Dark Souls III Guide (Steam) Introduction
A World of Ash & Cinders
Dark Souls games tell their story without resorting to exposition or lengthy dialogue. Instead, they allow the player to uncover tidbits about the world indirectly. Item text descriptions and engaging your foes while getting brief glimpses into their motivations are all that you get. For some players, the history of the world will remain a mystery despite multiple playthroughs.
It isn’t this guide’s place to reveal all of the world’s secrets; spoilers do not make for a very enjoyable guide. However, this chapter is designed to lead you toward the story and show you how to figure out the world.
Talk to NPCs
One of the few ways to get information directly is chatting with the characters you meet at the Ashen Shrine and out in the area around Lothric. The first time you talk to each NPC, you often hear about their lives and whatever it is that they’re doing. You’re free to walk away at that point.
However, you can also stick around and continue talking to each character that you meet. They’ll have multiple things to say to you if you keep talking to them. Sometimes this grants physical rewards (gifts from the characters you’ve met) or additional wisdom about the surrounding territory and its dangers.
It’s suggested that you exhaust every NPC’s conversations by talking to them until they repeat themselves. It’s well worth your time, and players without patience can tap their buttons to hurry the conversation along.
Watch the Intro Movie Again
The movie that begins the game is beautiful, dark, and exciting, but it won’t have much relevance to you initially. Try going back after playing 10 hours of the game or so, and the voiceover and visuals will start to have deeper meaning. The factions involved there are the same ones that you will be dealing with as you progress through the story.
Read Item Descriptions
Every item in the game has two screens’ worth of information. One of them lists the stats for the item in question. These are certainly important for combat and utility, but press the “Show Item Info” button at the bottom of the screen to switch to the other page of info.
The descriptive page has a picture of the current item and some text that explains the function and often the lore of the item you’re examining.
This is good for finding out the game’s history, and it’s also useful because there are sometimes hints about things that you can do with specific items. As an example, look at the descriptions for your keys. They’ll lead you toward the area where you’re supposed to use them.
Play the Rest of the Series
Dark Souls games don’t take place in a new world each time. Instead, they’re all linked together as part of one great (albeit sad) story of a world that has seen many better days.
There are even some characters that return from previous games. Keep an eye out for them; they’re probably all trustworthy…
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The Dark Souls story is an interesting experience. Every person who plays through these games comes away with a slightly different impression. Because the story is fragmented and presented piecemeal, and there are many optional encounters, items, NPCs, and even entire areas, no two experiences are exactly the same. You can talk to a friend who completed the game and come away with two different interpretations of events easily, and if you go online, you’ll find pages of discussion and hours of videos where other players try to dissect the overall storyline. There are also many smaller stories presented: sometimes short tales of single NPCs, sometimes factions or nations that only exist in the background on item descriptions or even item names. The heart of the story in each Dark Souls game tends to be relatively straightforward, but there are always little loose ends and threads that you can pull and look deeper if you so choose. How far you go down this rabbit hole is entirely up to you—there’s no wrong way to experience the story. If you’re the type who simply enjoys soaking in the atmosphere and letting it settle, you may not even want to delve too deeply into other theories. On the other hand, if you can’t stand an unresolved mystery, you’ll find mountains of speculation online about how all the pieces fit together. Fair warning, though—many aspects of the story and world are missing pieces, so there will always be some aspects of the world that are left up to your interpretation. This is entirely by design, and your particular experience and interpretation of the world is always going to be a unique one. Enjoy it: few games tell a story or present a world in this manner. |