Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is back online, but original Dark Souls is offline forever

(Image credit: FromSoftware)

Two months after Dark Souls 3's servers sprung back to life, and nine months after the servers for the entire Souls series went offline, Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin (SOTFS) is back online. And that's pretty much where the good news ends.

Online features for the PC version of Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (DX11) have been reactivated.Online features for the base version of #DarkSouls II for PC (DX9) will be made available at a later date.Our thanks for your continued patience and support. pic.twitter.com/OihQUJOIbuOctober 25, 2022

The original version of DS2, which runs on DX9 and lacks the additions and reconfigured encounters of SOTSF, will have to wait a little longer to get its servers back up and running. From said only that base DS2's online features would be back online "at a later date," which is a scarily elastic timespan.

Still, it's a better prognosis than the one given to Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition (the original, pre-remaster version of DS1): that game won't be coming back online at all.

"We have determined that we will not be able to support online services for the PC version of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition that was released in 2012," said From, putting the blame on the "aging system" that supports the game's online features.

It's not too surprising: you can't even buy that version of the game any more, but it's a sad end for the original Dark Souls, which just passed its PC release's tenth anniversary. Sure, the game was incredibly janky, barely playable on keyboard and mouse, and has since been supplanted by a remastered version, but you'd hope the game that kicked off the PC's love affair with Souls games would go out with more bang and less whimper. Plus, Prepare to Die Edition still has over double the number of mods available for it than the remaster, more than a few of which centre around online play.

But it's not meant to be. From is, of course, still promising to restore the servers for Dark Souls Remastered, so it's not like DS1's online play has winked out of existence. Judging by how long it took to fix DS2: SOTSF after restoring DS3, though, we probably still have a few months of serverless Souls ahead of us before things are back to normal.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.