The Teardown Analysis of Dark Souls III

By Louis Chan

The core experience the Dark Souls series tend to provide is that the players can keep having a huge sense of accomplishment throughout the game. Therefore, the enemies and environment in the world of Dark Souls III are continued in brutality in order to make you die easily and lose your Souls, the most important thing in the game, repetitively.

So that, you can learn from your mistakes, find patterns and strategies to defeat enemies, and acknowledging you have become stronger and accomplished something incredible.

Character System

To provide a high degree of freedom in strategy choice, Dark Souls III designed various classes that have different attributes and stats with corresponding weapons and items that can affect the gameplay and lead to different experiences (Knight, Sorcerer, Assassin, etc).

For example, leveling up certain character attributes will change the means of attack, the use of the combat system, and most importantly, the gameplay experience: increasing intelligence allows you to use more and stronger magic to help you fight from a range, or even use magic named 'Hidden Body' to be invisible so you can bypass most of the enemies in the level.

However, you are still vulnerable to environments and enemies due to the well-balanced value, and well-designed combat system and game loop with the purpose that you can have the core experience.

Combat System

The combat system is focused on letting the players feel underpowered and intimidated in the beginning to have just enough ability to overcome the odds to a certain (small) extent and proceed forward without being 'too' frustrated. Therefore, it is designed not to be complicated but difficult to master. However, when you are learning and adapting more to the system in the loop between failure and challenge, the more you will believe you have a chance to win and stay motivated.

Although the damage value and character attribute level did increase with Souls assigned or upgrade materials consumed, that just increased the rate of fault tolerance and the 'action points' in the combat. Moreover, since rolling has the i-frames that make the character invincible, and some attributes of shields can block 100% of the damage, the game doesn't want you to overuse them. Therefore, a stamina management system is introduced to prevent such scenarios.

At first, Dark Souls III looks like a real-time action RPG; however, its core is a real-time turn-based action RPG, in which you have to control and assign your stamina to the right action and response since there is no animation cancelation, in order words, all the decisions you made were made, and you have to suffer the full consequences. So, you have to balance the risks and gains, such as parry requires the ability to capture the precise timing and it comes with the risk of taking continuous damage if failed, before making a decision each time instead of spamming the rolling key or simply holding the block key.

Game/Core Loop

Throughout the whole game, the player is required to be patient, learn enemies' patterns and find the correct timing to choose the correct response. You can only learn and adapt to the game mechanics because the increase of level or weapon damage does not mean you take full advantage because any enemies can kill the character easily, and almost every death in the game is your fault, which forced you to remain calm, observe and learn, then adapt, predict, find the timing to have the right response and overcome. That is the process of how you are getting stronger in the true sense.

There is also the 'corpse running' part is an important mechanic in Dark Souls III because Souls is basically the most important resource in the game, and all the mechanics that are related to the character relied on it. In other words, the importance of souls is like the currency and experience point in an RPG system.

When you died in the game, accidentally or not, you will want to sprint back to your dropped Souls and retrieve them since it represents your game progress, to a large extent. It looks fair for the players because they can have a second chance at least. However, sprinting all the way back means you have to overcome the obstacles that killed you last time, which might be tricky enough to kill you again to make you lose all your Souls (Rage screams).

Therefore, when you just start playing the game, your goal might be wanting to explore a new area, slaughter enemies, and defeat the boss, but after a while, you will find out that the most urgent mission is to find another bonfire before you died.

Eventually, when the players learn from their experience by repeatedly taking on the challenges and overcoming the odds, that great sense of accomplishment from the accumulated suffering and the satisfaction of manipulating the combat system are the experiences Dark Souls III intends the players to have.

Story

The story of Dark Souls III is obscure because the narrative is fragmented, clues and lore are only from the few dialogues between the player and the NPCs, item descriptions, short cinematics, and the rest must be discovered from observations. That maintains the sense of mystery of the world and the players' curiosity. The lack of information and explicit guidance also makes them fear the unknown in front of their journey, which benefits the expression of the core experience.

Level Design

The level design fits the core experience perfectly: enemies are placed loosely and easy to handle in early games (except Ludex Gundyr) to make sure you are following a learning curve. Then, the difficulty keeps increasing to force you to grow, and made every kill, bonfire and shortcut found able to provide a sense of accomplishment.

As the environmental aspect, branching and twisted paths in maze-like levels where a lot of rewards for inquisitive are hidden can do more than just increase the number of traps or enemies to rise difficulty but also makes exploration fun and attractive (hidden areas with chests or shortcuts that leads you back to a bonfire is really a relief).

Also, to make sure there is a constant fear of death along levels nowhere is truly safe in the world other than Firelink Shrine (it's useless running back and trying to sit a bonfire in the middle of combat, I tried), and that is achieved by making the player feel small and weak when they enter those gigantic architectures and encounter enormous enemies.

As for the gameplay aspect, the levels are full of corners which implies that there are unknowns waiting ahead to encourage you to make decisions precisely, play strategically and be deliberate and consider every move carefully. Furthermore, you will get punished for being reckless, dying in a way they regret the decisions they made, such as being killed by traps, ambush, or being besieged since enemies are placed crowded, and they are agile, aggressive, and fatal.

The classic and epic boss fights are the souls of the game. They are so unforgettable, the music, the battle location, the ambiance, and the anger and frustration. The bosses are meant to be terrifying, so they are all designed to be tremendous and almost all boss fights have two phases that might require different strategies to take them down. To achieve that, you have to keep observing and thinking during the combat rather than repeating the same tactics over and over again hoping to defeat them.

Last but not least, the precious leisure time in the game for the players to admire the beautiful visually astonishing environments is also the main reason to motivate players to explore and dig deeper into the world of Dark Souls III.