TOKYO — After more than 11 years of review and deliberation since you pressed L2, the Dark Souls peer-to-peer connection master relay at Bandai Namco Inc. headquarters has determined that, yes, you did land that heavy attack on that guy after all, sources confirmed.
“So he’s standing perfectly still, and I hit him square with the overhead slash on the Zweihander,” you complained to a friend on Xbox Live the day that you performed the attack, according to reports. “And it just phases right through him. Then he flinches about 20 seconds later, and there’s a blood splatter 15 seconds after that, but in the wrong part of the room. He rolls off a cliff and dies, but I get the death screen instead, and now I swear to God my game’s in French and my landline doesn’t work anymore. What are these servers hosted on, again? Prison wi-fi?”
This news reportedly comes after you lost a duel with an online invader in the summer of 2012, which reset the infamously tough runback to Seath the Scaleless and ruined your whole afternoon. This was then followed by the entire rest of the game, two New Game Plus cycles, seven major From Software game releases, three presidential administrations, and countless millions of human births and deaths, before your attack registered.
“Eleven years or eleven seconds, it doesn’t matter; I earned that win,” complained the invading player who claimed your Humanity at press time. “Bad netcode is just another skill-based obstacle you have to work around in Dark Souls, like the magic teachers you can kill forever, or the trick bridges that slide you into bottomless pits. Don’t like it? Get better internet. Or be like me, and get even worse internet.”
Game director Hidetaka Miyazaki was quick to reassure you both, as well as other Dark Souls fans, that the janky online play is just part of the game’s grim allegory.
“When I designed a multiplayer mode where other players could invade your solo-play session and murder you, a theme of loneliness and betrayal was the goal,” said Miyazaki in a rare public statement. “In this treacherous dark fantasy world, we want players to feel uncertain, so we might just… ignore or delete the occasional attack or dodge. And to create a sense of disconnect from other human beings, we literally disconnect them from other human beings and boot them back to the main menu.”
Other Souls developers are proud of their innovative peer-to-peer multiplayer, which can transmit many tens of bytes per second between the dozens of Dark Souls fans who enjoy playing online.
“You must understand this in the context of the time—it was 2011, and the internet had pretty much just been invented,” reads a press release from the Online Player Interactions team at From Software’s studio in Fukuoka. “What Miyazaki-sama wanted was very ambitious, practically unheard-of, for an online mode. We’re talking two players, sometimes three, and they’re all attacking! Sometimes they attack at the same time. Thankfully 90 percent of players take their console offline the instant they launch the game, or it might be even worse.”
Following this news update, you have been permanently banned from online play for reasons that are deeply unclear.
