The developer of Dark Souls, From Software, reveals they implemented a new plan to help combat early non-legit copies of their game playing on the game's servers by announcing the game will be completely unfair and "broken" to those gamers.
Until the official release of the game in each region, gamers with early copies who try to play online have to deal exclusively with a race of monsters called "Black Phantoms" whose job is to cause as much frustration as possible.
These monsters are at a level 145 and can't be killed easily due to the player needing roughly 30-60 hours to even have a small chance of beating them while using cheats or hacks will cause the player to be banned or kicked out of the servers. These monsters also have all of their stats maxed out to level 99 making it impossible for someone to beat them normally.
Also hinted was the "Black Phantoms" are not CPU controlled but human controlled monsters which allows the developers a quicker and easier way of "harassing" pirated copy players but will not be done once the game is officially available.
It also appears this plan was done without Namco-Bandi's knowledge or involvement but they will not do anything to change the plan.
The game officially goes on sale in Japan tomorrow with an October 4 release for North America and October 7 release for UK/Europe.
http://www.giantbomb.com/news/is-fro...-players/3681/
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Quick News Round-Up:
1) Some Square-Enix news fromTGS reveals the company hinted at a sequel to The World Ends With You from the DS is currently in development.. Also revealed was DLC for Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be arriving around March of next year but will only be offered as a pre-order and the company has completely moved away from any future support of FF XIII.
2) After a recent investors meeting Bioware had involving the release of their Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO game possibly being delayed, the company announced fans shouldn't be worried as the current plans are still to release the game in late October. The original concern was due to Bioware mentioning the game could have a March 2012 release date if it misses the October/November 2011 window.
3) Viacom officially has filed a lawsuit to the amount of $130 million against Harmonix with the main issue being a refund Viacom feels Harmonix owes them due to actions involving stockholders of Harmonix since the time of the sale to MTV. The lawsuit was also filed due to Harmonix recent lawsuit against Viacom for $13 million claiming "unfair buisness practices" was done during the development process involving the Rock Band series.