I have a new piece up at Rock Paper Shotgun about Dark Souls 2 (2014), but no prior Dark Souls experience is necessary to read it.
It's about when I got hacked in Dark Souls 2. Basically a malicious multiplayer PvP invader can "inject" invalid items into your inventory, causing the game to crash if you try to open your inventory screen. In my case, my hacker injected me with 500 cursed swords, like truly cursed, more powerful than any intended in-game mechanic or lore.
A really skilled player could probably finish Dark Souls 2 without opening their inventory ever again, but I'm not a really skilled player, so I had to figure out a way to unhack myself -- and the only way out was through the abyss.
All this actually happened to me back in 2024, and it's been marinating in my brain all this time. Now in 2026, I've even tracked down my hacker for this story and interviewed him. I think letting those years pass also helped me see the story from a different angle: empathy, forgiveness, and a depraved sense of shared fallen grace.
There's one thing all the cheaters and anti-cheaters I interviewed can agree on: the DS2 codebase is a total shitshow. I was surprised to learn about FromSoftware's history of poor engineering practices and lax attitude to user security. Why don't they just fix this stuff? From my understanding, fixing inventory crashes is a pretty easy fix -- just clamp the item upgrade level properly. It's bizarre behavior for a very successful studio that definitely has the resources to maintain a still-popular catalog of games.
The whole article kinda goes all over the place -- from personal memoir to cyber security reporting to hacking tutorial to dark fantasy lore analysis to nostalgic retrospective. It's a bit of an adventure, and it was fun to write. Thanks for reading!
