While PC gamers celebrate, Demon's Souls on the PS3 will rage one last time into the night.
Dark Souls, the spiritual successor of the surprise hit Demon’s Souls, has been lauded by many a gamer for its brutal and unforgiving difficulty – a feature that has separated the game from the more regular AAA fair that was released last year. It’s a game designed specifically for the hardcore gamer, but it hadn’t yet been able to call the most hardcore of platforms, the PC, home. That is, until now.
Namco Bandai has been persuaded in part by an online fan petition to bring Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition to the PC. This new edition of the game will land on store shelves on August 24, 2012 and will include a modified Player Vs. Player mode that will reportedly bring the would-be saviors of Lordran closer together by allowing players to “more closely assemble battles against one another online in an all-out fight to the death.”
As a little more added incentive, the PC edition will also include a brand-new chapter to the story called “Artorias of the Abyss.” This new chapter will expand the game world and will include everything that you’d expect in an expansion – new secrets to uncover, new baddies to combat and new bosses to get killed by over and over again.
There is no word at this time if any of this content will make its way to the console versions of the game via DLC, or if a special edition will soon be announced.
And in related news, the original death simulator for the PlayStation 3, Demon’s Souls, will be going dark at the end of May in North America.
At 11:59pm PST Atlus will officially pull the plug on the popular game that originally went live on October 6, 2009. Those that have been waiting to play the game for whatever reason should take some time to take it for a spin, but this does not mean that there’s a time limit on the game’s life as Atlus has indicated that the single-player portion of the game will remain unaffected.
Atlus wishes to send the old girl off with a bang and will host two World Tendency events in the game’s final month online – one from May 1-15 and another from May 16-31. These events will be determined by fan voting as they have been previously, such as was the case this past Valentine’s Day.
Feel free to share your experiences with both Dark and Demon’s Souls in the comments section below.
Press Release
Statement from ATLUS VP of sales and marketing Tim Pivnicny to Game Informer
On October 6, 2009, North American gamers’ expectations of what an online roleplaying experience could be were forever changed. With Demon’s Souls, gamers received a title of breathtaking scope and vision, a project built on experimental cooperative and competitive multiplayer concepts, offering users both direct and indirect methods of communication and interaction. Elements of every connected player’s single player world carried into the worlds of others, sometimes as nothing more than an echo or afterimage, and other times in the form of an alliance or invasion. With countless hazards to memorize and plan for spread across each of the game’s sprawling dozen-plus worlds, the ability for players to leave hints—or, potentially, deceptions—and to view the final moments of other adventurers’ lives, created an unprecedented form of RPG crowd-sourcing that remains revolutionary to this day.
When subtle interactions were insufficient assistance, players could call across dimensions for assistance, pulling the weakened spirit forms of other adventurers—unable to communicate using conventional voice chat in order to preserve the game’s intense atmosphere—into their worlds to help them defeat the game’s unforgettable boss monsters. Other less altruistic spirit form users could invade the world of living adventurers and try to revive themselves by quite literally stealing that life from another. All of these online elements, all of the ways in which gamers would interact with each other, served to enhance and complement the core game and were designed so as to neither diminish nor distract from the experience and thrill of simply playing the game.
It has been a tremendous honor and privilege for all of our staff at ATLUS to have been involved with so innovative and groundbreaking an interactive entertainment experience. We poured our heart and soul into every facet of our involvement with Demon’s Souls, particularly the title’s memorable Deluxe Edition, which served as the only avenue through which to purchase the game’s official strategy guide. It was also of the utmost importance for us to sustain the game’s online experience as long as possible, even beyond the point at which sales could help to offset the expense. Regrettably, the online servers cannot be sustained forever and now the end draws near.
Thank you to the unparalleled passion and support of the Demon’s Souls community throughout these last two and a half years. The online adventure may end soon, but the memory of it—just like that of every boss strategy, every level floor plan, and hidden secret—lives on in the gamers for whom the game was so special.
Long live Boletaria!
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