A couple of months back, James spoke about how Dark Souls mods were on the cusp of becoming weird as hell. Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin now has a level editor and file repacker which lets users reshuffle enemies and/or remove them from the game's levels entirely, facilitating a different type of weird altogether.
Imagine strolling through the Iron Keep, Lost Bastille or Belfry Luna without your shield raised, your riposte readied or you Estus in-hand? Despite being the weakest map of the Souls series, exploring some of Scholar of the First Sin's fantastical locales sans foes sounds pretty neat—as does steering an otherwise combat-heavy role-player towards non-combative exploration in the process.
"If you've used Wulf's MSBEditor for DkS1, it's similar to that," explains the editor's creator Jgwman. "Essentially, this gives modders the ability to redesign levels by moving (or removing) enemies that already exist in any level (except for Chasm of Old), as well as by adding entirely new enemies of any type that exists in the game. Basically, the community can design their own version of what the SotFS edition of DkS2 attempted to do, for either personal use or community distribution.
"If you follow the provided instructions, it should be fairly easy to use. The level editor itself is GUI based and very easy to use; the only potential difficulties come with unpacking your game archive and preparing a mod for distribution. If you already know how to run command line applications, write basic batch files to execute command line applications, and create and distribute *.zip files, creating and sharing a mod should be a bowl of Estus soup piece of cake."
Jgwman details said provided instructions within this SotFS Level Editor and Repacker Q&A, which is where you should head for installation instructions too.
