Dark Souls 3 The Fire Fades (Ringed City DLC)

If there is any franchise that I've talked more about on this blog besides Batman, it would be FromSoft's Dark Soul series. In fact, if FromSoft somehow acquired the rights to use Batman's likeness in Souls game, I would claim that to be the best game ever made before even playing it.


Sadly, with the release of the newest DLC for Dark Souls 3, "The Ringed City," the franchise seems to be at a end. It doesn't look like the same team will be working on a new one for some time. And while I love the Dark Souls series (even the spiritual successor that got lost with time, Demon's Souls), I can't help but be glad that it's over. This may seem like a weird thing to say from a self-proclaimed rabid fan but hear me out.

When Dark Souls came out, it redefined a genre by taking gaming back to its roots. Nothing was clear cut when it came to progressing through the game, and while it did cause some frustration to the uninitiated, the game compelled you to explore and increase your skill level so that you could overcome challenges and find out what to do next. Not to mention that Dark Souls came out as an open world game (with some caveats) in a time where games held players' hands with mission markers, quick time events, and forgiving combat. All three Souls games were exhausting to complete, but the exhaustion was always proportional to the satisfaction felt when finally seeing the end credits.

Not only did the game redefine the series, it also created a close knit community on internet forums like Reddit that resembled those days back in grade school (before the internet) where kids would discuss and trade stories about the latest game. Players would experiment, explore, and help each other out on where to go and what to use to get past certain areas in the game. Dark Souls side-quests were always pretty cryptic but someone within the community would always figure it out without spoiling too much of the fun for everyone else. So not only was Dark Souls fun to play (in my humble opinion), it was fun to talk about, too.

You meet some great people...

And for the next seven to eight years (I don't remember when I bought Demon's Souls), I ate up all their content as soon as it came out. I even bought all the DLCs for each game upon release without hesitating, only because I knew from before that the quality of gameplay would be consistent. Even the DLCs for Dark Souls 1 and 2 had these amazing, unique boss fights that there exciting and challenging. While not every boss had me floored (there were some weird and repeat bosses), the game itself had more than its fair share of memorable moments.

The Ringed City landscape

And while I love Dark Souls 3 and its DLC just as much as the others, The Ringed City just made me feel like it was a good time to end the series. There were fewer surprises, the bosses felt eerily similar to past bosses in series, and the community was nowhere as inclusive and fun to be in as before. In my experience, there were more spoilers, cheaters, pranksters, and people who didn't really understand the unwritten rules of the community (like not healing in duels).
The developers/publisher also had to deal with an influx in their audience. So to appease more and more player, there were frequent patch updates that changed the game's weapons and bosses which would cause certain build's to respec. Not only that, but the developers made this specific DLC not very fun to co-op in. It's a very short area where all the bosses are kind of in the same area so exploring with a friend is unnecessary. The bosses also seem to get ridiculously strong when more than two people show up to the fight.

...you could say the game gets stuck on you...

What's funny is that Dark Souls has this fascination and focus on "fire" and "flame." The whole game's lore revolves around bringing in the age of fire or the age of man. Checkpoints in all the games are represented by bonfires that you must light to restock on much needed healing supplies. And while checkpoints are great, they also revive the enemies in the game. I feel like there is some symbolic meaning in lighting a bonfire; in that the game is revived and begun anew. But now the last bonfire has been lit (as in the last DLC being released) and the fire is fading. It's been a good run, but I'm glad that Dark Souls is finishing up before the ashes it created end up choking it.

Good bye, from the end of the world.