Gadgetory

there's something special at the raw challenge and abuse that games of your put us through there was this ever-present concept that the core experience was sort of a reward mechanic fulfilled by player gratification yielded from self-improvement an acquired skill rather than items given to you throughout the course of the game and information conveyance helped with obstacles and level navigation for lack of high resolution details and finer object placement like we have in today's games and those games were hard to it's definitely something that feels like it's gone away where the games have gotten easier with time but a lot of that is really a byproduct a difficulty of older games as a byproduct of an era with significant technological limitations mostly a lack of storage capacity on things like cartridges where you couldn't fit savegame files and a few modern games resurrects the design psychology of challenge reward progression as experienced with those older titles but some of them have definitely made a bit of return if we look at games like Super Meat Boy on the platformer side that certainly was one of the hardest games made in recent years on the RPG side it's been dark souls which has established itself as one of the most prolific titles of its ilk in recent years and it's been taken down a few notches only by shaky PC port history but other than that gameplay itself has been generally good and in today's review of Dark Souls 3 we'll be talking about PC controls first gameplay mechanics and replayability we're starting with those PC controls and the state of the port which as a full disclaimer is the most negative aspect of this review because the rest of the game is pretty good and so the tone is generally positive but PC compatibility and the controls of Dark Souls have been a systemic issue for the last few games and it remains the case with Dark Souls 3 the first game of the series never made it to PC and the second was rushed to the PC platform by the publishers something that from software themselves explained when noting that Namco Bandai cared less about figuring out how to make the game work and more about just getting it out the door and observing the market consumption on the PC side Dark Souls 3 was poised to improve but still shipped with a number of issues default input is completely utterly nonsensical and our first greeting upon booting the game is a giant legal disclaimer screen that requires an accepted declined button press and that's kind of okay but the accept and decline buttons are unclick Abul until you scroll through the entire legal document and the best part is the scroll wheel doesn't work and neither does the scroll bar or the scroll arrow is on the screen and the only way to get through it is with the arrow keys or just a little bit of infuriating because someone with frontpage could have made a better scroll bar than what was made in Dark Souls 3 so we're forced to hold down the arrow key which eventually unlocks the accept button and that's sort of the first puzzle in the game is figuring out how to scroll down we're then met with the splash screen that says press any key to continue and well it's really not any key because enter doesn't work escape doesn't work and literally any other key on the keyboard does not work so there's no way to get through this without just clicking on the text that says press any key and then you get to the next puzzle of navigating the game menus and settings again enter an escape do nothing it's actually e and q to navigate the menus by default cube e and what's naturally of course escape for a menu in the eyes of the developers from software and that's before talking about framerate which is again locked to 60fps like the previous title which was fixed only through hacks made by users that's a major issue for owners of high refresh rate displays and vsync is not present or toggleable in the menu system and trying to force it off through the Nvidia control panel and these control panels just simply doesn't work it seems as if the framerate is tied to the engine timing as we've seen in games like fallout 4 and it'll research this more for a future peace but for now all this said we just were stuck to 60fps for the playthrough we also had some issues with game pads and keyboard input but these were resolved with a day one patch or actually a pre day one patch and it's clear that the team is at least trying to make these different input devices work properly with Dark Souls 3 but enough of the controls bash and that's easy to do with Dark Souls and it always has been let's look at the gameplay itself Dark Souls drops us into a game world that's secondary to the mechanics but still well designed and important to overall cohesion of delivery the world is ending and thrown into chaos and we've been resurrected as a quantity or equality solution to that problem Dark Souls 3 is what we all an offline multiplayer game and it doesn't really try to hide the fact that there's really no heroes here only thousands of actors within its landscape death is common and is accommodated for in the design mechanics and notes left behind by dying characters ie other players in the offline online fusion make this pretty clear monster ahead for example is something that someone might write on one of the notes and that would be followed by a timely discovery of murderous aberrations it's all just background to the gameplay focus though and gameplay in Dark Souls 3 is more complex than the average pedestrian hack and slash game combat is comprised of dodging timing and attack speed all of which rapidly outpace character development in terms of battle advocacy and the importance of just being good rather than having a good character the game takes a skill based approach to progression and uses player betterment as the primary reward mechanic still Dark Souls 3 has deeper role-playing elements than just battle mechanics and this is one shown by classes in Dark Souls 3 which are basically a construct of stat point assignment meaning that classes are entirely just characters of points pre assigned for different equipment advantages and layouts and proficiencies characters start around level eight to ten giving the players some established style and a fighting chance but hardcore players can start at level one and build from the ground up if they so choose a skilled player can do a lot with a low-level character and its really all about navigation of the battlefield so there's less reliance and fallback on the raw power level of the player character the souls games have always had this focus on gameplay characters and story work as supporting casts to the mechanical star of the show combat is technical it's about the details and there's no allowance to get lazy in any combat event even against a mob tier foes timing of blocks and attacks is paramount in preserving the scarcest resource in Dark Souls and that is character Health Dark Souls has never handed out checkpoints and they don't do it in the newest game either a death can set progress back measurably which means that this type of game is one that's not easily exploited deciding to charge fourth and Explorer on the contingency that you can just load it for example it doesn't really translate into dark souls and will get punished pretty fiercely you can set you back a good amount of time in real world time sometimes this means that combat can feel tedious or means that a death causes you to turn the game off for the evening just because it's been taken too long to get past something but the reward is getting better at the game learning the animations and telegraphed attacks of enemies and it's worth the investment if you like that type of game Dark Souls 3 is a very personal game in this regard and it's all about giving the player a distinct feeling of advancement in progress and learning rather than items and all this is to say that while everything in the game serves the gameplay there is still somewhat of a plot so the plot isn't really something that you're there for it certainly exists it's in the background you've been returned to life or on life as it were to save the dying planet and the game never really pedals this beyond that sort of basic foundation as players story advancement was never our motivation to take the controls getting better was and that's pretty unique levels are semi linear and that's clear in the end point of the levels but designs sometimes create sprawled side paths that build upon the atmosphere information conveyance is used adeptly - this direct players in the right direction and that allows for these side paths to exist without imposing a feeling of being lost or overwhelmed this sometimes happened with dungeon games Dark Souls 3 is seriously worth to pick up if you're able to tolerate the summer awkwardly ported nature of the game it's challenging and the challenge is intensely rewarding in terms of personal gratification from skill advancement and if you want to read more about what we think about Dark Souls 3 its level design or other topics related to the game be sure to check the link in the description below for the full review as written by IGN's Keaton gallic who assisted in the script and the playthrough thanks for watching if you like this type of coverage as always hit the patreon link the post roll video to help us out directly link low description below for more and I'll see you all next time