Dark Souls III First Playthrough Complete

10 May, 2016. 496 words.

I finished my first playthrough of Dark Souls III Sunday morning. I think it took around 84 hours and 87 levels, using a Knight build based mainly around strength and vitality. All bosses defeated solo, although I almost cracked and summoned help on the Twin Princes. (After the rather dismal experience I had with the Dancer of Boreal Valley, and when it looked like I might be heading in the same direction with the Twin Princes, I did summon help twice, but both times I died very quickly, which I took as a sign that I should stick with my original plan to get all the bosses solo on the first playthrough.)

If you’re interested I recorded the whole thing and I’m putting it on my YouTube channel, all 96 parts.

Dark Souls is a very alt-friendly kind of game (in the sense that the gameplay is completely different depending on which weapon you use and how you build your stats), so I plan to play through again with a sorcerer build and a dexterity build. (Or perhaps I might combine those two, since my sorcerer is currently tearing up the Undead Settlement with a rapier.) Naturally I missed a bunch of things the first time through, including about 5 optional bosses and a few areas, so I’ll be looking forward to uncovering those things.

It also makes me want to play Dark Souls 1 and 2 again, too. Have I mentioned how great these games are? They’re really great, if I haven’t mentioned it.

Okay, that’s the end of my Dark Souls evangelism.

But oh my god you guys Dark Souls is teh greatest!!!

That being said there are a few things that I found troublesome about Dark Souls III:

Disconnects. The absolute worst thing about Dark Souls III that I hadn’t seen in previous games is that when it disconnects from the network, it throws you out of what you’re doing and sends you back to the main menu. Yes, including in the middle of boss fights. Though it didn’t happen to me, it could have happened as I was swinging the final blow that would have otherwise ended the fight.

Crashes. It crashes a lot. I mean, not like ten times every play session but it crashes a good once or twice a week, which is a pretty bad track record in my opinion.

Lag. The network play is very laggy, far worse than previous games. I assume it’s because everybody in the world is playing now, but still. It sucks every bit of the fun out of the online play. The completely seamless online play was one of the best features of previous games.

UI. While the tool belt is a very nice addition in DS3, there are still some areas of the UI that are a bit clunky. For example, they still haven’t worked out how to let the player efficiently crush a lot of souls in your inventory at once.

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