While most Souls fans are digging into Dark Souls 3, there’s a passionate community of thousands who play the original game regularly. But if you’re on PC, Dark Souls been suspiciously quiet for the past week or so.
It’s possible to play Dark Souls on your own, but interacting with other players is a huge part of the experience for others, whether it’s to play co-op and take down the terrifying bosses or invade others and ruin their day.
On Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, everything’s trucking along, as though nothing’s changed since the game launched in 2011. It’s different on PC, where the game’s matchmaking functions haven’t worked for a week.
“I really picked a bad time to start my first entry to the Dark Souls series,” said Jake12x on the game’s subreddit.
No kidding, Jake12x!
This hasn’t simply borked matchmaking, though. The useful messages other players leave in the world, tiny rays of hope? Those are gone, too.
Based on changes made to the game’s Steam DB profile, either From Software or Bandai Namco recently modified Dark Souls. That change, which involved an item called usemms, seems to have caused the recent issues.
“I had nodes and went to get a snack, came back to about 12 ‘Failed to create session’ notifications that kept on coming,” wrote Wulf Hunter on Steam.
Though Bandai Namco has not responded to my request for comment, a community manager recently acknowledged the issue.
RE: Dark Souls PTDE Matchmaking. Not sure why it’s being funky. Have made dev team aware – Will share any updates.
— J. Kartje (@JKartje) April 14, 2016
(PTDE means Prepare to Die Edition, a moniker given to the PC version.)
That was four days ago, though! As of today, the game’s still not working.
“I’m going through the game again now and it really feels different without the online component,” said _Lelantos on reddit. “The game feels a bit empty. No sense of struggling through this together with other people, no ‘praise the sun!’ messages after each boss… Even the messages that have always always showed up aren’t there now :(”
I’ll bee keeping an eye on this. For now, be careful out there.
Comments
10 responses to “Nobody Knows Why Dark Souls 1 For PC Has Been Offline For A Week”
I never got into 1 & 2, but I loved Bloodborne and I’m killing 3 right now.
They’re totally worth going back to!
1 I just found really visually unappealing; I probably would’ve stuck with 2 for longer were it not for looking like someone vomited rainbows and unicorns into my dark fantasy game :O (but mostly the wonky hitboxes were disparaging).
I’ll probably go back to 2, though, I always try to get into it over and over haha. I’ve at least beaten the boss in the Forset of fallen Giants
I rolled a dex character last year, and yes there was intermittent periods of ‘what’s up with the online???’ threads gumming up the Steam community forum from time to time. Still haven’t beaten the Four Kings.
I was always surprised to hear people struggled on this one because I got it on the first try… Wearing full Havels gear + shield.
Yeah that’d be why 😉
Oh no. I bought DS1 some time ago, hoping to get into it soon, and now I hear this is all gone. Hopefully they’ll turn it back on before I give it a go.
Kotaku, please keep us informed!
Hopefully this is just a temporary blip.
My wife and I like to fire it up once or twice a year for a co-op run together with a challenge of some sort, if they kill the multi then we’ll never be able to do that again.
I guess I’m one of the few people who preferred it offline, the only people who ever seemed to join my game were people in endgame gear who had managed to avoid levelling up so they could gank lowbies.
I prefer my game offline, where I don’t get my ass handed to me by people who build their characters to PvP. Is it so bad that I just want to play without worrying about how other people are going to crush my obviously inept build and skills?