One of this year's most anticipated titles, "Dark Souls III," is off to an inauspicious start for some PC players. While the "Dark Souls" series is known to be a naturally difficult game, a string of bugs and glitches has taken this difficulty to whole new levels, even making the game unplayable for some.
Reports of these issues have been present ever since it went live overnight on Tuesday. Negative reviews, referring to the crashes as "deal-breakers," have been popping up on various communities such as Steam and Reddit, indicating that these aren't isolated occurrences, but widespread problems.
As seen in a Steam forum thread, these crashes happen after lighting the first Bonfire for most players. Of course, it wouldn't be much of an issue if it was limited to just the first bonfire, but the problems extend beyond it. If players manage to make it past the first bonfire, the game can still crash at Firelink Shrine or sometimes simply because it feels like it.
However, crashes are just the tip of the iceberg. Other problems, such as severe frame rate drops, have also been recorded.
Not one to be deprived of playing the game that they've been looking forward to for so long, the "DS III" community on Reddit has launched a PC Support Megathread in which they record an assortment of problems plaguing PC players and the appropriate fixes. Some of the simpler fixes include starting with the Knight class and keeping the helmet on or setting the "lighting" to low, while a more complex one reads:
"Basically for anyone experiencing frequent crashes when doing anything whatsoever, should increase their virtual memory size to something like 10GBs minimum, and 12GB max (assuming they have that much free space.) You can do this by right-clicking on 'This PC' (Windows 7? and up) or, 'My Computer' (Windows Vista, I think), then click 'Properties.' And, it should bring you to the System information page, from there you'll click on, 'Advanced System Settings' it's either on the middle-left of the page or the bottom-right, after you click that it should pop a window with a couple tabs and it should be on the 'Performance' tab (I think that's the name, you might have to click through the tabs to find it) then their should be a selection to manage Virtual Memory size or something like that. Click on that. Set it to user defined, make the minimum like 10GBs and the max like 12GB. This should probably help, especially if the crashing was occurring due to a memory leak, or something similar."
The thread also lists ways to address frame rate issues and problems that may be caused with a controller, so be sure to check it out if you've been affected.
In the meantime, Bandai Namco has failed to issue a statement specific to these crashes, simply directing affected customers to its regular support channels.
That isn't to say Bandai Namco isn't working on a solution - it most likely is since the issues are game-breaking. However, we should hope that the solution isn't similar to what Bandai Namco did with the durability bug in the PC version of "Dark Souls II."
