Dark Souls 3 Patch Makes it Worse

If you haven't heard--and bless you if you happen to be so fortunate--the PC version of Dark Souls 3 is a bit of a steaming, mess right now, perhaps an even bigger mess than the Dark Souls 1 PC port ever was. Yeah, Dark Souls 1 was horribly ported, with bad controls, a frame-rate limit, optimization issues up the butt, and came attached to the larded Games for Windows Live platform... but Dark Souls 3 has all those (sans the Games for Windows Live thing, which no longer exists) with the added bonus of a massive hacker problem where even falling victim to a hack could get you soft-banned, banished to only play on servers full of other cheaters and hackers.

Now, Namco Bandai is a lot of things, but responsive to fan outcry isn't one of them: just like the poise stat (which they say is working as intended despite everyone else claiming it's broken and useless), it seemed as if they were more than willing to just let things be and allow players to get screwed over, even going on record as saying it's the victims fault if they let their game get hacked.

Fortunately, their skin isn't completely made of stone, and after enough people threw a fit, they finally threw their hands up and released a patch that they hoped would at least fix some of the problems. Specifically, the 1.06.1 patch was designed to help people who were victimizes of these 'cyber criminals' by preventing the following issues:

• Being sent immediately to your world
• Being sent to the Firelink Shrine
• Being changed in full Dragon Body Status

Sounds great, right? Small problem: while the functionality of the patch could be argued, most people agree it wasn't worth it, because it introduced a whole host of massive performance issues the game didn't use to suffer, like freezing, stuttering, and lag. Namco Bandai responded to this issue quickly, and has since retracted the patch until it could be fixed, but some of the damage can't seem to be easily repaired, and players are still complaining about stuttering frame-rates and freezing. Sheesh.

So that's bad. Say what you want about the PC master race: at least most game devs have enough experience developing for consoles that they don't usually suffer these massive issues. And sometimes, if you just want to play your damn game, a little stability is all you want. Stability, like what's supposed to be offered by poise. Namco Bandai, you monsters.