Dark Souls 3 is here offering up all its decadent painful pleasures like a Las Vegas sex dungeon. There are no safe words in From Software’s new title however, just tears, tears and more tears, and it’s finally time for you reader to drink ours.
Mild story spoilers ahead. In the third installment of the Dark Souls franchise you play a piece of Unkindled Ash. Undead, formerly human, utterly worthless. As Unkindled the most you could ever hope to accomplish is servitude. Four god-like rulers called the Lords of Cinder have vacated their thrones, and it is your job to drag them back by the ear and make them do their jobs. To help you in this task you get a Team of Experts ™ and can add to your cool little base with more teachers, assistants, vendors and merry makers. Question, if you serve a servant does that make you like… A server servant? An ultra servant? Finding these Lords is the entire premise of Dark Souls 3 and the basis of your great quest, and thus we set out to complete this task.
The spoilers end here.
Mechanically Dark Souls 3 is a bit of a hybrid between Bloodborne and Dark Souls. The game moves at about the same speed as Bloodborne, it even repeats a few of Bloodborne’s tricks. For example every weapon now gets a special ability one can activate if wielding two handed, rather than just a few unique weapons, which gives most the weapons a lot more flexibility and adaptability. However the cornerstones of Dark Souls remains, shield builds, heavy armor, magic, it’s all got a strong presence. Well. For the most part. A bit more on that later.
There are some unique challenges however that Dark Souls 3 brings to the table. For example, enemy hit boxes seem to be extended, while the player’s iframes seem to be much shorter. In layman’s terms this means it’s easier for you to get hit by enemy attacks if you don’t have hair trigger timing and a good spatial awareness. Several of the enemies in the game also now “delay” their attacks in an attempt to throw off said player timing. While Dark Souls 1 let you dodge or block most attacks with a fair amount of projection, and Bloodborne rewarded attacking through the pain, Dark Souls 3 requires you learn the tempo of a new tango. Your villainous foes can also control a lot more of the battle now, mixing up close range, medium range and long distance attacks. The ball is in the enemy’s court, your homefield advantage is gone and other sports metaphors.
While classes usually don’t mean much in the long run unless you’re min/maxing stats, I would like to touch a bit on the new classes and a few class changes. New for this title are the Herald and the Assassin, both warrior/mage hybrid builds. Herald is augmented with miracles, making them more of a tanky heals paladin tank, while Assassin starts with auxiliary sorceries not so much meant to own as they are to augment and make the Assassin slicker, quieter and deadlier. A few classes return under different names, such as Mercenary being the newer model of Wanderer. While familiar classes such as Knight and Pyromancer return in their full glory. While I started the game as an Assassin and used that as my primary progression character, I had a serious case of alt-itis, with a Herald I rounded out exclusively for PvE while building a Thief for PvP.
Every starting class now moves at the same fast clip. While it’s a subtle change, it has a major impact on how the game is played, for example Dexterity classes no longer get the “early” advantage of being any faster than the next class. This also means no more rumbly, tumbly heavy rolling unless you bog yourself down in gear. To be frank depending on the class you got a very clear advantage on the early game content, and I’m not really sure stats and gear round characters out enough for late game advantages to take hold. Knight and Pyromancer meant rocking the game, Assassin and Sorcerer meant suffering.
For people who don’t really intend to dive into the mechanics of the game and min/max their toons, or experiment with different builds, these class disparities are likely negligible. There are also a few stat changes that could make for some fun and interesting builds. Thief starts out with a hefty amount of “Luck”, a stat brand new to the Souls series. Luck impacts item discovery similar to your sanity related Insight in Bloodborne. However Luck is also the dictating factor behind the effectiveness of certain status effects. Again this is for people really willing to crawl into the skin of the game, for the most part only a handful of classes will be more than efficient for clearing the game on one or two runs. This is mostly because Dark Souls 3 has a balancing issue. There’s a lot in the game that’s cool in theory, but feels so tiered down in the core game it gets to be head scratching as to why it’s even present. *cough*Assassin*cough*
Dark Souls 3 is poorly balanced. The game doesn’t need to be easier, and it doesn’t need to be harder, it just needs to be better balanced. As of now there are builds, weapons and armor that are plain not very viable, and only for the ultra stubborn. Magic overall seems to be less effective, and outside a handful of pyromancies you’ll likely find spells are just too weak to be greatly effective. Weapons you’re rewarded with for beating bosses look cool with some chief weapon animations, but have upgrade requirements that you often won’t be able to fulfill until late game when they’re fairly irrelevant. This follows for entire schools of weapons. It gets to be too late in the game before they become viable, and you’ll have long forgotten them. Though there is at least a mechanic to switch out weapon stats and weapon scaling to ease the pain a little.
This is all without going into the fact there’s an entire stat in the game that flat out doesn’t work. The oh so important Poise. If you’re new to the series, Poise basically ensures you can take a lick and continue to tick, like some kind of crazy Terminator unit absorbing shotgun shells. This wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t several pieces of equipment that relied on the Poise mechanic. In my mind this means there are entire, vast sets of gear that become completely trivial. Sure I still get some of the protection benefits from heavier armor, but I also move slower with a worthless dodge skill, so why wear it at all? While it’s up for debate that the Poise skill is intentionally broken or not (it’s literally just a value that has to be turned on) it reeks of the Dark Souls 3 overall design problems. Essentially so many player skills are relatively ineffective, compared to other player skills that are vastly more beneficial, and this overall narrows the variety in playstyle one can use to tackle the game’s content.
It’s not just equipment and classes that sit as a little lackluster. The same can be said for several of Dark Souls 3’s bosses. There are some story bosses that are absolutely incredible fights. They’re epic, they’re multi-phased, they’re challenging, they’re lore heavy. These battles I really enjoyed the shit out of, and they always reminded me why I played the game to begin with. On the other side of the coin there are far too many bosses that felt simply like filler. Like they had no real place in the game and From deposited them there because they needed a boss to cap off the area. These bosses also often felt as though they belonged in another game, with at least one making me think I had been plucked out of Souls and dropped into a Nintendo title.
Now when the bosses got creative and fun, they were really creative. Some would require a very specific strategy that extended beyond “Run behind legs, hit.” …Okay so a few of these bosses were “Run behind the butt” or “Run behind the wrists” instead. However every now and then you would run into a guy with a really awesome mechanic you could use to fuck their shit up, or a clever way the boss would kill you dead. Ultimately it ended up being a mixed bag of fun, challenging bosses and lackluster ‘Prequisite Big Enemy Fights.’
Dark Souls 3 needs some huge props on how stunning their locales were. Some truly jaw dropping vistas. It finally captured that ‘epic’ feel I never quite got in Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne. It gave a real sense of place, like the world of Dark Souls 3 was tangible yet mythical. You could often spot one or more locations from the next, a trick From has explored in previous games, but is fully palpable here. The first two locations in the game are huge, meaty and full of spectacle. Every so often I’ll walk out of a gloomy dungeon or climb above a tree canopy and mouth a “Wow.”
This comes with a ‘but’. As well designed, both level wise and in art design as these locations were, there were often areas that felt phoned in. I’m not sure if it was a lack of creativity, crunch time, or pure laziness on From’s part, but for every location that blew my mind there was one where that didn’t have much going on. Some of these locations were simply glorified boss corridors. There was one vast underground city that looked as though it came straight out of Lord of the Rings, and while I was excited to explore it I was pretty bummed out to discover it near instantly lead to a boss door with one minor optional side area.
Bogging down their level design was also From’s decisions on enemy placement and traps. Bloodborne is maybe one of the tightest video games I ever played. For the most part the challenge in Bloodborne is fair, locations are well made, the game trains you well for its more intense moments, and though I had a few complaints about some of Bloodborne’s endgame areas overall it was a very satisfying experience. Dark Souls 3 throws all that out the window for a ton of cheap tricks and just loves to encompass everything bad about Dark Souls. Ambushes that aren’t telegraphed, paper thin ledges, forced fall damage and enemy congestion. It felt as though From had given up on building a proper challenge and went for a frustrating design meant to flat out kill the player.
It’s actually not the dying that frustrated me, it wasn’t the want for skill, to be perfectly frank there are some areas that no matter how well I did, they just got to feel like a chore. Killing my way through dozens and dozens of enemies just felt like a battle of attrition. It took me back to games like Tomb Raider which, while I also adored that title, had a real bad case of add on enemies for adds sake. There were challenges in Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne that made me want to play the game again and again. That made me want to tackle areas head on until I got it right. Where I always wanted to seek out the next level of challenge, be it a New Game Plus or a low level run. Dark Souls 3 had spots where I felt like once was more than enough. That’s not a very good feeling in a title built on replayability.
Co-op and invasions also seem a bit busted, but when was that ever not the case? Some areas are dead, others offer nonstop invasions. While I mostly like to tackle the game solo, I love to offer up my services, and I found it difficult to connect even on the hardest most in-demand co-op bosses. New covenant mechanics also allow big multiplayer orgies of invaders and cooperators, though I found that would backfire more than it would work as intended. Five games in and From still can’t seem to get the online right.
Finally, Dark Soul’s 3 cast of characters made it feel as though it’s one of From’s richest world’s yet. You’ll find your base gets to be a pretty full house, and this is even if a fair amount of characters have a little oopsie and pass on. Following the character quests in this game was delightful. From also recently patched the title to make sure characters were a little harder to miss and their quests a little easier to complete and to this, I say, thank god. It always bugged me that Dark Souls and Bloodborne were so obtuse with characters, how they interacted, and how you were meant to complete their quests. It was also a very nasty habit indie Soulslike titles picked up from From, designing their quests to be less than obvious, easily missable. Dark Souls 3 also gives you a much greater sense of completion when you see a character’s story all the way through. In Bloodborne too often the tales of the world’s inhabitants would just fall flat and leave me with a giant question mark as to whether there were more to it. Dark Souls 3 the questing feels final, with some very rewarding ends tied to the characters.
Dark Souls 3, like its predecessors, is an imperfect game. However I do feel it’s even more imperfect than the titles before it. I’m not sure if strange design doctrines or a time crunch influenced From’s approach to this title, but there are some cracks in the veneer that only get deeper as the game progresses. That said I feel as though this is From’s most epic, striking world yet. There’s really a sense of awe in this game, and the locales are rich with character and culture. While I’m not sure I want a Dark Souls 4, it makes me super excited for what From offers next, be it Bloodborne 2 or perhaps, as Soul’s director Miyazaki has hinted, an entirely new franchise. Even though there are quite a few places this title let me down, it’s that sense of excitement and wonder the game inspired that pushed me to keep playing.
