After 290 days, Dark Souls Remastered's servers are finally back online, meaning that every game in the trilogy is playable with PvE and PvP enabled, bar the original Dark Souls.
"Online features for the PC version of Dark Souls Remastered have been reactivated," the official Twitter account said (thanks, PCGamesN). "Thank you once again for your patience, understanding, and support."
Last month, it was reported that Dark Souls: Prepare to Die's servers would never be coming back "due to an aging system", essentially meaning you have to buy the Remastered version to use online functionality. As the servers are now back, that's a possibility again, though it remains to be seen how secure the servers are as, when Dark Souls 2's came back, fans were quick to point out that there are still security concerns.
The servers first went down after an exploit was discovered that allowed for hackers to infiltrate your PC and withdraw sensitive data such as passwords and private information. FromSoftware, once alerted to this, quickly closed all the servers for maintenance across the entire Souls series, and they remained offline for nearly an entire year.
Dark Souls 2 came back recently, but with a few key issues such as hackers and cheaters still being able to force illegal items into your inventory, getting you banned. Cheaters can also still become "Turrets" in that they can spam bullets and spells, which not only is unfair in PvP but can crash your game due to VFX overload. Not using this glitch, hackers can still force close your game - it remains to be seen if Dark Souls Remastered will have similar leftover problems.
Dark Souls 3's servers came back earlier this year and it's been smooth sailing for the most part. And with so many eagerly waiting for the online functionality to reactivate, Dark Souls Remastered might be more active than it has been in years, so now's the perfect time to jump in, get invading, leave breadcrumb messages, and help someone beat the Gaping Dragon. Or get through Blighttown, but who wants to bother with all that?