Blighttown is an area of the original Dark Souls that combined a high degree of difficulty in combat and navigating the environment with a punishingly low frame rate. It’s one of the game’s challenges that often felt unfair, due to the performance issues hobbling your ability to move and fight with the same ease found in other parts of the game.
And it looks like it was fixed in Dark Souls: Remastered.
Digital Foundry scrutinized Dark Souls: Remastered to see if Blighttown had been improved, and the team came away impressed. You can watch the full video above to see it in action.
While even an Xbox One X running a backward-compatible version of the Xbox 360 version of Dark Souls would often dip to 20 fps, Dark Souls: Remastered on a base PlayStation 4 maintains its performance of a solid 60 fps throughout Blighttown. This is despite the updated effects and higher native resolution of 1080p. It’s an impressive achievement; you’ll finally be fighting the monsters in Blighttown, not the frame rate.
The PlayStation 4 Pro version of the game also keeps the frame rate at a near-perfect 60 fps, even though the game runs at a native 1800p. Digital Foundry has not been able to test the Xbox One, Xbox One X or PC versions of the remaster, but this is still good news for PlayStation fans. It should give everyone else hope that their favorite consoles will perform similarly. There’s also a day one patch on the way that wasn’t used for this test, but it’s unlikely the first patch will degrade performance.
Dark Souls: Remastered is out May 25 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. The Nintendo Switch version has been delayed with no new release date given yet.
