http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=957469

Are they even allowed to do that? DSFix doesn't do anything that I feel would be worthy of a valid DMCA take down.

So Durante fixed Namco's broken ass PC ports for free thereby increasing not only sales but users' enjoyment of the Dark Souls games, and Namco thanks him by issuing a baseless DMCA claim.

Well done, Namco. What a bunch of jerks, I'll remember this when considering buying any of their games in the future. If this isn't some kind of mistake, then it's evident that Namco could not care less about their customers. Gross.

Pricks.

As shitty as this is, it's their motive for doing so that really bothers me.

Dark Souls has been out for years on the PC by now, there is no reason they'd suddenly hop out of their wheelchairs and yell "MAKE THIS A LESSER VERSION THIS INSTANT!". DSFix has helped them get additional sales on the PC to be sure. They gain nothing from stabbing their established user-base in the back.

So, why the sudden change of policy? Well.. Namco's launching a preemptive strike in order to avoid an even greater backlash in a few months time. They're re-releasing Dark Souls 2 with a graphical update, which owners of the current PC version has to pay to upgrade to. Basically, DSFix did something for free that they're now going to charge money for (not announced if it'll be full price or not, but it's likely). They don't want that contrast floating about once the new DS2 version hits.

Jesus, what scum-like behaviour. It's important to distinguish Namco, the producer, and From Software, the developers here. I find it difficult to believe the latter would consent of this move.

Paging @patrickklepek: Please make sure people know about this dirty, dirty move on behalf of Bandai Namco.

I could swear they said pc buyers of DS2 would get the new textures as a download? Thought it is namco so it wouldn't surprise me. I have hated these guys ever since Demon's Souls days. They let Atlus do all the work and spend all the money, then once the Souls games were 100% locked easy money they just swooped in and demanded exclusivity or no release deal. Good on Sony for cutting these dbags out of Bloodbourne.

From Software is at least partially at fault here for putting out an unplayable PC port in the first place. If it wasn't for Durante's work, I never would have even bought the PC version of Dark Souls in the first place.

Namco and From should be paying Durante and begging him for help rather than whatever this is. I think 2% of all revenues from Dark Souls PC sales would be a nice gesture, along with a public apology to Durante and everyone who bought broken ass Dark Souls.

What a bullshit, unjustified and uninformed move on Namco's part.

Fuck.

Whoo another episode of "The Higher-Ups In A Big Game Company Doesn't Understand Their Customers."

@do_the_manta_ray But I'm pretty sure DS2 comes with all the bells and whistles that were expected from a PC port. Wouldn't it make more sense to DMCA the mods that add extra shaders/textures to DS2?

Yes that would make more sense, which is exactly why corporate lawyer guy tm won't do it. His contract stipulates that he never actually does anything intelligent.

Idiots. The suits in this in industry are just plain fucking idiots. I'm sorry.

Man, what a shitbag move. A lot of people only ever bought the game because of that.

@karkarov: Thank you Based Corporate Lawyer Guy™

Wow what complete assholes.

Dark Souls 2.0.1 patch notes:

• Improved stability
• Now includes Bandai Souls fix (BSFix) developed by our own Burante

That was prty gd

@krullban: AFAIK, sites like Dropbox, Google or any hosting site has to comply to any claim by any copyright holder, or a representative thereof, according to the DMCA. Whatever the basis is of that claim.

Anyway, digging further in the NeoGAF thread seems to point to a third party representative of Namco Bandai Germany who is in charge of hunting down illegal download links of their content. If any past DMCA complaints were any indication, this is done by bots, and in this case, seemingly believed by any human in the chain.

(Of course, this would be the ideal place to make a joke about Germans and following rules to the extreme...)

This ideally will resolve itself (unless Durante actually "stole" From Software's code for his mode, which is unlikely) and DSFix will be back, but with the holidays ahead of us, it will take a few days.

I take back what I said. THANKS, DUDES!

Pretty fucking lame :-/

I hope it's a mistake. Both for the sake of From Software's PR, and all the people that use DSFix themselves.

For those that don't know,

They released a patch last week that disabled GFWL functionality and enabled Steamworks functionality. I had been playing the game and wondered why I couldn't start it. Turns out this update was put out. I looked at the comments for the update and numerous other people were unable to play the game. I uninstalled DSFix, reinstalled Dark Souls, verified integrity, and still couldn't play the damn game. I still can't play it. Sucks, since it's probably my favorite game... ever.

I can only assume they think DSFix is not working well alongside their recent update and decided the nice thing to do is take down DSFix. I don't even... are they actually that clueless as to how fucking awful the game runs without DSFix? Even without GFWL, I have to imagine it still runs as shitty as it used to without DSFix, horrible resolution and all.

@tru3_blu3: I'm confused... did they take down the third party patch because they hired the guy who made it and included it as an official patch?

@development: While they were going to the trouble of the (fairly involved, I assume) GFWL to Steamworks update, couldn't they have quite easily implemented their own version of DSFix? I mean, didn't Durante say it was pretty simple, and isn't the code freely available? Seems like either a huge oversight, or extremely fucking lazy.

i'm sure this will all be worked out as a misunderstanding, little bit of patience, and I am sure they come back to explain this.

@wolfgame: Yeah I'm hoping it was just some new hire in the legal department taking too much initiative, and not some company-wide-approval kind of thing.

I don't play Dark Souls, but, man...that's f'ed up.

That's weird. I wonder why they did that. It doesn't hurt the game as far as I know and it doesn't affect their bottom line. I fnothing else it helps them.

What an odd thing for them to suddenly do.

Everybody should try to calm the fuck down until we know exactly what happened. This looks like a textbook example of a URL being automatically flagged by an anti-piracy bot, probably because it pointed to a well known file sharing site and the phrase "Dark Souls" appeared somewhere in the page markup.

They can't be serious right? Who thought it was a good idea to punish the person who fixed their port?

So quick question this takes down DSfix for distribution correct? If let's say we saved it somewhere we're still alright if we were planning to play it in the future with the gow to steam migration.

This seems like a mistake. If anyone at Namco's marketing department has half a brain then they'll sort it out by tomorrow.

@feathered: i can hear this whoooshing over my head as i type. Was this just a spiteful joke by From against the lawyers, or did they actually officially implement Durante's fix (also possibly to spite lawyers)?

I wouldn't have bought Dark Souls on the PC if DSFix didn't exist. They're idiots.

"I'm actually waiting for the other shoe to drop on this horse shit and for it to be a patch for the updated steam version that incorporates the fix."

I'm not surprised anymore by Namco's lack of awareness, but this would be truly frightening.

Wow...

Give it 24 hours before there are a bunch of DSFix 2.3 mirrors and torrents up. Good luck removing those, Namco.

Sure glad I downloaded it already. But the mods are still available:

DSmfix: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=1105a8f9b697e3cc&id=1105A8F9B697E3CC!796

Dsfix: https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?url=http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=dsfix

Also see this thread on Steam for help with tweaking it in the new Steam version. http://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791433525619/announcements/detail/206368522048405952

I really want to believe that this was a miscommunication. They can't seriously be this out of touch?

Personally I wouldn't have even bought the pc version if there was no dsfix. It's basically unplayable garbage without it.

Huh, what weird timing.

I agree with people claiming that it's just an error, because they have no grounds for doing this.

Has there been an official statement yet? Because I'm with the folks that think it's just a mistake.

If this happens, the press and the userbase really need to explain to From soft exactly why they are wrong, MS always online style.

Amongst the Dark Souls crowd there's no way in hell they'll ever eliminate the presence of DSFix on the basis of some violation. However seeing that it's a German affiliate to Namco tells me there's something weird to this that should sort itself out. Should being the operative word.

Otherwise it does indeed come off as a cold and heartless gesture in light of someone who effectively made Dark Souls viable to thousands, and encouraged as many sales to that effect, for free. Either way there's nothing to worry about outside of any larger issues Dark Souls continues to have during its transition to Steamworks.

I feel like there are two conversations and two pieces of information in this thread and neither are communicating with the other.

Also, fwiw to the guy who was asking, Dark Souls 1 ran much better for me without GFWL (and DSfix, obviously). I lagged so bad in blighttown I had to be offline, but now it's... still not great but I'm getting double digit frames.

How embarrassing for them. I'd guess a copyright lawyer who has no idea what he's doing is at the root of this. Hope he/she gets fired and word of this gets around. Not like Bandai Namco needs anymore talk of their embarrassing port job.

Or I suppose it could be a result of the Sins of A Something or Other repackaging they are doing as some have suggested. Might reconsider buying from B-N ever again if this is not resolved.

It's back up guys, he's released 2.3.1

Link

I'm pretty sure it's if you have the fps unlocked, i've heard. I don't and it runs fine with the fix.

Had Namco and From Software shown competence and professionalism before I'd be easy to classify this as an idiotic, but hopefully short-lived error. Taking into consideration their prior clueless and erratic behavior I'm suddenly not so sure. Glad I overcame the desire to make do with another worthless PC port just to check out what all the insane hype is about.

At least the fact that an allegedly incredibly skill-based, twitch-focussed action game supposedly works just fine without even achieving acceptable FPS on any platform is endlessly amusing to me.

@baal_sagoth: The counterpoint, of course, is: How fantastic must the game be for it to have such a devoted following with such a flaky port? Don't knock it til you've tried it.

@dave_tacitus: Absolutely! I'm in the same boat with many overly ambitious RPGs. I can deal with a lot of jank for a high upside but with action games I'm personally a lot more picky, especially when it comes to performance.

I also have a solid, basic grasp on the Souls series as I did play Demon's Souls on console with friends. I respect that game a fair bit though I never really got into it on my own nor did I ever finish any entry by myself! I like to think that I do understand what the appeal is but I can't get used to the grindy elements the Souls games have when compared to some of the best modernized but still traditional rogue-likes. Those fill that role very well for me.

But honestly a big part of my preference might just be that I'm a lot better at strategizing than I am at action combat.

@baal_sagoth: I think Demons' souls is actually by far the grindiest of the souls games (it's the only one where you need to grind healing items), I don't think I've ever actually intentionally did any grinding in DS1 and I managed to beat the game just fine.

It's also not really a twitch based action game from my experience, your reflexes can save you occasionally but you need to know boss patterns to get anywhere. In fact responding overly fast to something will often get you killed, since you cannot cancel or change your action till it completes as you can in a Bayonetta or DMC.

@johntunoku: I understand, but my main concern is the "grind" (or whatever we want to call it) that is the result of death not being permanent and the stakes in Souls being ultimately really low. Add lack of randomization and character options on the level of rogue-like favorites of mine like TOME and I start getting less interested. I get that this isn't some objective or fair comparison; it's just that games like that fill the "high-stakes dungeon crawling requiring a methodic approach" slot for me.

Sure, in the realm of action games Souls games are actually on the methodic side of things, I get it. But they're still highly timing based and that's still not my cup of tea when they perform poorly. Because I'm not that good at that shit to begin with and also used to well supported PC games.

Just my weird perspective on Souls. I understand it's an important series. I actually love the dark fantasy setting and the innovative multiplayer. I see why people love it.

Unfortunately, it's been confirmed that there will be a new separate release of Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin on PC, as well as the current-gen consoles. None of these versions will be compatible with save-games, or even online-play, from the last-gen versions of the game, including the PC port as is. They have not released any statements on whether there'll be an option for established PC owners to upgrade for a lesser sum, but we will definitely have to pay for new graphics. What we will get, as well as Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 owners, is the new content, which consists of some new areas, new NPCs and overall gameplay fixes.

@thunderslash: You're right, it would make a lot more sense, but there's a pretty distinct difference between the kind of fixes available for DS 1 and DS 2. The graphical mods for DS 2 are simply sliders, retuned lightning, SweetFX, it's working with what's already there in an attempt at producing a look that's more pleasing. GEM is a good example. The kind of modding you're going to see for just about every game. DSFix on the other hand is a complete overhaul which actually disrupts the game's internal logic with it's API and forces it to work differently in order to run at a higher resolution, etc. But what it actually comes down to here is the reputation. Most people who play DS 2 on the PC probably didn't bother with any graphical mods because the game looks fine, and it works fine. DSFix on the other hand, a major overhaul to the way the game looked (comparative to the effect of this new release), was god damn necessary. It's infamous among DS fans at this juncture. It is basically on par with what they're doing now, only for free rather than retail price. Mind, this might all just boil down to there having been a mistake due to the recent changed to Dark Souls, but.. I doubt it.