PlayStation

I was lucky enough to be in the first showing of Dark Souls III, and here are my impressions:

Miyazaki gave a 20 minute presentation before the demo started. He said the focus of the game was to increase the sense of scale and immersion, evolve and deepen the concept that the series is known for, and push the apocalyptic world and heroic lore. The game has a very strong visual identity, with Miyazaki using the term "withered beauty" to describe the artistic theme.

That theme becomes immediately apparent once the demo began; the light from the faded sunset coated the entire level, the shrubs on the ground looked like they belonged in California, and there were decaying pillars and rubble everywhere. Personally, I was wowed when we came across a dead dragon; the player controller moved in closer and we saw the ashes of the dragon slowly drifting away, gently being pushed by the wind. I am by no means an expert in graphics, but I think the graphics are pretty close to Bloodborne, with this game edging it out. Since the visual identity is so strong, however, I'm partial to say that it's a beautiful game.

The demo mostly focused on the changes/additions made to combat, but Miyazaki did mention that he was a big fan of interconnected worlds, so he made it a priority to have that implemented. Generally, the combat is very much how you all remember it. However, they did take a page out of Bloodborne and introduced some new moves that you can do with the weapons you acquire throughout the game.

It seems that each weapon type have some "exclusive" moves that you could do. The concept for this was to increase the amount of tools and strategy needed (Miyazaki specifically mentions one-on-one fights). For example, holding the longsword with both hands gives you access to the "ready" stance. In this stance, you're able to strike using a strong swing that breaks a guard and a thrust that has long range.

We were then treated to a greatsword, which gives you a "lunge". Normally, the greatsword are weapons of long range and slow swings, but using the lunge and attack, allows you to do a quick upswing that does massive damage. The player character landed one of these hits on a enemy knight and it was sent flying 15 feet into the air. And I'm not talking about a trash mob enemy; it was one of those aggressive knights that has no problem ripping you to shreds. The downside of using this, however, is that you are very vulnerable if you miss.

Later on, we were able to see the player controller use the short bow, which allows you to shoot bows immediately out of moving and rolling. It looked really cool, being able to shoot and move made it look like the player was Legolas. Finally, the final weapon we saw was the dual wield scimitars. It's similar to the Blades of Mercy with longer range. Its special move was the spin move, which worked great for grouped trash mobs. It didn't look too strong though.

Anyhow, as we were going through the demo, the player ended up on a fork in the path. The bottom path had a formidable knight and a group of lower level mobs throwing projectiles. When the player went towards the upper path, we were greeted by a gigantic fire breathing dragon. Miyazaki described the level that was being demoed was a kingdom that was once guarded by many dragons. One by one, they slowly died off (the withering dragon mentioned above was one of them), and dragon on the upper path was indeed "the last guardian". This is the point in which they demonstrated how we could use the dangers of the world to your advantage. When the player ran away from the dragon and back down to the lower path, the dragon follows and unleashes his breath of fire, incinerating our once powerful enemies and effectively clearing the path.

Going forward, we were eventually treated to a mini-boss that was formed from a group of lower level mobs. I can't even describe what it looked like. It was some sort of tentacle, bug-like, slithery thing? Needless to say, it killed the player controller. Miyazaki mentioned earlier in the presentation that the E3 demo was more lenient in difficulty, but the enemies had no problem killing the player. I think he died three times total in that 30 minute total. Afterwards, time was running short so they rushed to get to the boss of the level.

We were given a preview of the boss of the level, "Dancer of the Frigid Alley" (might not be the correct name, as that's what I scribbled in my notes). This particular boss drew inspiration from middle eastern dancers; she had a long, slender body with light armor and a ghostly blue veil. She reminded me of Vicar Amelia from Bloodborne, but I definitely liked the look of this boss more (especially that veil). The boss in the game uses different moves depending on the amount of health it has, and we were supposed to see the second set of moves from the boss, but the player died before he could get there. And of course, we ran out of time from the demo.

A couple of miscellaneous notes: it was played on PC with the XB1 controller, and the build was 30 fps with minor hitches here and there. Miyazaki wanted to return to the fantasy theme after working on the Lovecraftian theme in Bloodborne and joined the DS3 production team once prototyping began. DS3 was planned before Miyazaki became president of From Software and it's now been in development for 2 years. He was able to work on Bloodborne and DS3 at the same time because From is now large enough to have multiple directors working in their studio.

Hope this gives you guys some insight on how the game is so far!



The second image is the mini-boss that was I was talking about above. It was as big as the Abhorrent Beast in Bloodborne and was crawling on all fours. I couldn't figure out what the hell I was looking at!