In the past, we’ve written about the Dark Souls modder Datehacks who is best known as the creator of the ambitious Age of Fire mod for the original Dark Souls, a mod that turns the game’s boss enemies into playable avatars. More recently, Datehacks was in the process of creating a similar mod for Dark Souls 3, but now he has suddenly decided to abandon the modding scene entirely after a wave of backlash and accusations of mod theft.
The details of what exactly happened still remain somewhat unclear as of this writing, but what follows is as accurate a retelling as I could construct after I did a little digging of my own. It all began when Datehacks put up this Reddit post advertising a new mod he was creating called Forces of Annihilation, a mod which would allow users to play as boss enemies in Dark Souls 3.
Datehacks included several links to videos on his YouTube channel showing the mod in action, but as of this writing most of the links are now broken, leading to videos which have since been taken down. Scrolling down through the comments section of the original Reddit post, I discovered this exchange in which Datehacks said that, due to an overwhelming amount of insults that were thrown his way on August 13 (yesterday), he has decided to abandon both the Forces of Annihilation mod and modding in its entirely, and he has even closed down his Reddit account (no new posts have been made from his account as of this writing, seeming to suggest he followed through on that part of his promise).
Other commenters were quick to refute Datehacks’ claims that he was some sort of victim, with one commenter linking to a screengrab of a since-deleted post (strong language warning) from Reddit’s r/gaming section which appears to show Datehacks going on a verbal tirade against another user. Around the same time, Datehacks also put up this post on his official ‘Datehacks Team’ message board in which he strongly rebuffed those who had insulted him and accused him of mod theft.
It’s not entirely clear where exactly the accusations of mod theft first sprang up since Reddit’s moderators naturally removed more inflammatory comments and threads, but it is worth mentioning that several days after Dark Souls modder theelfriede shared a ‘Bright Souls’ mod they had created, Datehacks posted about a new mod of his own that sounded eerily similar, right down to the usage of the term Bright Souls.
Since Datehacks also removed the YouTube video he created for his own Bright Souls mod, it’s unfortunately impossible to do any sort of direct comparisons with theelfriede’s mod, but it’s still easy to see why such a circumstance could lead to accusations of mod theft (if that was indeed the mod that did it). Things seem to have calmed down for now, and Datehacks even went ahead and posted a tutorial video for the Forces of Annihilation mod *after* the whole Reddit kerfuffle, which suggests his claim that he was done with modding for good was merely made out of anger and not something he intended to follow through on.