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Running on PS4 for its network stress test, From Software offers a remarkable taster of what's to come in Dark Souls 3, six months ahead of its 2016 launch. The engine at its heart already has many parallels with Bloodborne, a PS4 title that blazed a trail just this year with the studio's more experimental ideas. Both in its nightmare-fuelled art design and its technical frontiers, Bloodborne was a marvel to behold - a current-gen title in the Souls mould, and also indicative of the direction taken with the upcoming multi-platform Dark Souls 3. With our hands on this early code, we see certain technical points are - perhaps inevitably - re-introduced from the Sony exclusive. Needless to say, Bloodborne pushed ahead of what we saw in Dark Souls 2, even compared to the 1080p Scholar of the First Sin remaster. Its new lighting model took centre-stage, bringing detailed specular mapping across Yharnam. Materials were lit with more accuracy - from the flapping cloaks to the cobblestone floors, giving the town a wet sheen where particle effects lit each surface. It set a precedent, a divide between the simpler lighting and world designs on From Software's last-gen titles and the studio's output on PS4 and Xbox One.
Based on this demo across the High Wall of Lothric, Dark Souls 3's engine matches Bloodborne on many points. Lighting is a similar plus point based on this demo, and it runs at a full 1920x1080 native resolution on PS4 as well. As for anti-aliasing, we're in familiar post-process AA territory again; pixel crawl is similar to From Software's last game, and on most sharp geometric edges it's ineffective. Fine details like plants produce visual noise in this stress-test, especially as we pan the camera, but at the very least its base 1080p image looks crisp.
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