We all know it: Dark Souls is pretty good, but it's also pretty hard. And as we know, having to walk through the same rooms and the same enemies over and over again just to have another try at the boss, or losing all your precious souls and humanities because of an unlucky sudden invasion, can get insufferably annoying pretty fast.

In this guide I'll explain a simple method I came up with to have a makeshift quicksave function through a simple batch program which will create copies of your save file, that you can then "reload" to get back from the worst screw-ups and/or save a bit of time. For obvious reasons, it only works on Windows.

Needless to say, my suggestion is that you don't use it at all, and play the game the way it was designed, including its most unforgiving aspects: the tedium and frustration of repeting the same sections over and over again are part of the experience, and are also important lore-wise. However, I do realise that some are less patient, or are put off by the idea of continually repeating already-conquered sections; or some may simply have less time on their hands, and thus cannot afford to spend so many hours and so many tries for little to no progress; or some may be curious to experiment and try out a few things without it compromising their playthrough. And in these cases and more, I believe that it's better to experience this game in a less "complete" way than to not experience it at all.

• Locating your save file
  It should be in the Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls folder. Its name should be something along the lines of DRAKS0005". From now on, I'll refer to the file as "FILENAME.sl2".
  
  
• Creating the batch program
  Create a new .txt file and open it in an editor of your choice. The Windows default is Notepad. In that file, we're going to write a program that will periodically create one or more copies of your savefile, so that in case of a bad screw-up you'll have various "backup states" to recover from.
  
  Notice that most of this program can be customised according to your needs: number of iterations, wait time between each copy, and the destination folder of the copies. First of all, here's what I wrote:
  
  ########################################
  :loop
  
  copy /Y "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME.sl2" "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME_a.sl2"
  
  timeout /t 300 /NOBREAK
  copy /Y "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME.sl2" "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME_b.sl2"
  
  timeout /t 300 /NOBREAK
  copy /Y "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME.sl2" "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME_c.sl2"
  
  timeout /t 300 /NOBREAK
  
  goto loop
  ########################################
  The first directory after the "copy /Y" command is the source file, the second is the destination file; you can change its title however you like, as long as it's different from the source file's name. The number after the "timeout /t" command is the number of seconds the program will wait before going to the next line; 300 means five minutes, set it to whatever you like. Written like this, the program will continuously make a copy of the save file every five minutes, but will only keep three versions at all times, overwriting them one by one each time the loop restarts. If you want to have more, simply copy-and-paste the "timeout" and "copy" lines, but take care to give each of the further iterations a unique file name (e.g. FILENAME_d.sl2, FILENAME_e.sl2 etc.).
  
  
• Finalising the program
  Save the .txt file, and then rename it to whatever you like and change its extension to .bat.
  If you have more than one save (i.e. more than one character), simply copy the program you just made, open it again in Notepad, and modify it by changing the FILENAME accordingly.

And that's it: simply double-click the .bat program before starting up the game, leave it running, and play knowing that you have your back covered.

Alternatively, or additionally, if you want to manually create your backup copy when you want it, you can write another batch program to do that. Create another .txt file, and write the following:

#####################
copy /Y "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME.sl2" "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\NBGI\DarkSouls\FILENAME_M.sl2"

exit
#####################

Again, you can set the destination file to be wherever and whatever you want. Again, save it, change its extension to .bat, and there you go. And again, if you have more than one save, simply repeat the process changing the FILENAME accordingly.

If you have a programmable gaming keyboard, like a Logitech G910 or a Razer BlackWidow for instance, you can even bind one of the programmable keys so that it executes this batch file, thus creating yourself an actual in-game quicksave key! Using it, though, will send you to desktop; you'll just have to ALT+TAB back to the game, which takes but a second, but keep this in mind.

I realise that both these solutions are quite rough, and that both programs are very rudimentary; however I haven't got much programming experience, so my knowledge is limited. If you have a better-working or a simpler code, feel free to share.

Reloading these makeshift quicksaves isn't so quick, unfortunately, but I reckon it's better than not having them at all.

• Quit the game
  
• Delete FILENAME.sl2
  
• Rename the desired copy (e.g. FILENAME_b.sl2 or FILENAME_M.sl2) to FILENAME.sl2
  
• Restart the game

My suggestion is that you manually make a further copy of your backup before renaming it, so that in case anything goes wrong again you won't have lost it. Alternatively, simply quicksave again as soon as you start. Also, sorting the files in that folder by "last modified" will be of great help.

Finally, I suggest disabling Steam Cloud for Dark Souls if you use this, because otherwise it may mess with your save file folder by restoring files that you had deleted.

So here we are. I hope this guide will be useful to somebody. Let me know!