From Software It's another Demon's Souls thread god damnit

[TC Jr]

Any chance of them ever releasing this on PC? Would love to play through it again but can't be fucked setting up the PS3.

 

[Villagkouras]

From what I hear it's playable on pc depending on your system via rpcs3

 

[Vorark]

Demon's Souls Shuts Down Online Servers Soon, Losing Multiplayer And More

Don't worry, they'll release a PS4 remaster with full online functionality. After PS5 is released, they'll turn the servers down once more, so you get to buy the PS5 remaster.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Any chance of them ever releasing this on PC? Would love to play through it again but can't be fucked setting up the PS3.

Sony paid From Software for Demon's Souls to be an exclusive on the PS3 (and also to own the IP), so sadly it will likely never be ported to the PC.

Though, as mentioned above, it isn't impossible to play Demon's Souls on a PC.

 

[TC Jr]

Cheers for the responses, yeah I'll just sack it then, got DoS2 on this so I'll play through that, Demon's was my favourite.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

How one enterprising fan brought Demon's Souls back to life

Last month, From Software's Demon's Souls suffered the cruellest death of all, its servers going offline nine years after the game's initial release. No longer could players invade each other, or help wayward newcomers best one of the kingdom of Boletaria's famous roadblocks. But while everyone else was readying their chisels to etch their epitaph onto the remains of the game, one dedicated fan was putting the finishing touches on their own attempt at a revival.

Just two days after the servers went down, a thread popped up on the Demon's Souls subreddit detailing the efforts of a game preservationist who goes by the handle "ymgve". His ambition was simple, if bold: to set up a proof-of-concept private server with the same functionality as its official equivalent. And it works - having proven the concept, ymgve released the source code as open-source to the rest of the community, and it only took a short time for another community member, "Yuvi," to set up a more permanent solution. Now, simply by adjusting your PS3's DNS settings, you can experience the full Demon's Souls of old, complete with duels, jolly cooperation, and the enigmatic "World Tendency" system - albeit with reduced player counts, at least for the time being.

For his part, ymgve describes the process of backward-engineering the tech that powers the server as surprisingly straightforward. "The project started last year, shortly after From announced the servers would close," he says. "A day or two in, it seemed pretty clear that it was possible, but the final push into creating a fully working server didn't happen before the week of the shutdown. The first step was playing the game and capturing all network traffic generated during play. It turns out all the communication uses HTTP, instead of the more secure HTTPS, so it was easy to get the raw data."

It was here where ymgve ran into his first major obstacle. The chatter from the console to the server was encrypted, but he managed to find the encryption key inside of the game executable with the help of a friend familiar with the network traffic. "With the raw traffic in both directions, I wrote a proxy program that forwarded traffic from and to the real servers, and got the game communicating with the proxy instead. When that worked well, I created a 'bare-bones' server that just sent placeholder data, and that eventually evolved into the current server."

When ymgve revealed the server to the world, the response was immediate and overwhelming, with the announcement quickly gaining traction on Demon's Souls' subreddit. Still, as he expected, the population has proven rather meager so far, with his test serving topping out at 31 simultaneous players, indicating that it was a rather niche undertaking, even for a game as notorious as Demon's Souls. For him, though, it's more about the history than thrilling clashes between players: "I've got a small obsession with preserving digital data, and it feels great to have not just the game, but also the online parts living on. I'm not much of a multiplayer guy, so, personally, it was more important to have the world filled with messages and bloodstains, feeling like it did when the official servers were up. Those elements are part of what makes the Soulsborne games so unique to me."

Dipping back into the monolithic chambers of the Nexus for the first time in a half-decade, I can't help but agree with ymgve's assessment. After all, Boletaria is a lonesome-enough place already, filled to the brim with creaking skeletons brandishing broadswords, or screaming stingrays that rain death-bolts on you from far above. Even the occasional sentient beings that you run into possess their own secretive agendas, or charge you laughably-inflated prices for substandard goods. (Sadly, in this world-rending apocalypse, there isn't much in the way of a consumer-protection agency.) Dark Souls might boast the more fearsome reputation, but its predecessor truly exhibits what even the most masochistic gamers would call punitive design, hiding top-tier gear behind tiny loot-lizards with limited respawns, demanding that you bash your head against the same blackened skeleton for hours for a chance at a maxed-out Dex weapon, and stashing the hardest boss in the game behind a grumpy dragon that takes hundreds and hundreds of arrows to the dome to kill. More than any other game in the series, Demon's Souls needs those tiny points of light that tell you to go That Way, not The Other Way to help cut through the everlasting dark.

Despite the considerable amount of labor that he put into the project, once things are more settled ymgve intends to entrust the tech to the community alone. "I have no desire to be the administrator for a server on a more permanent basis," he says. "I've continued keeping it running for now, but eventually I will shut it down and tell the remaining players to use the other server instead. Anyone is free to create and run their own server. The code is very lightweight, so handling hundreds of players should be possible." For now, community member Yuvi has happily filled that role, setting up a dedicated server in the computer lab he keeps at home as part of his job. "I just want to mimic the experience of the real servers," Yuvi says. "Due to ymgve's great work, we have the ability to implement everything the original server had. This week, I started to implement the World Tendency changes, just like they used to for the original servers. The way I see it, the more people playing, the better."

 

[Elwro]

What exactly should I do on my PS3 to connect ?

 

[Perkel]

What exactly should I do on my PS3 to connect ?

Change DNS in internet options. Read article.

 

[Delterius]

 

[Silva]

Demon's Soul Remaster NOW!

 

[Socur Toxanarosa]

Demon's Souls just need a resolution bump and 60FPS, the game still has the best atmosphere of the series by far and maybe of any game ever.

 

[sullynathan]

but why would you want to play Demon's souls online? soul tendency is still broken and glitched and not many people are playing it

 

[Vorark]

Demon's Soul Remaster NOW!

This is the one game I wouldn't mind a proper remaster. Could add Nier to the list too.

 

[cvv]

Demon's Souls just need a resolution bump and 60FPS, the game still has the best atmosphere of the series by far and maybe of any game ever.

DeS doesn't have any downright bad areas like DS1 but it'd probably need a whole new engine by this point. And the same QoL improvements we wanted for DS1 - a total UI rehaul, respec, mutliple item use etc. Plus I personally would love From do something drastic with the tendency system. Either totally change it or at least scrap the online functionality so that people can manipulate it online in the same way they do offline.

Ofc none of that will ever happen since DS1 is infinitely more popular and commercially successful and they still put only the bare minimum effort into the remaster bc anything more would be too expensive to pay for itself (or so they probably thought).

 

[Elwro]

Why play online? The tendency system is ridiculously bad, but duels are great fun (And only in DeS did people thank me by private messages for helping with Flamelurker and Maneater )

 

[praetor]

Why play online? The tendency system is ridiculously bad, but duels are great fun (And only in DeS did people thank me by private messages for helping with Flamelurker and Maneater )

eh. duels are the worst in the series, by far. the most amount of obnoxious exploits (running firestorm says hello), backstab fishing as bad as DaS (if not worse), worst netcode (and thus lag/phantom hits/online hitboxes), least amount of viable builds, least weapon variety etc.

 

[Perkel]

but why would you want to play Demon's souls online? soul tendency is still broken and glitched and not many people are playing it

Because DS online is superior to rest of souls games as online works as part of single player experience first hand rather than being additional part of game some players choose to play. It echances your single player experience with enemies that can fight and kill you instead of creating some sperglords in fedoras.

 

[sullynathan]

but why would you want to play Demon's souls online? soul tendency is still broken and glitched and not many people are playing it

Because DS online is superior to rest of souls games as online works as part of single player experience first hand rather than being additional part of game some players choose to play. It echances your single player experience with enemies that can fight and kill you instead of creating some sperglords in fedoras.

did you even play demons souls?

 

[Perkel]

did you even play demons souls?

Yeah back when most of codex ignored it because it was consoletard game at release.
It is a shame that initial online concept devolved into current online.

 

[sullynathan]

did you even play demons souls?

Yeah back when most of codex ignored it because it was consoletard game at release.
It is a shame that initial online concept devolved into current online.

how the hell did you come to the conclusion that it's online was superior to the rest?

 

[Perkel]

did you even play demons souls?

Yeah back when most of codex ignored it because it was consoletard game at release.
It is a shame that initial online concept devolved into current online.

how the hell did you come to the conclusion that it's online was superior to the rest?

Because served as part of single player experience rather than being shitty fedora duelists all around fagging about no use of estus flasks and other shit which is common these days.

Back on release when you found red phantom you could only expect getting hurt because there were almost no faggots who would proudly duel you instead of being very hard blockade you had to breach like developers intended.
Same reason why people were summoned to fight with yellow turban head.

While other souls games still have some single player enhancement it is clear that whole concept transformed to full on standard multiplayer pvp focus. Especially with DS2 and DS3 and BB.

Initial concept was that of GM which is bored looking at same game and throws firework into game to stir shit up to make game more interesting. You don't know how you will meet other players, maybe they will be boss maybe they will be just red phantoms etc. Which is why that concept was awesome.

Naturally instead of further enhancing single player content with multiplayer elements they instead started to look for more standard multplayer stuff.

And let's not forget that in DeS you don't have bonfires every 5 seconds so getting red phantom was huge thing as in case of death it probably meant you had to do whole level all over again.

 

[Arnust]

Literally the only difference is getting killed by Red Phantoms deleveling you, the Humanity restoring item being not as easy to come by (still can be farmed in hoards easy, it's just more contrived) and being generally shitier for all it's comcerned. All the rest of what you said is true for literally every title in the series. Bonfires hardly influence multiplayer because the areas will remain enclosed for as long as you have other players in the session. The only time this really changes is when in 2 you can "light" bonfires without resting to not get completely fucked over if that's the first time you're getting through the level (also makes the "no resting" challenge possible but I digress).

 

[cvv]

All the rest of what you said is true for literally every title in the series.

Yeah it made no sense. I guess Perkel gonna Perkel. He does have a point though about the bonfires tho. If you get at the end of Latria you have to go through all this shit again.

 

[Arnust]

It's also pretty contradicting to blame them for shifting the focus off the multiplayer experience... but then that's bad? It's not like you can blam From for the duel and honor meta (which again is a thing in DeS and reversely can be ignored safely in the others).

He does have a point though about the bonfires tho. If you get at the end of Latria you have to go through all this shit again.

That also means that you'll be wasting each other's time more trying to find one another or fleeing, the loser being sent back to the checkpoint and the winner probably hurt enough to need to do the same.

 

[cvv]

He does have a point though about the bonfires tho. If you get at the end of Latria you have to go through all this shit again.

That also means that you'll be wasting each other's time more trying to find one another or fleeing, the loser being sent back to the checkpoint and the winner probably hurt enough to need to do the same.

That's supposing the original PvP in DeS was straightforward, without twinkers, griefers, tryhards and people who only play PvP 24/7. Because in all Souls vast majority of invaders have always been people who blast through the game once and then only invade for the next few years, meaning an Average Joe is virtually always gonna get crushed. And I don't believe that for a minute. I'm 100% certain even in DeS there were PvP tryhards camping the spots before final bosses, griefing regular players and sending them back at the start. And if they lose 1 match out of 20 it's still more than worth it. That's exactly how it worked in DS1, 2 and 3.