Blighttown, the Dark Souls area infamous for causing catastrophic frame-rate drops, has been cured of its performance plague in the game’s remaster. In Dark Souls Remastered Blighttown (as well as everywhere else in the game) runs at a smooth 60 fps on the PS4 and PS4 Pro, reportedly.
Blighttown is perhaps one of Dark Souls‘ most complex location, a colossal swamp filled with rickety wooden scaffolding and haphazard elevators. As a result, the original versions of the game on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC suffered performance-wise. Dark Souls walkthroughs even site the abysmal frame-rate experienced in Blighttown as a factor in the difficulty on account of its infamy.
But no longer, it seems! Digital Foundry managed to get its hands on a copy of Dark Souls Remastered on PS4. Despite missing the day-one patch, it already looks like Polish developer QLOC (who are understood to be at the helm of the remasters) have managed to fix the issue. “The games playability at 60fps is the biggest advantage of the remaster,” said Digital Foundry. They also said that Dark Souls Remastered runs at this frame rate without a “single hiccup,” including Blighttown.
What’s important to note is that this marketed performance improvement has only been confirmed for the PS4 version of Dark Souls Remastered. Digital Foundry has only been able to try this one out, and haven’t yet tested Xbox One, Xbox One X or PC versions of the game. Though with even an Xbox One X running the Xbox 360 version of Dark Souls through backwards-compatibility dipping to 20fps from time to time, its likely that whatever optimization QLOC have implemented will have a similar if not identical impact on the other versions.
It’s very impressive to see how well everything performs in Dark Souls Remastered Blighttown specifically, on the PS4. This is especially great with the game running at a new native resolution of 1080p and with updated graphics overall. We’ll have to cross our fingers that the same will be said for the other versions of the remaster.
