Dark Souls is a game modders have enjoyed playing around with almost as much as gamers have enjoyed being slaughtered by its inhabitants, but one thing they've never been able to do is import fully custom maps into the game. That all changed this week, when modders managed to bring a Half Life 2 map into the Dark Souls world, running around it like a medieval Gordon Freeman.
This is an effort that's been eight years in the making. Modders originally figured out a method to bring in maps from earlier Demon Souls games. That was a major achievement in itself, but they've never been able to get a fully custom map into the game. The recent flurry of developmental progress began this year when a modder by the name of Meowmaritus built a tool to bring objects into the game without collision, as per Eurogamer. Another modder then built a system for creating collision maps.
And with that, custom maps became possible. With a lot of work.
The reason this was all so difficult, is because Dark Souls uses an arbitrary map system file format, which made it almost impossible to replicate it with traditional map import techniques. What modders discovered, however, was that if you utilized an old version of Havok Content Tools, you could create collision maps for Dark Souls, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition, and Dark Souls 2.
Now, in theory, modders can bring just about any map they want to Dark Souls. Get ready for some crazy crossovers.