When this week's major Dark Souls II patch rolled out, From Software didn't exactly provide a detailed list of everything that's changed. That's not Dark Souls! It's up to players to piece it together. The game's lore has been subtly updated and altered through item descriptions, and players have come up with an extremely clever way to figure out what's changed en masse.
Diff Checker is a website that does exactly what you might expect: help you spot differences.
Look at all of this!
Players have dropped the game's old lore on the left and the new lore on the right. As you scroll through, it's easy to tell where From Software has tweaked the game's text.
Some of the changes are pretty subtle:
In other cases, From Software has introduced completely new story elements and wrinkles:
These changes only really impact players who dive deep into the Souls lore hole, but when you've finished the game a dozen times, that's what you're left with, and the lore hole goes really deep. The series doesn't present much information in context. You can play an entire Souls game and not have any idea what happened, besides dying a bunch and killing cool bosses.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
The real question is what happens with Bloodborne next month. Rumors had pegged the game as Demon's Souls 2 for a long time, and while Demon's Souls and Dark Souls aren't sequels, the games have pieces of lore that nod at one another. Could Bloodborne do the same thing? Hmm.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.