Dark Souls can be an intensely lonely experience – but you might have noticed a higher volume of ghostly bloodstains and scrawled notes for company in its newest iteration – which Fraser loved in his Dark Souls 2 review – than the last. That’s because, despite low-level grumblings that this Souls might not be quite so epoch-shattering as the first, Dark Souls 2 has done spectacularly well on the PC.
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The original Dark Souls’ Prepare to Die port peaked at just over 10,000 concurrent players on Steam upon its August 2012 release – and reached consistently similar heights again early this year as anticipation for its sequel reached fever pitch.
But when Dark Souls 2 did come out on April 25, it dwarfed the numbers of its predecessor. Concurrent players spiralled immediately to nearly 80,000 on Steam. They’ve peaked a couple of times since on the way down at around 63,000 and 45,000.
Though the numbers are still dropping to less absurd levels, Dark Souls 2 was drawing in 27,000 players a day at last count – two and a half times more than Prepare to Die did at its best.
The game has benefitted from a PC version decidedly less shonky than that of the original game. From Software worked on increased resolutions and improved mouse and keyboard controls – and in our Dark Souls 2 Port Inspection, Fraser noted it was “the best looking, smoothest the Souls series has ever been”.
Our Fraser had equally kind words for the game in his eventual Dark Souls 2 review, in which he described a “marriage of phenomenal world design and impressively tight mechanics”. Would you agree with that assessment? I like the way the environments wind back in on themselves unexpectedly. Good geography.
Cheers, Steamgraph.