Hacking Dark Souls II
by 3t3rn41 1d1o7e
For the sake of simplicity, I want to make this as easy as I can...
For starters, this feels unreal. I am not the a-typical hacker. I honestly don't think of myself as one. I always loved exploring.
I would find embedded games in government workstations at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Portland, Oregon. Think early 1990s IBM tech, so all DOS-based. I was around 12. That was decades ago. Now the closest I get is a Homebrew Linux Pi station or laughing at old 1990s hacker movies...
I am lucky enough to be able to retire young, so now I have tons of free time. And, being a vet, I had some baggage. PTSD is a bitch.
During the last few years during college and after nearly eight years in the Army, I rediscovered video games. I had always liked them, but real life took over. After I bought my first next-generation console in 2015, I found a game - one that hit close to home for me: Dark Souls II.
For those who don't know this game, it is brutal.
Like, be ready to die. Shit tons!! (Sorry, NSFW warning.) Now this particular game has a reputation, not only for the immense difficulty and learning curve, but also the secrecy and hidden paths everywhere. A hacker's wet dream. Your task is to find hidden rings and weapons, all while dying like a squealing little girl being sprayed with a hose.
One major aspect of this game is the interaction. You can be invaded by other players... like me. We are cruel but fair. We don't discriminate. We destroy with abandon and mock you as you fall.
Now the vast majority of players are pretty chill and don't make waves.
There are ways to avoid confrontations and just walk away, but some are just the worst. Bullies. Now I understand this is a video game and is not real. But, with that being said, there are a lot of people who make their living playing these games, so it's very real to them.
Being a game with a pretty dedicated fan base, we can get pretty choosy about who we deal with. There is a code amongst the initiated. One that can be considered almost a secret society, with secret handshakes and rankings.
So with that small history lesson, here's the meat of the matter.
FromSoftware, like most companies, hates being exposed. This game is no different. It has been out for nearly a decade, and yet no one has been able to add any new cracks or codes. Aside from blatant and obvious hacks, like using cheat engines, or hooking a console to a PC and cracking the actual code itself. The latter will land you in a hard ban from the servers.
A recent 2600 starts with "What is Truth?" And, in that article, it's stated that hackers want to expose vulnerabilities while criminals keep them hidden. I believe that the gray area is now too big and there is no longer a good versus bad mentality. Ethically cracking anything is wrong. But when the dice are loaded against you, why not do everything in your power to increase your odds of survival?
Take this game.
Dark Souls II is based almost completely on odds and hit boxes. So all my information was freely available on a website dedicated to the game. This was solely to share information about the massive amounts of lore the game has to offer. I just took what was there and looked at it from a different POV.
In DS2, there are items, like any game, but in this game those items sometimes have "timers" attached. Everyone on the forums say they are random and quite probably they are. There is one type of item I found, one used specifically for invasion-type events. It is called a seed of a giant. These seeds, once used, make the game turn on any incoming invader for a total of 45 seconds - a lifetime in this game.
Now...
I was getting sick of being invaded and taunted when all I wanted to do was play an already difficult game - all while not getting invaded by another player just trying to ruin my afternoon by making any progress I had made in the game a moot point. A death results in losing your collection of "souls" - a type of in-game currency for leveling up weapons and yourself.
The common saying is "get gud." Learn or die. Not much sympathy.
Here's the fun part.
I noticed something about the timing on the seeds. The website said it had about a ten percent chance of spawning after your character is invaded four times randomly throughout the world map. The spawn didn't seem random as the web page stated. I think it started about early spring 2021. I wanted to find a way to get the seeds of giants figured out... it wasn't random in my mind.
That is when I started.
It felt like an eternity. Daily grinding playing incessantly, obsessively. Making note of time, day, week, if I was logged into a world online or not, etc. Anything I could think of related to the timing of a spawn point. Then, after about six months of stumbling around ham-fisting my PlayStation 4 thinking I was wasting my time, I found... something.
I can't call this a cheat code.
Most definitely, it is a vulnerability/exploit. And the timing is in its infancy, but I found I can accurately repeat the process and amass a pile of items I shouldn't have in only a few minutes.
It was an NES cheat every kid from the eighties knew - Turtle Tipping - that gave me the idea.
I noticed that in one specific area of the game, there is a point where you have almost a Super Mario Bros cheat code moment.
I cried. I felt like I found something so amazing and that I was the first one to do it!
I created a cheat code by fuzzing my PlayStation 4.
I had no keyboard and the only input was a standard PS4 controller and all the info I could find online. I won't bore you with the details, pretty lame to be totally honest, but it involves timing a button press, a spawning invader and the grabbing of an item - all within a few milliseconds of each other.
The turtle tap comes from the invader. If done right, you get bumped as they invade, just as the game force spawns the said item.
I just wanted to tell someone, as I am pretty proud of myself. I cracked an uncrackable video game with no keyboard, a controller, and time. So I think the term "hackers" need to be reassessed.
The link below is proof of my accomplishment. It doesn't look like much and is boring as f*ck!! I am trying to find the "sweet" spot. It lines up in the run up to the tree - a brick or something right in front. I aim for it as I haul ass as quickly as possible without running.
This is a legit thing and FromSoftware's worse nightmare: someone cracked their software.
I want to find a debug menu, but I think I may actually be chasing pipe dreams there. I am not trying to be an asshole; I just wanted to see if I could do it.