Earlier this week, From Software concluded a strange but crucial chapter in its legendaryDark Soulsseries. On Tuesday, the developer confirmed that online servers for the PC version of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, which went down nine months ago due to a security vulnerability,would remain offline permanently. That means no more invasions(yay!), no more soapstone messages or other players’ bloodstains(boo!), and no more online co-op play (hiss!). Granted, Dark Souls is mainly a single-player game and will still be playable, but it strips away an aspect that’s always been integral to these games.
The news was met with a mixed reaction. On the one hand there were people saying ‘fair enough,’ reminiscing about the good times they had with the troubled PC port, while suggesting that after 11 years it’s high time to call it a day. In the other corner, there was the furious crowd who saw this as a great betrayal on FromSoft’s part. Colourful responses to the announcement on Steam included such things as“Fromsoft is spitting in players’ faces,”and“Absolutely ********* unbelievable. Never buying a fromsoft game again, you deserve every pirated copy you get.”
Some overreactions for sure, and I wonder if those same players will be singing the same tune if and when that elusive Bloodborne remaster comes to PC, but the big question is: was it fair for FromSoft to permanently cripple the game for PC players, or was it the right time to say goodbye to what was a very flawed PC port from the start?
There are a few key details to note here. First, it’s that Dark Souls on PC isn’t dead. Dark Souls Remastered came out in May 2018 and continues to enjoy about 1000 daily players on average (it was well over 2000 before Elden Ring dropped). From the moment of its release, the remaster became the predominant way to play Dark Souls on PC, to a large extent deprecating the Prepare to Die Edition.
Unlike some more magnanimous publishers who have released remasters in the past (Bethesda with Skyrim, 2K with Bioshock and Mafia 2, to name a few), FromSoft never offered a free upgrade for Prepare to Die Edition players, instead sticking to a 50% discount that lasted for some time after the game’s release (even at 50% off, you were still looking at around $20 for a fairly rudimentary remaster).
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The PC version of the Prepare to Die Edition was pretty poor too, with a 30fps frame rate cap, low resolutions, and no way to configure the graphics in-game. Modders had to step in with mods like DSfix to sort out the frame rate, and DSCM to make the online component of the game work properly. Non-Steam players were also saddled with the Games for Windows - LIVE DRM, which meant they had to find workarounds when the service was shut down in 2013. In short, people who bought Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC had already suffered plenty, and could certainly feel like they never really got their money’s worth for the game.
Now, it’s hard to argue against the business and gameplay logic of merging the audiences of two versions of the same game on the same platform into the superior, more recent version. Less maintenance costs for developers, and more people for the audience to play with. That the rickety Prepare to Die Edition is being deprecated after 11 years is not an issue in itself, it’s more that there probably wouldn’t need to be a rather expensive remaster of the game if From Software had done a good job with the original.
Upon the remaster’s release in 2018, it was already a little bit cheeky of From Software to ask existing players to pay $20 for a version of the game that was as much a fix-up as a remaster, but at least players still had the choice to stick with the original version if they wanted to (which, once you applied the community fixes, actually ran fine). That’s the key thing - the choice to not spend more money to keep having full use of a thing you already own.
So what’s the solution? Well, it’s hard to imagine that FromSoft would stand to lose a lot of money if they just gave the mere hundreds of remaining holdouts of the Prepare to Die Edition a free upgrade to the remaster. They’ve already cashed in on the remaster plenty, they’re sitting pretty after the formidable success of Elden Ring - what’s a few thousand giveaways of Dark Souls Remastered going to affect apart from goodwill from some of the series’ longest-serving PC players?
There’s also the principle of the matter - that if people who have already bought Dark Souls on PC want to keep having the full Dark Souls experience on PC, then they shouldn’t have to cough up more money to do so, especially as many of those people paid for a game that was seriously compromised from the start.
From Software have never been known for their charity - you won’t find their games in free giveaways, you won’t see free upgrade offers to the ‘complete’ version of a given game (they did a similar thing with Dark Souls 2 and Scholar of the First Sin), and you won’t even often see their games on sale. To make those now-uprooted Prepare to Die Edition players pay to keep having an experience that’s clearly sufficed for them over the years feels like wringing every last bit of soul out of a hollowed corpse.
