Dark Souls’ PC servers will stay offline until after Elden Ring launches

theverge.com:

Dark Souls’ servers on PC will remain offline until after the February 25th release of Elden Ring, Bandai Namco and FromSoftware announced on Twitter. The game publisher and developer are also investigating the upcoming Elden Ring for the same issue that shut down Dark Souls: a remote code execution (RCE) exploit that could let bad actors infiltrate your system.

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“We want to thank the entire Dark Souls community and the players who have reached out to us directly to voice their concerns and offer solutions. Thanks to you, we have identified the cause and are working on fixing the issue,” Bandai Namco and FromSoftware said. “In addition, we have extended the investigation to Elden Ring — our upcoming title launching on February 25th — and have made sure the necessary security measures are in place for this title on all target platforms.”

The dangerous RCE vulnerability didn’t catch users’ — and Bandai Namco’s — attention until a Twitch streamer became a victim of the hack while livestreaming Dark Souls. His game crashed in the middle of his (now-deleted) stream, and a hacker appeared to hijack his computer’s text-to-speech generator to talk smack about his gameplay.

Fortunately, the hacker likely didn’t have malicious intent — a screenshotted post on Discord explains that the hacker discovered the exploit, and after receiving no response from Bandai Namco and FromSoftware about the issue, they started using it on Twitch streamers to get their attention. A community-made anti-cheat mod patched the exploit shortly after it was brought up in the Dark Souls community, but the game still wasn’t