It's with a heavy heart that I write this review. It is, of course, my opinion. As a player with several thousand hours between Demons souls, Dark souls on PS3 and PC, Dark Souls 2 on PS3 aswell as on PC, Dark Souls 2: SotFS on PC, and Bloodborne on PS4, I feel I am obligated to write this. For the record, this review will change if the current state of the game improves, but as it stands, the game is not worth buying. While yes, it is a souls game, it is in a poor state.
I'll first start by saying that I never played the Japanese version, even though it released almost three weeks early there. That, of course, would allow for some sense of reassurance that many of the major issues with networking and balancing would be sorted out by the time of full release. Unfortunately, that's not the case. When the game was fully released, the first area of the game after getting to the main hub was in essence broken. For whatever reason, the game made it almost impossible for a lot of people to see summon signs of friends while using the password system. The system that is supposed to make sure that those summon signs were the only ones visible to you and your friends. However, without a password, tons of signs were easily visible. Even if they were useless in the sense that 70% of summoning attempts would only fail and say "unable to summon phantom." So, three weeks early and the networking for the first area doesn't even work properly. Alright, moving on to the next area, summon signs without passwords still refused to work on a regular basis, and STILL DO at the time of my writing this. However, passworded signs would show up.
This brings me to the next glaring issue; there are multiple covenants in the game that are dependent on automatically being summoned for an area to defend it or to protect a player who is already invaded. These covenants were next to useless when the game released as they would never send you to defend the area associated with your covenant. Thus making it that much harder to acquire the covenants items required to rank up to aquire certain spells and rings that are necessary for the achievements. Unless you want to farm trash mobs for an hour+ to get your covenants drops. That's right; FromSoft was kind enough to add a method of grinding for the covenants that negate even needing to use them. It seems to me they knew that their networking was so broken that they made sure to add an offline method of doing covenants. Before anyone says, "Well they put it there so people can play offline and still do all the covenants and such." I doubt that someone so concerned with collecting all the items and such would play offline.
Another interesting thing is that the armor stat "Poise" (it's in armor pieces stat pages, on the character stat page and there's a ring dedicated to boosting balance) is turned off in the config files for players. However, NPC's still have it. It mostly makes actual defense stats more important than anything. Unless you use certain heavy weapons that have infinite poise while using a light attack. It makes trading with heavy weapons an impossibility if you're playing PvP as hitting them before their attack connects does not stun them and leaves you completely open for a full hit, which WILL stun you and give them a free second hit before you're able to roll away. And again, before anyone says "git gud" keep in mind I typically keep my builds lightweight and even use the carthus bloodring to improve my I-frames while dodging. Not being able to interrupt someone simply because their weapon is bigger and happens to give them hyper armor while swinging puts myself at a major disadvantage regardless of any factors.
What else. Oh, the mind-numbing difficulty of the game. I'm kidding of course. As far as souls games go, Dark Souls 3, is objectively the easiest and most forgiving. Not only are most of the larger, tougher enemies either stun lockable with the help of a phantom, but the larger ones can be visceral attacked after connecting a few hits on them, usually killing them. Also, the difference between New Game and NG+ is negligible. I've completely the game four times already, both NG and NG+ and have been horribly dissappointed with NG+. The enemies are hardly any tougher, as you're a character is already fully geared by the time you get there and just getting more powerful. Not to mention the signature addition of random dark spirit invaders and red phantom versions of standard enemies that would appear in NG+ in previous games, all the way back to Demons Souls. It's not a new concept, and it kept NG+ fresh and exciting. The ONLY thing to look forward to in NG+ over NG in Dark souls 3 is +1 versions of rings. And I've heard that the only thing in NG++ is +2 rings. It's a massive disappointment for more hardcore players like myself that liked the added challenge of turning a corner and running into a skeleton or hollow on steroids that hits twice as hard. It takes a lot of the hardcore "YOU WILL DIE" mentality that's been a trademark for souls games away and instead changed it to "YOU WILL FARM".
I suppose another small thing to note is that large portions of the game feel highly unpolished and rushed. Some areas are breathtakingly beautiful, while others are full of large portions of texture and mesh completely missing, leading to literal holes in the world. Not to mention the weird graphical errors people get where everything goes wire mesh and turns bright shades of purple and green. Or players body texture clipping through armor when you hold a specific type of weapon as a specific gender. Or the fact that on full release, bonfires were one of the most dangerous things in the game, as they would cause a graphics driver kernel crash if you're lighting setting in the options menu was set to anything above low. A real kick in the ribs to players with high-end PC's capable of running the game at max settings but being forced to tweak on setting to avoid crashes. Or the fact that after shutting down the game and restarting it, the game had a tendency to reset the lighting setting to the recommended, detected setting without your knowing, causing crashes that you thought you'd fixed. Another thing of note is that the game runs like trash on the console. It does not play at an acceptable framerate on PS4 compared to PC. Looking at one, then the other, the difference is almost physically sickening.
As stated above, this is my opinion, and this review is subject to being edited if the game sees improvement. I wish I could recommend it, but I simply can't, and it pains me to say that. I hope you found something useful or helpful in my review before making a purchase. Have a beautiful day.
resource:
| http://saaran.net/ |
