Please support Game Informer. Print magazine subscriptions are less than $2 per issue
Preview Footage Of Dark Souls Remastered Shows A Stable Blighttown
Blighttown is one of the most notorious settings in modern video games. Not just because it's an ugly, dark cavern filled with poison swamps and nasty monsters ready to kill you at every turn. No, it's infamous because it's an ugly, dark cavern filled with poison swamps and nasty monsters with astonishingly awful framerate dips.
If you played through Dark Souls on PS3 or Xbox 360, then you know what I'm talking about. There are entire segments of Blighttown that slow down to resemble a slideshow. PC Players, with the help of some mods, have bypassed this problem for a while now, but console players have never known a stable experience with that area of the game.
Among the biggest questions surrounding Dark Souls Remastered is whether or not Blighttown's framerate would be fixed, on all platforms. PAX East preview footage of the Switch version of Dark Souls Remastered has been making the rounds and it looks like the answer to that question is a definitive yes.
You can see for yourself here:
Solid, stable gameplay performance all the way through. Now this is the Switch version running and the PS4/Xbox One version supposedly runs at 60 FPS but since there's no preview footage of those versions, we can't verify that Blighttown runs stable (or at 60 FPS) in those versions. It stands to reason that they would, though given the boost in hardware power.
For more on Dark Souls Remastered, check out our impressions of the game here.
Our Take
I'm sure there are a bunch of people who are excited for this and generally improvements to performance for a game are a good thing, but Dark Souls with a fixed Blighttown is almost sacrilegious to me. Among the game's biggest, most insurmountable challenges were that area and the archers of Anor Londo. To remove that challenge, whether it was an unintentional challenge or not, removes something that was a fundamental element my experience with that game initially. Ah well. So it goes.
I’d like to ask you to support Game Informer’s continued coverage of games with a subscription. For less than two dollars per issue, we mail you a full year of 10 print magazines, each with cover stories and preview features filled with exclusive details about the most exciting upcoming games. We profile and interview game creators. We look back on the rich history of gaming, and we celebrate what’s next.
Here on the website, we offer much of our content for free, including game reviews, daily news, videos, event coverage, and more – all with minimal ads.
We do so with a small editorial team, alongside contributing paid writers from around the world – over 65 individuals from 9 countries around the world, just in the last couple of years.
It’s not possible without support.
In a time when game makers and games coverage have faced hard struggles and layoffs, the future of this 30+ year magazine and community is at risk. Our new standalone magazine subscription is the number one way you can keep us alive – and we believe you’ll get a pretty fantastic gaming magazine in your mailbox every few weeks for your trouble.
Thank you.
