Bandai Namco’s Elden Ring Collab Silence Is Reviving Dark Souls II Runs

The Wait Sends Players Back to Drangleic

With no Elden Ring DLC announcement, no spin-off reveal, and no meaningful communication from Bandai Namco about what comes next for the Soulsborne universe, fans have done what FromSoftware’s audience always does when left without new content: they went digging through the back catalog. And this time, Dark Souls II is getting the spotlight.

Why Dark Souls II, and Why Now

Dark Souls II has always occupied a strange position in the FromSoftware library. It was developed under different leadership than the other Souls titles – director Tomohiro Shibuya stepped in while Hidetaka Miyazaki worked on Bloodborne – and that DNA shows in its world design, enemy placement, and overall pacing. For years, that difference made it the easy target: the one fans skipped, the one speedrunners avoided, the one Reddit threads used as a punchline. That reputation is now cracking open in interesting ways.

Routing communities and casual players alike have started returning to Dark Souls II with fresh eyes, partly because the void left by Bandai Namco’s silence creates a specific itch that only a long, meaty run can scratch. Elden Ring takes dozens of hours to complete even for veterans. Dark Souls II, with its Scholar of the First Sin edition and three substantial DLC packs, offers a comparable time investment – and a world that most players who came in through Elden Ring have genuinely never seen. That novelty factor is driving more first-time runs than the community has seen in years.

The other factor is streaming. Content creators who built audiences on Elden Ring playthroughs are now exhausted their go-to material. Playing Dark Souls II cold, reacting to its quirks in real time, has become a reliable format because the game breaks expectations constantly. The ADP (Adaptability) stat, which controls i-frame duration on rolls and genuinely works unlike any other Souls mechanic, tends to produce genuine confusion and frustration from players expecting Elden Ring’s dodge behavior. That friction is watchable. It generates conversation. And that conversation pulls more people into attempting their own runs.

There is also a completionist angle driving returns. Players who have thoroughly explored the Lands Between – every cave, every hidden wall, every remembrance boss – are looking for something with comparable density. Dark Souls II’s Scholar of the First Sin version repositioned enemies and added new invasions and NPC interactions specifically to reward careful exploration. That version still holds up as a legitimate content delivery mechanism for players who want discovery without waiting on Bandai Namco to announce something new.

The Silence Strategy and Its Unintended Consequences

Bandai Namco’s communication style around Elden Ring’s post-launch future has been notably sparse. Shadow of the Erdtree launched in June 2024, received strong sales and critical attention, and then the conversation around what follows went quiet. No network tests, no trademark filings generating significant buzz, no interviews with developers teasing direction. That kind of quiet after a major release would be unremarkable in most genres, but in the Soulsborne community, where anticipation cycles are intense and constant, it creates a vacuum that fans fill themselves.

The pattern is not unique to FromSoftware’s audience. Konami’s Castlevania community went through something similar, with Nocturne Season 2’s delayed announcement pushing fans back into older titles. The mechanics differ but the psychology is consistent: when a publisher goes quiet, the fanbase doesn’t pause – it recirculates. In FromSoftware’s case, that recirculation lands on Dark Souls II specifically because it is the one entry that most of the current Elden Ring generation skipped.

Dark Souls II’s reputation as the “weird one” also makes it a more interesting community object right now than Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls III. Both of those titles are more tonally and mechanically aligned with Elden Ring, so returning to them feels like a minor variation on familiar territory. Dark Souls II genuinely feels like a different game. Its hub world, Majula, uses a different lighting system and color palette than anything Miyazaki directed. Its boss design prioritizes endurance and resource management over the aggressive pattern-reading that defines Elden Ring encounters. Playing it after Elden Ring is not regression – it is a genuinely different design philosophy, and players are starting to engage with it on those terms rather than dismissing it for not feeling like the rest of the series.

Speedrunning categories for Dark Souls II have also seen renewed interest. Any% runs of the game involve some of the more technically involved route decisions in the Soulsborne speedrunning ecosystem – soul memory manipulation, specific item routing through DLC areas, and the infamous “door skip” strats that took years for runners to fully optimize. New runners entering the category after years on Elden Ring leaderboards are refreshing community spaces and bringing in viewers who have never watched a Souls II run before. That influx keeps the community active and visible, which in turn makes the game more attractive to casual players wondering what the noise is about.

The timing also lines up with a broader re-evaluation of games that were originally received with mixed responses. Dark Souls II was not poorly reviewed at launch – it scored well critically – but community opinion soured over time as comparisons to Miyazaki’s other work became the default frame. That frame is shifting now, with players approaching it as its own artifact rather than a failed attempt at replicating Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls I. The Shaded Woods, Earthen Peak, and the Iron Keep still generate debate, but that debate is now happening with more players who have actually walked through those areas rather than inherited a secondhand opinion about them.

What This Means for FromSoftware’s Back Catalog

The revival of Dark Souls II runs is not purely driven by nostalgia or desperation for content. It reflects something more practical: the Elden Ring fanbase is large enough that a significant portion of it never played the earlier Souls titles at all. For those players, Dark Souls II is not a revisit – it is a first encounter. And first encounters with FromSoftware games, however the community feels about a particular entry, tend to generate the same thing: long sessions, shared frustration, incremental mastery, and the specific satisfaction of clearing a boss that seemed impossible an hour earlier.

Bandai Namco may not have planned for their silence to serve as free advertising for a decade-old game, but that is effectively what has happened. Dark Souls II still sells on Steam. Scholar of the First Sin still appears regularly in sale charts. The longer Bandai Namco stays quiet about whatever comes next in the Elden Ring universe, the longer that back catalog keeps moving – and the more firmly Dark Souls II cements itself as the series’ most misread entry rather than its weakest one.