Hot on the tails of our new Grimrock Nexus site we’ve got another special treat for you. It’s my pleasure to announce the launch of Dark Souls Nexus for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition.

For those living under a rock for the past few months I’ll break it down a little. Dark Souls was (originally) a dark-fantasy console-only RPG that is well known for being quite difficult but particularly rewarding for players. It was so popular that the PC gaming community petitioned for a PC version of the game. In the end the petition received over 90,000 signatures, so the developers got on board with the idea and released Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition for the PC. Some players have been quick to criticise the direct port of the game lacking certain PC comforts, but developers FromSoftware were always very candid in mentioning that the Prepare to Die edition would be an almost direct port, so if you’re one of those complaining; stop! I think the best way to put it would be “perhaps the worst port going, but still the best game this year”.

While the game hasn’t been without its fair share of issues, the PC gaming community has been quick to take on the task of getting it up to scratch (one of the many beauties of the PC as a gaming platform, I’m sure you’ll agree) and many programmers and modders have been working away at the game to see what they can do to make things better. And boy have they worked hard.

While several great utilities have been released to make PC gamer’s lives easier within Dark Souls, the cream of the crop has got to be Durante’s DSfix tools. DSfix provides many customisable options, including changing the game’s internal rendering resolution past the embarrassingly tiny 1024x720 defaults, depth of field changes, HUD customisations, save game backups, but most importantly for modders, texture over-rides.

Using DSfix with texture overriding enabled allows users to find, modify and change pretty much any of the textures used within the game. It also allows users to share these modifications with others. And that’s what Dark Souls Nexus is here to help with. While texture overriding isn’t like having a full SDK or editor to play with, it’s a great start, and heck, even if that’s the only modable thing the clever-clog programmers like Durante can get out of the game then it’s much better than nothing. Durante has kindly agreed to keep us posted on his work on DSfix as a news writer here at Dark Souls Nexus, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be getting an initial piece up about what DSfix currently can and can’t do in regards to modding some point soon. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

Thanks to the great Reddit community and the quick action of some of the users on the site there’s already a flourish of modding activity going on for Dark Souls over in the DarkSoulsMods section, all pretty much revolving around DSfix. Some have come to the Nexus forums to see if a Dark Souls Nexus might be possible, and I’ve been monitoring the situation for a little while now. What I’ve seen being done and worked on with what little resources have been provided from the developers has really made me want to help out in any way I can. The Dark Souls modders deserve a decent modding community to get behind them, and I’m here to try and kick it up a gear.

With that in mind I’ve tried to contact as many mod authors as I could find on Reddit to see if they’d be interested in getting their work up on Dark Souls Nexus before I launched the site. Their response has been fantastic and I’m really pleased to say there are already a good handful of mods available for the game. If you’ve created some new textures or utilities for the game then please come and share them with the rest of us, and sorry if I didn’t catch you on Reddit.

Because DSfix is required to enable modding in Dark Souls it does present a small barrier to entry for newcomers to modding. Having said that, we are currently working on getting Dark Souls supported in our Nexus Mod Manager that will enable the easy one-click installing of mods. It will still require DSfix to work, but we’re going to build some checks in to NMM to ensure you’re all set to go. If you haven’t got DSfix, or you haven’t setup your ini properly for modding, NMM will tell you. So that should hopefully help out a few people. In the mean-time, if you want to get in to modding your Dark Souls game then head on over to the DSfix page here on the Nexus, download and install it and then check out willypiggy’s tutorial video on how to get your DSfix setup and ready for modding. You’ll need to do this for mods to work in your game.

If you’re reading this news and you’re an RPG fanatic but haven’t looked in to Dark Souls: Prepare to Die then get on it. If you can get around the slightly disappointing obvious console port feel to the game you will honestly find it one of the deepest, darkest and challenging RPGs you’ve ever played. Just a word of warning however, it’s not called “Prepare to Die” for nothing.