By Oskar P.
If you’re undecided whether you should get Dark Souls Remastered, I made a cheeky little flowchart at the bottom of this article. Sadly, it doesn’t function as a tl;dr, but it reflects my true feelings nonetheless. Anyway…
Sometimes I wish I could look at Dark Souls with fresh eyes. I’m hard-pressed to say anything about it that hasn’t more or less been said better by another party in one way or another. The series has long since cemented itself as one of my favorites in the last generation, but at this point, I personally feel it’s overstaying its welcome – it and its overblown reputation of being the hardest thing since unbalanced NES games. The way game journalism so casually and wrongly compares anything remotely difficult to Dark Souls doesn’t help either.
…And journalism in general, apparently. This is getting out of hand.
Upon release, Dark Souls Remastered started off strong on Steam, review-wise. Not even half a day later and it’s already down to a Mixed rating. Fans want more, and the changes don’t really justify the 40-dollar price tag (although former owners of the original on Steam do get do a 50% discount).
I can understand the disappointment of long-time fans because this was such a missed opportunity to polish up on things. There is some level of polish, to be sure, but it feels more of a committee polish instead of an auteur polish. Bandai Namco calls the shots in the long run. Dark Souls is their IP. FromSoftware themselves probably didn’t even want the remaster to happen. They didn’t even work on it. Development was outsourced to two different studios: QLOC for the PS4, XB1 and PC versions and Virtuos for the Switch version. All of these point to committee polish.
Another reason for the mixed PC reviews has to do with cheating already being rampant. For the uninitiated, there are generally two ways you can engage in multiplayer in Dark Souls: jolly co-op or PVP. The latter can be split between invasions and arena duels. An invasion, as the name suggests, is when another human player forcibly enters your world to thwart your progress. Ordinarily, it’s not so bad even if you get killed by one. It’s part of the game, after all. You can avoid it by not going back to human form or altogether staying offline, but here’s what makes it extra bad: if a cheater invades your world, you’re the one who gets soft-banned. It seems like there are no plans to address it officially, so it’s all up to the community to try and come up with preventive measures. Really lends itself to the argument that this is just a quick and lazy cash grab, no?
Showcasing the basic combat.
One of the first few things that stood out to me when I started the game, oddly enough, is that audio quality in general seems to be… crisper. I haven’t done any extensive comparisons on this or anything and I’m willing to bet it’s probably just placebo. If there really are improvements, they probably just post-processed the sound differently. Definitely not redone samples, lord no. Not even across games do they do that. FromSoftware likes reusing their sound assets a lot and it’s one of the lesser gripes you’ll see everywhere else. Understandably so. The sound of footsteps on different types of floors, creaking doors, ladder clanks, elevator chains, crossbows firing off. The list goes on.
If you’re coming from Bloodborne or a later Souls title, Dark Souls Remastered may feel a bit stiff, mechanically speaking. But it’s really more about the later games being faster paced and less about Dark Souls emulating the feeling of hauling a boulder. You will adapt in no time. It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to get back to a more comfortable groove.
Also, for some reason, I was expecting the game to not feel that much more fluid running in 60 FPS compared to the original’s 30 FPS, despite the fact that 100% of action games are better off running in the former than the latter. Maybe I thought 60 FPS wouldn’t be able to “save” the slightly slower-paced combat? Fortunately, that’s not the case.
This is my first time experiencing this game in 60 FPS, you see. The previous PC version has a mod (DSFix) that lets you unlock the framerate, but I never bothered to try it after hearing about its bugs: you sometimes clip through the world as you descend ladders; your jump distance is slightly decreased; you sometimes get stuck at bonfires. Speedrunners have to switch the mod off in certain places to avoid the risk of ruining their run. It’s inelegant. Not to mention it doesn’t completely eliminate frame drops in the worst-performing areas of the game.
My attempt to re-acclimate to the feel of Dark Souls was met with a bit of roughness, but eventually I ended up steamrolling through a sizable chunk of the game.
The graphical changes are minute overall. Texture-wise, the remaster makes some areas look washed out, like there’s less contrast. It’s more evident in areas with foliage, any kind of greenery. Some stuff became more vibrant, though, like the color of a certain red dragon in a certain big bridge. If you’re an old player, you’ll stop noticing what little difference there is in no time. If you’re a new player, well, there’s not much else to say, really. It’s still just 2011-tier graphics, only slightly dressed up. It’s not mind-blowing but it’s adequate.
The effects shine brighter than the textures at least. Quite literally, at times. Fire, magic, lightning, blood. My favorite visual change. Light sources in particular are way more potent. There’s this spot in a later area that’s lined with cages, one containing a bonfire. In the original version, if you look at the cages from afar, it’s difficult to eyeball which cage houses the bonfire. In the remaster, the bonfire easily conveys its location because it now emits a pronounced orange glow. Nifty, but has little to no practical use. It is very gorgeous, though, especially the way light bounces off tiles.
I mentioned missed opportunities above but it’s not all that grim in the gameplay territory. They did implement some quality of life features, some of which were first introduced in Dark Souls III.
Firstly, if you hold down on your d-pad, you automatically cycle to the first thing in your item hotbar. This is useful if you want to quickly access a specific item, typically your Estus Flask, forgoing having to toggle one by one when looking for it during a pinch. It works for your spell hotbar too, which is up on the d-pad.
There’s another QoL change that involves the hotbar. In the original game, if you pick up a consumable that you’re only picking up for the first time, the game will auto-equip it to your item hotbar. This is particularly annoying for players who choose to equip only a few items at a time, usually in a preferred order. If something gets inserted in the middle of that, it messes with the number of taps they have to make to perform a deliberate selection. Sure, you can always just remove unwanted items, but that’s an added step for every new item you find. In Dark Souls Remastered, new pick-ups no longer auto-equip to the item hotbar.
Next one’s a massive time-saver: the game now lets you use multiple amounts of consumable souls, humanity, covenant items and the like, whereas in the original you can only pop one at a time. This option extends itself to when you’re offering items for covenants. One covenant is notorious for requiring 30 of a certain item to reach a certain rank. I need to emphasize how big a deal this is: in the original, for each offering you make, you have to sit through about a 5-second animation of your character offering the thing. Now, instead of having to do that 30 times, you do it once. Pair that with the fact that you can now change covenants at bonfires, instead of having to haul ass to specific locations, and you’re golden.
The remastered version also lets you scale the UI and remap your controls for every button, even on the console versions. If you’re a new player, you might want to remap your jump button to L3. Here’s why: by default, your jump button shares a slot with your sprint button. Doing a sprint requires you to hold the cancel button down, which you then have to quickly release and press again to execute a jump. That split second you let go of the button is enough to kill your momentum, making slightly trickier jumps difficult to pull off. Separating your jump button from your sprint button ensures you have max momentum on all your jumps.
An extra bonfire has been added next to a certain blacksmith, allowing for easier access later on. It’s quite a thoughtful change since this blacksmith is a pain to get to – and you will need to make return trips depending on your build.
It may not seem apparent at first, but there’s a lot of verticality in the general world design of Dark Souls.
Overall, if you’ve not played Dark Souls before, this is definitely the version to pick up. A solid, bug-free 60 FPS and a revived multiplayer player count are among the top reasons to choose this over any other version. The question then becomes platform. Reportedly, the console versions both perform similarly to the PC version – as they should be with how light the changes are. The PS4 version probably has the most number of players, while the PC version has that mod advantage, for added longevity down the line, but is currently plagued by cheaters, albeit rare. (If you missed the link above, there is now a mod that aims to sniff out cheaters and prevent you from losing progress from their actions.)
I bought Dark Souls Remastered on PC, on launch, and the most insulting thing about it is not the lack of security during online play – it almost is! The real culprit is this lazy-ass, squished game thumbnail on Steam. For some reason they forgot to make a proper thumbnail for List View. Grid View on the other hand displays it properly. Almost a metaphor for the remaster itself, methinks.
Top to bottom: Grid View thumbnail, List View thumbnail
Would I recommend Dark Souls Remastered? Let’s see:
8.8Overall8Presentation10Gameplay8.5Value