Dark Souls 3 - Season Pass (DLC)

The Dark Souls 3 Season Pass bundles both DLC expansions, Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City, into one package, and the gap in quality between them is significant enough that buying them together is essentially the only sensible approach. Ariandel drops you into the Painted World, a snow-covered, rot-infested landscape populated by Corvian settlers and Millwood Knights, and it closes with Sister Friede - a three-phase boss fight that stands among the best FromSoftware has ever designed. The scythe she leaves behind is a genuine PvP and PvE weapon. Ariandel also introduces a dedicated PvP arena, which the community praised on arrival. The criticism that stuck, though, is fair: the DLC is short, closer to an appetizer than a full chapter, and outside of Friede the content is thin. The Ringed City is where the Season Pass earns its keep. The narrative picks up directly from Ariandel - Slave Knight Gael, who drew you into the Painted World, is searching for the Dark Soul of Man at the literal end of the world so a young painter can create something new. The Dreg Heap, the DLC's opening zone, layers ruins from across the entire trilogy on top of each other: Lothric stonework gives way to Earthen Peak from Dark Souls 2, which collapses into the base of Firelink Shrine from the original game. For anyone who has been with the series since the beginning, this is the kind of worldbuilding payoff that makes item descriptions worth reading twice. The lore here actually attempts to close threads that have been dangling since Dark Souls 1, and it largely succeeds. Boss quality in The Ringed City is the real argument for the Season Pass. Four encounters in total, one optional. The Demon Prince is a two-stage fight that rewards aggression and punishes passive play. Darkeater Midir, the optional dragon, is easily the best dragon fight in the entire series - enormous, fast, and demanding in a way that feels earned rather than arbitrary. Slave Knight Gael himself is the finale, a frantic, three-phase showdown in a vast desert arena that the community has repeatedly called one of FromSoftware's finest moments. The boss souls from these fights also convert into standout weapons via Soul Transposition: the Frayed Blade katana and the Demon Scar, which is the best melee option for pyromancer builds, are both locked behind Ringed City bosses. The criticisms are real and worth flagging. Ashes of Ariandel has a boss-to-content ratio that community opinion consistently calls lopsided - Friede is the whole reason to be there. The Ringed City opens with an instakill gauntlet mechanic in the Dreg Heap that forces cover-based movement in a game not built for it, and some players bounced off it hard. A couple of the Ringed City bosses suffer from camera problems in enclosed spaces, and the ending of the DLC is deliberately, almost perversely, underpowered as a sendoff for the entire series. The difficulty throughout both DLCs is also noticeably higher than the base game, and the recommended entry point is after completing Lothric Castle - jumping in earlier will not go well. For anyone who has already put meaningful hours into Dark Souls 3 and wants the full picture on Gael, on the Pygmies, on what the Painted World was actually for: the Season Pass is the correct way to experience it. If you bounced off the base game before the halfway point, neither DLC is going to change your mind.

Monika · Scout Team

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