Fix Dark Souls III Crashing Issues With These Tips

This is the big week for Dark Souls fans here in the US. While the game has been out in Japan for a little while already, the rest of the world is only just now getting access to the game. And so far, it's proving to be a far more difficult challenge than the previous two games, although for very different reasons.

While fans of the franchise are prepared for big bad bosses that an kill you with a single hit, PC users weren't prepared for the one boss fight that's proving to be nearly impossible to overcome. His name is Constant Crashes. Instead of wielding a giant sword, he cuts you down with a game-crashing bug, that forces you to restart from the last bonfire, once you get the game up and running again.

So far Bandai Namco has had little to say on the matter, aside from directing people to contact them for support. Naturally, just like any other in-game challenge, people have banded together to try and figure out the patterns which indicate when these crashes crop up.

Currently, there is a Steam thread called "Put your Crashes in here" with more than 1,600 comments, and a Reddit post dubbed "Crash Reports" with more than 500 responses. While many of the responses are the same, there is some useful information to be found in there.

There appears to be one main spot where many people have issues with crashing. Once you defeat the first boss, the game will crash once you try to enter the circle where his bonfire is. That's quite possibly the worst place to find a game-breaking bug. You've just really started getting into the swing of things, and you've killed a boss. Now you're heading over to a bonfire, which acts as a save point for your game. Before you can even reach it, the game crashes, and you're forced to go through that battle once again.

The first clue to getting past this bug was when it came to light that many of the people not having crashes were playing as the Knight class. Other players who had experienced them gave it a shot, and a surprising number of them were able to get past the bonfire without crashing. But it didn't work for everyone.

The next hint was finding out that wearing a full helmet helped prevent the crashes for a lot of people. This would indicate that it has something to do with the head. And since it would most often happen when approaching a bonfire, this lead people to think that it could actually be a lighting issue. If the lighting effects and hair effects were causing the issues, then that would explain why the helmet helped.

With clues pointing toward lighting issues, players started turning their "Lighting" settings to low. So far, this trick seems to be the most successful one, for players. While there are still reports of people having issues, a large majority of players seems to have found this to be the best fix, at the moment.

There are some other players that seem to have a slightly different set of problems, which causes a crash when entering the Firelink Shrine. Once the door is opened, the game will also possibly crash. This appears to be mostly centered around those using AMD cards. The fix for this one appears to be simply loading up the latest drivers for your card. Many users have reported that this prevents the crashing upon opening the door.

If you're just skimming the article looking for solutions, here's the rundown of what you can try:

1. Update your graphics card drivers (especially if you're using an AMD card).

2. Turn Lighting to Low.

3. Try equipping a full helmet.

4. Try using the Knight class (though it will likely have the same success as just equipping a helmet.

These seem to be the only things that consistently help users while playing the game. If you've found another solution, or have found other problems, feel free to comment with them, below. We'll update the article when we have more information on possible fixes.