Dark Souls 3 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game (Review...?) - Writing on Games

If you're a regular viewer of the show, stay tuned until the end for some announcements! Also, just a heads up - I go into the specifics of a mid-game boss battle from 8:30 - 12:38. It's not spoiler-y in nature or anything, and I only talk about mechanics as opposed to lore, but I know people are sensitive about that stuff.

So over the past couple of weeks, I've experienced some of the most intense emotional shifts a game has ever caused me. That game is Dark Souls 3, and it's a game I've fallen deeply in love with. That said, I believe this might be the worst game to play for the purposes of getting a review out that there could possibly be. I received code later than bigger sites and streamers, so only had six days before release to try and complete the game to meet my self-imposed deadline. This brought about unbelievable stress and even panic attacks - I worried I was going to fail as a critic for not completing the game.

This got me thinking though - the context of playing a game for review is almost entirely different from playing for entertainment, and the fundamental design of Dark Souls runs entirely contrary to the mindset one enters when playing for review and trying to finish a game so that one can write a piece and try and get it out as close to release date as possible.

It is this context that I want to focus on in this episode - if you're looking for a typical review then I'm sorry to disappoint, but rest assured this will definitely not be the last video I do on Dark Souls 3. I just thought it might be interesting to consider the fact that once I disregarded this self-imposed deadline that I not only became a better player, but a better critic - I was finally experiencing the game the way it was meant to experience. This caused me to question the reliability of other critiques of the game from bigger sites who did indeed pursue that embargo regardless of whether it meant rushing the game or not. With this in mind, how seriously can one take the earlier critiques of the game?

I'll also state that a lot of the footage in this video was taken from a current NG+ I'm going through, where I am playing with a late-game boss weapon which, fully upgraded and coupled with my ridiculous strength stat, has pretty much broken the game. It's utterly ridiculous how much damage that thing does, even to bosses, to the point where I would be taken aback if they didn't decide to patch it at some point. Just incase you were thinking 'this guy is a filthy casual' (which is true) or 'he doesn't seem to be having too many problems with this game'.

---


Patreon:   / writingongames  

---

Thanks so much for watching!