The Chosen Undead - A Dark Souls Reshade

THE CHOSEN UNDEAD

A Dark Souls ReShade

Improved bloom and fake HDR effect to refine the ambience of the scene and make bright spots and effects pop

Better midtones and sharpening to brush up visual fidelity

Subtle ambient occlusion to enhance realism

No over-the-top effects to ensure consistent visual experience across all levels

Minimal FPS drop

Everything is optional, and can be toggled on and off on the fly

The Chosen Undead is my effort to create a subtle visual improvement courtesy of ReShade that maintains the games atmosphere while touching up the visuals to create a more pleasing image. While some other presets have beautiful effects like depth of field and reflective bump-mapping, there's no discretion with their distribution, and they frequently clash with the UI and create visual artifacts. The intention of this preset is not to make the game look next-gen, but to make everything pop a little more as well as look more natural. It's no secret that Remastered altered a lot of the games lighting for the worse, and while a mod like this won't fix it, ideally it touches the visuals up just enough to emulate some of the original games lighting themes.

There will still be some minor transparency issues relating to the UI and certain effects like smoke with ambient occlusion enabled. Personally, I find it to be a small trade off for the visual improvement but if it bothers you it can be easily disabled, just open up ReShade's GUI and disable GloomyAO

Open ReShade GUI

INSTALLATION

1. Download ReShade from their website (version 5. 8. 0 at the time of writing)

2. Download my preset from the files tab and unpack The Chosen Undead.ini to the game directory (for instance, mine is D:\Games\Steam\steamapps\Common\DARK SOULS REMASTERED)

3. Run ReShade, Select Dark Souls Remastered (it should pop up immediately, otherwise point the installer to the game directory), then select Microsoft DirectX 10/11/12

4. Select my preset with the browse button, click next until the installer completes

5. You're done! I'd recommend opening ReShade's GUI and setting it to performance mode as well as adding an effect toggle key (I personally use END) to see the in-game differences yourself.

UNINSTALLING

If you decide my preset is garbage, uninstalling is simple. Just delete the following files from your game directory:

reshade-shaders folder

ReShade.ini

ReShade.log

ReShadePreset.ini

The Chosen Undead.ini

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