An unfortunate reality of the Dark Souls PVP experience is running into hackers. Sometimes this means fighting foes with infinite health; in other case it means invisible, backstabbing bastards.
Hackers have plagued Dark Souls from the start of the series, and they’re already up to no good in Dark Souls Remastered.
Dark Souls Remastered released early on Steam last night, ahead of its full release on consoles this Friday. Eager players returned to the land of Lordran, excited to explore a familiar world or try out the series for the first time.
A hacker going by the name “Malcolm Reynolds,” infamous throughout the Souls community, booted up the game to harass players using hacked magic spells to instantly kill them, drop nasty status effects, and break their equipment.
Reynolds has a dreaded reputation within the Souls community thanks to a history of dangerous hacks. During Dark Souls 3‘s height, he streamed himself defeating players with cheats, going so far as to claim he could modify code to get players “softbanned.”
A softban marks the player as a cheater who can only play with other cheaters. Last night, Reynolds streamed his first foray into Dark Souls Remastered.
The result was a horrifying beatdown of unsuspecting players.
Adjusting the game’s code, Reynolds created a hellish fireball spell with numerous effects. The fireball did massive damage with a huge radius, which would already be bad enough for new players to deal with.
However, it also had other effects. The spell afflicts Curse on the player, a debuff that lasts after death and reduces HP by half. It also adds the “Egghead” effect, a strange status that infects the player with a brain worm. Players with this status can’t wear helmets, and half of the souls they pick up are consumed by the egg.
The only way to remove these statuses is to use special items that are difficult to obtain at the start of the game. For extra measure, Reynolds’ spell also broke his victim’s equipment. All he needed to do was invade games and toss his fireball in the vague direction of his target.
“These guys might as well make a new character,” Reynolds said at one point during the stream. “It’s going to be such a pain in the arse going past this point with broken shit, egghead. And I know it’s all working because I’m seeing it in front of my eyes.”
Dark Souls‘ PC version had enough hackers that a popular mod was created called PVP Watch Dog that warned players if they were facing a known hacker. Following Reynolds’ stream, PVP Watch Dog creator eur0pa told the community that he had no plans to make a version for Dark Souls Remastered.
“it’s been 6 years since Dark Souls came out, there have been 4 games on different engines, all of them sharing the same flaws, plagued with the same amount of cheaters and script kiddies, and all of them pulling off the same destructive actions: it’s time FromSoft fixed their own games without relying on the efforts of the community,” he wrote.
Reynolds’ stream is an ominous sign for Dark Souls Remastered. The Dark Souls games’ anti-cheat measures are easy to abuse, allowing hackers to trick the game into banning legit players. In Dark Souls 3, it was as easy as dropping a hacked item for players to pick up.
Mass bannings led Bandai Namco to tell my former colleague Patrick Klepek that some accounts might have been falsely flagged. Hackers might get banned, but they will likely do a lot of damage before they do.
“I’ll definitely get banned eventually,” Reynolds said on stream. “Just not right now.”
Comments
24 responses to “Infamous Hacker Already Wreaking Havoc In Dark Souls Remastered”
Isn’t this giving the hacker exactly what he wants by publishing a story about him?
It almost certainly is, but it also provides a warning for anyone taking this online about the kind of sociopathic dicks they might encounter.
It could just be an article discussing there is a hacker problem currently in Dark Souls remaster. Not showing links and videos and naming a hacker who is being one of the more offending persons.
Yeah, fair call.
Yes.
What a loser
He’s not a looser he’s a wiener. LOL sorry couldn’t help myself.
Same system for injection as past titles with no detection for who is doing it. I love the games, but fuck the devs are lazy.
I think it’s more the devs just make the game and then Namco Bandai manage the patches/updates. Which would explain why we’ve had such huge problems in the past. Also if memory serves, they weren’t familiar with the PC platform when they first ported the first one over so they really struggled to support it. I could be remembering wrong here….
Guess I won’t be buying this after all.
I hovered above it yesterday. The comments on Steam are right though…. the “remaster” is what the original PC version should’ve been. It is literally 20 USD (or 40 USD if you didn’t own the original) for a patched version of the game.
Yeah pretty much original with DSFIX
All online games (sadly) have cheating problems and hackers. Some people can’t bear to play a game without ruining it for other because they are insecure man-children.
Shouldn’t be a decider in whether you purchase. Just my opinion
The problem is this kind of cheating can literally cripple / ruin the game for you. Ignroing the soft ban, the curse/gear/egg head side effects as a result of them cheating would be infuriating. Especially if you’re struggling through the game as it is, only to have your progress wiped by a hacker.
Sadly, this actually makes me less likely to purchase the game.
What a stain. Shit like this will turn people away from the game. I dont mind getting beaten by some one thats better than me. But getting beaten by a cheater sucks.
Exactly this. I didn’t play any Souls games because I’d heard about so many innocent players being banned for the actions of hackers or for simply having certain unrelated programs or peripherals on their PC’s. And then, when I finally decided to try DS3, and loved it, I got banned from all multiplayer experiences after a questionable invasion after 90 hours on my first playthrough.
Hearing that this shit it still going on and someone can wreck my game on a whim and that the devs will do nothing to fix this, why should I put money on this game?
This is the problem with the Souls games’ multiplayer system: the server trusts the client completely. This guy makes a spell that has effects that is shouldn’t be capable of and, instead of checking those effects or attributes associated with that spell, the server just lets the client perform the illegal operation, unchecked. But then, later on, the server checks players’ game data and penalizes those whose game data has become corrupted as a result of the hacker’s actions during as invasion. Meanwhile, the hacker, knowing how to mask their game data or otherwise prevent it from being seen as invalid, skates on by the detection system without a hitch.
I like hard games with punishing consequences, eg Darkest Dungeon, but the lack of a pause is terrible. I’ve got young kids, they sometimes need instant attention and the punishing consequences of dying while I leave the game unpaused is not fun.
Yeah….not interest in paying money to be griefed by these c****.
These hackers and trolls are truly sad individuals. This clown seems like he is proud of being a griefer.. oh wow buddy, you’re so subversive and cool, everyone is so impressed.
I take some comfort in theorising that his life is probably quite empty and sad for him to be using his time to overtly ruin games for random people on the Internet. Fairly defective personality trait.
Cannot the game be played offline?
Or with a private server as such?
And play without one of the main features? I’m not into Darksouls PvP but I love the notes people leave and seeing the deaths of those that came before to get valuable clues about traps.
It can be played offline. And in truth I think one of my earlier playthroughs, I did this as I was getting griefed way too much. You do lose something from the experience though which is a shame.
The hacker the article is about has a YouTube channel. Downvote his cheating videos and report his channel to get him banned from YouTube.