Some UK and Nordic customers who purchased boxed retail copies of Dead Island: Riptide for PC have found that the Steam codes they’ve been asked to activate actually end up redeeming them copies of Dark Souls instead.

The printing mix-up has been explained on the Steam forums by Deep Silver’s community manager, who said that “Dark Souls is an amazing game, but you probably bought Dead Island Riptide to play Dead Island Riptide! For those of you who don’t know this, Dark Souls is also not a Deep Silver game.”

“We are aware of this mixup by whoever printed these codes for a completely different game from a different publisher, and are working on a best possible solution to help affected players and retailers.”

If you’ve purchased a boxed retail copy of Dead Island: Riptide from the UK to save on unfair Australian price-gouging, and this happens to you, contact Steam Support and you’ll be given the correct game.

Meanwhile, we reviewed Dead Island: Riptide and called it “boring, by-the-numbers, fan service”. Read the full review here.

Source: MCV

In the finest tradition of PC gaming, some enterprising wizards have modded Dark Souls to fix one of its most annoying problems: namely, that it would rather summon complete strangers into your world than actual friends.

Now, thanks to the Dark Souls Connectivity Fix, “direct connections to friends are established right away, whereas in vanilla Dark Souls this only happens after the first successful summon or invasion (if you were even lucky to get that far).”

“This greatly reduces the time required to summon a friend, with typical wait times of about a few seconds.”

How does it work? “It is an interception DLL intended to be used with DSfix and functions by adding any online GFWL friends to your P2P connection pool before searching for random peers.” So — magic, like I said.

You can find the download links and all the other info right here.

Source: PC Gamer

You know what I love? Grinding. Sometimes. It depends on the game, obviously, but I don’t think grinding is as inherently bad as we often make it out to be. Repetitive tasks can be enjoyable and relaxing. They can be meaningful in and of themselves, not just for the promise of a reward. Sometimes the fun is in the process.

Those gameplay activities we call grinding are usually those that ask us to repeat the same actions over and over for some small, incremental reward that will allow us to keep repeating that same action for a little bit longer for another small, incremental reward. Usually, it’s the role-playing games that most often get called out for grinding. The player is often expected to run around in circles for hours to farm experience points and money before moving on. But then enemies get rougher, gear gets more expensive, and you have to run around in circles all over again.

It’s a carrot on a stick, dangled in front of the player: a promised reward delayed. We’ve seen grinding embraced and abused by free-to-play models, with games made deliberately grindy and monotonous, and then the player is given the option to spend money to cut straight to the reward. Such pay-to-not-play models clearly use grinding in an exploitative way, but I’m not sure grinding itself is inherently evil.

If grinding is fundamentally bad because it persistently puts off rewarding the player for their actions, then that implies that we do things in games for the reward, not for the process of playing itself. But why do we need to be rewarded? As long as we are happy to do a repetitive task simply because we find enjoyable in and of itself, is that bad? Sometimes it can be relaxing and therapeutic and, well, fun, to just mindlessly do the same things over again. Sometimes, grinding is exactly what I want to do.

Borderlands is often accused of being a grind, with its infinite guns acting less as coveted treasures and more a constant stream of ultimately forgettable rewards. For me, though, the constant new weapons aren’t shiny, material rewards I want to hoard. Rather, they are variations, for a time, on what I can do. I enjoy constantly doing the same things over and over in Borderlands because that ‘same thing’ has a different flavour to it every time I pull out a new weapon. I don’t enjoy the reward of obtaining new weapons; I enjoy the process of using them. It’s the grind itself that is the reward in Borderlands.

Another game that makes grinding feel good is Dark Souls. To be sure, once you know what you are doing in Dark Souls, once you know where to go, you don’t really have to grind at all. But newcomers (myself included) will often spend hours going up and down the same paths, as much to farm souls as because we are unsure what way we should actually go next. Yet, going up and down the same few paths over and over again in Dark Souls never really feels repetitive or empty. I think it is because of how the game-world treats time. Somehow, I always feel like I am progressing, even if I am killed and lose thousands of souls. I still feel like I’ve learned something, and I still have all the items you picked up.

In Dark Souls, you’re never not progressing. Not just because it is literally impossible to pause the game, but because as you improve your character by grinding you are also improving yourself as a player. By grinding in Dark Souls, I have intimately learned how to use my different abilities—when to block, when to parry, when to strike. As I grind, I feel like I obtain real-world skills. Grinding in Dark Souls is itself a real reward.

But, by far, the game that I’ve most enjoyed grinding in of late is Little Inferno. Little Inferno is clearly meant as a very cynical and self-aware satire of mindless, grinding gameplay, and of micro-transactions and casual game design generally. The whole games takes place in front of a fireplace. The player buys toys and other worldly objects and throws them into the fireplace to watch them burn. These objects drop money as they burn, so the player can buy more more toys to burn.

It’s a deliberately empty endeavour. The game explicitly says, at one point, “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace was designed to not matter”. The game is trying to say that this kind of repetitive gameplay is meaningless, that you never really gain anything by burning everything to ash. You can go for as long as you want, but you have nothing to show for it. This kind of gameplay doesn’t reward you, it steals your rewards away.

But the thing is, burning stuff in Little Inferno is really, really enjoyable. More enjoyable, I dare say, than simply hoarding the game’s rewards ever would be. More than the emptiness of just sitting in our lounge rooms, looking at our televisions or fireplaces, burning time or possessions, Little Inferno shows us how to liberate ourselves from the need to hoard possession. Sometimes, the process is meaningful in itself.

And that’s why I love grinding when it is implemented in the right way. More than a carrot on a stick, it show me that I don’t need a carrot at all to just enjoy the walk. Grinding can be (and often is) used poorly in games, asking the players to repeat themselves over and over for some kind of reward later on. But in some games, the process of grinding itself is meaningful. I enjoy grinding in these games not because of what I will the game’s promised I will get later, but because the repetitive acts themselves and the time I spend doing them feels meaningful. Sometimes I just want to watch things burn.

When you played Dark Souls, what starting “gift” did you choose? Was it the pendant, its mystery and allure drawing you in like no other item on the list? If it was, you wouldn’t be the only one.

For thirteen months fans have been asking each other, “What is this?! What does it do?!” There are over 1500 words devoted to speculation as to its power on the Dark Souls wiki. Up to now, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Dark Souls‘ game director, has been silent as to its mysterious power. But he has come forward at last to let you in on the pendant’s secret.

The item’s description reads, “Trinket. No effect, but fond memories comfort travellers.” Mysterious! Or is it? Despite being at the center of every conspiracy theory Dark Souls has ever seen, the pendant really, truly has no effect whatsoever.

“When it comes to the pendant, I actually had a little bit of an intention to play a prank.” Miyazaki told IGN.

Well! I guess we can all go home.

Source: IGN

Mere short weeks after enterprising modders fixed Dark Souls’ internal resolution issues, another modder appears to be making headway on the games’ locked frame rate.

Posting in the comments of the site hosting the resolution fix, a user name Nwks claims that they’ve made progress on getting the game to run at 60FPS without any weird animation bugs, but that it — for the moment, at least — only works in offline mode. Also, it might horribly break your game, so use at your own risk.

Nwks offers this MediaFire link as a download, so if you’re feeling adventurous and being locked at 30FPS is causing your eyes to bleed, why not take a look? Commenters are reporting that it generally works in most areas, but is causing some severe frame drops in others.

Source: DSO Gaming

In an interview published last week, director Hidetaka Miyazaki astonished and outraged fans with a suggestion that he might add an “easy mode” to Dark Souls, a game designed solely not to be easy. Namco Bandai got in touch with Metro, which posted the original interview, to explain that Miyzaki had been mistranslated, and to offer a correction. Apparently, when asked about the RPG’s reputation as being almost impossible for more casual players, Miyazaki actually said:

“It is true that Dark Souls is rather difficult and a number of people may hesitate to play. This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about how to make everyone complete the game while maintaining the current difficulty and carefully send all gamers the messages behind it.”

The original translation which caused all the fuss read:

“This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about whether I should prepare another difficulty that everyone can complete or carefully send all gamers the messages behind our difficult games.”

“This revision has been made in order to inform Miyazaki-san’s true intention and what has been originally posted had a mistake because of mistranslation,” Namco Bandai said.

Source: Metro

A child throwing tantrums, and throwing controllers even harder; a teenager thinking they’re invincible to everything around them; a hurried adult stubborn in repetition.

These are the many faces of Dark Souls‘ frustration.

Yet Dark Souls is always cruel to be kind: pick up the sword and the shield that it offers you and you can fight those inner demons, because without them this would all be too easy. Minutes in and you’re that child – cursing your fate and the monsters who have killed you. Progress further and you’re that teenager – five minutes of unabated progress and enemies falling to your sword. Nothing can stop you now. Look at you go.

And finally you’re that adult. Progress halted through stubborn repetition, whisked through a waterfall of emotions in this fast-forward evolution, until you reach your stumbling block, falling again and again and never truly seeing why, because you’re not sure what to look for.

The enemy within

To truly progress you’ll have to cast them aside: defeat those inner demons that are holding you back. For all the heralding of Dark Souls as the judge, jury and executioner, you are your own worst enemy within its realm of Lordan. Even more so than the giant creatures that you stare at with a morbid curiosity, entranced by their appearance as they crumple you under their hammer/mace/finger for the umpteenth time, casting you aside like a feather in the wind.

You feel angry because this is unexpected: years of gaming past have taught you, trained you, for this, but that experience does you no good here. In fact it only hinders you, as Dark Souls doesn’t play by your rules, and the quicker you’re able to adapt the quicker you’ll be on your way. Whether you cast flames or cast aside bodies with the sharp edge of a sword, the enemy is always the same: your exuberant mind and your inexperienced fingers.

So Dark Souls, then, is a game to be learned. To be observed and studied. A rare beast in this industry where there are always so many hands grasping out to you in the dark, leading you along the merry path to “Well done, you… did it?”.

Order in the chaos

Stare long enough and you see that there’s some method to this madness. Everything here has a purpose, even if most of those purposes all point in your direction with poison-tipped darts. Walk, swing a sword, block with a shield – you see that every decision is a commitment, and not one to be taken lightly.

Die once, and you lose the souls you’ve collected from your journey so far. Die again on the journey back to your body to reclaim them, and they’re gone for good. “No worries,” some might think, but you’ll be less relaxed when you find souls act as your currency for both items and levelling, spent at bonfires that litter the environment like beacons of hope kindled in the dark. But even they stab you in the back as they comfort you with their warmth, reincarnating every enemy you’ve faced along the way. Dark Souls is less executioner, more a sick necromancer, never letting you truly die and escape this world. You will die again. And again. And again.

You’ll die until Dark Souls finally holds a mirror up to you and shows you that you’ve been fighting with yourself all along.

So now you finally see it, no longer faced with mistimed swings. Instead they’re replaced by a pin point riposte. A parry. A lunge. A slash and a stab. Fumbling fingers soon learn their place, like a Starcraft veteran hovering over hotkeys or a Street Fighter superstar, playing their part in rhythmic synchronicity, and you see Dark Souls’ combat for what it truly is: a fine ballet.

The mystery ruined

It’s that skill you need to traverse Lordan, in what is a world whose intrigue has worn away with the passage of time. The great discoveries took place when Dark Souls first saw the light of day on consoles, when the inexperienced were thrown in like guinea pigs to test the toxic waters. Now innumerable wikis and FAQs lay bare those secrets, and friends are only too eager to offer advice, and while it may be hard, it would be wise to shun them in favour of the first time experience.

Because Lordan is a world worth experiencing blind, traversed easier once your fingers have learned what they’re meant to be doing and can guide you through not unchallenged but more capably. You’ll wind your way through the interconnected labyrinth, twisting in every which direction before twisting back on yourself, more directed and detailed than its semi open world title may let on.

It’s a world that only makes heavier your heart in the worst of times, and at others provides a sweeping vista to lift your spirits. A world that feels tired, worn even, not lived in but bled for, left to decay. Hiding secrets in every corner, connected via halls, forests and castles all built for the sole purpose of carrying the echo of your footsteps to your ears and making you run that little bit faster.

It’s a world recreated pixel-for-pixel in its PC debut, awakening the demons in the very community that asked for it. Contrasting outrage and joy. Dark Souls is always the experience of dual emotions.

The PC experience

From’s openness in their struggles with the movement of their land of Lordan to the PC carried similarities of every cry for help from those locked within its lands. And it’s fitting, then, in a game where community is the only real thing that gets you through — summoning fellow players to help you slay those demons that halt your progress — that the Dark Souls community stepped up to the plate to help From take those last few steps.

With a simple patch — no larger than 150KB – they’ve taken Dark Souls from a recreation and turned it into a release worthy of the platform. It may not be feature rich, but then Dark Souls is never the game of extravagancy. It asks you to be utilitarian. Lightweight. And its performance is no different.

A barely serviceable keyboard and mouse scheme aside, there are no noticeable bugs here. None of the crashes that plagued the console version. No more of that dreadful Blighttown lag or awkward responsiveness. Dark Souls’ performance is perhaps the only reliable thing you can latch onto amidst the dark, and it brings you closer than ever to apologizing for being just so mad at its dreadful console performance.

Old veterans returned

For those who are awakening to Lordan for the second time, the clarity is both awe-inspiring and at the same time a little bit iconoclastic — but look a little deeper, with learned eyes, and you see Dark Souls still has something to say. A chance to bend it to your will, perhaps. To test its bounds. And a familiarity that can bite: you’re ever your own worst enemy.

And for those just awaking, who are haunted by their own demons, you couldn’t have chosen a better time to join the hollow undead. For once all the cards are in your favour. You’ll have a newfound clarity some of us never had the first time around, and those creatures you face will be all the more horrifying for it.

One day, perhaps, you will defeat those inner demons holding you from Dark Souls success. Not mastery, but a control of yourself you never knew you had, because no one can ever truly tame Lordan and the monsters that reside there. The best you can ever do is say “I Defeated”, and that, truly, is the one and only face of Dark Souls joy.

Good:

• Rewards those willing to learn
• A twisted fantasy world that stands tall in a genre full of dragons and elves
• An otherwise stable and bug-free PC release
• Extra content leaves this release as the most feature complete, best performing version of the game to date

Bad:

• Keyboard & mouse support may as well be non-existent
• Requires a community patch to achieve acceptable visuals
• Pre-patch resolution is blurry and annoying

The director of Dark Souls has admitted in an interview that the game’s difficulty has been one of its biggest hurdles in getting people to even try it. “..it is true that Dark Souls is rather difficult and a number of people may hesitate to play,” said Hidetaka Miyazaki to Metro.

“This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about whether I should prepare another difficulty that everyone can complete or carefully send all gamers the messages behind our difficult games.”

“However, I suppose gamers do not particularly prefer easy games,” he says. “What they want is interesting and worthwhile games to play, so I think it is natural that hindrance or stress that does not attribute to such interesting and worthwhile elements will be removed in the end.”

In the same interview, Miyazaki mentions how flattered he is that Cliffy B wants to emulate Dark Souls, and that “the petition campaign (for a PC version) was absolutely a big surprise for us. I believe that the petition was one of the main factors that we finally determine on creating the PC version”.

Source: Metro (via VG247)

Modder Durante has fixed what he considers the “last huge bug” of the mod to solve Dark Souls internal resolution issues on PC. Version 0.4, which can be downloaded here, fixes the depth-of-field effect in the game, as well as adding an .ini setting to override the resolution on the depth-of-field effect.

“I also provide the option to completely disable DoF scaling,” writes Durante. “However, I don’t recommend that. I think the game looks better with DoF, and it’s the way From Software intended it. Also, disabling the DoF this way may actually reduce performance.”

Durante’s mod has received widespread coverage since its announcement, but From Software or Namco Bandai are yet to make a comment on the issue.

Source: metaclassofnil (thanks, Mekon)

PC gamers rejoice – it seems that an enthusiastic modder has already created a workaround to fix the internal resolution issues which were limiting Dark Souls to 720p regardless of your monitor. A NeoGAF forum member by the name of Durante has posted this explanation showing some before and after screenshots, which links to this site as a place to download it from.

There are a few known issues including bad framerates with AMD cards, but presumably these will be ironed out soon. Meanwhile, Green Man Gaming have issued a statement on their recent refusal to sell the game to Australians, claiming that they “haven’t been able to reach an agreement regarding the specifics of this product”, and “as such we can’t currently sell Dark Souls in Australia and New Zealand”.

When games.on.net asked them why Dark Souls was sold to us prior to having an agreement in place, their community manager responded with “It shouldn’t have been. But anyone who bought it during that time will still receive their copy.”

Source: Thanks, Jambo

On July 26, we learned that Dark Souls had had another $30 mysteriously added to the Steam price if you were unfortunate enough to be an Australian. Many of our users recommended, and we later endorsed, the purchase of the game through Green Man Gaming instead, where it was a very reasonable $39.99.

Now, clicking the link above gets you an Error 404, and searching for “Dark Souls” gets you no result. Overseas users however, as confirmed by proxy, are still able to purchase Dark Souls for $39.99 through the site. It seems as though Green Man Gaming has either blocked access to Dark Souls for Australians (presumably at the request of the publisher), or accidentally de-listed it — we’ve reached out to them for comment and will let you know what is happening.

Update: Green Man Gaming are confirming on Facebook that users who have already purchased the game through them will receive their keys. Thanks, Eggheart!

I loved Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64. I must have sunk hundreds of hours into that game, replaying the single player, doing the co-op, sharing a couch with three mates well into the small hours of the school holidays. But there was this section — in Area 51 Infiltration, to be exact — where the frame rate would just die when you exploded a sentry bot. The game could not handle smoke from explosions at all. Walking through it caused the console to become a slideshow.

They shipped the game anyway and, hell, I had a good time. But when the game was re-mastered for the Xbox 360 and re-released on Xbox LIVE, those frame-rate problems were gone. The games’ ugly models were cleaned up. The textures were crisp and sharp.

Imagine if they weren’t? Imagine if Rare and Microsoft just released the game exactly as it was the first time around. Imagine how hilariously redundant that would be, using the power of your new Xbox 360 to run a game that barely needed it. Why, I imagine that if that happened, anybody who shelled out for the re-release would be pretty mad.

It’s not exactly rocket science

Dark Souls is coming to PC, following a successful petition by gamers everywhere to bring it over from console. Unfortunately, we’ve recently learned that it will be locked to 30FPS and a 720p resolution. The news has upset more than a few PC gamers, but it’s also caused a lot of people to claim that those upset gamers are being unreasonable.

Well, no. They’re not. You see, if you spend more money, you expect a better result. This is how capitalism works.

If you shell out for a home theatre system, you expect to get better picture quality. If you go all out on a nice pair of Sennheisers, you expect the sound to be fantastic.

If you drop a couple thousand dollars on a top-of-the-line gaming computer, you expect a top-of-the-line gaming experience, that makes the best use of your new hardware. Right? Because this is how capitalism works.

Wasted money, wasted potential

Conversely, if I purchase a blu-ray disc only to find that it’s locked to standard definition and thus looks like crap on my new home theatre, I’ll be pissed. If I grab a new album from my favourite band only to find that the CD has been encoded at a bitrate no better than I’d get if somebody played it to me down the phone, I’d be furious.

And who would gainsay me? Nobody. Nobody would think twice: you’d be well within your rights to be upset about a total failure to utilise the potential of a media platform, especially since you shelled out all of that money to set it up.

But for some reason, if you get frustrated that a game developer releases a PC game with a locked FPS and resolution, you’re being completely unreasonable, and probably a PC elitist to boot. Right?

Well, bollocks to that.

I just spent a lot of money on a new computer. Intel i7 3820, GeForce 670, 16 GB RAM, SSD, the works. I’m pretty happy with it, thanks for asking. It spits out Hitman at a silky-smooth 65 FPS, and I’m sure Square Enix won’t mind me telling you that Sleeping Dogs looks amazing with HD textures cranked on and world density set to maximum, streaming out to my loungeroom TV at full 1080p. It runs Crysis like it was Pac-Man.

This is why I buy the things I buy: because I expect — quite reasonably — that games will look better if I spend the money to give them an environment in which to do so.

It’s not okay to say we should “just be happy that it’s coming to PC”. Implicit in the request for developers to bring their game to PC is the understanding that they’ll try their best to take advantage of the power of the PC platform because that power is what the platform is all about. It is somewhat naive to think PC gamers, who by their very nature are more financially invested than their console counterparts, won’t be annoyed when it’s revealed that their money is going to waste.

If you petitioned a movie studio to bring an old 1980′s movie to blu-ray and, when they finally did, you found that it was actually just an upscaled version of the original rather than being remastered to HD, you’d be mad, right? You wouldn’t say “Oh well, at least I got it in blu-ray! I’m thankful for that.” You’d say “Uhhh, okay. Why would I even buy it on blu-ray? I’ll just buy the original.”

That’s exactly what’s on offer here. No, it’s not unreasonable to be annoyed about this. And writing it off as “PC elitism” is not cool, either.

But there’s no need to be a dick about it

It’s great that Namco Bandai are bringing the game to PC, and it’s great that it’s being exposed to a new audience, especially one that likes to paint itself as the hardest of core. It’s also highly commendable of From Software to be so upfront about their problems bringing the game over. Many developers fail to mention it completely, and you only find out later when outraged forum posts start flooding the internet.

If you’re the sort of person whose purchase hinges around this, then you now have that information. You should be thankful that you knew before, and not after you’d just dropped $70 on it. That’s great, too.

It’s not great to start flinging names around and acting as if Namco Bandai personally came to your house and pooped in your letterbox. So if you could just stop doing that, I’d appreciate it. You make us all look bad.

Seriously, stop it.

It’s not the end of the world. Dark Souls will still be playable, still fun, and — as countless Game of the Year awards will attest — still an amazing game. It’s even had some of those cripplingly bad lag problems tidied up, if this Eurogamer preview is anything to go by.

In fact, I would suggest you think about buying the game anyway. I know that we’re getting massively and inexplicably price-gouged, but maybe it’s worth it.

Take one for the team

PC gamers, we are a secondary market. It’s sad, but it’s true. Consoles are the target platform now, and they’re probably going to be that way for a while to come. Many publishers are already abandoning the PC as a platform, citing concerns with piracy, or development costs. From Software have — in what is a highly commendable step — taken the time to bring this game to PC, purely because of consumer demand. Make no mistake: other publishers are watching this. They’re looking at this to see how it goes down.

This is why, if you support PC gaming, and especially if you’re one of the people who actually signed the petition, you should do the right thing and buy the game. If the game sells well, it’ll encourage other publishers to think about doing the same. It might convince more publishers to take their games to our favourite platform, and, hopefully, they’ll take the time to properly optimise them.

If it sells badly, it’s just yet another nail in the coffin of publisher confidence in the platform. And that’s the last thing we need.

Before you argue that supporting a straight, unoptimised port is just encouraging poor games, stop for a second and consider: there’s no nuance here. There’s no room for qualification. Don’t think that publishers will see poor sales figures and think “Well, that’s what happens when we don’t optimise our games for PC! Maybe we’ll optimise next time.” You’re kidding yourself. Poor sales figures on PC are poor sales figures on PC, end of story. They could very well have repercussions that make it even harder than it is to be a PC gamer.

This is a tipping point. We owe it to ourselves as PC gamers to be supportive, mature, and calm the face of belittling comments about our optimisation concerns.

There’s no excuse for paying Australian Steam prices, though. Green Man Gaming has it for $39.99, which is a very reasonable amount and only slightly less than you’d pay for the console version.

Pretty soon after it was announced that Dark Souls was coming to the PC, it was also made public that developers From Software were having technical issues with the port – and weren’t altogether experienced with this sort of thing anyway. Unfortunately, it looks as though those issues are going to have a real impact on the playability of the game at release.

Eurogamer got a look at it recently, and said there were still a few complaints. The game’s rough edges have been filed somewhat, but the frame-rate has been capped at 30FPS. The graphical options in general leave a lot to be desired, with an on/off switch for both anti-aliasing and motion blur. Most strangely, Dark Souls appears to use the same 1024×720 internal framebuffer as console versions, regardless of the resolution you pick in the menus – meaning while it’ll play on most monitors, the image quality will remain the same.

Hopefully either the modding community can fix some of these black marks, or From Software are very swift at listening to player feedback, and fix it up themselves. Pleasingly though, Eurogamer’s preview mentions that frame rate issues with areas like Blight Town – a common complaint on the console version – appear to have been solved.

Source: Eurogamer

Twitter user Sean Gabriel just pointed out to us that the Steam price for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition has almost doubled today, going up from $39.95 to the new price of $69.95. No reason was given for the change, and international prices remain unchanged with US players paying $39.99 for their copies. We’ve contacted NamcoBandai for an explanation and will let you know what we learn.

Source: @suibriel

From Software underestimated the time it would take to port Dark Souls to PC, Producer Daisuke Uchiyama revealed. “Because we wanted to get the PC version out as soon as possible, it’s more strictly a port from the console version,” Uchiyama said. “We haven’t been able to step up into doing any specific optimisation for PC.”

Uchiyama also apolgised for frame rate problems in areas like Blighttown, but mentioned that these will not be fixed in the PC version. “In Japan there’s not much of a PC market and we haven’t really taken into consideration that audience before. That’s one of the reasons why we haven’t been able to step up on the PC platform until now.”

Source: Eurogamer

The upcoming PC edition of the famously grueling Dark Souls will be coming to Steam, Namco Bandai have revealed. Launching on August 24, the version will come with extra areas, boss types, NPC’s and more, which will be made retrospectively available to console owners of the original game as the ‘Artorias of the Abyss’ DLC, priced at 1200 MS points on 360 or USD $14.99 on PS3.

Source: VG247 (thanks to PinothyJ for the tip)