Dark Souls 2 Free Remaster Gets New Release That Completely Transforms The Game

Dark Souls 2’s free path tracing mod has just received a new release, available to anyone with the PC version of the game.

Released way back in 2014, Dark Souls 2 did not use path tracing technology at the time as it was not available to most players, with path and ray tracing being introduced to gaming consoles around a generation later.

Dark Souls 2’s baked lighting was gorgeous for its time, but now modders have found a way of introducing path tracing to the game which completely transforms the way it looks.

Given the rather awkward-to-say name of DS2LightingEngine SotFS (via Dominic Tarason on BlueSky), the mod introduces a variety of new graphical features to Dark Souls 2.

Path tracing is available for the entire game, improving the lighting in nearly every area and making the environment pop out a lot more.

In addition to that, it also features dynamic shadows for every item and object, where even things like torch sconces, bonfires, and other ambient lights cast their own unique shadows.

It also adds distant scenery in multiple areas, with pre-configured presets for each location that you can also configure yourself.

In addition to this, the mod also includes volumetric fog, ground truth ambient occlusion, HDR, improved material rendering for metals and non-metals, new meshes for grass and distant geometry, temporal super sampling for use with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR technologies, and texture replacements.

It’s quite the mouthful, but it does make the game look pretty gorgeous in some screenshots.

Dark Souls 2 Was Already A Beautiful Game, But This Mod Takes It To The Next Level

As journalist Dominic Tarason points out, there are some texture packs to further improve the game’s graphics to give it a proper remaster feeling.

He also says that it improves the look of human characters, which had a plasticity to them in the game’s default lighting, and massively improves features like skin and hair colour.

As the mod is still in beta, expect some weird shenanigans to occur if you were to install it. Particularly, there are confirmed to be some weird rendering errors in some places which may affect your gameplay.

It also may change your settings with each new update, which is something to be aware of. Altogether though, it’s looking great for an early iteration of the mod, and should be worth downloading for any fans of Dark Souls that want to start a fresh playthrough.

Dark Souls 2 is the second installment of the Dark Souls series, released by FromSoftware in 2014 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

After receiving three DLC packs across the year, the game was remastered and repackaged as Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin in 2015, releasing on the then-next-gen consoles Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

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