We have a new rumor from good old Shpeshal Nick Baker, about a game that he doesn’t personally care for.
As he shared in the latest episode of the XboxEra podcast, Nick was suddenly told by a source recently that a Dark Souls 3 remaster is coming on the way. He is not at liberty to share more details, but he does know a bit more about this pending remaster.
And Nick and his co-hosts do reiterate that this is the ‘most obvious’ rumor, but that doesn’t mean there is no value in it. There was no meaningful schedule for FromSoftware’s remasters of their games, so it was genuinely up in the air when it was going to be announced or released.
I’ll review the franchise’s history a bit so that you will understand what I mean. The original Dark Souls released in 2011 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. In the following year, it came to Windows. Incredibly, in 2018, Dark Souls Remastered came to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows, and even Nintendo Switch, in 2018.
Dark Souls II first came to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Windows in 2014. This game came with a trilogy of DLC in the same year. Before 2014 ended, FromSoftware announced a remaster called Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. This remaster may be contentious for some fans, because it came to the same three platforms mentioned above, as well as the recently launched PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game and its remaster awkwardly came in the middle of the transition between console generations.
And if we were honest about it, the rabid fans who bought the game out the gate took it the worst. Now, if you happen to have been an early bird on PC, you could update to Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners had to pay for the update like it was DLC.
Dark Souls III released to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. So as wild as it seemed, FromSoftware had a lot of activity around the Dark Souls franchise in three years, came out with a remaster two years after that, and then they stopped touching the franchise for the last eight years.
No one will say that FromSoftware is not prolific, but they certainly have an opportunity to improve this game considerably. As the XboxEra hosts explained, Dark Souls III does benefit from FPS Boost on Xbox Series X to lock in a solid 60FPS, but it outputs at 900p. On PlayStation 5, it outputs 1080p at a locked 60 FPS. However, on all these platforms, and PC, the visuals are fuzzy, and reflect the standards of a previous console generation when it comes to graphics.
FromSoftware fans know intimately that the studio always faces criticism the most for their optimization and game performance. For these remasters, FromSoftware has largely delivered on what they promised, and a Dark Souls III remaster should make those fans happy if they continue to do the same.
