You all petitioned for it, begged Namco Bandai to port over one of the most beloved, anti-propaganda, anti-mass market action-RPGs ever made. It was a small game designed to challenge players and not compromise on its appeal and it finally arrived for PC, albeit a shoddy consolitis port. Nevertheless, despite all the mellow raging going on right now there are modders already hard at work fixing the game, adjusting the resolution and working on fixes for the controls.
GameSpy's Port Authority is quickly becoming one of my favorite go-to sites for information on PC ports. It's honest and hard hitting and better than any review out there (which usually succumbs to pandering to the publisher's interest).
The Port Authority lays out a lot of what PC gamers ought to be afraid of when purchasing a port like Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition for PC and it's that there are very limited options available for modifying the experience to suit your PC's setup.
As stated in the GameSpy article there is a patch for Dark Souls to improve the resolution so that it's no longer an upscaled, blocky mess. The patch comes courtesy of a PC Community Champion named Durante who frequents NeoGaf and has a DLL download available for those of you who want the resolution fixed.
According to Durante...
I developed an interception dll framework during this week to prepare for the job. I did the actual work to make the game render at higher res in that amount of time though -- based on the framework -- and spent a few more hours testing and adding the config file.
Leave it to the modding community to fix what pros couldn't get right the first time around.
The game has received fair reviews from two sites so far, with a German site giving it a 92 out of 100 and PC Gamer settling for an 89 out of 100. As a hack-and-slash, tactical action-RPG it still seems to hold its own on PC despite some of the shortcomings brought up in the GameSpy article.
I don't know if Dark Souls was really needed for PC given that the platform already has a few games like Skyrim and (to a lesser extent) some Gothic type titles, but this was also a perfect chance for PC gamers to prove that they are a paying-bunch and that not everything that comes to PC has to fail in light of the often blamed elephant in the room...piracy.
According to PC Gamer the “game isn't buggy, doesn't crash and loading times are quicker than they were on console” which should allow many PC gamers to take a sigh of relief.
If the game continues to prove to be mod friendly enough so that the community can expand and enhance the experience (much like how it was the community that saved that absolutely gross port of Resident Evil 4 from Ubisoft) then Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition could have a long and fruitful life on PC.
You can pick the game up right now from Steam for only $39.99. While FromSoftware admitted to Eurogamer they weren't accustomed to working on PC titles and that people shouldn't hold their breath too much for the PC port, it looks like things turned out well enough in the end.
