Praise the sun for this new Dark Souls patch

Many of us were pleasantly surprised to hear that 1.5 million copies of Dark Souls have been shipped worldwide. “Praise the sun,” indeed. Following this bit of cheerfulness, there’s patch 1.04 — it’s coming with some greatly appreciated tweaks (via NeoGAF).

Getting rid of delayed attack animations, adjusting lock-ons, adding more to shop inventories, and allowing you to keep Cracked Red Eye Orbs if invading fails are just some of what this patch does. It also sounds as if we might actually be able to see how many souls are required to level up, which would be lovely.

The patch seems to be live for Japanese players but I haven’t had the opportunity to see if it’s available in North America on Xbox 360 since Xbox Live isn’t working for me all of a sudden. Anyone care to comment?

Patch 1.04

• Some magic effects have been revised. (Magic Shield, Greater Magic Shield, Tranquil Walk of Peace, Ring of Fog, Iron Flesh)

• Elemental enhanced and Stat enhanced weapons have been rebalanced.

• Some slight adjustments have been made to other weapons, equipment, and magic. (Pyromancer’s Flame’s magic adjustment)

• Matching and multiplayer conditions have been adjusted.

• Defeating a boss in multiplayer will now reward the host with the full amount of souls from the boss.

• When failing to invade a player’s world using the Cracked Red Eye Orb, the item will no longer be used up.

• Adjustments to the amount of souls dropped by enemies.

• Adjustments to the item drops from enemies.

• Some bosses will drop Humanity and Homeward Bones now.

• Increased Drop rates for certain Covenant items and Equipment Enhancement materials which had extremely low drop rates.

• Adjusted the Item Discovery increase rate which scales with Humanity levels.

• Item lists in shops have been adjusted. (Bottomless Box added to Male Undead Merchant. Bunch of arrows added to Female Undead Merchant, Andrei, Domnhall, Giant Blacksmith, and Vamos. Domnhall will sell the Master Key after he moves to the Firelink Shrine. Giant and Vamos both sell the various equipment boxes. Giant sells a bunch of shards now. Vamos sells Titanite Shards. Ingward sells Transient Curse.)

• The amount of Faith required to join the Sunlight Covenant is now 25 instead of 50. The formula for reducing it with multiplayer remains the same.

• Paying for your sins is now cheaper. The formula is Level x 500 souls, instead of Level x 2000 souls previously.

• Equipment Weight adjustments.

• Lock-on behavior has been adjusted.

• Fixed certain cases of game freezing.

• Changed the way souls are displayed in the Level Up Menu.

• Fixed the exploit with infinite weapon/magic usage.

• Fixed the 1 second delay during certain attack animations.

• Fixed the bug where Solaire isn’t in New Game+.

• Fixed the shard bug with Frampt which took away all your shards if you had more than 99.

• Fixed getting stuck in certain parts of the map, being unable to progress.

• Changed some English text in the game to be consistent with corrections made in the overseas version of the game.