Written by Victor Sanchez, April 12, 2012, at 1:00 p.m.
Dark Souls 3 is out and I am having a wonderful time playing it. A few hours in, and this could be my game of the year. I’m playing it on the PC, and while I’m loving it, others are not having as good of a time, and by that I mean they can’t play it at all.
As of right now, the PC version of Dark Souls 3 is suffering from a massive crashing problem. Many players report that the game will constantly crash around the first few bonfires. A few of us have been lucky, and even then I personally am suffering from low frame rates in some areas, but the game is overall playable for me.
This is hardly the first time titles from the Souls series have botched their ports to PC in fact it’s kind of becoming a staple of the series at this point. Much like how Bethesda can’t release a game that doesn’t have beta levels of bugs, Fromsoft has always bungled porting their games.
Dark Souls
The original Dark Souls sits on the top of plenty of “greatest of all time” lists and with good reason, it just excels in every way. While Demon’s Souls was a cult classic, Dark Souls launched into the mainstream console market with such success that the “Prepare to Die Edition,” including the expansion pack, was released on Steam.
The PC version, while still universally loved, is still a train wreck. It barely reaches 30 FPS, even with unofficial patches. If you try to remove the 30 FPS cap, the whole thing refuses to work. Not to mention that the mouse and keyboard controls are so shit that it is a popular challenge run for a Souls expert to beat the game with those god awful controls.
Dark Souls 2
Dark Souls 2 is the red-headed step child of the bunch as the most disliked Souls game that had the most technically competent port. They had clearly learned their lesson from the first game. The PC version of the game runs at a silky smooth 60 FPS at all times and worked wonderfully without any patches. The only problem is the way weapon degradation was designed. Any given weapon lost durability dependent on how many frames a weapon passed through an enemy body.
In the console version of the game, one of the many complaints was that the weapons broke too quickly. In the PC version this happened twice as fast. This changed the way you played the game, building characters around holding multiple weapons at once to switch out easily if something broke. Fortunately, the problem was fixed, for the most part, reducing the number of frames it takes to break a weapon.
Dark Souls 3
Now Dark Souls 3 is out and most had hoped that Fromsoft had learned their lesson. Unfortunately, Dark Souls 3 is unplayable for more than a few PC users, with some reports of 40+ crashes leading up to the tutorial boss. Bizarrely enough, there are multiple confirmed reports that starting a character as the Knight class will solve the problem. A bizarre fix for a near-fatal bug. It’s too soon after release to see if this port has been a complete failure. Let’s just hope Fromsoft will fix the problem.
As terrible as the ports have been, it doesn’t change the fact that this series is good enough for many people to overlook bugs and crashes to play some truly great video games. There have been recent murmurings, mostly ambiguous Twitter and YouTube comments, that we may be seeing a proper port of the original Dark Souls in the future.
In the meantime I’ll just spend my time playing Dark Souls 3, so stay tuned for my full review.