Dark Souls - busiest platform?

Question

Dark Souls is, by far, the greatest game I have ever played and I will never forget the freezing cold winter when I stayed at home most days and played it about 5 years ago. I had it on xbox 360.

I'll admit I am not the world's greatest video gamer, and I summoned help for almost all bosses, and it has become the one thing that has put me off picking it up again and playing it. I just can't imagine ever seeing myself being a good enough player to beat Ornstein & Smough, and the day I beat the Capra Demon in Undead Burg was practically a highlight of my gaming career.

So if I were start playing again, which platform would be the best to start playing on in terms of people still playing online? And are there any ways to make it easier to access other players in the game world?

Answer 1

As someone currently playing through the game for the first time on PC, I can say that there is definitely a thriving online community there right now. I always have options for summoning other players (not just NPCs) outside of boss doors and there are a surprising number of new messages being dropped.

My one hesitation is that I have found my ability to connect to that online mode spotty. Sometimes I'll make it halfway through a level (with lots of deaths in between) with no messages or phantoms in sight before they suddenly appear everywhere. I don't know if this is related to the game, my computer (a laptop that is beginning to show its age), or something to do with my DSFix setup, but to answer your question, when I am connected to the online community there are always online options.

Answer 2

I don't think this will be very easy to answer since finding numbers like ones you are asking for can be difficult. I have found so far that Steam provides some information like this. They list the Prepare to Die edition as having around ~1800 people currently playing (at time of posting). They also include some additional information if you select the graphs tab on the left which includes (as one might suspect) a bunch of graphs with information.

The only other information I could find is a rather old Reddit that states that PS3 may be the best option since the PS3 is much more popular in Japan, where a large player base exists for this game. However, I'm not sure if you can find players in Japan unless you are somewhere in a neighboring country (I could be wrong about this, as it is just a guess). If this is true, you could try switching locales on your PS3 for the time being and that may be able to fix this should it be an issue.