Released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 last month, From Software’s love letter to hardcore gaming, Dark Souls II, has garnered extremely positive reviews from the gaming community. The game will soon be making its way to the PC, and images of extensive graphics and control customization options have surfaced, giving hope to PC gamers disappointed by the first Dark Souls port.
PC Gamer has posted images of Dark Souls II’s detailed graphics and control options, which allow adjustments for resolution, texture quality, shadow quality, motion blur, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, and High-Quality Character Rendering, among other things.
All controls can also be remapped to player preference:
Gamespot’s Kevin Van Ord also writes positively of Dark Souls II’s PC performance, saying that “When you set the resolution at 1920 X 1080, the image you see is actually rendering at that resolution,” and “The game runs at a brisk 60 frames per second, even on modest PCs.”
Coupled with screenshot comparisons between PC and console versions which show the PC version as vastly superior in the graphics department, it appears that From Software has made a remarkable improvement over the first Dark Souls PC port.
The PC version of Dark Souls, subtitled Prepare to Die Edition, was released on August 23 2012 after nearly 100,000 people signed a petition asking From Software to port the game. Unfortunately, being relatively inexperienced with the PC, From Software encountered difficulties with the task, and upon release, Prepare to Die Edition had just about every symptom of a bad port. These included using the unpopular Games for Windows Live, locked frame rate, awful keyboard and mouse controls, and a nonadjustable screen resolution. Since then, a number of mods attempting to rectify these problems have appeared on the Dark Souls Nexus site.
Game director Yui Tanimura said in an interview: “With the first Dark Souls, the development team started work on the console version before the PC version, and because of that there were less options for the development team to make the PC version more optimal in terms of resolution and so on […] With Dark Souls 2, the team’s working on console and PC at the same time, so there shouldn’t be an issue with how optimal it will be on day one.”
Dark Souls II will be released on the PC on April 25 via Steam.