Dark Souls 3 has a serious crash issue on the PC. You’ll know if you encounter the bug: You won’t be able to get past the first bonfire.
Released today, the game appears to still have a few bugs left over from when the press was playing it. More than a few of you are going to experience these issues.
Players who downloaded and ran the game overnight have reported their issues over on the Steam forums and Reddit. At the moment, it’s unclear exactly what is causing the game to crash for these players, but for many, it’s hurting the experience.
The crashes are first encountered upon lighting the first bonfire past the introduction area. Other players have also reported crashing once reaching the Firelink Shrine beyond the first boss. Many players have determined that the starting class they pick can cause the game to crash—except for the Knight.
I’ve played the game using the Knight and have yet to experience a single crash, so there may be some merit to that.
One workaround for the issue is to turn the game’s Lighting setting to “low.”
Beyond the crashes, many players are reporting that the character creation screen is incredibly laggy, with slideshow-like framerate. This problem dissipates once you actually manage to create your character and get into the game, however.
Bandai Namco and FromSoftware have yet to issue an official announcement regarding the game’s bugs, so we’ll let you know once they do.