Praise the sun, for the entire Dark Souls trilogy is finally back online. Over nine months after being deactivated, FromSoftware has at long last re-enabled online features for Dark Souls Remastered.
The game, along with Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, had its PvP servers shut down on PC back in January. This was thanks to a serious security vulnerability that was discovered for Dark Souls 3, which allowed some pretty malicious code to be run through its online functionality. It took an entire four months to hear any further news when FromSoftware finally announced that the servers would be returning "progressively," starting with the third game in the trilogy.
Three months after that, Dark Souls 3 was finally back. At the time, FromSoftware said it was working "to restore these features for all other Dark Souls titles." Unfortunately, when Dark Souls 2 was resurrected in October, the developer revealed that one original Dark Souls game would get left behind. Prepare to Die Edition was found to have "an aging system" supporting its online features and was promptly nixed from FromSoftware's to-do list.
Online features for the PC version of #DarkSouls: Remastered have been reactivated.Thank you once again for your patience, understanding, and support. pic.twitter.com/IZ8lsfx3TxNovember 9, 2022
That just left Dark Souls: Remastered, completing the developer's nine-month-long journey to squash the security vulnerability and bring the game back. FromSoftware kept its final triumph very brief, tweeting: "Thank you once again for your patience, understanding, and support."
It's wild that it's taken almost the entirety of 2022 to restore three of the four games deactivated. But at least Dark Souls players are now free to invade, summon and slap together some cheeky (and occasionally massively unhelpful) messages to bamboozle and amuse fellow players in whichever game they like. Except for PtDE, sorry.
