Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin durability bug to be patched

The long-running issue (and debate) regarding weapon durability rates in Dark Souls 2 will soon be resolved, in a forthcoming patch for Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin.

This issues goes all the way back to the initial PC release of Dark Souls 2. It slowly became clear (and I believe Reddit was the first source for this,) that weapon durability tumbled much faster at 60fps than it did at 30fps. And god help you if your weapon clipped through a corpse on the floor, because that would hurt the durability even more.

From Software did absolutely nothing about patching the problem on PC, which resulted in some people pondering whether the durability rates at 60fps were actually intended all along.

Turns out, probably not. New notes for an upcoming Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin patch (date to still be announced) heavily imply that the durability issue has been a bug all along, and will be fixed.

The patch notes are in Japanese, and when translated through Google state: “When you attack the enemy, such as corpses, and modification of the phenomenon that weapon endurance value decreases significantly.”

That’s still a bit vague though, and could be read as just fixing the specific corpse-clipping aspect of the bug. A Namco Bandai representative has spelled it out a bit more clearly to Kotaku, saying “The fix will be issued for PS4, Steam and Xbox One, and will be apparent for people running the game at 60fps as the durability decrease rate is linked to the frame rate.”

If that person is correct, this sounds like a more general durability rate fix.

However, this does still leave one issue unanswered. All copies of Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin will receive this patch; but where does that leave the older (original) version of Dark Souls 2 on PC? It still runs at 60fps, and is still affected by this problem (as it has been for over a year.)

Hopefully it’ll get fixed in that version too. The original Dark Souls 2 has already been patched to receive some of the Scholar updates for free (new item descriptions and the like,) so it’s not out of the question that it’ll get this bug fix as well. It’s not yet clear either way.