Over the past few days, an exploit has the Dark Souls PC community up in arms. Since this exploit was discovered with Dark Souls 3, a fix has been implemented but only for those who have installed the Blue Sentinel anti-cheat tool for Dark Souls 3. Now, it would seem that Bandai Namco has taken action and has taken ALL of the Dark Souls PC servers offline. This includes Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls: Remastered, and Dark Souls: Prepare to Die. This exploit does not affect the PlayStation or Xbox versions of the game.
PvP servers for Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls: Remastered have been temporarily deactivated to allow the team to investigate recent reports of an issue with online services.
Servers for Dark Souls: PtDE will join them shortly.We apologize for this inconvenience.
— Dark Souls (@DarkSoulsGame) January 23, 2022
Initially, Bandai Namco was contacted by the person who discovered this exploit, but they ignored this. After which, the person showed via a livestream what this exploit can do. Since then, Bandai Namco has been contacted by multiple people, and the company has let others know they are aware of the exploit.
Bandai Namco has taken down the Dark Souls servers so that they can look into this exploit. The last time an exploit like this made the rounds, hundreds of Dark Souls players had suffered from corrupted saves files. Others were either soft or permanently banned due to picking up hacked items. It seems this time around, these are being taken seriously.
More specifically, it has been speculated that this exploit could also find its way into Elden Ring. If that is the case, it’s no wonder that Bandai Namco and Fromsoftware are looking into this issue.
Prior to this, LukeYui, the creator of the Dark Souls 3 Blue Sentinel anti-cheat tool, had worked with the person who discovered this exploit. between the two, they were able to get the anti-cheat tool updated to safeguard against this exploit. However, this didn’t help protect the other Dark Souls games, and likely Bandai Namco wanted to make sure they could stop this exploit from harming any and all Dark Souls player’s servers and players.
As to when the Dark Souls servers will be back online, we’ll have to keep checking the Dark Souls Twitter account until then. For now, all the Dark Souls servers are down and we don’t see them coming back anytime soon.