Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Dark Souls III
Today I got to attend a closed door Demo of Dark Souls 3 from Miyazaki-Shacho. Here are my first impressions.

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General Info Before the Hands-Off Demo

It was basically a sectioned off area / room inside Bamco’s conference area (not on the main floor of E3). We got in line, and the entrance to the room was blocked off by curtains. When we were finally getting ready to go in, the curtains pulled back and a smoke machine started going (i.e.: walk through the fog gate kind of thing :D). Inside the room were three fairly long rows of benches. I’d say each bench fit like 10, maybe 12 people? A few other people crammed in and were standing, so overall there was maybe like 35-40 people? Perhaps one of the other members of Soulbrandt can clarify / deny this.

So the actual event thing started off with confirmation that Dark Souls 3 is going to be a current gen exclusive (meaning no xbox 360 / ps3) and is going to use DirectX 11. They also said that it’s going to be an early 2016 release, so I’d imagine it’s going to be March of next year, possibly earlier though I find it unlikely. They didn’t really comment on the number of Players other than to simply say “stay tuned for details”. There was also a focus on highlighting 3 major points of the game: (1) The visual style / world scale (2) The world view / story line (apocalyptic / heroic lore), (3) Evolving / deepening the game concepts

They talked a bit about level design and made a point of saying that what is visible will be accessible. They also talked about Dynamic light sources as well as particle effects of ash and the physics of clothes / cloth. Basically it’s going to have graphical fidelity very, very, very similar to Bloodborne (but themed more medieval fantasy, obviously). Next the translator was talking about how the map is more complicated and bigger than ever. The game is taking place in an apocalyptic setting, but is not just dark. They are trying to reproduce very unique visuals within the game. The story deals with the lords of cinders. They mention that in the trailer “one of the lords of cinder” is resurrected. Basically the story line of dark souls 3 is about the resurrecting lords of cinder and a dark hero trying to kill them. Don’t really know much more than that. Miyazaki also said that they will be basically sticking to the core gameplay; sense of accomplishment of overcoming difficult and online unique systems to loosely interconnect with other players are still there. Not only that, they are also looking to improve and evolve those systems.

The Demo

The hands off demo started in a giant neo-gothic esque castle. They kept saying that all the buildings in the scenery were subject to exploration, even the ones in the distance. I’m skeptical it’s as “open” as they were trying to make it, but at the very least it should be easy to expect a big comprehensive world like dark souls 1. There was a dead dragon corpse sprawled out on one of the walkway wall things and ash was flaking off of it with a really cool effect (think of something along the lines of Skyrim when you absorb a dragon’s soul).

The character then moved into a tower or room with a surprise attack from an enemy, and there were interactable objects in the area (it was almost identical in concept to that of demons souls 1-1 where the hollows at the bottom of the tower towards the cling ring shortcut where you could fight the dreglings or just throw a firebomb into some exploding barrels and kill everything that way.)

Next the player went downstairs to find a gravestone nearby a wall. They said something about players being able to leave an “epitaph” and that it can be used as a torch and a landmark. Players can torch the graves and by doing so they can learn about the backstory of the game. To be perfectly honest I wasn’t entirely sure of the purpose of these things, or how they really worked.

The player keeps moving onwards and then comes to an area that has a long hallway, and parallel to that are stairs going upwards. A bunch of enemies start to swarm so the character runs up the stairs then a dragon flies in on a bridge thing and breathes fire (looks *** incredible by the way). Miyazaki then said that designing the first stage to have a dragon in a castle is one of his very favourite things :D.

The first area in general reminded me very much of 1-1 in demons souls. There were lots of shitty useless enemies, and then some crazy strong, really interesting knight enemies. They were very fast and aggressive. From is seemingly focusing less on this idea of million enemy gang bangs and more on having less numbers but more significant and interesting enemies. (Please take this observation with a grain of salt though, as this was just one tiny level that we were shown. I’m hopeful it’s indicative of the entire game, but we shall have to wait and see). Oh, praise the sun is 100% confirmed back [t]/

They progressed in the level to an area that they pointed out was visible from the starting point. Miyazaki really seemed to want to get this point across that what you see you go to. They even said that the insides of the buildings were all subject to exploration. Again, I’m kind of skeptical for whatever reason. I just think it seems incredibly ambitious to try and do, or that there is something being lost in translation or being exaggerated. If it is in fact as they say it is, I am going to be so *** excited, you all have no idea lol.

The next big thing was that one of the enemies on a church roof (where a bunch of other enemies were praying) turned into this crazy black goo like creature. It was kind of similar to the snake balls in Bloodborne and the Centipede Demon from Dark Souls 1. It was just this big mess of swirling black goop that formed into these arms / tentacle things. It was really, really interesting. From a story / lore perspective it wouldn’t surprise me if this was something to do with a coming darkness, and it was humanity going wild (think of manus or whatever). Either way the enemy went abso-***-lutley nuts and killed the other NPCs and the player controlled character fairly quickly.

They also wanted to stress player control being more intuitive this time around, but obviously it’s hard to really talk about this without actually playing the game.

There was also an encounter with two big, fast, scary as ***knights. Firstly, they look incredible. The armor shines in a very dynamic way, and overall just looks really *** good with the cloth physics and their little tuffs of red fabric poking out of their plate armor. As for how the encounters were, it reminded me of the red eye knights of demons souls. They were just so aggressive. There was the standard sword knight and spear knight. The spear knight would attack behind the shield and poke, but then would swap into a 2h mode then what seemed like a “weapon art” stance for the weapon where it had some attacks similar to the pikes running attack from Dark Souls 1.

The boss room looked like a big cathedral room, and this big plate armored enemy appeared. It had very skinny and very long limbs (all fully plated in shiny metal that had some pretty awesome dynamic lightning). The weapons itself was a flaming sword. The boss’s name is Dancer something (unfortunately I don’t remember the actual name) but it’s been described as moving around like Voldo from Soul Calibur and that’s honestly not a bad description in the sense that it had this very slithering-esque movement to it. It had this veil / cape thing that was very spectre like in appearance that just kind of floated around. Think of seeing cloth or ribbons moving around in liquid (shitty description I suppose but it’s what comes to my mind). Either way, Miyazaki mentioned that each boss has at least two phases, and the second phase of this enemy was to pull out a second sword and dual wield it. The second was an “ash” sword. The boss had these really odd looking attacks. They were hard to predict because the movement was so foreign, but it looked really interesting both from a gameplay standpoint as well as a visual standpoint. One of the other really interesting things about the fight was that the fire sword started igniting the boss area. The pillars caught fire, the floor and carpets caught fire, and a little while into the fight the area was more or less engulfed in flames. Really, really awesome stuff.

COMBAT

They talked a fair bit about the “deepening of the combat”. Miyazaki spent some time talking about something they called (I believe) “Weapon Arts”.

The first example of this was the straight sword weapon which has a feature called “ready stance” where the character holds the weapon like this. So there was the normal 1h stance, then the normal 2h stance, then a new “weapon art” they called the “ready stance”. When the character was in the ready stance it got some really cool new moves. They had this different effect on them, and honestly it reminded me a lot of the unique, special attacks of the silver knight straight sword of dark souls 1. One of the special moves allows players to break the block of defending players. The guard break wasn’t like dark souls 2 where you got a free critical, instead you just stagger the opponent for a free hit.

Next weapon was the Greatsword. The weapon arts for it was pretty cool. The character kind of lunges forward with the sword raised vertically in a blocking type stance (Miyazaki made a reference to guts from berserk) and then from there the character was able to issue another attack. It kind of looked like the animations here were cancelable but I think it is done in two parts, and I’ll talk a bit more about it in a bit.

Next weapon they demo’d was the Short Bow. The *** short bow, holy ***. It is sooo fast. It seemed to have a rolling attack as well. Think of how fast the estoc rolling attack pokes came out in Demon’s Souls; that’s how fast the bow seemed to fire after rolling. It seriously looked more like dragon’s dogma or something. Miyazaki even made a comment that he felt kind of like Legolas from Lord of the Rings. This really, really has me thinking the bow will be a very viable option for gameplay.

The final weapon they showed was a scimitar (unfortunately I forget the full name). Visually it looked identical to the normal scimitar in dark souls 1; however the icon of the item itself when picked up were two scimitars in an X shape. The normal 1h and 2h stances seemed very reminiscent of its previous design in Dark Souls 1, however the “weapon arts” for this specific item was that the character equipped the second scimitar which was previously in a sheath on the characters side. This now had the character holding two scimitars and dual wielding. The attacks while dual wielding were really *** cool. It was very reminiscent of the movement of the gold tracer special attacks. There was also a spin attack that seemed chargeable (the loading screens had a button layout, and the R2 attack said “hold – charge attack” which had me thinking for a while after how this whole system works.

If I were to speculate (as we didn’t get a hands on demo), I think that while 2h, pressing L2 activates the weapon arts thing (which is what it said in the controller layout load scree). So, weapons arts is ready stance for longsword, lunge for greatsword, dual wield for scimitar etc. From there, the character can use R1 R2 and Charged R2 to attack (again this is my speculation). Basically, every weapon seems to have this unique property to it (kind of similar to trick weapons in Bloodborne) but it seems to be done in a bit more of a practical and unique way. It’s really quite interesting, and I’d love to know more about it. Again, I feel like I need to stress that I didn’t actually get a chance to play the game and test it myself, I could only think about how it’d make sense based on little bit of button layout information I was able to read, and what the character was actually doing on the video feed.

Parry with the shield looked the same as dark souls 1 and demons souls. The character parried an enemy into an instant riposte, rather than having the enemy drop on the ground etc. Some people are going to hate this next part, but I actually kind of like it lol. It seems like the Demon’s Souls / Dark Souls 1 backstab system is back. We don’t know how much damage they do, we don’t know how easy they are to pull off (when the person controlling the character got a backstab in our demo he was literally directly behind the enemy). It’s possible they’ve made it harder to do, but we didn’t get to play, and I have no idea. :(

Also, a lot of people seemed to ask about movement in this game. Animations, character feel, everything I saw has me convinced that this game will feel like controlling a Dark Souls 1 character. There was none of that floaty kind of movement from Dark Souls 2, or slower startup for attack and roll animations etc. The game just looked fast. Equivalent to Dark Souls 1 if not faster in some regards.

Someone seems to have confirmed multi-directional rolling etc. From what I saw it was the same 4 way directional roll system that existed in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1. It's possible that there may be a slightly modified version of 4way direction roll system, but I'm not 100% sure as I'm going off memory of a short gameplay demo. Either way, what I mean by somewhat modified is that when the character got close to an enemy and rolled to a side, the character sort of pivoted around the enemy rather than just going directly left or right (kind of like how dashing works in Bloodborne if that makes sense to anyone). Again, we didn’t get to play it, so I can’t say for sure, but that’s my opinion from what I saw.

Q&A

Q&A started off with some asking if the game was taking on the direction of having no HUD and being minimalistic, or if it was just for demo purposes, and after being told that it was for demo purposes said “well, I think it looks better without a HUD” or something to that effect, to which Miyazaki replied by saying more or less “well, there is an option to toggle it if you’d like”. Off to a great start.

Dave (davecontrollive) had asked if the world would be more hub based (like Demons Souls), or more interconnected (like Dark Souls 1) or more of a hybrid like Bloodborne and Dark Souls 2. Miyazaki responded by saying that maps are basically interconnected, and even clarified that he himself is taking the lead for the direction of level design (suuuper *** hyped about that)

Someone had asked about the hollowing process for Dark Souls 3, but the answer just more or less said “we’re making some adjustments but we’d like to you stay tuned for updates at a later time”

Peeve asked about how invasions were going to work, whether or not it was similar to Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne or something resembling SL matching etc. Miyazaki said that they were making some adjustments to it but signs would still remain, and that matching would be using Soul Levels. Miyazaki also added that there would be “dedicated game servers” (which is how the translator described it), however I believe what they intended to say was that it’d function in the way Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 2 worked. Servers would be used to make the connections between players, and then the encounters themselves would shift to peer to peer. Actual dedicated servers for the entirety of the encounter is such a fundamentally different, and important change that I simply can’t see them meaning anything other than what I just described, as you’d expect a change like this to be a big talking point or announcement or something they couldn’t talk about yet, rather than just an afterthought of “oh yea, there’s also this other thing”.

Someone asked about whether the game would be 30 or 60 fps and if it would use Soul Memory (literally right after Miyazaki clarified that it was using level matching). Miyazaki did confirm it would run at 30fps, and then asked kindly to not have any more questions about framerate. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Someone then asked about whether or not an Arena of some sort would make its way into Dark Souls 3. Basically they said that there weren’t any plans to be making an arena, but they were probably going to prepare some kind of exclusive sign or something for people who want to do those types of fights. Not entirely sure what this means.

Brandon asked if any unique invasion mechanics would make their way into Dark Souls 3. Things like Old Monk / Mirror knight. Miyazaki said to wait for more announcements later, but that they were planning something unique. Have no idea about any specifics on this.

Upgrade system was asked about, and basically it will be an evolution of the Dark Souls 2 system.

Amusingly enough Ty asked a PVE question about the lore significance of “the lord of cinder” and whether there’d be any direct connection or continuation to the previous games. Miyazaki said that the usage of “lord of cinder” was a general term, and not referring to any one individual, and that they’d like us to save for a later update.

We were then told that this next one would be the last question so someone decided to ask a weapon question that was already answered in the demo, and then that was that.

Conclusions

People who are familiar with my stream and are familiar with my impressions of the different games in the Souls Series should have a pretty good idea of the significance of what I'm about to say.

"Of everything I've seen so far on Dark Souls 3, there is nothing that I don't like or have issue with". It's a position that's subject to change, but so far it's looking like they've made some excellent design decisions. From what I've seen for myself, and what was explained by Miyazaki-Shacho himself, I feel like they seem to have picked out the best aspects of the individual games and combined them into one. Jerp and I actually managed to both be happy about this game. That doesn't happen. Ever.

Now, I realize that this is incredibly early info, and that a lot of stuff is yet to be known, and that some things may still change. I will make changes to my opinion as I know more about the game, but right now Keanu Reeves just hopped on my hype train and it is not slowing down.