Dark Souls 3’s Online Functionality On PC Has Been Restored

After the unexpectedly long wait time of seven months, online services for Dark Souls 3 on PC have been restored. Players can once again team up to fight the game’s many painfully challenging bosses or invade other players’ realms and fight each other. Dark Souls 3 is the latest iteration in the franchise, as well as the game that’s still most played on PC, so it makes sense why they fixed this one first, but certainly, many are still waiting for the online services to return on all three Dark Souls titles.

The official Dark Souls Twitter asserted that the team is aware of this, stating the developer is still working on restoring online functions for all games in the series. Online services were first removed back in January 2022 due to the discovery of a code vulnerability that put the security of participating players at risk; it was said to allow abusers to take control of other players’ computers. Bandai Namco, the game’s publisher, had previously stated that the deactivation was temporary and that the service would return, however, it had given no date nor any piece of substantial information until now.

It took from January to August for the online functions for Dark Souls 3 to return, so there’s no telling how long it’s going to take for the other titles. Yet again, no timeframe has been given, but many fans hope that whatever breakthrough that allowed for Dark Souls 3 to go back online, can be implemented for the other titles.

Dark Souls is the acclaimed third-person action series from Japanese studio FromSoftware, the developer of the more recent smash-hit Elden Ring. Though no Dark Souls title was ever the huge seller Elden Ring is, no one can deny the massive impact the franchise has had on the industry, re-invigorating interest in difficulty in games, and spawning its own sub-genre with the term ‘souls-like’.

Indeed, it is the Dark Souls gameplay that was used as the foundation of Elden Ring’s combat, the latter now widely considered a landmark in open-world games. Other well-known titles in the studio’s portfolio include the 2015 PlayStation exclusive Bloodborne, and 2019’s Game of the Year winner, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, published by Sony and Activision respectively.