Living in ’Demon’s Souls’ as the Servers Shut Down

When I begin Demon's Souls, I am not alone. My avatar's character model is overlapped by a ghost. It runs out ahead of me, raises a spectral shield, and charges into the unknown. I wish it luck, and creep carefully forward.

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This ghost is another player, and for the time being Demon's Souls is full of them. If you enable the game's online functionality, they fade in and out of the world, fighting, exploring, dying. They're you, the player, reflected back at yourself, experts and newcomers alike echoing your own successes and failures, fellowship via haunting.

This is my first time fighting here, struggling to find a foothold in the dark fantasy world Demon's Souls takes place in. The ghosts, like so much of the game's online element, make the difficult parts of that quest feel more bearable. Like all Souls games, Demon's can feel capricious and cruel to new players. One of the primary functions of online play in these games, all developed by From Software with the guidance of creative head (now company president) Hidetaka Miyazaki, is to encourage the player to persevere.

But not for much longer, at least not in Demon's Souls case. The game's servers will soon be shutting down, removing all of the PlayStation 3 game's online elements for good. In the meantime, here I am, rusted sword in hand, trying to claw my way into Boletaria as the doors close.

When it was released in 2009, From Software's Demon's Souls was transformative. Initially ignored, growing in sales and esteem via word of mouth and a surprising amount of interest in the West, the dark fantasy game garnered a cult following and an eventual surge of critical acclaim, spurring on the development of a sort-of sequel, called Dark Souls, which used its predecessor as a template to solidify a burgeoning miniature genre.

These games thrive on the twin pillars of adversity and community. On the one end, they are demanding in a way most modern games aren't. They center around combat that moves slowly, does high damage, and punishes inattention. Experience points to grow your character and enhance your weapons are tied directly to player performance: If you die, you drop all the experience you're carrying, and can only reclaim it if you struggle back to the spot where you died without perishing a second time.

But alongside that challenge comes a community dedicated to making the game both easier and harder. Alongside player ghosts, the online functionality records player's deaths as bloodstains in the world. If you touch a stain, you see a brief reenactment of how that player died, a warning, but for the grace of the server go I. It also allows you to leave messages on the ground, in the form of canned phrases strung together, letting the intrepid communicator give warnings, offer advice, or even troll. Bottomless pits tend to have messages next to them, excoriating the nearest sucker to try jumping. On the more sinister side, players can engage in combat with others, sometimes against their will: Certain items allow you to invade the worlds of other players, making yourself one more unexpected obstacle to conquer. These invasions can range from honorable contests to glorified hazing rituals, and they offer a peculiar flavor to the space, the unpredictable sense that the worst can always happen, anywhere. Yet invasions can also be made by invitation for the purpose of helping other players, summoning allies to help take on particularly tough encounters and bosses.

Demon's Souls, a game about the end of the world, is suffering its own sort of apocalypse.

All of these functions are reliant on servers run by From Software to function. Now, their days are over—they were shut down yesterday—and there's no way to restore them. Much of the functionality of these servers is private information, and I have no idea how, say, the game decides which messages to put in any individual player's world, or how to connect players for invasions or cooperation. From Software is exceptionally tight-lipped, and even if they weren't, there's no legal way to restore servers to a game once the game's owner shuts them down. To do so would require hacking the game to function outside of official authentication, a breach of copyright.

The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) is fighting for the right to recreate centralized servers for the purpose of education and research, arguing for an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for that very purpose. So far, however, MADE has been unsuccessful, with the Entertainment Software Association, representing major game publishers, serving as unlikely opponents in the fight. The ESA argues that exemptions like the MADE's would serve no research purpose and would, in fact, simply be used for recreation.