Dark Souls - Preview @ bit-tech

Catching up on a few links...bit-tech has a preview of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.

Personally, I struggled just to make it through the opening sections of the game but still found the slowly unfolding lore and rules to be bafflingly, brilliantly labyrinthine. Dark Souls' unashamedly involved stats and jargon-saturated systems are a breath of fresh air (or possibly stale air from the early 1990s) for an industry that's increasingly orientated towards accessibility.

You might think that this depth means Dark Souls is a far greater fit for the PC than it was for consoles. That's certainly what a lot of people thought and, conceptually, they might be right - but realistically the implementation Namco has taken isn't as good fit as you might think.

This is the bit where I said I'd come back to and where I talk about being annoyed with Dark Souls on the PC - and not just because it uses Games for Windows LIVE, either. Though that certainly doesn't help.

What was much more of a problem was the performance, which was lacking to the point of skipping frames even though it was running at only medium detail, non-extreme resolutions on beefy Alienware gaming laptops.