Dark Souls fans who woke up yesterday morning were greeted with a welcome surprise: the PC version of Dark Souls Remastered, originally scheduled to launch today alongside its PlayStation 4 and Xbox One brethren, had arrived a full 24 hours early, with its newly revamped version of Blighttown and everything. However, the happiness that the early launch caused soon soured into frustration and disappointment as those same fans logged into the newly remastered game to discover a world already infested with hackers.
Those who visit the official Steam page for Dark Souls Remastered will see that the game already has a “mixed” aggregate of user-submitted reviews, meaning there are about as many negative reviews as positive. Most of the negative reviews are from users who take umbrage with the fact that new players are paying $40 for what amounts to a few minor technical and graphical upgrades (those who own the original Dark Souls PC release, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, can upgrade to the remaster for $20). It’s a valid complaint, though other user reviews rightly point out that implementing those upgrades while also porting the game over to current-gen consoles likely wasn’t cheap.
The second major issue that fans have is that trying to play Dark Souls Remastered online is an effort in futility since there’s a rampant issue of cheaters and hackers using third-party programs to gain an unfair advantage and, worse, invade the games of innocent players and get them soft-banned. From Software is known for not implementing very strict anti-cheat measures for the Dark Souls series, so many fans are already resigned to believing that such will also be the case with Dark Souls Remastered.
As of this writing, neither From Software nor publisher Bandai Namco have responded to the cheater issue, though hopefully they have plans to sort it out sooner rather than later. In the meantime, if you want to avoid cheaters, you might be better off playing Dark Souls Remastered on PS4 or Xbox One. Along with the above platforms, Bandai Namco also plans to bring Dark Souls Remastered to the Nintendo Switch later this summer.