Dark Souls III DLC coming this fall, publisher confirms

By Danny Cowan April 15, 2016

dark souls 3 dlc coming this fall ds3dlc header — Image used with permission by copyright holder

FromSoftware’s nightmarishly difficult action-RPG Dark Souls III will get its first downloadable expansion this fall, publisher Bandai Namco confirmed today.

The upcoming DLC will be the first of two planned expansions for Dark Souls III launching by the end of 2016.

Today’s announcement confirms recently leaked details regarding Dark Souls III‘s Season Pass. An Xbox Store listing previously revealed that Dark Souls III would host two DLC expansions in the coming months.

Dark Souls III players who pick up the game’s digital Season Pass priced at $25 will receive both DLC packs upon their launch. While Bandai Namco did not reveal its pricing plans for individual DLC packs, the Dark Souls III Xbox Store description notes that players will get an unspecified discount on Dark Souls III‘s expanded content by purchasing the Season Pass, as opposed to buying both packs separately.

Specific details regarding the content featured in Dark Souls III‘s upcoming expansions are not yet known, though Bandai Namco notes in the game’s Steam store description that future DLC will add “new maps, bosses, enemies and additional weapon and armor sets.”

Dark Souls III is the concluding chapter in a series of notoriously difficult third-person action games developed by Japanese studio FromSoftware. The first series entry premiered in 2011, following up on the PlayStation 3-exclusive predecessor, Demon’s Souls. Between Dark Souls II and III, series director Hidetaka Miyazaki developed Bloodborne for From, a PS4 exclusive that took the basic model from Dark Souls and transposed it into a Gothic setting with more aggressive and fast-paced combat.

In the Dark Souls games, players battle undead foes in the hopes of restoring their lost humanity. The series has earned acclaim for its fiendish level design, which confronts players with deadly traps and unexpected enemy encounters throughout. Players who are unprepared for the challenge will suffer a quick and brutal defeat, as the game’s uncompromising difficulty level demands practice and a willingness to learn through repeated failure.

Dark Souls III is available now for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PCs via Steam.

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Overwatch 2 is going free-to-play. Here’s why

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Overwatch 2 is going free-to-play this October. The upcoming competitive shooter from an embattled Activision Blizzard was expected to launch in 2023, but we learned that it was coming a bit earlier than expected and would be free during the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase on June 12. Still, this is a shocking shift for one of Blizzard's biggest franchises and one that has a lot of implications for the pace of updates and new content. Ahead of a livestream that gives more details about the free-to-play shift, Digital Trends spoke to some members of the development team, including Game Director Aaron Keller and Overwatch VP and Commerical Lead Jon Spector, to learn why exactly the Overwatch 2 team decided to embrace free-to-play.
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"We don't want to develop things and try to pool it together into a big box release; we'd rather just put content out when it's ready and do it as quickly as we can," Keller says. "As we kept working on some of the more innovative gameplay for the PvE side of Overwatch 2, it meant that it was going to take longer for any of our PvP features to go public. We want to release stuff as frequently as we can, but it was taking us too long to be able to get it in front of our players."
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Jotaro Kujo stands before a battle in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle R.

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JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R - Early Access Demo
Even the voiceovers and character models got updates to match the voice acting and styles fans will remember from the anime. We don't get many video games based on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, so it's nice to see this one put in extra care to respect the source material and improve upon the original release. That said, graphics will only get you so far in a fighting game. It's the gameplay mechanics that really ensure a fighting game lives or dies.
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A player stands in Metro City's Times Square equivalent in Street Fighter 6 World Tour.

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World Tour is one of Street Fighter 6's three main pillars, the others being the standard Fighting Ground mode and the multiplayer-focused Battle Hub. He commented how it's always hard to tell how much is enough to put in a game for fans, especially following Street Fighter V's rocky reception at launch due to a lack of content. However, he hopes World Tour provides enough to negate that criticism.
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