Praise The Sun! Dark Souls II Fixing Weapon Durability Bug

Once an obvious bug has been in a game long enough, one comes to accept it'll always be there. You learn to play around the bug, knowing when it'll strike and what you can do to avoid it. It's one of those quirks that makes a game more personal, a little more human. "Oh sweet little Jimmy Buggletons," I imagine you sigh when you find a weapon cracking in Dark Souls II [official site] thanks to the durability bug, "we meet again!" You insufferably twee git.

Well, dear reader, I'm afraid Jimmy is going away to a farm where he'll be very happy playing with the other glitches. The durability bug's finally being, ah, sent to a better place.

The bug makes weapons lose far too much durability when they strike targets like enemy corpses (including folks who die mid-strike) and friendly characters. This is made worse by the durability loss being linked to the framerate and calculated based on 30fps, so anyone running at 60fps (which, y'know, is a bonus of playing on PC) could chew through weapons at a terrible pace.

Players did address the fps problem by making a tool, continuing to fix the shoddy work of developers From Software, but couldn't do it all. Now From are finally addressing the bug, though it's not entirely clear how.

Publishers Bandai Namco announced an upcoming patch yesterday, with changes including:

"Fixed issue whereby weapon durability was decreased drastically when used on enemy corpses, friendly characters, etc. (Especially apparent for users running the game at 60 fps as the durability decrease rate was linked to the frame rate)."

So will folks running at 60fps still lose durability at a higher rate? The "was" in "the durability decrease rate was linked to the frame rate" would seem to suggest they're fixing that as well as the mega durability hit of striking corpses. Either way, addressing the corpse problem will help a load.

The patch is due "in the coming weeks" with a handful of other fixes too. Do check the notes if you're curious. It seems that yes, it is for both the original Dark Souls II and its recent weird/confusing Scholar of the First Sin repackaging.

One of my most tense moments in the original Dark Souls came from weapon durability. Over a long, slow, death-heavy slug down into Blighttown, my fragile Uchigatana started to give, and was almost gone as I neared the Quelaag boss battle. I probably would've given up if durability had sapped faster (and if someone watching my stream hadn't magically invaded me to deliver a fresh sword - in desperation I took it but felt weird about that, and resolved to accept less help).