Dark Souls 3, by design, is meant to test players in numerous ways. The core of the experience revolves around the player's dedication to seeing it through, and when it lands, it opens them up to a bold new genre of Soulslike games. The brutal difficulty is off-putting to many, and it can be difficult to feel like progress is being made after the starting area. But the starting area isn't the real tutorial, Dark Souls 3's Vordt of the Boreal Valley is.
Boss fights in Souls games are a unique beast, mostly because the boss is only a sliver of it. Players also need to learn routes to the boss, enemy placement along the way, where items are, and any available shortcuts if they want to be successful. Neglect that, and there's a good chance they'll enter the showdown with a low health bar and a single Estus Flask to spare.
The Beauty of Vordt
Nowhere is this truer than with Dark Souls 3's Vordt of the Boreal Valley, one of the game's first major bosses, and an introduction to the franchise's wider game mechanics. There were many Dark Souls veterans out in the wild by the time the third entry rolled around, but it also served as a starting point for new players, and while From Software offers eye-gougingly difficult scenarios, it still needs a way to get newbies up to speed.
Vordt of the Boreal Valley serves that purpose. After making it Firelink Shrine, players are dumped onto the High Wall of Lothric with branching paths to explore and no real direction to go. After navigating through the dense corridors along the wall, they'll eventually find their way to Vordt, the greatest challenge they've encountered up until that point.
It's what happens between setting out and finding Vordt that the magic of the game happens. Dark Souls 3's Vordt of the Boreal Valley section is one of the most precisely crafted learning experiences that has been featured in a game to date. Players are rewarded for exploration, with new items and souls scattered along the way; they face mini-bosses that are best avoided before the real fight, and they have to forge new paths to lower the risk of eating resources before the confrontation.
Learn Fast or Die Trying
Those are skills that players will need to carry with them throughout the rest of the game, if they want to see it all the way through. Dark Souls relegates most of the narrative to environmental storytelling and item descriptions, and if players don't know what to look out for, their only real driving motive will be reaching the next boss fight. If Dark Souls 3's Vordt segment was weaker, far fewer new players would find it so enamoring.
For beginners, it'll likely take hours before they even reach Dark Souls 3's Vordt of the Boreal Valley boss fight. Once they get there, they'll then have to work on nailing down Vordt of the Boreal Valley's various attack sequences, and likely suffer multiple embarrassing defeats before they'll finally be ready to move on to the next zone - and have the fundamentals of the Dark Souls formula down.
Dark Souls 3 is a blend of the other From Software games out there, blending together many elements of the studio's newer games into a cohesive formula. It still has its share of issues, but it's a good platform to learn how to play other games in the genre, even those like Mortal Shell, that aren't developed by From Software. Dark Souls 3's Vordt of the Boreal Valley is just particularly instrumental in gaining that knowledge.
Dark Souls 3 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.