I like watching trailers, they still fill me with a little bit of wonder, a slice of mystery about what is to come, the promise that every game can look absolutely fantastic and play like your dreams. Dark Souls 3 has had its share of great ones, particularly the Accursed trailer from a few weeks back and the pair of spoiler-free 80s-inspired ones, but this latest and last – gosh. It’s bloody good, enough so that despite having posted more about Dark Souls 3 in the last 24 hours than anything else, I wanted to showcase it anyway.
While I’m ranting about great trailers, here’s what Fraser thinks of the actual game in our Dark Souls 3 PC review.
As with any Dark Souls trailer, some may consider what’s contained within spoilers. But, honestly, if you’re that sort of person, why are you sat reading a gaming site when you could be playing it? Go forth, collect souls, lots of souls, and for the rest of us, here we go:
Hampered only slightly by the game already being out, there’s some incredible stuff here. The Souls series has always done a good job of taking what is, essentially, a very heavy metal game about killing your way through hundreds of bad guys and making it melancholy without removing the cool. The slow, ramping pace of this does it as well as anything.
Plus, the enemy design. That dude with the face, you know the one, he can leave forever. Don’t want absolutely any part of what he’s selling. There’s some more glimpses of the early bosses we’ve seen elsewhere too, but at odd new angles and with new footage. The slinky one does a lot more teleporting than I was expecting, no thanks. Dragon-riding dude isn’t my favourite either.
There’s a far better world where this trailer is one of the only ones released for the game, rather than the media ballistic broadside we’ve received. It’s just not a series that fits that sort of pre-release output, even if a lot of it has been great – and let’s not talk about the community reaction to how early streamers, YouTubers and press got the game, or the massive disparity in Japanese and English launch dates.
In the past now though. Go play, if you want.