10 Things You Should Know About "Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition"

Dark Souls is far from a perfect game, but it nevertheless has somehow become my favorite game—if not of all time, then at least of the last half decade or so. Its weird, dark fantasy world, weighty combat and high-adrenaline risk/reward system—in which hours of progress can easily be lost with nothing to show for it besides your sweaty palms—have kept me coming back time and time again for almost a year.

When Namco Bandai caved to a 100,000-signature petition begging them to port Dark Souls to PC, I was indifferent, having already mastered it on Xbox 360. But when they announced that there would be a ton of new content added, making the new edition into a director's cut of sorts, I knew I'd be playing Dark Souls yet again come August.

Like the core game, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC isn't perfect. But whether you're already on board with the PC version or you've made up your mind to skip it, there are some thing you should know that might just change your mind either way.

Let's get this out of the way right now: Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition is pretty much a straight port of the console game. It's clear that From Software and Namco Bandai—admittedly unfamiliar with PC development—didn't put much effort into appeasing hardcore PC gamers with pages and pages of platform-specific options.

So if you're looking to change your FOV, crank up the graphics and effects, or otherwise optimize Dark Souls for your $2,000 gaming rig, you're going to be disappointed. It looks like a console game, because it is a console game.

On top of a general lack of PC-specific options, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition is capped at a framerate of 30 FPS—which isn't that noticeable, to be honest—and 1024x720 resolution, which unfortunately is noticeable.

Namco Bandai has been upfront about this flaw for weeks, but it's still sure to irk plenty of players who'll wonder why the game looks like it's from 2007.

As big an issue as the resolution cap may seem, one modder—NeoGAF user Durante—has already fixed it. In fact, he fixed it before the game had even come out, by looking at other games that use DirectX 9 the way the Dark Souls port does.

It's simple: just download the files and drop them into the folder where Dark Souls is located, and suddenly Prepare to Die Edition becomes the visually stunning, 1080 HD version it should have been to begin with. Problem solved!

Resolution issues/solutions aside, one of the biggest questions has been whether Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition would fix the rampant framerate issues found in the original game.

There's good news on this front: the framerate remains consistent throughout almost the entire game, and it never so much as blinks during prior problem areas like Blighttown and Lost Izalith. My PC rig is great, but not the best, but I also played on a pretty crappy HP laptop, so the average PC player likely won't have any problems.

So that leaves only one hurdle to potential PC purists hoping to join the hunt for souls: how are the keyboard and mouse controls?

To put it simply, if you're the type of gamer who refuses to use a controller under any circumstances, you're going to have a hard time making progress in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. The keys are fully mappable, but Dark Souls demands so many simultaneous actions that mapping 90 percent of the controls to your keyboard hand simply doesn't work very well.

That said, a wired Xbox 360 controller works perfectly.

There's nothing quite like the sense of foreboding you get when exploring a new area in Dark Souls. Experienced players have had no way to recreate that—I know every inch of this game better than I know my own backyard—until now. Traversing brand new areas feels terrifying and wonderful.

Especially since the new content is just as good as anything in the main game. There are three big, new areas, including several bosses, new enemy types, armor, weapons, and spells. All in all it took me the promised 5-6 hours to complete, and left me feeling like I had just played the best kind of expansion—the one that somehow adds to a game that felt so complete already.

Given all those new areas, you'll be happy to learn that it's much easier to get around in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. From Software managed to sneak in some small changes to the game—one less ghost here, one extra golem there—but the most welcome change is a slew of new warp points.

Previously, you could only warp to bonfires with a Fire Keeper, which means (in layman's terms) it could be a bitch to get around. Not anymore, though: they added 11 new warp points, only five of which are in the new content.

And you'll be warping back to the new area fairly often, if you're anything like me and you love PVP. Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition brings a much-requested arena mode, which allows you to easily enter into PVP matches.

There are two separate battlegrounds, and each one can host 1v1, 2v2 or 4-person free-for-all matches. Each round lasts three minutes, and the person/team with the most kills once time is up wins. It's that simple.

You won't win any souls from competing in the "Battle of Stoicism," as it's been dubbed, though some might consider it a strength of the new mode that there's nothing on the line while you're playing.

And for those who want to summon, invade and win jackpots of souls and humanity like in the good old days, all the game's other multiplayer offerings remain intact and available. Throw down a summon sign, and you can help others fight bosses or fend off invaders. Join the right Covenant, and you can invade other players endlessly, laying ambushes and preying on the weak (if that's your thing).

That said, these multiplayer methods are still finicky. Summoning often fails, and it can be difficult to connect with other players. There's still no easy way to connect with friends. It does currently seem slightly easier to connect with people, though it's unclear at this point whether that's simply due to the influx of new players around launch time.

Lastly—and this goes more for existing Dark Souls diehards—some items and weapons have been tweaked ever-so-slightly. There's a chance this won't affect you, but if you rely on the Dark Wood Grain Ring to help you flip around during battles, you're going to be disappointed to hear that the accessory's been nerfed significantly.

I'm assuming there are other such tweaks, though I didn't encounter them during my 40-plus hours with Prepare to Die Edition.

One thing is for sure: with superior visuals (thanks again, Durante), beautiful new content, seemingly improved matchmaking, a PVP arena, and various gameplay tweaks, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition is the best version of Dark Souls available.