An unofficial Dark Souls 4 was on its way to release back in 2022, but it vanished abruptly.

Fans are the usual suspects of causing unexpected chaos for any video game studio out there, including Hidetaka Miyazaki’s FromSoftware. But who would have known some of these fans would have taken it upon themselves to bring back the Dark Souls franchise for good.

The project in context is the Nightfall mod for Dark Souls, which looked so promising that many believed it would have matched the level of quality given by the studio, only if it’s full version ever ended up coming out.

Fans and their broken dreams to play the unofficial Dark Souls  4

Miyazaki and Kim have a bit more in common than you might think
Headed by a known modder called Grimrukh and a team of a few other people, ‘Nightfall‘ was a mod for Dark Souls that would have been a complete sequel for the now-ended franchise completely made by fans. This meant that the complete mod would have offered new bosses and new characters on a seemingly new map essentially made from existing assets.

The official blog post about the mod talks about how the team behind Nightfall has essentially been in development since 2019, with them now looking forward to a proper release in December 2021 or January 2022.

Unfortunately, the mod was forever left in development at the demo stage soon after that, with radio silence from its creators’ side on when it might be back on the table again.

There can be many reasons to guess as to why the fan-made Dark Souls 4 never came into reality. This can essentially range from running out of interest/resources to FromSoftware secretly stepping in to stop the development, as Nightfall’s release would have hurt with the upcoming Elden Ring’s launch.

Why the Dark Souls franchise officially needs to come back

The massively popular Elden Ring that was released in 2022 took the gaming world by storm, quickly becoming the face of its creator and soon FromSoftware too. However, it was the Dark Souls franchise that everyone was a fan of before that.

The game has even managed to build a running legacy because of multiple releases as opposed to Elden Ring, and one final installment in the series to end it all can quite possibly end up becoming FromSoftware’s best decision ever.

Nearly everyone has been waiting for a Dark Souls 4; maybe that’s why Nightfall got so much attention when it got first announced. If you still want to try it out, a demo version is available on the popular modding forum Nexus.