Demon's Souls is having its online functionality shut off early next year
Demon's Souls, the predecessor to the Dark Souls trilogy, will soon have its online capabilities shut down.
After a full nine years of online support, the servers for Demon's Souls are due to shutter on February 28, 2018. Up until then, you'll still be able to play the game online, encountering messages left by other players and teaming up (or fighting against each other). But with most Souls players having long since left the game for the Dark Souls 1-3 and Bloodborne, it doesn't make sense to keep the online component of this PS3 exclusive going.
This is not the first time we've seen a news story about this - back in 2012, Atlus looked likely to shut the game's servers down, but ended up promising to support them 'into the foreseeable future'. The foreseeable future, as it turned out, was nearly six more years.
The online component of Demon's Souls was a huge part of the game's charm. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the franchise's chief director (for all games except Dark Souls 2) cites the Demon's Souls 'Old Monk' boss as his favourite in the series because of how it used the game's online capabilities - the boss could be controlled by another player, and you'd have to fight and defeat them in combat.
Miyazaki has also talked up the possibility of Sony issuing a remaster of Demon's Souls, which is definitely a thing a lot of people would be interested in playing.
But there's no confirmation that Sony is even considering this, so for now you'll need to dust off your PS3 if you want to check out the messages scrawled by players all over Boletaria one last time.