A little while back, we reported on the news that Sony Interactive Entertainment would be shutting down the online servers for the PlayStation 3 classic Demon’s Souls. While an exact reason wasn’t given for the shutdown, keep in mind that the game is several years old, and, obviously, we have new Souls games to play, such as the forthcoming Dark Souls Remastered.
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Well, those servers came to a close a few days ago, but that isn’t stopping a few devoted players from attempting to resurrect their own, in the hopes of keeping the online features – including messages, co-op, invasions and a boss encounter – alive and well.
There’s quite a devoted community behind the game, as this Reddit thread easily shows. And a number of players are already hard at work on a process to resurrect online play via said private servers. The source code for the project has been posted at the thread above, meaning that a number of savvy programmers can do their stuff when it comes to getting these servers working. We haven’t heard about a success story behind it yet, but it’s great to see that they’re giving it a try.
While the idea of creating private servers for a publicly released game may sound somewhat ridiculous – especially if said parent company behind the game doesn’t support it – that doesn’t mean communities haven’t been successful before. In fact, the Dreamcast classic Phantasy Star Online has managed to last a few years after Sega dropped support of it, with the help of its avid community and their private servers. And we’ve even seen some that still manage to run today…so anything is possible.
Again, your best bet for learning more about this process is checking out the Reddit thread, as it details just what users can do in terms of keeping it alive a little bit longer.
We’ll let you know if anyone becomes successful in getting these servers up and running, and we certainly wish them the best of luck. We do hope they pull it off, because a cult classic like this is still getting players discovering it – so why shouldn’t it be online?
Demon’s Souls is available now for PlayStation 3.
