#DARK SOULS 3 UPDATE SERIES#
Years of muscle memory build-up will enable veterans of the series to blitz through many of its boss fights, those spectacular encounters that demand players first observe and learn the enemy’s patterns before launching their own assaults. Those glittering bugs which carry essential crafting material on their backs no longer vanish after a few seconds, meaning you’ll only need to chase them into a corner to catch and harvest them. There is, for example, a more generous spattering of bonfires throughout the world, those life-giving warp points which offer you shortcuts into the mystery as, scene by scene, you clear the fog of war. There have been several concessions to the series’ renowned difficulty, which has surely caused injury to many a controller, smushed into the carpet while the refrain ‘You Died’ drips onto the screen. Besides, you must take every friend you can get in a place like this. Firelink becomes, as one character puts it late in the game, a “cesspool of doddering old-folk and degenerates.” It’s an unfair judgement. In this location, the weird and colourful characters whom you meet in your travels congregate, with their freakish sniffles, bent backs, and glinting masks. You may heal your character, level up their abilities, meet with a benevolent blacksmith who can fortify your weapons, and trade with other various salespeople. In Dark Souls 3, Firelink Shrine performs the same function, but here it’s found in a grand, throne-room like structure, with stratospheric ceilings and a warren of tunnels and stairwells. Once positioned on a cliff surrounded by crumbling pillars, it was a dear place of refuge in the first game, a spiritual centre where the elemental warmth of its health-restoring firelight could be enjoyed without fear of attack.
You meet old friends, enemies and acquaintances, but each has been changed in mysterious ways you visit places that seem familiar but for a few new architectural arrangements, as if encountered in a recurring yet warping dream.įirelink Shrine is one such place. In Dark Souls 3, the setting is Lothric, though we do return to certain areas of Lordran which have been further disrupted by decay. As such, you had to unpick the story of the place like an archaeologist digging at ruins, or by reading the abstruse descriptions on items plundered from crisp-dry corpses, or rust-stuck chests.
At once ethereal and vividly tangible, with its rain-slicked cobblestones, and moss-covered pillars, its history was partially obscured by nature’s reclaiming work. In the first Dark Souls, Lordran was a place buffered and ruined by time as much as by violence. And it does so with arguably Miyazaki and his Shinjuku-based team’s greatest flourish yet. In this way, revisiting this realm does not weary or undermine what came before. And yet, the cyclical nature of life, death and rebirth is the foundational theme of this series your character revives after death, and may return to the point of his or her demise to collect what was dropped. Where once Dark Souls felt furtive and refreshing, an antidote to the mainstream parade of minutely tinkered video game sequels, now it is part of the same cycle. Most players are familiar with the titles and have either succumbed to their mesmerising rhythms or skulked away. The novelty is gone in this, the third and final Dark Souls game.