Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin will be $19.99 on PC for players with the game and DLC.

which would lead to really obvious piracy issues

You don't really think it's a smart idea to put all of the new content in the game's files so that people can just mod them in, right? You realize how ridiculously easy it would become to pirate the new game content?

Plus, what happens if the file names have shared names? What if the two different maps for NMW had the same filename? They'd have to be renamed, renaming every single file to prevent conflicts would be annoying.

And how do you handle alternate maps? The game wouldn't have any way to tell which version the players are on, since they're on the same server, so how would it knwo when to load which maps?

And, what if there's features that literally cannot function on DX9? What if some of the new enemy groups, new encounters, even parts of the new maps or the way they're loaded are only possible with DX11? Then how do you handle that situation if a player gets summoned to a DX11 world if they have DX9, for some reason?

There's just too many issues that would crop up, it's really not that unreasonable to think Fromsoft didn't want to tackle all of that stuff and decided to keep it simple and just make the games separate. The games are really just too radically different, incompatibility should really be expected.

It doesn't actually hurt the community as much as people think. If anything it will only get larger, because there is literally no reason to get regular DS2 now as long as you can run SotFS, so the community isn't going to shrink, and eventually more and more people will switch over to the new version.

It'll be a little smaller at first, but it will grow back up to the size of vanilla DS2 and far beyond it, most likely, pretty quickly. It's not like they're exactly splitting the community 50/50 and keeping it split 50/50 forever, the old DS2 will just slowly die out and people will switch to the new one eventually.

I can see why From would decide that it's not really worth the effort to try and make them compatible when chances are nobody will be playing vanilla DS2 for very long anymore anyway. I know there's a lot of pissed off people, but they're probably just going to quit DS2 eventually anyway if they don't switch over.

/r/DarkSouls2 Thread Parent