We might be a little bit behind on this, but Justin Wicker knocks out a stellar review of Dark Souls III.
Dark Souls 3 is simultaneously a carefully composed love letter to Dark Souls fanboys, and the most
approachable entry point into the series for new players.
It balances the
continuing iteration of the series’ systems and combat with nods and story
beats often directly referential to the past games, sometimes even in a very
not Souls-like fashion. It uses a
more linear progression of areas and bosses, but still manages to return to the
interconnected world feel of the original Dark Souls wherein the second
entry of the series did not. The game is absolutely gorgeous, and manages to
find beauty even in the dark corners of dungeons and dilapidated villages of
the bygone age of fire. While the references can be a bit ham-fisted, at least
in the context of a series with such a history of inscrutability, and though
the PC version had some technical issues at launch, Dark Souls 3 is rapidly becoming my favorite entry into the series.
If you come to Dark Souls 3 having bounced off other Souls games in the past, you will likely find a few nuances that
change your mind, but as a whole Dark
Souls 3 is still rooted in what gives the series its unique character. The
combat maintains its slow and plodding pace where every hit counts, and any enemy
is a serious threat. The systems and character statistics are still obfuscated,
often requiring online research or personal testing to determine things like
the effects of new equipment or stat changes. The story is still told in as
cryptic a fashion as ever, putting the onus on the player to read item
descriptions, be scrupulous with exploration, closely observe the environments,
listen to NPCs, and piece it all together in their mind.
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Friendly players can still be
summoned for “Jolly Cooperation”
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All that notwithstanding, Dark Souls 3 has made a vast array of improvements to the gameplay
that warrant the aforementioned title of “most approachable.” Moreso than ever,
Dark Souls 3 offers the player actual
direction as to where to go, and some NPCs even have straightforward hints
about systems or locations (practically nonexistent in previous titles). Within
a short period of time after starting, the player already has access to a hub
area with NPCs to talk to, vendors, and even an introduction to the main quest
of the player. This is not a novel concept; action games and RPGs have been
doing such things for decades, but the idea of this in a Dark Souls game
was a surprise to me as a longtime fan. I was able to talk to the blacksmith,
and instead of getting a few sentences of cryptic nonsense and uneasy laughs,
he told me about some special items to watch out for, and what to do if my
equipment broke. Some folks in the community may brush this off as an
unnecessary or a negative addition to the game, but despite the information
being less useful to me personally, I think it's a welcome addition to the
often impenetrable series.
Another new addition to Dark Souls 3 is the focus point system for magic and special
abilities. This time around, they included something akin to a ‘mana bar’ that
is used for things like spells and abilities. In lieu of the systems in Dark
Souls and Dark Souls 2, wherein spells had a fixed number of charges
between resting, all of these spells are now fueled by the power of focus
points. This was a bit of a personal cause of concern when I first heard about
it; having a wide variety of spells in the past would allow for many casts
between bonfires, and I didn’t want to be more limited by the use of a new
resource. Fortunately, the design combats this concern directly by
introducing another new mechanic into the mix called the Ashen Estus Flask, a
new reusable potion equivalent that allows you to refill your focus points.
Conceptually, this is a simple addition to the game that just allows for
additional ability uses, but adds a whole new mechanic that allows the player
to make a decision as to how they want to allot their flasks between healing
health and refilling focus points. This freedom to allot as many of your flasks
to focus as you would like enables a wide variety of character builds for the
game, allowing players to go all-in on a pure spellcasting strategy, or mix it
up with physical combat too.
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| The environment and tone is still as gritty and bleak as ever |
Sword-swingers out there, don’t fret: From
Software learned a thing or two from the design of Bloodborne, and added weapon abilities to the game that also use
focus points. Non-magic-users still get a multitude of abilities ranging from
temporary player buffs and weapon enhancements to new fighting stances and
special attacks. All weapons in the game have an activated ability that uses
the focus points in one way or another, some of which can completely define a
weapon’s playstyle. Some types of weapons share an ability, for example most of
the axes in the game activate a war cry that temporarily increases your attack,
but special and uncommon weapons have their own unique abilities as well. This
is especially nice for keeping the gameplay fresh, adding more variety in a
series that is well treaded.
This ‘freshness’ was something that From
Software was obviously concerned about when developing Dark Souls 3. Coming off 2015’s Bloodborne, a lot of the
community was disappointed in the lack of variety of character builds and
weapons available. Dark Souls 3
combats this immediately, and has options for weapons in spades. Within just
the first few hours I had dozens of weapons in multiple different sizes and
categories. Every player is bound to find something with a moveset and style
they enjoy. To encourage this variety and experimentation, I also noticed that
upgrade materials were more abundant, especially early in the game. This choice
of allowing the player to upgrade and test out new weapons without punishment
is a welcomed change in a series where materials are often scarce. An above-average
amount of ranged weapons was available sooner as well, and the newer and
slightly faster style of combat even support builds around bows and ranged
weapons more so than the series ever has in the past.
These positive changes unfortunately do not come
without a cost. Despite my praise, Dark
Souls 3 has some issues familiar to those of us who played Souls games in the past, and some
unexpected problems that certainly did not go unnoticed. A lot of outlets got
review copies of Dark Souls 3 a few
weeks early, and many of them had reported issues with crashes, especially near
the beginning of the game. This is understandable to an extent, as a lot of
games have issues pre-release, and with tight shipping schedules often many of
these bugs are not resolved until the ever-present ‘day one patch’. The problem
here was that said issues were not fixed for everyone at launch. While the
issues were not widespread, many PC users had issues with hard crashes and
performance issues, especially those with 700 Series nVidia video cards. I have
not been able to find any information as to whether this is completely fixed,
but it's the sort of issue I was not expecting considering how big of a release
Dark Souls 3 was. Performance
problems were not unique to PC, either; the console releases may not have
struggled with the same crashing issues, but they had their own struggles with
framerate like many other modern console titles. The console versions run at a
mostly consistent 30fps, but it just wouldn’t be a Dark Souls game without a swampy area that suffers from frequent
framerate dips.
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| Well I’ll just light a torch to check this out… NOPE |
While the gameplay as a whole has been one of
the best in the series, it was also not without flaws. I struggled with a few
problems throughout my playthroughs of the game, the biggest one being problems
with the camera. Camera issues have been plaguing 3D, especially third-person,
games since their inception, but in my experience this seemed to be more
problematic than expected. While it wasn't uncommon in the past games of the
series, Dark Souls 3 still suffers from
the occasional camera freakout when backed into a corner, traveling through
narrow corridors, or fighting particularly large monsters. It wasn’t a glaring
negative in my experience, but worth noting in an effort to always expect more
from your video games. Similarly, the lock-on targeting feature that fixes the
camera didn't seem to operate on a consistent basis, and I would often lose
targeting at random even when targeting enemies that aren't moving or were close
by. This was especially frustrating as someone who played through the game the
first time as a magic-centric character that relies on locking-on due to the
lack of aiming reticle. This was also a contributing factor to my general
feeling throughout most of the game that magic felt a bit underpowered. There
were a lot of trade-offs that needed to be made to increase magic damage to
equal the levels of my axe or club-wielding counterparts, and I never really
felt like I got into a good rhythm and statistical parity with magic until very
late in the game.
I have no qualms in recommending Dark Souls 3 to a new player with piqued
interest, and for fans of the series it's a must have. I have already put
dozens of hours into it, and I look fondly forward to making new
characters, continuing through New Game+, experimenting with PVP, and adding Dark Souls 3 to my short list of games
to regularly revisit (hopefully with some new story dlc). My experience with it
has been overwhelmingly positive outside of the handful of issues, and I don’t
think I could come up with a better way to conclude a franchise with as much
love and passion behind it as Dark Souls.
-Justin Wicker