Dark Souls 3 is now officially out, but although the game has attracted wide praise from critics with it currently sitting at a 90 rating on Metacritic, many PC gamers are struggling to enjoy its PC port as a result of frequent crashes and other issues.
The game currently sits at a ‘Mostly Positive’ rating on Steam, which is below the standard typically expected of one of the most beloved series in the industry, as both the original Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 boast a ‘Very Positive’ rating. Browsing the negative reviews, however, reveals that the issues many are having aren’t as a result of the quality of the game itself, but rather they are due to frequent and crippling technical problems.
The negative review of the game that has been branded the “most helpful” call it a “broken, buggy mess,” with one user discussing how they had experienced 15 crashes after only 2 hours of gameplay. Another claimed they had experienced “consistent crashes at every bonfire,” while others claimed that playing on a PC that met the minimum requirements resulted in the game dropping frames significantly.
To put it into context, at the time of this writing, the game has 3,053 positive reviews and 1,294 negative on Steam. By comparison, two years after its release Dark Souls 2 only has 3,059 negative reviews compared to its 26,983 positive, so on the day of its launch Dark Souls 3 is nearly halfway to garnering the same amount of negative reviews as its predecessor. Publisher Bandai Namco is asking those experiencing problems with the PC version of the game to contact their support team, with some users finding that setting the lighting setting to “low” works as a temporary fix for a number of these issues.
While not every PC player has been affected by these issues, with many stating that the game is running fine for them, enough have complained that it has now negatively impacted upon the game’s Steam rating. It remains to be seen what the reasoning is behind so many having such contrasting experiences with the game, but it seems that many who are experiencing issues are trying to run the game on either its minimum or recommended settings, so it could perhaps be optimization problems that are causing these problems.
Whatever the issue is, with the series having a troubled history with PC ports, hopefully a patch is issued sooner rather than later in order to appease those who are feeling more than a little frustrated by their first day with the game.
