Into The Hollow: Dark Souls 2 First Person Mod

Some things were never meant to be seen up close and personal. Take the Mona Lisa - Da Vinci's elaborate smiley isn't kept behind bulletproof glass for its own safety, it's locked up to maintain a secure distance from onlookers. Get within a few inches and the familiar smile ceases to draw the eye - instead, you'll be unable to ignore the painter's self-insertion, an image of himself mooning the model, reflected in the sparkle of her eye.

With the release of a Dark Souls 2 first-person mod, it's now possible to see the buildings and beasties of Drangleic up close and personal, but do you really want to? Take a look.

It's such a strange experience, seeing places you have strong memories of from a different perspective. It's a bit like the unshakeable weirdness that I always have in a changing room, when mirrors present my own profile to me. Oh, so that's what I actually look like? Oh.

Of course, this isn't what Dark Souls 2 actually looks like. This is a contortion of the original form and it's more interesting as an experiment than an actual mode of playing or perusing. One for the Cabinet of Curiosities.

I had a bit of a panic when I imagined fighting anything larger than the most feeble of hollow soldiers. Would rolling around in first-person cause my eyes to trickle out of their sockets? Would everything I'd learned about timings and weight be rendered useless? It's a daunting prospect, revisiting and relearning the game in this way. If you're interested, here's how to go about it.

1) You'll need to have Cheat Engine installed, which means playing online could lead to a ban.

2) Download this file.

3) "Simply freeze the camera zoom value, equip a bow/binoculars and zoom in. the camera will stay zoomed, allowing you to roam drangleic in first person. triggering a load screen (and possibly cutscene) will reset the camera, simply perform the above steps again. may not work for windows 8 users or those with an outdated copy of the game."

Known issues follow:

there's clipping
fov is wonky (you can edit the fov to help with this)
because it uses cheat engine you risk being banned if you go online (protip: you won't be banned due to from's incompetence)
character movement is not aligned with the camera, try to move forward as much as possible
bows and binoculars will likely cause issues

The important thing to note is that the zoom is being frozen when the bow or binoculars are used, rather than the camera being manually repositioned. That's why the rolling doesn't cause the camera to roll, or indulge in any other fancy vomit-mongering acrobatics.

The countdown to eye-mashing Oculus Rift implementation begins now.