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zombiescantfly · 6 years

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Words About Games: Dark Souls 3 (From Software, 2016)

Oh, so that’s where the rest of Bloodborne went.

I love Dark Souls 1. Lots of people love Dark Souls 1. Dark Souls 2 hated Dark Souls 1. Lots of people hated Dark Souls 2. My own thoughts on Dark Souls 2 are still complicated. I like Dark Souls 3. It’s a good game that could have been very bad. It’s supposed to be a last hurrah for the series, but it didn’t take the easy way out. It tried to touch on some things from 1, made passing mentions to 2 that only bolstered my own personal theory (which I should really write a new essay for), and tried to do its own thing. Some people strangely call it nothing but fanservicey callbacks, and I really have no idea where they’re coming from. These games are connected, and referencing the first shouldn’t be looked down upon, especially when people’s complaints about 2 was that it wasn’t at all connected to 1.

So I’ll lay my stance out clear right now: I really appreciate what Dark Souls 3 did to cap off the franchise. It approached the topic of “ending the world” (as in, the series) with care and respect while still delivering a new game with fresh mechanics and a unique world. That, unfortunately, did not stop it from feeling like the team was running out of energy.

As much as Dark Souls 3 feels like a genuine effort to give fans something great to remember the series by after 2 disappointed almost everyone, it also feels like a game made out of obligation. It came out only 13 months after Bloodborne, and I feel like it suffered greatly for that. Remnants of abandoned systems are prominent in game, and screenshots from not even two months prior to the game’s release show wildly different environments and concepts. But as with Bloodborne, the mechanics are solid enough to carry the game, just maybe not to the heights fans came to expect.

Dark Souls 3 is basically the mix of DS1 and Demon’s Souls that everyone hoped DS2 was going to be. It presents a massive, sprawling world with areas that, while not crisscrossing over themselves as in DS1, are stuffed full of shortcuts and secrets in their own space. There’s nothing like the Undead Burg or Central Yarnham, but fans of Boletaria or Stonefang Tunnel will recognize what’s been presented.

That said, areas don’t have as strong of a sense of identity as they did in DS1 or 2; they’re missing a couple certain somethings that even a million polygons stuffed in every corner can’t replace. I’ll save the rant about aesthetics for later, but just remember the words “bleak” and “churches.”

Weapons take a step back from DS2’s penchant for absurdity and return to more reasonable medieval fantasy fair. Big goofy weapons still exist of course - they always have - but nobody’s running around with a poison-infused broken sword hilt or shooting fire out of a javelin. Weapon arts were introduced to give weapons a sort of “secondary moveset” to better differentiate individual entries in a single category. DS2 had a ton of single-handed straight swords, and apart from a vertical slash here or a stab there, not much set them apart. DS3’s weapon arts introduce an extra variety of offensive utility; an upward sweep to lever a shield away, a piercing stab for sudden extra reach, or even just a brutal combo that very clearly tells your opponent it was a bad idea to try and trade hits. I originally applauded DS2 for much the same thing, but after sinking 299 hours into it, it turns out that having two movesets shared between seven shortswords isn’t actually that interesting, even if an extra stab or slash gets tossed in every so often.

The weapon arts replace powerstancing from DS2, and personally I was 100% fine with that. Powerstancing was pretty uninteresting overall and actually kind of useless, unless you were using dual blacksmith hammers to stunlock people in PVP. Getting the required strength married you very quickly to one specific build, any any points not put towards powerstancing (if you planned your character around doing so) were pretty much wasted.

Dark Souls 3 brings back a more freeform approach to leveling; no more having to shove a dozen levels into Adaptability just to be able to roll well, or ten into Dexterity so you can cast a spell fast enough to actually live to see it connect. It does, unfortunately, cripple pyromancy by having your damage scale off both intelligence and faith, which led to me abandoning a pyro build because my Int was already 40 and I have all these sorceries lying around . . .

It's far from perfect. In a noble but misguided attempt to pave over the couple of oppressively powerful low level builds that allowed a lot of unevenly-matched invasions in the first couple areas of Dark Souls 1, From added odd stat requirements to all the weapons that aren't starting options. As a result, your beefy Strength dude might need to bewilderingly sink half a dozen levels into Dexterity to swing that giant club around. Coupled with an all-around nerf to Dex scaling because everyone's Dex is so high to begin with, DS3 spends most of its early to middle game as a Strength or Quality build paradise, with the occasional Sorcerer running around trying to do damage before collecting all 4 rings mandatory for making the build work.

Oh, right, magic as a whole is back to Demon’s Souls’ mana bar. You have a separate Estus flask for mana, and you can talk to a guy in the central hub to set how many of each type of flask you're carrying, pulled from a total of how many flask shards you've turned in. It works fine.

And part of the reason it works fine is because there's always a bonfire not 10 minutes of first-time-playthrough time away from the last. This is a common complaint, and very clearly an issue that arose as a result of the scrapped “create your own bonfire” system that was among one of the first features announced. I don't actually know offhand if its intended mechanics were ever revealed, but its exclusion from the final game created an obvious shift in how the different areas of the game ended up. A few areas, notably the expansions, manage to capture DS1’s feel of a desperate crawl from fire to fire your first time through, but most often I found myself a bit surprised at how quickly and easily I'd gotten from one to the next.

As for those levels themselves, let's finally revisit those two terms from earlier. Dark Souls 3’s map is, like 1’s, a sprawling expanse of shortcuts and secret corners, each connected to the other in a very tangible, real sense. Dark Souls 2’s magically overlapping zones and elevators to nowhere have been chased off for good. But where 2 opted for a theme park style approach to areas and 1 guided you through a decaying city, 3 opts for a more homogeneous smear of bleak churches.

Dark Souls 1 was a carefully constructed world, and its map has been touted as one of the best, or at least one of the best constructed, since its release. It's through not only the ability to orient yourself with landmarks that were places you'd already visited, but a skilled use of light and architecture to visually separate each area while making the transition seem natural, or in the case of various manmade areas, sensible. The Undead Burg and the Depths both had relatively neutral lighting, with the latter dumping oppressive shadow on you the player; fitting for a grimy sewer. But head down the cistern to Blighttown and suddenly your screen is flooded with sickly green shades, a result of a deliberate, aggressive color grading trick that lends each area that little extra bit of personality. Darkroot Garden pairs its dark green foliage with a dusty blue, Sen’s Fortress feels almost sepia toned at times, waves of red heat roll off ancient stone in the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, dark water and pale ghosts in New Londo are brought together by an eerie cyan, and Anor Londo itself blazes with golden glory.

In Dark Souls 3, the sky is yellow, the ground is brown, and everything you walk next to is gray.

Dark Souls 3 tries to sell its “time of ash” schtick with a thin gray film over everything, but the result is a very boring, flat lighting scheme that sits comfortably in the middle values, never pushing itself to any real contrast between bright light and oppressive darkness. Sure, you'll pull out your torch every now and then, but it's always a hazy sort of darkness that has you saying “it would be convenient if it were brighter right now” rather than “this small circle of light is now the only safe part of this world.”

Not helping the cause is DS3’s general lack of interesting or at least unique terrain. Areas are massive, but their aesthetic is spread rather thinly across it all, getting a bit boring right around three quarters of the way through every time. The first and last areas are essentially the same (which makes sense at least, the first part of the game is spent in the lower sections of the final part); a big fantastical European castle town that ended up being more castle than town. You spend a very long time in the area each time, and it honestly drags a bit. There's only so much to be done with the same stone wall and wooden roof before the scenery runs its course, and that happens with every area. The Undead Settlement is full of crappy wooden huts, stone ruins, and not much else, but it's one of the largest areas in the game. The Cathedral of the Deep is a giant church that you first spend too long crawling on top of, then too long crawling around inside of. And on the inside, of course, is nothing but a maze of smaller churches, each one complete with the same altar, pews, and candles.

The Cathedral kind of neatly exemplifies my overall issue with DS3’s world design. It is always too much of the same thing for too long. The game world didn't need to be this big, and I genuinely believe it suffered for it. Areas stretch themselves out so much that a lot of the time you're just walking from enemy group to enemy group, going through the motions more than anything else.

One of the major strengths of both Demon’s and Dark Souls 1 was that its enemy encounters were a crafted ordeal, meant to highlight the terrain you were on or in and make you think just a bit critically about how you were going to approach. An example I really like is the small group right before the first bonfire in the Undead Burg. Three hollows are hiding behind wooden barriers, another sits up a short flight of stairs with a crossbow, and two more are over across a short bridge, holding spears and shields. Six enemies total. Entering the main area with the first three has them burst through their cover and slowly advance, while the crossbowman takes a potshot every few seconds. Far from overwhelming, even as a beginner. But if you panic and try to run across the footbridge, the spearmen start paying attention to you, and their shields will easily stop you from coming into their territory. Then the crossbow dude and the other three show up behind you and whoops, maybe that was a bad idea.

This encounter isn't all that far away from Firelink, and only a handful of other enemies get in your way. But, at least following the intended progression, it's the first complex encounter a player sees. It has a lot to teach, and it does it well. Enemies can break through cover, some enemies aren't immediately reachable (and may be bad to rush up to), some enemies are only concerned about defending their turf, shields are difficult to break through, and generally, enemies will be quick to punish dumb mistakes.

That's a pretty impressive little slice of DS1’s design philosophy. Let's look at a comparable encounter from 3.

Very close to the area where you warp in from this game’s Firelink Shrine, there's a short section of battlement with a group of six or so enemies. Most are basic dudes, one has a sword and some armor, and one has a bell of some kind. The basic dudes are docile, the swordsman will try to kill you, and the guy with the bell will start screaming and ringing if you hang around too long, waking the docile dudes up and making them hostile. This is all on a straight platform with a couple small statues off to either side, and no other terrain feature of note for this encounter.

Let's ask the same question, then. What does this teach us about the game? A few things. The biggest is that it's more important to identify targets who will have a big impact on the fight, rather than just going for the scariest looking one first. Hooking into that is the lesson that some enemies can and will drastically change the landscape of a combat encounter. Both are true throughout the game, but the second thing becomes less relevant as the game goes on.

Other than that, there isn't much to learn from this encounter, really. The terrain doesn't offer much, and the enemies don't do much beyond attacking as a group once the guy with the bell wakes them up.

What I'll call “big groups in front of you filled with lots of dudes” (Big Groups for short) make up a considerable amount of what's found in Dark Souls 3, and it seems to be inherited from Bloodborne. But in Bloodborne, Big Groups were what the game's entire philosophy revolved around, or at least for its first half. Controlling those Big Groups is how the game functioned, it's what the faster dodge, faster heal, and Regain system were built to deal with. In Dark Souls, those Big Groups just become weird roadblocks that you have to get past without the same tools.

Bringing us to my admittedly flippant opening remark, this is a single part of where I feel Bloodborne's rushed development merged with Dark Souls 3’s even more rushed development. A lot of enemies seem better suited for the prior game than the latter; they’re smaller or faster (almost universally faster), they use more projectiles, they have more aggressive gap-closing attacks, more grapples, and they appear in larger groups. They seem designed around a fundamentally different style of interaction than what's actually present in Dark Souls.

And that brings me back to how Dark Souls 3 felt like an obligation. As a videogame, it's nothing short of excellent. But as an entry in an overwhelmingly popular series, it feels more like a rushed apology for the lukewarm reception of DS2, and one that took much-needed attention away from another game while it was still being made. It doesn't feel unfinished in the same sense that DS1 very obviously was, but there's a clear lack of focus present with the way all these trailing threads hang right in front of you. Areas that are large for no reason or gain, enemies that seem dumped onto the map rather than placed, a progression through the world that never offers much choice, a muted sense of character progression, and a setting that us always comfortably close to where it was previously. I don't want to say the game's direction feels entirely without creativity, but it's obvious that the grand ideas of Dark Souls 1, left unfinished, or the ambition behind Bloodborne that had to be rushed out the door half-baked just aren't here. Dark Souls 3 doesn't feel like a game Miyazaki, the director, wanted to make, it feels like something he was obligated to make. The game comes and goes with a solid presence that's still more impressive than a lot of AAA rpg fair, but it never attempts to reach the same heights that all of its predecessors never got to. Dark Souls 1 is a deeply, deeply flawed game, but its ambition is obvious and admirable, and its lowest points are backed up by its highest managing to, if only for a moment, reach that grand goal. Bloodborne was the same way; when it worked, it was magnificent, but it fell flat just as much.

Dark Souls 3 doesn't try hard enough to be the games it wants to remind people of. It settles to be a solid action rpg that still exists in the Dark Souls essence, but it feels like a shrug. A shrug by From, given after the end of a marathon of hard work, aimed at Bandai Namco and the fans, just exhaustedly presenting something that has to be good enough. And it is. It's good enough. I enjoyed Dark Souls 3, I enjoyed its expansions, I enjoyed my time working my pet theory into what it had to say, and I enjoyed where it left the series.

As of the time of writing, we haven't seen anything from From except for a 10 second teaser for their next project and the announcement of Dark Souls Remastered, and that's fine. Beyond the expansions for DS3, we didn't see anything huge from them for all of 2017, and that's perfectly fine. Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 proved that they aren't comfortable releasing a game every year, and it seems that Bandai Namco realized that. In the current norm of a new entry into a series being churned out every year or every other, I'm more than happy to let From take their time and make something we haven't seen before, or take a surprise revisit to an older series. From is at their best when they have the time to build those grand ideas, even if the game only reaches them for a few brief moments. That's when you can see the effort, see the intent peering through whatever didn't quite go right. I personally would rather see their ambition fall a bit short than see half the ambition come to a slow trudge across the finish line.

In closing, dear From, please make Kings Field 5.

#words about games #dark souls #dark souls 3 #from software #fromsoft #namco bandai #videogame review

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