The Dark Souls trilogy's PC servers may be rising from the ashes

Now that we're well past Elden Ring's launch, Bandai Namco appears to be on its way to reactivating the servers for its Dark Souls franchise on PC.  

In January, the publisher had to shut down PvP servers for the PC versions of FromSoftware's series--Dark Souls: Remastered, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls III--to investigate a security issue said to brick PCs and potentially allow remote access to players' machines. At the time, Bandai Namco said the issue wouldn't be fixed until the release of FromSoftware's Elden Ring. 

Now it seems that the studio may be readying to bring the games back online. YouTuber Lance McDonald spotted that the SteamDB page for Souls III shows that an update had been sent last week to users who had access to the game's debug branches. It marks the first patch to the game in years, and could suggest a fix is on the horizon.

At the time, Bandai Namco told PC Gamer that it would "provide additional updates as soon as the restoration schedule is finalized. We want to thank all our players for your patience and understanding as we work to fix this issue.”

For Elden Ring players, the issue was later confirmed to exist by the person who discovered the original Souls exploit, and appears to be "completely fixed" in that game. 

More like Hack Souls, and they aren't the only ones

Bandai Namco has been no stranger to hacks and exploits this year. Earlier in the month, a ransomware group called ALPHAV hacked the Souls and Tekken publisher. Following the hack, Bandai Namco published a statement confirming the event. 

"We have since taken measures such as blocking access to the servers to prevent the damage from spreading," wrote Bandai Namco at the time. "We will continue to investigate the cause of this incident and will disclose the investigation results as appropriate[...] We offer our sincerest apologies to everyone involved for any complications or concerns caused by this incident.”

Similarly, French publisher Ubisoft was also hacked earlier this year by the same group who hacked PC company Nvidia. At the time, Ubisoft said it didn't believe the hackers had managed to acquire employee data and proprietary information from Nvidia, however, and instituted a company-wide password reset.

Last week, the virtual pet website Neopets was itself hacked, compromising the confidential data of nearly 70 million users. Neopets has been hacked more than once, and on at least one occasion, its players actively took advantage of that hack to steal in-game pets and currency from other players.