Dark Souls 3 PC could be coming back online after 6 months, an update suggests

Following months of inactivity, it looks like Dark Souls 3’s PC severs could be coming back online.

As spotted by Souls YouTuber Lance McDonald, the SteamDB page for Dark Souls 3 shows that a new update for the game has been pushed to users with access to the debug branches of the game.

This is the first new patch in years, suggesting an online fix could be coming soon.

The PvP servers for the PC versions of Dark Souls: Remastered, Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 were “temporarily deactivated” in January, following reports of a potentially serious security issue.

Earlier this year, Bandai Namco confirmed that the servers would be restored,  but no timeframe was given as to when this would happen.

“We plan to restore online service for each game progressively, bringing back servers for Dark Souls 3 once we complete the necessary work to correct the problem,” the publisher said in a statement earlier this year to PC Gamer.

“We will provide additional updates as soon as the restoration schedule is finalised. We want to thank all our players for your patience and understanding as we work to fix this issue.”

The servers were turned off following the discovery of a severe remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, which was said to allow abusers to take control of other players’ PCs.

One of the people behind the discovery publicly disclosed details of the exploit in March.

Further reading

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Dark Souls servers taken down due to an exploit ‘that could let someone take over your PC’

PvP servers for Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 have all been temporarily turned off

The public disclosure contained proof of concept code and documentation for the RCE exploit that forced From Software to take the PC servers down. According to the description, the vulnerability is confirmed to be present in Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls Remastered, Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3.

The issue hasn’t been confirmed to be present in Demon’s Souls, although it’s likely.  It does exist in Sekiro, but according to the disclosure, there’s currently no way to trigger it, and thus it isn’t dangerous.

However, the person who discovered the exploit confirmed to VGC that it appears to be “completely fixed” in Elden Ring.