Dark Souls 2 is an often overlooked entry in the Souls series, despite just how unique it was in experimenting with its mechanics and atmosphere back in 2014. In being sandwiched between the now iconic original Dark Souls, and developer FromSoftware’s later efforts like Bloodborne, it’s at times forgotten – thought of as an experiment, a tangent that wasn’t followed up on. Even so, the modding community around Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is blossoming on PC right now, and among the most remarkable mod offerings for the game is the Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine.
Essentially, Lighting Engine is a replacement of the game’s original engine, allowing major changes to its visuals, and offers a toolbox of sorts for others in the modding community to go much further. At its core, installing the Lighting Engine mod adds new anti-aliasing options like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR – replacing the FXAA post processing of the official release. We get lighting upgrades, volumetric fog, vastly improved shadows, ground truth ambient occlusion, and it even re-arranges foliage, trees and terrain with new meshes. This is just scratching the surface, with more features that are work in progress. It’s a simple one to install too: go to Nexus Mods, download, unpack, and replace the shader folder next to the Darksouls 2.exe with the new one – along with several other files – and you’re good to go. From here, the upgrades are transformative in spots like Forest of the Fallen Giants, and No Man’s Wharf.
All of which raises the question: is this the Dark Souls 2 remaster that we’ve needed all these years? Of course, Dark Souls 2 has technically already received a remaster of sorts with the Scholar of the First Sin update in 2015 – a year after its initial release on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. The idea was to upgrade it from DX9 to DX11 with improved lighting, textures, enemy placement, bug fixes, while bundling in the first three DLC expansions. However, despite this suite of upgrades, Scholar of the First Sin still falls short by modern standards. Certainly, it doesn’t live up to the captivating early trailer of Dark Souls 2: the E3 2013 reveal where interplay between light and shadow was a major mechanic of play, where wind physics and volumetric effects played a bigger role. All of this was ultimately dialled back in the final release, and failed to make the grade in Scholar of the First Sin as well. Ten years on, then, it’s impressive to see at least some of that early promise realised by an advanced mod like Lighting Engine, as devised by a fan of the game.
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