. We included an invader column, but they only had 2-3 invaders over the entire course of the game. They did not co-op very often.
The second page shows their base stats immediately after defeating each major boss.
The third page was an attempt by me at writing down some interesting thing that happened each session. I was not able to keep up with that.
Game Play: The husbands did not provide in game assistance. We mostly watched, commentated, and talked. If the players got too lost or frustrated we would answer hints. Mostly that came in the form of tips about how to fight a boss once the deaths piled up and frustration was setting in. The longer the game went on, the more quickly we gave out information. At the very end, one of the husbands dropped an extra +10 Rivers of Blood so the Warrior could have a matching set. He also gave him a bunch of crafting materials to make more Uplifting Aromatics and Sleep pots.
The players mostly played the game by themselves, they occasionally co-op'ed for a few bosses. They never summoned other players. Both of them attempted bosses for a little bit before using summons. They didn't discover the Mimic Tear on their own, near the end of the game they both ran into boss fights that were pretty taxing so we pointed it out to them.
Data Now In Image Form!
Conclusion: Some things I wish we would have kept track of: What talismans they used for each major boss. The date they killed each major boss. I tried to keep track of lost runes, but that was too much.
Eventually we might do this again for some other game, but for a while we are going to take a break from FromSoft games. Its been a few years now of data collection. Let us know if you have any suggestions for games we could collect some interesting data on!
Credits: I found some great backgrounds to use in my images from this post, thanks u/fluentinsarcasm