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I was much excited about the release of Dark Souls for PC before Playstation 3 thinking that it would be great like other hack and slash games like Diablo 3 and Devil May Cry. But after playing this game for half an hour, I realized that it is a very badly ported game. My experience on PC version of Dark Souls was bad and I suggest that people who want to play this game should wait for the Playstation 3 version of this game to release and avoid the PC version.
When the game was to be released for the PC first and then the console, I thought that gaming industry had realized that PC gaming was much important and long lasting than the console version. I thought that this game was being developed for PC first and then being ported on Playstation 3 and other consoles. But I was wrong; Dark Souls was developed for console first and then ported to PC which has given it a bad design. I think that developers need to bring out a patch soon for the PC version of Dark Souls or else no one will buy it.
When a game is ported from console to PC, the first thing we expect is the improvement in the graphics of the game. As compared to the consoles, the hardware of the PC provides more flexibility for the developers to increase the quality of the graphics and the effects used in the game. But in case of Dark Souls, the graphics of the console version of this game is much better than that of the PC version of the game. The textures have no consistency in them. Some textures are having sharp details while some textures have fuzzy finishing. The mixture of these textures create problem as they are easily noticeable in the game.
Not just the sharpness and the fuzziness of the textures used in PC version of the Dark Souls is bad, but if you notice the textures on the walls which has bricks, then you will notice that same block of texture is repeated multiple times. You will notice that same texture repeats multiple times in various places. Also the level of detailing on the characters is very low. Take a look on the rounded surface and you will see that it has edgy surface which looks bad. Again there are various problems with graphical elements like health bar and so on. Many times the region behind these bars goes black and gives a bad look.
You will also notice that there are no proper instructions given in the game by the developers. The instructions that appear in the game are not sufficient to give proper details about what we have to do next and how we have to do it. The other instructions that we see are given with key configuration of the Xbox 360 gamepad. That is press ‘A’ from Xbox 360 controller to perform a specific action. When this game is made for PC, I think that developers should also design the in-game instructions for the PC. It took me around 2 days to realize which key on the key board perform which action. I think that this is the worse porting I have ever seen.
Dark Souls is virtually unplayable on PC because of its bad key configuration. If you want to play Dark Souls on PC, you need to have the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 gamepad attached to the PC. Only these gamepads will provide you the most comfortable controls to play this game. I think that this is totally wrong from the side of the developers of Dark Souls. They should have mentioned on the pack or the game cover that this game is best played with Xbox 360 controllers. This would have at least kept away many other gamers. I too think that PC version of Dark Souls is bad and it is playable only on consoles.
The graphical options like Anti-aliasing, VSync and motion blur are totally useless in Dark Souls. The motion blur will lower the framerate that we get in this game by a good rate. To maintain a good framerate, we have to disable the motion blur. Again the VSync is useless because it messes with the framerate of the game by a considerable level. Many people, who played Dark Souls in PC, complained of black patches in the game near the health bar and other such in game HUD elements. With Anti-aliasing active, this problem is noticed. So I think that options given in the game for PC are literally useless as they will downgrade the game more than enhancing it.
Many people must have also noticed that some of the instructions that we get in the game are missing. So do the text, icons and the in-game symbols go missing many times. Let me tell you that it is because of the anti-aliasing that these elements go missing. You disable the anti-aliasing from graphic options and they will be back in their place. Not just this, but Dark Souls also has a framerate lock on it. Because of this, even of the game is going to work in your computer at much higher framerate; it will be stuck on the lower framerate. This becomes very irritating sometimes.
The biggest problem that Dark Souls’ PC version suffers from is that it fails to work with the AMD graphic cards. It is not like that Dark Souls doesn’t work with AMD graphic cards, but you can’t make the game work on full graphic details. The Nvidia graphic cards make the game run properly, but same doesn’t happen with AMD graphic cards. Either the quality of the textures and resolution has to be lowered or maybe some other graphical element has to be compromised. Now we have to either wait for the developers of the Dark Souls game to release a patch for this problem or we need to wait for the AMD to release new graphic drivers that will support Dark Souls properly.
The PC version of Dark Souls is really bad and I too think that it will run properly on the Playstation 3 only. It is not just us who are complaining about the game’s PC version but there are many people who are troubled by it. You can read this post to see people discussing the problem with the PC version of Dark Souls and here is another post regarding the problems in this game. I think all the gamers who purchased Dark Souls for PC are frustrated by the broken and problem infested game.