A Dark Souls fan named Soul_Slasher has put together a mod that replaces the heads-up display (HUD) in Dark Souls with the one in Dark Souls 2. The mod is avaible and downloadable from Dark Souls Nexus.

Also dont forget about the "DXfix" mod which allows you to adjust the game's rendering resolution, improve the quality of the Depth of Field effect, add SSAO and SMAA, load texture mods, and more.

Actiontrip has news that Dark Souls has sold over 2.3 milllion games since its release in 2011. While not the greatest amount ever sold it's still impressive given the targeted audience.

Here’s the unit breakdown per Gpara and Livedoor which attended the event:

“Dark Souls (PS3) 375,000 units in Japan and overseas (PS3, Xbox 360) for a total of 1,300,000 and 1,675,000. Subsequently, 137,000 sold foreign (360, PC PS3, Xbox) to sell a total of 692,000 of the 555,000 units, including the additional content Dark Souls: Artorias of the Abyss edition (PS3, PC) 2,367,000 accumulated.”

While the game originally released on PS3 before moving to PC and Xbox 360, the original was not released on 360 in Japan. From Software said during the presentation Dark Souls 2 would be made available on Xbox 360 at launch in Japan.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an article on tweaking Dark Souls for the PC, starting with the obvious DSfix mod from Durante but also the DSMod controls mod and a bit on save games and other odds and ends.

Eurogamer serves up a review of Artorias of the Abyss, a Dark Souls DLC pack for consoles (already included with the PC version). The score is 9/10 and here's a sample:

For Dark Souls fans the sense of overcoming a seemingly insurmountable challenge is everything, and the Artorias of the Abyss DLC brings its fair share of mountains to climb. The new single-player campaign is also faithful to the eerie, mysterious mood of the core adventure, largely thanks to some beautifully crafted, sprawling areas to explore and the twisted creatures that populate them.

Namco Bandai announced that the console version of the Artorias Abyss DLC is now available for download at the PS3 and Xbox 360 marketplaces.   PC owners of the game already have acces to it as it came with the Prepare to Die Edition for the PC.

Just in case you missed the previous batches of revies here is one more Dark Souls: Prepare to Die review at NoHighScores:

The PC edition of Dark Souls is both a blessing and a curse in some ways, however. The game resolution at launch was a huge issue with some gamers until a user made a small patch file to allow you to crank up the res on higher end machines. For me that was a minor issue, even if I did appreciate the better visuals. A much larger issue is Games for Windows Live. I simply cannot stay connected to it for long stretches at a time. In fact it’s usually a matter of minutes before he “You have been disconnected from Games for Windows Live” message appears and the game is forced to autosave and reloads to the title screen. This happened nearly every single time I played and is easily the most aggravating aspect of the PC edition. Am I alone in this? I have no idea but all I know is that much of the online experience was hampered by it.

Two reviews for Dark Souls: Prepare To Die have showed up, both positive.

RPGCodex:

All things considered, I cannot say I'm disappointed with the product. Sure, "out of the box" the quality of the port is atrocious, but unlike most of its competitors Dark Souls: Prepare to Die only requires two small fan mods to bring out its full potential. The new content is also really good and on par with (or sometimes even better than) the main game, even if it rarely brings anything substantially new to the table.

So, should you buy the PC version or get the console version and wait for the DLC? The PC is definitely the superior singleplayer option (as befits the Master Race) with its superior performance, eye candy and mod potential and thus provides the ultimate Dark Souls experience. But if you already own a console version of the game and/or you are mostly into PvP, you are better off waiting for the DLC to arrive on consoles or at least for a Steam sale. Praise the Sun!

Dusty Cartridges gave it a 10:

I’m going to get a little personal here – there is a good chance that I am way too close to this game to review it for newcomers. I’ve poured anywhere between 90-120 hours into this game. Aside from magic builds and sorceries, I know this game back to front, and trying to describe it, in all of its wonderful glory as a game and as a truly complex, sublime piece of art, is incredibly hard. I could talk about the new armour set I found is great because it gives very similar protection to Havel’s armour but without the weight, or how useful the new pyromancy skill is when dealing with shield bearing enemies, or how Prepare to Die turned Artorias from a simple legend into a character that you couldn’t help but admire and despair over. But that is another article for another time.

here is a collection of reviews from the last week for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die.

Desslock gave the game 4.5 stars out of 5 for Gamespy:

While this port isn't the significant enhancement that we'd all hoped for (to put it kindly), Prepare to Die Edition is still clearly the definitive version of Dark Souls. It plays smoother, multiplayer is improved, mods have enhanced the resolution and promise further improvements, and there's content not currently available on the consoles. PC gamers have had to wait a while, but we now have the best version of Dark Souls anywhere, and it's almost-unique type of challenging and rewarding gameplay has made it one of my all-time favorite games.

RPGFan likes it for 85%:

The port itself isn't anything to write home about, so what about the new Artorias of the Abyss content? Explained simply, it's more Dark Souls. If you hated the original game, it's not going to change your mind. On the other hand, if you loved it – it's more Dark Souls! There are several new areas, all of which are up to the consistently high artistic standard of the rest of the game. The layout of one or two of them is a bit muddled, but they're just as well put-together as the main game, and the sense of interconnectedness that was such a well-beloved hallmark of the original release is still here.

Strategy Informer gives it a score of 9.4.

Worth Playing likes it a bit less at 7.3.

Gaming Nexus feels it is worth a 7.0.

Robert Boyd (Cthulhu Saves the World) looks at the design of Dark Souls at Gamasutra, arguing the game isn't necessarily as hard as its reputation suggests:

Why has Dark Souls achieved mainstream success and has not remained merely a cult favorite? I'd like to argue that a major factor behind Dark Souls' success is the disconnect between its perceived difficulty and its actual difficulty. Dark Souls presents itself as an impossible challenge to the player outwardly, but inwardly, the game is subtly designed in many ways to help the player achieve the impossible.

(Note: this article includes a few spoilers.)

1. Marketing

The publisher of Dark Souls actively sought to brand the game as a difficult game from day one. Just look at the name of the game's official website: PrepareToDie.com. Marketing the game as being extremely difficult increases the game's perceived difficulty without changing the actual difficulty at all.

2. It lets the players make their own rules

After stacking the odds against the player (with a huge, hostile world), the game starts stacking the odds back in the player's favor. First things first -- Dark Souls doesn't force the player to play the game in any particular way. Want to play a heavily armored knight, a light-on-her-feet warrior, a mage, a priest, or all of the above? Sure thing. The game lets you use the style of hero that you feel most comfortable with. Although the player chooses one of several set classes at the beginning of the game, class selection only determines the player's starting stats and equipment; where you go from there is entirely up to you.

VG247 has an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki,  the game director at From Software, the company behind this game. As always, an excerpt, this time about why Dark Souls is a superioer game:

Miyazaki offers us his own take on why he feels Dark Souls is a superior game, “One of the main achievements is the feeling of exploration given by the connected multi-level map. Another favourite is that players can share a moment of the bell ringing in online mode. As a creator of the game I have experienced both success and failure but I feel that our policy of creating a game that all gamers, regardless of different nationalities can immerse themselves in, was not wrong and it was supported by our development team.”

The DLC, Artorias of the Abyss, that the PC-oriented edition contained will be available for PS3 and Xbox 360. If you picked up a copy of the Dark Souls game before they announced the Prepare to Die Edition, you can buy this DLC from October 24th. A quote from the press release, courtesy of Gamebanshee:

CERGY PONTOISE, FRANCE – 19 September 2012 - NAMCO BANDAI Games Europe today announced that the Artorias of the Abyss content that debuted in Dark Souls™: Prepare to Die™ Edition will be available for purchase via digital download on both the PlayStation®Network and Xbox LIVE® on October 24th, 2012 in Europe and Australasia. In Dark Souls™: Artorias of the Abyss, acclaimed developers FromSoftware take console gamers into the depths of hell through torturous dungeons, unrelenting boss battles, and the most challenging of gameplay experiences in video games today. The Artorias of the Abyss DLC content will also provide console players with an enhanced online PVP (player vs. player) mode allowing players to assemble battles against one another for all-out fights to the death that console fans have been waiting for.

In a review of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die, Gamingtrend rates the game with a score of 91. The review is subtitled with: "Fix the bugs yourself".

First, let’s start with the controls. Now, I am a stubborn PC gamer of the old school – a school that didn’t bother with fancy-pants devices like “gamepads”. In game after game, I try and succeed to force the mouse/keyboard combo to work for me despite suggestions to the contrary, and until this point I’ve managed to succeed. With Dark Souls PC? I could not do it. Unless your reflexes and hand-eye-coordination works in some kind of alien relation that would no doubt confuse and frighten me, don’t bother trying to play this game with anything but a controller, short of getting into some real over the top customization of said controls.

Actually, strike what I said: the fact is, getting into rather technical manipulation of the game’s internals is going to be rather unavoidable if you want a maximally enjoyable gameplay experience. Let me run down the list of what I had to do to really get this game playing properly. I used a fan-made 360 controller emulator to get my off-brand gamepad to work with anything approaching the grace of the console controller. This involved going into the emulator itself, tweaking and fixing things to be appropriately tuned for Dark Souls itself.

Here are 2 more reviews of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die.

Adrenaline Vault 3/5:

Before going into detail as to why I’m disappointed with what should have been a good niche game for PC, I need to be upfront and tell you that Dark Souls requires Games for Windows Live. It saves your progress constantly to your online profile, so you have to be logged in constantly to play (I had the Steam version, so this might not be the case in other versions). Thus, no access to the Internet means no gameplay. And if you hate Games for Windows Live, then you’re out of luck. It also has a weird effect on multiplayer. It seems as if Dark Souls uses a kind of cloud-based peer-to-peer setup. Even if you’re not actually in a multiplayer game, others who are in your part of the cloud are sometimes visible as ghosts, and you can leave messages for one another scrawled on surfaces (a nice touch). So, the good news is that anyone eager for multiplayer will find it incredibly easy to get hooked up with people. The bad news is that you have no choice but to be online and available for multiplayer.

Otaku Study B:

I won’t deny, for games of this caliber I am generally not a PC gamer… preferring the controls of a controller be it for the Playstation, XBox or even a trusty WiiMote. I was curious as to how they would adapt the control schema to the keyboard given the sometimes need for quick reaction and careful movements. To put it into perspective as to how my experience was with the keyboard controls… I barely got out of the prison cell starting point before moving to the pad.  This might just be me, but the combination of mouse and keyboard controls do not work and if you do not have a game pad (Eg. Xbox 360 PC Pad) for your PC….. good luck to you there!

Here are some more reviews of Dark Souls Prepare to Die.

Destructoid does not really have a review but share their impressions.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of Dark Souls -- the ability to summon other players and invade their worlds, which nicely complements the brutal, cryptic setting of Lordran -- is less than ideal here. The community seems pretty solid already (with the occasional follow-up "thank you" message on Games for Windows Live after a successful boss run), but "summoning failed" is all too common a sight.

Gamespot has a video review.

TechZed has a review without a score but don't list many of the shortcomings that have been reported elsewhere.

The graphics of this game are wonderful. The Darkroot Garden present in the game is so green that you will feel as if the air around you has gotten warm. The surreal shores of Ash Lake are as if you are walking in some kind of dream. All of the locations are finely detailed, and they are able to stay in the minds of the players. Everything has a sense of beauty, which can’t be ignored, and it’s all because of the attention given to the graphics of the game.

Slimgamer rates it with 4 out of 5 stars.

Now, I say that Dark Souls is a ‘well made’ game – I am of course referring to the original build of Dark Souls which came out on console back in 2011 – the PC (Prepare to Die) edition has been created solely through fan outcry that there was not a PC version. From Software have basically taken their console version of Dark Souls and pushed that square peg against the round hole long enough until it finally fit into place and then pushed it out of the door. Normally this would be a critics dream playground, a shoddy port from console to PC seems to be the ‘in’ thing these days but From Software have openly said that this is all the fans asked for so it’s all that they delivered – I can’t really blame them for that.

And finally the Bellingham Herald with no score but a positive tone.

"Dark Souls" is harmonious - a rare quality which often separates good games from great ones. The artwork, gameplay mechanics, and level design all work together to support the uncompromising, oppressive feel of the game. The new content in the PC release fits right in. While connection issues are still a problem, it's a minor complaint when compared with the staggering number of things "Dark Souls" gets right. "Dark Souls" is a modern masterpiece - a confident title that stands above its contemporaries with much larger budgets. While it wasn't designed with PC inputs in mind, and should be played with a gamepad, "Dark Souls" is every bit as magical on the PC as it is on consoles. If you haven't experienced "Dark Souls" yet (or even if you have), this new edition is well worth the asking price.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die has been reviewed by TweakTown scoring 90%.

In an age where gamers complain incessantly that games are too easy these days, and too short, Dark Souls comes out to show just how tough a game can be. From the outset you have no lengthy tutorial (one does exist however), no handholding or guides, nothing. It is you versus the world the game is set in and that is what makes it one of the most unique gaming experiences around.

2D-X also have taken a look at the game without scoring it but concluding this:

This is the console version of Dark Souls, playable on PC. It’s playable and it’s great, tense, grim stuff. Yes, this port is lazy and weird, but it’s also on PC because the fans wanted it there. It’s better than no lazy port at all. The outside fixes — a controller and the work of a programmer unaffiliated with Namco Bandai or From Software — plus all the additional content almost make the PC version the optimal way to play the game. Until you factor in Microsoft’s woeful DRM, and the huge graphic overlay for equipped items and weapons, but that should get sorted out by the tireless efforts of the PC gaming crowd.

An analysis of the performance of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die on PC has been made by Dark Side of Gaming with the following conclusion:

All in all, Dark Souls PC is a quick cash-in and nothing more. Namco Bandai didn’t want to invest time and money on the PC version and that’s precisely why it did not let another studio handle this port. From Software is also to be blamed here, as it doesn’t take much PC expertise to change some global values of your game’s code. This is the same studio that developed the damn game. It’s not like another studio – with no access to its source code – was responsible for porting it. From Software has also used GFWL, a service that was not asked on the Dark Souls PC petition. In fact, a lot of PC gamers asked From Software to avoid using it. The reason why From Software decided to use it is simple – as Capcom’s Sven said a while back, 95% of GFWL system calls are identical to Xbox Live. And hey, why should you rewrite something when you have it up and running by 95%?

DSfix v1.0 has been released, bringing a number of improvements to Dark Souls since we last looked at it. This latest version adds fully configurable keys and integrated SSAO but previous versions added features such as save-game backups, HUD-less screenshots, intro skipping and more.

Another preview of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die showed up at Forbes. The reviewer feels it is a good game but the port is rather bad, but becomes better with some custom fixes.

I tried playing with mouse and keyboard as long as I could. It was excruciating. I praised the sun when I finally got my Xbox 360 controller working. Running at 1080P internal resolution with anti-aliasing cranked up to 16X and an Xbox 360 controller…the game is sweet. I meant that. It’s already the best version of the game once you make these changes. This means that on the day the game is released, the modding community has already made this game awesome.

I know a lot of people are pissed off about the port, and I think they’re totally justified in feeling burned. If From was hitting blockades, Namco or From should have brought in some people to help. If a modder can make such an enormous fix in such a short period of time, experienced PC game designers could have come in and really helped From along.

In addition also Rock, Paper, Shotgun checked the game out.

Dark Souls resembles an RPG, with its levels, stats and classes, but that’s only one aspect of the game. Killing monsters and collecting souls is kind of like gathering experience, sure, and it’s certainly possible to grind, min-max and become the best possible version of whatever it is you want to be, whether agile assassin, armoured knight, archer, cleric or wizard. Thanks to the multiplayer sharing of the world I’ve seen phantom images of other players who are as unlike my character as another humanoid could be. One lonely figure, clinging to the solace of a bonfire’s glow, was the spitting image of Rincewind, pointy hat and all.

Several websites have reviews for his game. I'll quote from two of them and list the rest.

Metro has a review 8/10.   A quote about how you start the game:

You exist in a land where the bad guys have already won - society is in terminal decline and everyone is turning into undead 'hollows'. That's how you start the game, but some trick of fate allows you to keep your human mind. You can even transform back into a person by obtaining 'humanity' from dead enemies - although it's a rare commodity and, as you may have heard, dying is a very frequent occurrence in Dark Souls.

Inc Gamers has a review as well 10/10.  A quote about how

Dark Souls is a game that pokes at our soft, flabby bellies and laughs at the way other titles have babied us with cheap gimmicks and easy rewards. It’s a game whose mechanics are the perfect reflection of its bleak, desolate world. You will suffer, you will learn and you will feel triumph after elated triumph when you succeed. The subversion of traditional RPG thinking (levelling up is nothing compared to good equipment, and skill trumps all), tremendous physicality of its combat and clever integration of co-op play are just a few highlights from a truly outstanding title.

Review at Cheat Code Central  4/5

Atomic Gamer's Review 7/10

Eurogamer has reviewed Dark Souls for PC, dismissing the port complaints against the strengths of the game. The score is 9/10 and here's a sample:

The title of the 'Prepare To Die' edition plays up what the game's known for, of course, and this expanded version is the result of PC gamers clamouring to have a game like this on their systems. There is much that has been complained about: the locked resolution is one example, which has almost instantly been unlocked by an enterprising neogaffer. Other demands, while desirable, are not realistic, because they would have required From Software rebuilding the game entirely.

In general, the arguments are wearying and all that needs to be said is this: Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition does not come with the technical options you would expect from a well-engineered PC game, because it's a port of a console game, and that's all From Software ever promised to deliver. Anyone who passes up Dark Souls for this reason is cutting off their nose to spite their neckbeard of a face. 

PC Gamer has a 3-page review for this game 89/100

A quote about if the game is for you:

Ask yourself how you pronounce ‘PC game’. If your emphasis is on the ‘PC’, then run. Run far from Dark Souls and don’t look back. There is nothing for you here. There are many reasons to run. The twisted, shrouded, uneasy medieval fantasy land of Lordran stretches away like the darkest night. Go the wrong way, probe too deeply into the inky depths, and the things that lurk there will get you. My best analogy: it reminds me of being six years old and hearing a noise downstairs in a dark house.

A quote about the unfairness in the game:

I don’t blame you. That feeling never goes away. Fifteen hours into Dark Souls, I fought a ten-foot bipedal goat man. He was armed with two vast cleavers, and supported by two vicious dogs. Raising my shield, I could deflect the goat demon’s blows, but staccato bites from his mutts raised my poison gauge to critical levels. Swinging my mace in a wide arc, I crushed the skulls of the dogs, but I was poisoned, losing health as I was backed into a corner. The goat demon reared back to strike. I darted between his legs, aimed a blow at his heel, and promptly keeled over, dead from the dog’s venom. YOU DIED. This is bullshit, I’m turning this off.

And the conclusion:

If you know the trip downstairs will be long, hard, and sometimes uncomfortable, but you want to take it anyway because you know it will reward you like nothing else – if that noise downstairs leaves you too curious to climb back into bed and cover your ears – then Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition is waiting for you at the bottom of the stairs. I suggest you go and investigate.

Namco Bandai, the studio behind the game, has announced that the so far pc exclusive Prepare to Die Edition will be available for consoles on Oct 26th 2012, it will be a boxed version though:

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition will be released as a boxed product for consoles, Namco Bandai has announced. Launched (and modded!) this week on PC, the Prepare to Die Edition features all of the original Dark Souls content along with a new expansion called "Artorias of the Abyss" and brand new PVP matchmaking. This new console edition will launch in Europe and Australasia on October 26. For those who already own Dark Souls on console, the new content is slated for a downloadable release as well. We've contacted Namco Bandai to see if the retail edition is headed to North America as well.

Thanks Joystig :)

Catching up on some items, you're probably aware Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition has been released on Steam:

Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition is Now Available on Steam!

Prepare for a new, mysterious story, centered around the the world of Lodran, but most of all, prepare to die. You will face countless murderous traps, countless darkly grotesque mobs and several gargantuan, supremely powerful demons and dragons bosses. You must learn from death to persist through this unforgiving world. And you aren’t alone.

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition will include an untold chapter in the world of Lordran where the player must stop the spread of darkness at all costs by facing and defeating the Dark Knight Artorias.

There's also a release trailer and, as discussed on our forums, a clever user has already worked on the internal 1024x720 resolution problem and released a mod. The author notes it's too early to know how well this works for the entire game, but it doesn't make any changes to the code and is easily removed.

A trailer for this game has been released during Games Com. If you want to see what you can expect, please follow this link to Youtube.

Catching up on a few links...bit-tech has a preview of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.

Personally, I struggled just to make it through the opening sections of the game but still found the slowly unfolding lore and rules to be bafflingly, brilliantly labyrinthine. Dark Souls' unashamedly involved stats and jargon-saturated systems are a breath of fresh air (or possibly stale air from the early 1990s) for an industry that's increasingly orientated towards accessibility.

You might think that this depth means Dark Souls is a far greater fit for the PC than it was for consoles. That's certainly what a lot of people thought and, conceptually, they might be right - but realistically the implementation Namco has taken isn't as good fit as you might think.

This is the bit where I said I'd come back to and where I talk about being annoyed with Dark Souls on the PC - and not just because it uses Games for Windows LIVE, either. Though that certainly doesn't help.

What was much more of a problem was the performance, which was lacking to the point of skipping frames even though it was running at only medium detail, non-extreme resolutions on beefy Alienware gaming laptops.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has gone hands-on with the PC version of Dark Souls. For the fans desperate to play it on their preferred platform, it's Dark Souls on the PC. For those dubious about the quality of the port, be prepared to have your fears justified:

This was never part of the plan. Dark Souls is coming to PC because so many people asked for it, just as Demons’ Souls only travelled West because an unexpected demand arose. There have been worrying signs that the port will be less than optimal and, having now played the Prepare to Die edition, it’s my sad duty to report that the experience is far from smooth. It’s still Dark Souls though, with more content than on console, and, framerate issues or not, there’s nothing else quite like it.

GFWL, or whatever it’s called these days, is in. That’s the worst of the bad news I think, although I do seem to dislike Microsoft’s sentry system more than most. The official word is that it’s being used to implement the all-important multiplayer, including a PvP system that is new for the Prepare to Die edition. The game will be available direct from Namco’s digital store, through Steam or in an actual box with all sorts of fancy goodies, but wherever you get it, you’ll have to sign in to GFWL.

Eurogamer also has a preview up, with some differences in the detail of their experience:

To cut to the chase, the frame-rate on consoles has always been a major area of complaint among Dark Souls fans, and the notorious Blight Town or New Londo Ruins areas are usually singled out as the big offenders. The implication of a PC release is obviously that all these problems can be tackled by the brute force of a faster CPU, and though there are very light hitches here and there, it's a relief to say Blight Town now plays without all the constant chugging. The improvement is staggering to those that endured the treacle-like pace of the area on PS3 and 360, already making this version a winning proposition.

There is bad news which could hit PC gamers pretty hit hard, though. While the frame-rate's rough edges have been filed down, you're still going to be playing at 30FPS out of the box, as widely rumoured. A graphics menu has been added in, but there are no obvious ways to raise the bar to the preferable 60FPS mark. In fact, options are pretty meagre overall on this front; you have the standard resolution and refresh rate settings (it does nothing to solve this), and also check-boxes to remove anti aliasing or motion blur. Barebones and to the point. 

The system requirements for the Dark Souls PC port have been added to the Steam store page:

System Requirements
OS: Windows XP , Windows Vista, Windows 7, or newer
Processor: 2.6 GHz Dual-Core
Memory: 1 GB (XP), 2GB (Vista/7)
Hard Disk Space:  4 GB
Video Card: 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 4850 or higher, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or higher
DirectX®: 9.0c
Sound: Direct Sound Compatible
Additional: Multiplayer requires microphone headset support

Yeah, sure.