Screenshot: Dark Souls 3
Dark Souls’ servers on PC will remain offline until after the February 25th release of Elden Ring, Bandai Namco and FromSoftware announced on Twitter. The game publisher and developer are also investigating the upcoming Elden Ring for the same issue that shut down Dark Souls: a remote code execution (RCE) exploit that could let bad actors infiltrate your system.
#DarkSouls pic.twitter.com/ZRhX9OcvQe
— Dark Souls (@DarkSoulsGame) February 9, 2022
“We want to thank the entire Dark Souls community and the players who have reached out to us directly to voice their concerns and offer solutions. Thanks to you, we have identified the cause and are working on fixing the issue,” Bandai Namco and FromSoftware said. “In addition, we have extended the investigation to Elden Ring — our upcoming title launching on February 25th — and have made sure the necessary security measures are in place for this title on all target platforms.”
The dangerous RCE vulnerability didn’t catch users’ — and Bandai Namco’s — attention until a Twitch streamer became a victim of the hack while livestreaming Dark Souls. His game crashed in the middle of his (now-deleted) stream, and a hacker appeared to hijack his computer’s text-to-speech generator to talk smack about his gameplay.
Fortunately, the hacker likely didn’t have malicious intent — a screenshotted post on Discord explains that the hacker discovered the exploit, and after receiving no response from Bandai Namco and FromSoftware about the issue, they started using it on Twitch streamers to get their attention. A community-made anti-cheat mod patched the exploit shortly after it was brought up in the Dark Souls community, but the game still wasn’t completely safe to play online.
Bandai Namco and FromSoftware later shut down the servers of all Dark Souls games on January 23rd, and now they’ll remain offline for at least another two weeks. “Due to the time required to set up proper testing environments, online services for the Dark Souls series on PC will not resume until after the release of Elden Ring,” Bandai Namco and FromSoftware explained. There still isn’t a set date for when the servers will come back online, but Bandai Namco and FromSoftware said any updates will be posted on Dark Souls’ social media accounts.