New Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin Trailer Shows Off New Ways to Die

Dark Souls 2 news! You know what that means—mindless of what other worthy news item might have come out, I’ll be reporting on this! That’s the great thing about being a fan of something while simultaneously being a reporter for an online website—you get the unique privilege of making other people consume the same things you do!

Anyway, with the February 5th patch fast approaching—the patch, you’ll remember, that will act as prelude to the release of the Scholar of the First Sin update to the game—a new trailer has been released to raise hype and awareness for the upcoming Dark Sousl 2 “remix”. Check it out.



Three things worth note, from your local Dark Souls 2 expert. The first is that this trailer picks up after the last one and showed us some more of the shuffled around enemies that will, presumably, be throwing veterans for a loop. For example, we see the Pursuer in the first area, in the sandy beach in front of the sex-change coffin. This isn’t a big reveal, we already knew it was happening, but it was cool to see it in action.

The second thing to note is the scholar himself seems to speak in this trailer, at the beginning and at the end. He speaks as cryptically as you can expect, out of context, and seems to be a guy quite in the know. The rest of the voices we hear in the middle are pulled from the vanilla games and DLC. This trailer is surprisingly full of spoilers, so it was clearly designed for people such as myself who know their crap.

The third thing, though, is anyone who’s seen gameplay of Dark Souls 2 or played it at all knows that the game does not look as nice as it’s being shown in the video. Or at least, it looks different. That’s likely because it’s being shown on the PS4/Xbox One/PC version of the game, which Scholar of the First Sin will release on later this May. Not unusual for a trailer, but Dark Souls 2 actually has a spotty history with that sort of thing: way back when it was first being teased in 2013, the game boasted dynamic lighting that never showed up in the final product—like a much less extreme version of what happened with Aliens: Colonial Marines. While improved graphics are a nice promise, I’m sure more than a few souls fans are more anxious than hopeful.

Still, the final version is a few months out yet—we’ll just have to wait and see.