BODY: The invasions have stopped. So have the summons, the messages scrawled on the ground, and the bloodstains that tell you exactly how the player before you died. On the afternoon of October 30, FromSoftware took the online servers for DARK SOULS II and DARK SOULS III offline on every platform they run on โ and as of this writing, nobody outside the company knows when they're coming back.
The notice, posted to FromSoftware's official channels, is characteristically terse: a defect was discovered in the game servers, so all platform servers are being suspended. The company gave no technical detail about what the defect is, how it was found, or whether player data is affected. Restoration timing, it said, will be announced separately once determined.
The shutdown is unusually broad. It covers PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC โ and Xbox 360, a console Microsoft stopped manufacturing in 2016. That DARK SOULS II still has live servers on hardware that old is a quiet testament to how long FromSoftware has kept these worlds running.
Servers went dark around 4 p.m. Japan time, which put the announcement squarely in the middle of a Friday evening for Japanese players and the start of the weekend for everyone else. Single-player progression in both titles continues to work offline, but the asynchronous online layer โ the part that makes a Souls game feel haunted by other people โ is simply gone for now.
The insider take
Japanese players read the word ไธๅ ทๅ ("defect") in a FromSoftware server notice with a very specific memory attached. In January 2022, security researchers disclosed a remote code execution vulnerability in DARK SOULS III's PC multiplayer, and the company pulled PvP servers for months โ a fix that stretched from winter into the following summer. Nobody in the Japanese community is assuming that's what happened here, but the shape of the announcement is identical, and the speculation on X and 5ch moved in that direction within the hour. FromSoftware's house style is to say almost nothing until it has a date, which protects the engineering process and frustrates everyone else. Expect silence, then a single line with a timestamp.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).