I’ve spent close to a dozen hours exploring The Ringed City, the final expansion for Dark Souls 3, but still haven’t quite nailed down my feelings on the game’s last DLC. FromSoftware made good on many of its promises, including assurances that The Ringed City would be much larger than Ashes of Ariandel. But I find some elements of its design tremendously off-putting and I suspect I won’t be the only one who feels that way.
Much of the pre-launch coverage for Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City focused on the dev team’s attempts to subvert player expectations. The most commonly cited example being the need to backseat one’s fear of falling damage while taking leaps of faith that wouldn’t look out of place in the next Assassin’s Creed. But that’s far from the only occasion when FromSoftware tries to use the community’s experience against it. Subverted expectations are something of a theme in The Ringed City, mechanically and strategically, forcing players to reconsider (or abandon) learned behaviors that prove detrimental in the last Dark Souls 3 expansion.
Early on, this subversion is most apparent when players are asked to jump from heights that would be fatal in the base game. But FromSoftware toys with other expectations too. What if the journey to a boss was 10 times more challenging than the champion waiting on the other side of the fog? What if everything you’d learned about the game’s damage equation, and what makes a “good” or “bad” weapon, was tweaked ever so slightly? What if the visual indicators of a threat you’ve come to understand couldn’t be trusted anymore?
It’s an approach that I find aggravating and refreshing in near equal measures. And one that leaves The Ringed City with a difficulty curve that (if charted) looks much more like a difficulty mountain range, complete with high peaks and low valleys. To give you an example, it took me almost five hours to reach the expansion’s first boss; an arduous undertaking made far more difficult by the fact that I was only Soul Level 100 ( TRC is balanced for Level 125+). At one point I even reached out to my PR contact, inquiring about the possibility of modified game save, when I began to fear I wouldn’t actually see enough of The Ringed City to offer some thoughts this morning. But the boss waiting for me at the end of that nightmare died in minutes. Several hours later, I would also kill the second of three new bosses on my first attempt.
Truth be told, only one of the three bosses I’ve encountered so far has proven to be any sort of a challenge. And that can mostly be chalked up to the fact that my character, now Soul Level 110, is doing significantly less damage than FromSoftware expected from those exploring this portion of Dark Souls 3. Combat isn’t the reason every Soulsborne fan is here. But epic, patience-trying boss battles are certainly a hallmark of the franchise and a significant factor in the Souls series’ ability to make a name for itself in just five years. But The Ringed City is woefully lacking in that department. And subverted expectations aren’t really enough to justify the absence.
It’s not all disappointing. If you were drawn to the series by FromSoftware’s archaeological approach to storytelling, know that The Ringed City just as easily could’ve been called Dark Souls 3: That Good Shit. There are callbacks to other games in the Souls series, answers to longstanding lore questions -- along with the bases for entirely new lines of inquiry -- and plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. And The Ringed City may feel every bit as sprawling as the base game’s map, as opposed to the tightly-wound labyrinth many have called for since the first Dark Souls, but there are plenty of hidden passageways and other secrets to uncover. Many of which will have drastic impacts on your success (or failure) at the edge of the world.
We’ll have a proper review of The Ringed City up soon. For now, I’ll say that most of the folks disappointed by Ashes of Ariandel’s brevity will not feel the same way when they’ve completed the last Dark Souls 3 expansion. TRC is still more linear than some would prefer, and its toying with player expectations will wear at the patience of many players. But what you’ll find waiting in The Ringed City is much more in line with what fans have come to expect from the series.
Dark Souls 3 is currently available on PS4, Xbox One and PC. The game’s next expansion, The Ringed City , debuts March 28.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes and follow Scott on Twitter for more Dark Souls 3 news in 2017 and as long as FromSoftware supports Dark Souls 3 in the months ahead.
