Dark Souls 3 Japanese Release Date, Beta and What’s Returning
The Japanese release date for the highly anticipated Dark Souls 3 has been set for March 24th 2016, although that’s just for the PS4 and Xbox One versions. The game will be slightly cheaper if you buy it digitally, but if you opt for the retail version a limited number of copies will come with a physical map and the soundtrack. While they haven’t announced a Western release date as of yet I would expect it to follow soon after the Japanese one, at the latest by the second week in April because there has never been a long delay between the Japanese and Western release dates before. The PC version of the game doesn’t even have a release date in Japan yet, but expect news on that soon. The game will receive a beta on PS4 in order to test its network connections, and so on, between the 16th and 18th of October, although it’s unclear if that will come to the West, but more than likely it will.
Series director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, recently revealed some features that will return from the first two games. Although it got a mixed reception Dark Souls 2’s ability to fast travel from the beginning of the game is returning, this is in order to make the experience “convenient.” It hasn’t been decided yet if the “Soul Vessel” will return, but rest assured there will be some mechanic in place to help you redistribute your souls. Weapon durability will return but the team is hoping to find a balance between the first two games so weapons won’t break too easily but they’ll break enough to encourage players to try out different weapons. Summoning signs will make a return for multiplayer purposes. Unlike in Dark Souls 2 hidden walls won’t be triggered by a button, instead you’ll hit them with a weapon like in the first game. As always spells will return, but this time there will be an effort made to differentiate between them, this means they will differ in more than just stats and players will have to be more strategic with how they use them. Lastly new game plus will work as it did in the second game, remixing enemy layouts and adding in different enemies. They’ll probably announce some new features soon to help fans “prepare to die” before the games 2016 launch.