Dark Souls 2 and 3 multiplayer is back: We still don’t know what went wrong but at least it didn’t take almost a year to fix it

A little less than two weeks after their multiplayer features were taken offline because of a mysterious “server issue,” multiplayer functionality in Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 has been restored, meaning invasions and messages are once again working as they should.

Word of the service restoration game via a very businesslike message on the Dark Souls website: “Regarding the temporary suspension of the game server for Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3, the investigation has been completed and the fix has been applied. The game server and online features are now restored.

“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused, and thank you for your patience and understanding.”

So what exactly went wrong? Well, that’s the mysterious part. Aside from intermittent apologies for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience in messages posted to X, FromSoft’s had nothing to say about it—and that remains the case now: It’s back, be happy, speak of the matter no more.

Whatever happened, it clearly wasn’t as serious a problem as the 2022 mess that saw PC servers for all Dark Souls games shut down for the better part of a year. In that case, FromSoft copped to the problem: A security vulnerability that allowed malicious code to be executed via the games’ online services. But that fix was also long in coming because FromSoft was busy with other things, like finishing Elden Ring, which was kind of a big deal.

Anyway, aside from the relative brevity of the downtime, we had something else that made the outage a little more bearable than it was back in ’22: The Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 Seamless Co-op mods that operate independently of FromSoft’s servers. They also enable a far more flexible multiplayer experience than what’s offered by the games themselves, letting players team up to run through the games at will, and without having to deal with disconnects when somebody dies or a boss gets smoked.

But if your preference is for the chaos of native Dark Souls multiplayer? Now that option’s back on the table too.