FromSoftware restores all online features in Dark Souls Remastered, over 10 months after taking servers offline due to security concerns.
Fans of Dark Souls Remastered on the PC will no doubt be relieved to find that they can now enjoy access to the game's online gameplay features after months of servers being down. FromSoftware took the PC version of Dark Souls Remastered offline earlier this year due to security concerns, leaving fans unable to access many features of the game. Released back in 2011, the original Dark Souls is considered an all-time classic of the RPG genre, and the game still enjoys an active and devoted fan base as a result.
Back in January, it was announced that developer FromSoftware had discovered a serious security vulnerability in the online servers for the entire Dark Souls series on PC, including all three of the original games and the remastered edition of the first game. Due to the possibility of hackers taking control of players' computers through an exploit, FromSoftware and publisher Bandai Namco opted to pull the plug on the games' online features until a solution could be found. This meant that PC players could no longer enjoy some of the Dark Souls games' most iconic features, including online PvP and the ability for players to summon each other into their game worlds to aid them with difficult battles.
Over the past few months, the Dark Souls series' servers have slowly started coming back to life, working backwards from Dark Souls 3, and today FromSoftware announced on Twitter that Dark Souls Remastered has finally had all of its online functionality restored after over ten months offline. This means that online features have now been restored to every game in the series except for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die, the original PC port of the first game, which FromSoftware has said will remain offline permanently due to its "aging system."
While the news that Prepare to Die will never see its servers restored while come as a disappointment to the many passionate fans who still enjoy the original classic, players can still get the full Dark Souls online experience thanks to the remastered edition. The restoration of online gameplay to the Dark Souls trilogy has been long awaited by the devoted fans of the series who still play the games regularly to this day.
Any who were justifiably worried about the security risks discovered earlier this year can rest easy knowing the team at FromSoftware has spent the entirety of the past ten months working hard to patch the holes in their security and make sure their online services can resume safely. Taking the entire Dark Souls trilogy offline for most of a year can't have been an easy decision for the studio or their publisher Bandai Namco, given the likely high cost and the huge amount of dissatisfaction Dark Souls fans have expressed over the issue. After all this time and effort, FromSoftware bringing the game back online now can only mean that it is certain the issues have been fixed.
Dark Souls Remastered is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Kyle Thomas is a content writer and game designer who holds a Masters in Game Design from the University of Malta. He has also worked as a writer and researcher for the Armchair Historian, and he's helped design a couple of indie games over the years as well. When he isn't writing or designing games for work, he spends a lot of his time doing so for fun, preparing TTRPG sessions in his role as lifelong Forever DM. You can check out some of Kyle’s games on itch.io!
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