I understand that almost nobody will read this. I understand that speaking out against the emotional investment that many people have for this series will dull my message to much of those who do read this. I believe I am saying now what many will reluctantly admit retrospectively in several months once the hype has died down.

The open world design crutch

This game has the same issues as every other open world game, using the "open world" design philosophy pioneered by Ubisoft to supplement a lack of creative direction and cohesion, the team simply creates content for the sake of content to pad out the game. The overworld from the very first moment you leave the tutorial area is completely barren and devoid of any enemies other than one mounted enemy that cannot be reasonably defeated without a mount except through cheese. Nobody should have to chase the gameplay down. My first dungeon was small, filled with identical enemies in identical hallways, and pathetically short. I could tell from the moment I saw the boss and its weak design, that it was a cheap throwaway enemy just for this one dead-end dungeon. The boss room itself was empty, and bland aside from a nifty looking tree that was glowing in the back.

The lag. The crashes. The locked framerate.

This horse was probably pulverised into mush within the first hour of release, but I will still revisit it given this game has an awful level of stability and lag. Repeatedly, and seemingly at random, the game will hang for five to ten seconds. I do not know why. I am running the game at 1440p with it pinned at 60fps on high settings with my GPU at 75% utilization. Given that I have 32gb of ram and 8gb of VRAM neither of which were ever fully saturated, I can only assume this is an issue related to asset streaming. I am running this game off of a pair of Samsung 970 SSDs running in RAID_0 which have a measured data transfer rate of over 1GB/s. The only conclusion I can draw is that the game world has been so horribly optimised and designed that there are enemy encounters placed directly on loading zones. This is unforgivable in a game series that sells itself on the idea of being hard but fair. It is 2022 now, there is no excuse for any game to have a locked framerate in this day and age.

The gameplay.

The most controversial conversation to have in the Souls franchise is whether or not a gameplay element qualifies as being a cheap death or "part of the experience". This is not that. Going out into the open world for the first time, your eyes are immediately drawn to the large golden knight on horseback pacing in the distance. This is the closest enemy, and also the only enemy you can see. Naturally you will explore this area for items, and excluding the random crafting items you can collect there are none. So obviously the next step is to go down and fight this enemy. An enemy that I suspect can only reasonably be defeated without a mount through cheese for most class types. The first non-boss enemy group I came across was laughably easy to defeat and not particularly fun to do so. Entering my first dungeon, I experienced several deaths that I would define as being "cheap" deaths and entirely unrelated to skill. Dying because there was a popup notification following the use of a lever locking out all attack controls while allowing movement with an enemy placed for an ambush? Game design issue, and not particularly fun to deal with when you don't know why your character can walk around but not dodge or attack. Critical strikes disabling target lock? Why? This was a gripe in previous games too. Target lock disabling itself without breaking line of sight with an enemy? Glitch? The dungeon boss was just plain terrible. And the dungeon boss, generically named filler enemy to guard a resource required for character progression. Just awful. Weak design, weak music, uninteresting, and arbitrarily "pokey" strategy required to defeat it. If there is only one strategy available to you for a boss, and that strategy is one of whittling the boss down following the pattern of attack once, dodge until the next opening, repeat, your boss sucks.

All in all, it sucks that this game studio has fallen as much as the rest of the industry. I feel as if this game suffers the same issue of creative direction and cohesion that most other triple A games have had in recent years, though perhaps the blame really lies with the inability of the team to meet up and properly coordinate and collaborate over the last two years. In either case, the result is the same.

I will not recommend this game, if it was not engaging to me in the first hour which received the most attention, I will not be giving it the benefit of the next fifty needed to complete it.

I understand that almost nobody will read this. I understand that speaking out against the emotional investment that many people have for this series will dull my message to much of those who do read this. I believe I am saying now what many will reluctantly admit retrospectively in several months once the hype has died down. [b]The open world design crutch[/b] This game has the same issues as every other open world game, using the "open world" design philosophy pioneered by Ubisoft to supplement a lack of creative direction and cohesion, the team simply creates content for the sake of content to pad out the game. The overworld from the very first moment you leave the tutorial area is completely barren and devoid of any enemies other than one mounted enemy that cannot be reasonably defeated without a mount except through cheese. Nobody should have to chase the gameplay down. My first dungeon was small, filled with identical enemies in identical hallways, and pathetically short. I could tell from the moment I saw the boss and its weak design, that it was a cheap throwaway enemy just for this one dead-end dungeon. The boss room itself was empty, and bland aside from a nifty looking tree that was glowing in the back. [b]The lag. The crashes. The locked framerate.[/b] This horse was probably pulverised into mush within the first hour of release, but I will still revisit it given this game has an awful level of stability and lag. Repeatedly, and seemingly at random, the game will hang for five to ten seconds. I do not know why. I am running the game at 1440p with it pinned at 60fps on high settings with my GPU at 75% utilization. Given that I have 32gb of ram and 8gb of VRAM neither of which were ever fully saturated, I can only assume this is an issue related to asset streaming. I am running this game off of a pair of Samsung 970 SSDs running in RAID_0 which have a measured data transfer rate of over 1GB/s. The only conclusion I can draw is that the game world has been so horribly optimised and designed that there are enemy encounters placed directly on loading zones. This is unforgivable in a game series that sells itself on the idea of being hard but fair. It is 2022 now, there is no excuse for any game to have a locked framerate in this day and age. [b]The gameplay.[/b] The most controversial conversation to have in the Souls franchise is whether or not a gameplay element qualifies as being a cheap death or "part of the experience". This is not that. Going out into the open world for the first time, your eyes are immediately drawn to the large golden knight on horseback pacing in the distance. This is the closest enemy, and also the only enemy you can see. Naturally you will explore this area for items, and excluding the random crafting items you can collect there are none. So obviously the next step is to go down and fight this enemy. An enemy that I suspect can only reasonably be defeated without a mount through cheese for most class types. The first non-boss enemy group I came across was laughably easy to defeat and not particularly fun to do so. Entering my first dungeon, I experienced several deaths that I would define as being "cheap" deaths and entirely unrelated to skill. Dying because there was a popup notification following the use of a lever locking out all attack controls while allowing movement with an enemy placed for an ambush? Game design issue, and not particularly fun to deal with when you don't know why your character can walk around but not dodge or attack. Critical strikes disabling target lock? Why? This was a gripe in previous games too. Target lock disabling itself without breaking line of sight with an enemy? Glitch? The dungeon boss was just plain terrible. And the dungeon boss, generically named filler enemy to guard a resource required for character progression. Just awful. Weak design, weak music, uninteresting, and arbitrarily "pokey" strategy required to defeat it. If there is only one strategy available to you for a boss, and that strategy is one of whittling the boss down following the pattern of attack once, dodge until the next opening, repeat, your boss sucks. All in all, it sucks that this game studio has fallen as much as the rest of the industry. I feel as if this game suffers the same issue of creative direction and cohesion that most other triple A games have had in recent years, though perhaps the blame really lies with the inability of the team to meet up and properly coordinate and collaborate over the last two years. In either case, the result is the same. I will not recommend this game, if it was not engaging to me in the first hour which received the most attention, I will not be giving it the benefit of the next fifty needed to complete it.