Dark Souls III Online Play Restored Months After Remote Exploit Ruined PC Experience
Back in January of this year, a group of developers serving as white-hat hackers warned the "Souls" community of a serious Remote Code Execution (RCE) exploit that they found in FromSoftware's fantasy RPG series. The games' online play was taken down as a response and has remained down ever since. However, FromSoftware just delivered on its promise and put Dark Souls III back up, and says the other games are on the way.
Dark Souls III is the fourth game in the "Souls" series which starts with Demon Souls. Rather than being a simple series of games, "SoulsBorne"—the moniker combining the "Souls" series with Bloodborne, another FromSoftware title with similar gameplay—is almost more of a genre unto itself. Other publishers have attempted to ape the player-punishing formula but have met very mixed results.
Chief among the micro-genre are of course the progenitors of the style themselves: FromSoftware's Demon's Souls and the three games in the Dark Souls trilogy. It's the latter games that we're concerned about today; specifically, the PC versions of Dark Souls III, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, and Dark Souls: Remastered.
FromSoftware responsibly decided to take down the multiplayer servers on PC for the afflicted games following the revelation of the dangerous RCE bug. It allowed malicious remote players to run programs on the victim's computer. Even though the exploit was technically possible on consoles, the locked-down nature of consoles made it much less concerning.
Players were distraught with the news, because the online multiplayer is arguably the "point" of the series for many. While these games can be a lot of fun playing offline by yourself, the biggest reason people continue to play even the 13-year-old Demon's Souls to this day is because of the online multiplayer functions. Players can team up to challenge the game's vicious worlds in co-op, or forcibly invade each other for player versus player combat.
It's that latter point that made this RCE flaw so dangerous. When a multiplayer game has a bug like this, you can usually work around it simply by choosing to play only with trusted players. Indeed, it's likely that there are many other games with flaws like this that have simply never been found because finding them is not incentivized.
In the "Souls" series, though, players can be "invaded" by other players that seek to hunt them down. There's no way to control or stop this behavior in most of the games without avoiding multi-player functions altogether. The games were still playable in offline mode, of course, but for fans of the series who have likely beaten the games several times over, that's not why they're still keen to play.
Unfortunately, the nature of the PvP mode in these games means that a bad actor has essentially free reign over the game's player base. While it is impossible to target a specific player using the game's given functions—though third-party hacks exist to do just that—there was plenty of malicious mischief to be had simply connecting to random players and executing the exploit.
via @fromsoftware_sp on Twitter
With FromSoftware's tweet this morning, it looks like Dark Souls III's online multiplayer is back up and running. In a follow-up tweet, the company says that players will be able to look forward to patches for Dark Souls II and Dark Souls Remastered. FromSoftware declined to give a timeline for those updates, but just knowing that they're on the way is reassuring to say the least.
FromSoftware's latest game, Elden Ring, has become an international smash hit, finding its way onto many players' "greatest games of all time" lists. It's fair to call it a successor to the Dark Souls formula. It retains most of the same mechanics and systems, simply re-named, while layering on new tricks and techniques. Its early network test was affected by the RCE flaw, but FromSoftware fixed the issue before the game launched in March, which led many gamers to wonder why it has taken so long to get this patch out for the Dark Souls trilogy.
