It seems that the hardest part of Dark Souls III is just running it on PC. Our editor Jonathan Leack reported that players have experienced crashing at the character selection screen and that playing as the Knight class might be able to remedy the situation.
But the problem runs much deeper than that. While many PC owners have reportedly experienced no problems with framerate or crashing whatsoever, other players on Steam have experienced a litany of bugs and crashes:
– Crashing at the starting screen
– Crashing at the first bonfire, even just walking near it is enough
– Save corruption near the first bonfire
– Crashing upon killing the first boss
– Crashing upon entering Firelink Shrine for the first time
– Crashing after fast travel
– Freezing in the opening cutscene
– Having the monitor flash like a strobelight (may have to do with playing on a 120hz or 144hz monitor)
– Terrible framerate
- Infinite loading screens
– Not being able to download the full game
– Not being able to launch the game from the Steam application
All of these issues occur even for rigs that meet the recommended (not the minimum) specs for the game, which includes a Intel Core i7-3770 / AMD FX-8350, 8 GB RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970.
The one solution that has had some success, apart from starting as the Knight class, is lowering the graphical settings to Low; in particular, lowering the settings for "Lighting" to low. Perhaps this has something to do with the opening area after the Cemetery of Ash. Turning off online mode may help as well. You may need to fidget with the many settings in the GeForce Experience app.
A patch for Dark Souls III on PC can't come quickly enough. A driver update for GTX video cards could help as well.
