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Bargain-priced suffering: Atlus revives Demon’s Souls on PSN

Earnest Cavalli
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Demon's Souls

Against all odds, Demon’s Souls has become one of the most popular cult classic games in recent memory. This is a game developed by From Software that seemingly revels in a player’s misery. Almost everything in the title’s dark fantasy world is out to murder you in really nasty fashion, yet the “realistic” combat and chance to make just a bit more progress than on your last attempt keeps players coming back in droves, even years after the game’s 2009 debut.

The devoted Demon’s Souls fanbase is so rabid for their dungeon crawler of choice that it has made of habit of bringing the game back from the dead. While Demon’s Souls is largely a singleplayer roleplaying game, it also includes novel online functionality that can drastically alter the game’s world while also allowing players to send messages to one another. Atlus had initially planned to bring down the Demon’s Souls servers on October of 2011, but when Demon’s Souls proved itself a major hit, the company offered players a reprieve. The servers would stay on, at least until May 31, 2012. 

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May 31 came and went and the Demon’s Souls servers went dark. Since that time most fans of Demon’s Souls have moved on to Dark Souls, a From Software-developed dungeon crawl that is often described as the spiritual sequel to Demon’s Souls. However, there’s still apparently a sizable demand for the original hyper-difficult roleplaying game, and thus Atlus has decided to once again revive Demon’s Souls.

In an announcement issued earlier today, Atlus revealed that PlayStation 3 owners are now able to download Demon’s Souls from the PlayStation Network Store for only $20. What good does that do anyone if the servers are still offline? Good question. It wouldn’t do much if Atlus left the servers offline, but as part of this new release the publisher has brought the game’s online components back to life and plans keep the Demon’s Souls servers running indefinitely. 

In celebration of this miraculous resurrection Demon’s Souls will see a “Pure White World Tendency” from now until January 14. Long-time Demon’s Souls fans know what this entails, but for everyone else it basically means that all enemies in Demon’s Souls will be weaker and all treasure discovered is more likely to be of great value. The Pure White Tendency also opens up new parts of the Demon’s Souls world that are otherwise inaccessible to players. These White Tendencies are relatively rare and overall World Tendency seems to chance arbitrarily (despite the mathematics governing it), so now would be the perfect time for veterans to delve back into Demon’s Souls and new players to get acquainted with the game before it goes back to being as brutally difficult as it usually is.

Beyond that the $20 price tag featured on the new PSN release of Demon’s Souls is quite attractive, and while it has been priced this low before as one of the PlayStation 3’s Greatest Hits, this overall package is greatly enhanced by having its online components restored by Atlus. Hopefully this move pulls in a ton of profit, as we like the idea of publishers making business decisions based on the stated desires of their fans.

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