While FromSoftware's action-RPGs are primarily single player experiences, there are plenty of multiplayer features in games like Elden Ring and Dark Souls. If a boss is proving too hard, a player can summon in a co-op partner for support. Or, if a player wants the challenge of PvP, they can take part in what Dark Souls terms an invasion, where one user finds themselves in another's world, inevitably resulting in a duel to the death. However, for months now, players on PC have been unable to access the multiplayer for the Dark Souls games.
While Elden Ring's multiplayer has remained up, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, and 3 have all seen their online servers shut down, rendering the older titles without some important features. When this first occurred, many were worried, especially when neither Bandai Namco nor FromSoftware commented on the situation. Now, some months after players first noticed they couldn't access online features, Dark Souls 3's multiplayer has been restored.
The news was announced on the official Dark Souls Twitter account, which stated that the online features for the PC version of Dark Souls 3 had been reactivated. While this is a positive update on the situation, and it has calmed fans who were worried multiplayer would be removed from Dark Souls altogether, but the issues are still persisting in the series' other titles. In the same Twitter post, FromSoftware clarified that it is still working on restoring online features to Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, both of which also suffered from similar issues with multiplayer.
The process of fixing the Dark Souls multiplayer began early in 2022, when FromSoftware discovered that there had been a security breach in the game's servers. This was tied to an exploit found in Dark Souls 3, and once it was discovered, FromSoftware shut down the multiplayer features for the entire trilogy of games. After a month or so of silence, the developer finally updated fans on what was going on in February of this year, and has steadily informed players of how the process of fixing the online features was going.
Hopefully, with Dark Souls 3 multiplayer returning, fans can hope to see a fix to the online features for the other two games soon as well. However, with Elden Ring still receiving consistent patches and fixes, it seems that FromSoftware is hard at work to ensure its latest release is kept up to date. This means that fixing the multiplayer features for games that released in 2011 and 2014 might not be at the top of the priority list right now.
Dark Souls 3 is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.