It's official: Blighttown is fixed in Dark Souls Remastered
It's almost time for a long overdue return to Lordran. We've seen plenty of early areas in the Dark Souls Remaster already, from the Undead Asylum to the Taurus Demon, and most recently in the Network Test right up to the Bell Gargoyles. Performance has been impressive across the board on both Xbox One and PS4, but for many, there is only one performance test that actually matters: Blighttown.
It is notorious and legendary as a performance metric, but up until now we've not been allowed to test it. This area is dark, punishing and difficult to navigate even without its stuttering frame-rate. You had winding wooden platforms, elevators, ladders, poisonous wasps, rock-throwing golems, and a toxic swamp to avoid. All of that had to be dealt with in the usual trial and error fashion, but excessively poor performance made it even harder to handle. All of those structures - and that complex elevator system in particular - hit the rame-rate hard. Back in 2011, it was impossible to overlook its ability to hard lock down to 15fps - a rock-bottom frame-rate incurred by the environment on its own, even before enemy entities are in view. In fact, with this area being so widely criticised after its release on Xbox 360 and PS3, the team at From Software went so far as to apologise for the state of the game's performance overall.
Combined with its high difficulty level, it was a grind to play through, and even when played on Xbox One X via back-compat, the performance readout is still poor. Moving to PC's Prepare to Die version, Blighttown does improve significantly but removing the title's default 30fps cap shows that the engine's reliance on single-thread power still causes issues for modern CPUs. Even a monster like AMD's mighty Threadripper 1950X can't tackle Blighttown at 60fps. This puts the problem into some perspective.
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