It may sound crazy, but despite Dark Souls being 8 years and having received a lot of attention from the modding community, there has been one major obstacle that has proven to be a huge challenge for them. Put simply, it has been (so far) impossible for people to create custom maps and locations within the game.
Well, that’s not strictly true. While new areas can be created, a weird conflict with collision detection has meant that your character can’t really do anything with them. Well, except either fall or walk through them.
Following the release of a new video, however, it seems that (finally) this major hurdle may have been overcome!
Dark Souls May Finally Get Custom Maps
In a report via Eurogamer, one of the team who has worked on the custom map mod has said that while initial tests are proving successful (based on the years of failure and difficulties), it hasn’t been easy to achieve.
“We had initially thought we’d have to reverse engineer the collision format that Dark Souls uses in order to be able to generate custom collision, but Horkrux figured out how to do it just by using official Havok tools. It turns out FromSoftware didn’t make anything especially fancy, Horkrux just needed to make a template for Havok.”
When Can We Expect to See Some New Maps?
While the news is exciting to fans of the Dark Souls franchise, you shouldn’t be getting too excited at this point. The team behind the development has been very keen to point out that while this is a significant breakthrough, the fine-tuning of it (to the point that fully-fledged new areas could be inserted) is a long way away from reality.
With From Software seemingly taking an extended break from the franchise, however, this represents the best hope of any new Dark Souls content. I personally can’t wait to see what they have in store for us!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
