I watched some PC gameplay (you could see the Steam FPS counter in the top right window) and it was at a steady 60fps all the time.
It wouldn't be an issue on PC anyway as you could use something like MSI Afterburner's RTSS or NVIDIA Inspector (if you own an NVIDIA graphics card) to set 60 fps and even out the framepacing. That is what Digital Foundry have been recommending whenever they've come across it in PC games. Basically, there are ways around it unlike on consoles where you are at the complete mercy of the developers.
First 15 minutes at 4k/max settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XboGmkFgoRA In case anyone wants to know, the game runs at 40-50fps at 4k (max settings) with a single GTX 980Ti. SLI works by appling DS2 SLI Bits, but it adds minor flickering, so I decided to use one card to record the videos. A 4k gallery of screenshots will be posted on my website on april 4. Here's also a 1080/60fps video from the second boss. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAWYvGxx6LM
I'm not big enough of a fan to buy this at full price, but I can see myself getting it next year on sale, I really liked Bloodbourne but didn't like Dark Souls I, so it's a bit of a toss up whether I'll like DS3 or not.
Some info on the game from someone who just completed it. https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/4c96cq/spoilers_i_finished_dark_souls_3_earlier_today/ Spoiler The World World design feels like a combination between Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne. It resembles DS1 in that the world makes sense. The individual areas that make up the world are connected in a way that adds up to a cohesive, believable world. From the first proper area in the game, you can see the entire world and you eventually travel by foot and without loading screens to all of the areas you can see. From within each area you can also look around and see the general landmarks that make up the surrounding areas. It resembles DS2 in that you will cover a lot of horizontal travelling distance. When you make it to the far end of the world, it will feel like you have traveled a lot. Unlike DS2, however, DS3 actually manages to pull it off without breaking immersion. The transitions between areas are very well done and realistic; you won't find any magical elevators leading to floating **** castles in Lothric. It resembles Bloodborne in that individual areas are incredibly complex, often having several shortcuts and healthy degrees of verticality. Think Old Yharnam and Mergo's Loft. The game has about as many areas as the original DS1, pre-DLC. The areas are MUCH larger and far more complex, however. After having played DS3, it is my personal opinion that the level design in DS3 is the most complex in the series so far. It takes that crown away from Bloodborne. In terms of area variety, there's loads of it. DS3 has, in my opinion, the most amazing views of the series. Part of it is of course because of the updated graphics engine, but part of it is also the art direction. Do you remember the very first time you were lifted from the top of Sen's Fortress into Anor Londo? How amazing and beautiful it was? I think you might find a particular moment in DS3 that will one-up that moment. Attention to detail is on point. Gone are the endless empty rooms of DS2. You will find lots of area-appropriate assets everywhere you go. In terms of world flow from area to area, the game never really opens up like the second half of DS1 or the beginning of DS2. The game is mostly linear like Bloodborne and the first half of DS1, where you go from area to area in order. There are, however, some instances of branching paths here and there, but nothing major. Gameplay and Difficulty To me, the gameplay feels as if DS1 and Bloodborne had a child who inherited all of the good qualities from his parents. It inherited Bloodborne's speed and responsiveness without being as fast, with DS1's sense of weight and timings. Then, as the child was growing up, it hung out with a friend named DS2 and learned how to do omnidirectional rolling and animation cancelling from him. I have heard some people say the game feels more like Demons' Souls. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on that as I haven't played it. Purely my opinion: I am in love with DS3's combat system. It feels like the perfect blend of the best features from all previous games. For the most part, the game tends to be very fair yet incredibly punishing. Expect all of the usual Souls "cheese": enemies hiding around corners and ceilings as well as all manners of traps and situations designed to bait the player into a false sense of security. Overall, DS3 is far more sadistic in its enemy placement and traps than DS1 ever was. With that said, it rarely ever crosses into ******* territory like DS2 did so many times. If you are one of those people who insist on claiming the Souls games are all about fighting enemies 1v1, I have some very bad news for you. While you won't have to deal with anything as absurd (but manageable) as Lud and Zallen, expect lots of 1v2s, 1v3s and the occasional 1vMillion. With the exception of one particular case which I felt was just annoying, I found all the multi fights in the game very manageable and never quite reaching the absurdity of some specific DS2 examples. Hopefully Bloodborne and DS2 made you comfortable with the idea of fighting multiple enemies at once. The good news is that the game also provides a healthy serving of amazing 1v1 enemy encounters. There's lots of discussion going on about the game's difficulty. You've probably seen videos of "bad" players and journalists destroying some of the earlier bosses. Well, those videos are not too detached from reality. As a veteran souls player, I experienced my first boss death at the hands of the fourth boss. Let me assure you of one thing: the game is difficult. What FROM has done with DS3 is they have actually designed the game with a progressive difficulty curve. The game gets tougher the deeper you progress. A good way to look at is is as follows: roughly every 1/3 you hit a difficulty spike. All things considered, I feel DS3 is tougher than DS1. Some of the optional bosses are on par with Bloodborne's The Old Hunters expansion in terms of difficulty, and in some cases, surpass it. I do feel, however, that some of the early bosses simply have too little HP and/or resistances. They could use more. Enemies and Bosses The game has a lot of enemy variety. By far the largest enemy variety I have seen in a Souls game. You will find some very interesting and new enemy designs. The counter to this is that if you have played the previous Souls games, you can pretty much pin point the entry in the series from which they borrowed the animation rig or the base model for the enemy you are facing. I honestly didn't find this to be a problem at all. DS1 reused a lot of assets from Demons' Souls, and it was okay. DS2 was criticized in this regard because the asset reuse was not exactly graceful. DS3 reuses assets from previous entries in the series and even Bloodborne, but adds enough new things to keep the experience fresh. In its vanilla state, DS3 has 19 bosses total. It's the least amount of bosses in the vanilla edition of a Dark Souls game to date. Similar to DS1, the game has a handful of non-respawning mini bosses (like the Hydra in DS1). Some of these mini bosses are functionally closer to bosses, minus the fog gate. They drop their unique souls or rare equipment upon death. Go back to DS2 for a second, and imagine the Dragonrider in Heide's or the Smelter Demon in Iron Keep with no fog door. These are enemies that could've easily been turned into quick bosses with the addition of a fog door and a health bar. The game has some of the coolest bosses in the series, easily topping the best from Bloodborne. The farther you progress into the game, the more epic things get. Not everything is peachy, though. There is one particular boss which I thought was incredibly lame, and at least two more bosses which I personally found to be disappointing for my own reasons. Very few bosses have introductory cutscenes. FROM went for the approach shown in DS2's Crowns Trilogy, where bosses usually have some starting animation as you walk through the fog gate. Game Length / Replayability My save file clocked in at 48 hours when I beat the game. Subtract roughly 3 hours of AFK time, and you get a solid ~45 hours. I did not rush through any area. I took my sweet ass time exploring every nook and cranny, and tried to grab all the loot and find all the secrets in every area before I left. Just like with all other Souls games, once you know where to go and where the points of interest are, you can rush through areas. If you asked me to pull a number out of my ass, I'd say ~1.5 hours for an all-bosses speedrun of the game. The game is very comparable in length to vanilla DS1. There is an insane amount of weapon and armor variety in the game. I couldn't possibly be happier in this regard. The weapon and armor variety, together with all of the new spells should provide for a TON of replayability. There is hope for DS2 levels of replayability. There seems to be some sort of bug governing the scaling of spells in the game. Either we haven't figured it out, or offensive spells are simply undertuned at the moment. Lore and NPCs Keep in mind that I played the game in Japanese, so the finer lore details escape me at the moment. I simply cannot read the text, so I can't delve deeper into the lore to figure out how much of it makes sense at this point. With that said, this is the first Souls game where I understood what the plot was about just by playing the game and listening to the NPCs. Fear not, as the game does not shove the plot down your throat as most other games tend to do. You won't suddenly have the new leveling waifu call you on your Souls Phone to inform you of recent lore developments. There are a TON of very direct callbacks and straight up references to the world of DS1 that have nothing to do with items or equipment. They are not gratuitous callbacks; they make sense and have a reason to be there. On the other hand, I found exactly three direct references to the world of DS2 outside of items and equipment. DS3 seems to have built its foundation almost entirely on DS1 lore, and feels like a direct sequel to that game. There are a few nods in DS2's direction as if to acknowledge that the second game happened. DS2's contribution to the lore seems to have been relegated to the existence of cycles. The overarching narrative of the game is less cryptic this time around. The purpose of your journey and the significance of linking the fire are actually conveyed to you. This is something that may or may not bother you. Unlike Bloodborne, DS3 has a lot of NPCs. Unlike DS2, most of the NPCs are actually interesting. Unlike DS1, not all of the NPCs finish their conversations with an ambiguously evil laugh and not all of them have unnecessarily convoluted quest lines. In my opinion, DS3 has good NPCs. This is something that you will have to experience for yourself as you play through the game. No clear fan favorites like Solaire or Lucatiel come to mind. It will take time for the fandom to decide on their favorites for this game. Personal Disappointments and Nitpicking I was honestly expecting a few more bosses. As mentioned before, there is one particularly lame boss. It's especially lame when you run into him after going through one of the coolest areas in the game. One particular area I was REALLY looking forward to exploring turned out to be extremely small. A handful of enemies in the game graduated from the Bloodborne school of bull****tery. I'm talking about extremely fast enemies that get up in your face faster than you can blink, do insanely high damage, and usually have lightning fast and ridiculous grab attacks. Thankfully, there's only a few of them. One particular enemy type graduated from the DS2 school of bull****tery. Infinite stamina, stupid damage, no safe window to melee, kill-from-range type of enemy. Once again, they are manageable with a bit of thought. Some asset reuse, par for the course for a FROM game. You can see bits and pieces of Bloodborne's Pthumeru Chalice Dungeons used to build Firelink Shrine 2.0. The graves and lots of castle textures are lifted straight from Yharnam. There's even some Forest of the Fallen Giants textures in the Undead Settlement. Overall, minor things and they rarely look bad. Nothing quite as bad as the missing textures in the Duke's Archives in DS1, or the cave textures in DS2. You start the game in the hub world which doubles as the tutorial area. You then reach the first area of the game by warping from the hub world, meaning the game world proper is not connected to the hub world. I was a bit annoyed by this at first, but very late during my playthrough the game gave me a very compelling reason to not question this arrangement. The game ended. Concluding Thoughts Dark Souls 3 is almost everything I wanted it to be. Sure, there were some things that bothered me, some places where I felt slightly disappointed. All in all, minor things in an otherwise fantastic entry in the Souls series. One thing that I am particularly impressed with is the fact that the game never went downhill in terms of quality. A lot of games these days have noticeably less resources diverted to the later sections because less players reach those. DS3 never really went downhill in this regard, the game was one continuous crescendo. It kept the quality world building through and through until the end. All things considered, and keeping in mind that this is my 4th Souls game and that DS1 will forever remain my first love, I will say that I am very happy with the game and look forward to dumping 500+ hours into it. Also, I cannot wait for the PC release (silky smooth 60 FPS) and DLC. GIMME DLC.
My 4k screenshots gallery (200+ pics): http://www.pcmrace.com/2016/03/28/epic-shots-dark-souls-3/ Some pics: http://i0.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-25-04-03-30-521.jpg http://i0.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-24-23-53-55-054.jpg http://i2.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-28-00-13-39-443.jpg http://i2.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-24-03-04-39-721.jpg http://i2.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-26-19-12-45-791.jpg
It's so ****ed up they give the game earlier to streamers. The game is massive and popular enough that they don't need to market it via streamers to get purchases. I am in no rush to play DS3, it might be a day 1 purchase or it might not but it is very unfair to the whole gaming community that the publisher/developer does something like that especially when the streams can be watched by anyone and therefore, people will deliberately spoil the surprises for other hardcore fans. It's just favoritism.
I'm watching a playthrough of Bloodborne and it does make me want to try DS3 but since I'm not a huge fan nor capable of completing such a difficult game, I'll probably get it on sale (maybe Winter sale?).
Only on consoles though, although on XBO the region free store allowed others to purchase the game although apparently the JP version is version 1.01 and the WW version is 1.00 but there's only vague rumors on what the difference is. However there's also the part where streamers, reviewers and such can showcase the first I think it was the 1/3rd of the game until was it April 4th when the NDA expires and the rest of the game can be shown. (Though those buying and playing the console version are of course not bound by any such restrictions.) End result is that there's a lot of details about the game already available almost two weeks before release including a lot of people trying to spoil details about the game on for example the Steam community forums and of course the numerous Youtube and Twitch videos and streams. (Not that it matters too much on PC as we'll probably have to deal with a lot of cheaters once again in online mode - softban doesn't really work 100% going by DS2/ DS2 SOTFS - but there's going to be a lot of high-level players already when the game is officially released.)
Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly having played Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 on PS3 then again on PC both to completion followed by Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin then Bloodborne on PS4 (where I got to the penultimate boss before the ending), I am not itching to play Dark Souls 3 even though I am sure it will be a great game. Having seen footage from the start of the game, it looks far too similar to the previous two games with even the locations having an overfamiliar look to them, something that Bloodborne managed to avoid by having a different gameplay mechanic (the gun) and a Victorian setting. One thing that has always annoyed me about these games though is the poor storytelling. There are bits of story to discover and dialogue but the fact that the characters you meet aren't even lip-synced when they talk is incredibly jarring and everyone just stands around and never actually moves except for the enemies. You could say that adds to the overall strangeness of the game world but to me it reeks a bit of laziness. Also, I absolutely hate the online invasion thing. This game is already challenging enough without having someone invade your game and attack you, usually at the worst possible time. Uber-annoying and without going online you lose the little tips that are scattered around.
I see where you come from and do understand you. But I also feel that, after the not so great DS2 the series really needs one final and really great game. And since it looks like it will be like DS1 and BB mixed together I have high hopes that it will deliver. Even though I recently (finally) finished DS1 (with two different builds) and I’m still in the process of going through DS2 SotFS (again with two different builds) and I platinumed BB, I’m still not burnt out of the souls games. Even more so, I feel ready for DS3, as I’ve never been ready for another game before. Too bad that I’ll be able to play it a week after release due to working travel. As for the story telling – I’m fine with how those games manage it. The thing is that even if you ignore what little clues the games gives you, the pure gameplay of the is so fun and engaging that I don’t really care. The other thing is that it sometimes it is better without the game shoving the story in your face with cut scenes, a voice in your ear and whatnot. Souls games have very subtle storytelling, but somehow they succeed in conveying the emotion of what is happening around you. And bout the NPCs – I think that DS2 is really guilty of what you describe. Its NPCs did not tell any interesting stories and those that moved to Majula stayed there forever, without even changing their dialogue lines. DS1 NPCs where far more interesting, had their own agenda, came and went of Firelink and eventually all turned hollow in pursuit of their goals. Invasion I agree that can be very annoying at times. I have resorted to going offline just to go through a specific area in (relative) piece. Missing the notes and stains for a bit isn’t that bad. As for the release date - yeah they **** it up! But hey, it is a souls game, there should be some release ****ery to keep the tradition going! BTW if you pre-order from Steam, you get 40% off the Steam controller. I think I may take advantage of that offer. I’ve been willing to get the controller for some time now. Not gonna play DS3 with it, at least not at first, but it may prove fun for other games.
It´s true the game has a weak story and i think that´s because the story only exists to give a "purpose" or a "reason" on why are you doing all that stuff in the game... Like every game released because i can´t remember a game with a great story... But what the game lacks in story compensantes with an amazing lore that explains the origins of most items and the reasons why some NPCs are the way they are. And then there´s the amazing atmosphere of the games that makes you want to explore more and more... As for the invasions, at first i also thought they were stupid and annoying but later i realized that they are on e of the best parts of the game! The feeling i get everytime an invasion message appears is great! For me the only problem i can see in the game, is that we are going to have (again) a central hub where if have to go every time we want to level up or upgrade weapons... I hated that part in Demon Souls, Dark Souls 2 and in Bloodborne! It´s so annoying going back and forth to do those tasks and it´s just and artificial way of increasing the gameplay time... Why can´t it be like Dark Souls, where you could level up in every checkpoint and had to discover the blacksmiths scattered across the game to upgrade certain weapons... And the worst part is the early release of the game in certain parts of the world, is like they are ****ing Dark Souls fans just for fun! Really lame!!!
I recorded the first 13 minutes again, this time at 4k/60fps using GTX 980TI SLI. Use Chrome to watch it at 2160p/60. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZOrAJRkzvY Also, I updated my 4k screenshot gallery: www.pcmrace.com/2016/03/28/epic-shots-dark-souls-3/ Dont open the images if you dont wanna get "spoiled": http://i1.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-31-00-43-45-856.jpg http://i0.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-31-01-00-30-389.jpg http://i0.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-04-01-02-08-39-027.jpg http://www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-04-01-02-18-29-461.jph http://i0.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-04-01-02-15-17-812.jpg http://www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-03-31-02-19-26-217.jpg http://i1.wp.com/www.pcmrace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DarkSoulsIII-2016-04-01-02-29-47-424.jpg
