With this weekend’s announcement of Battlefield 1 dominating the newsosphere, it put us to considering whether this could be the game to finally topple Dark Souls 3 from the top of things people will click on if we write a headline like that. It’s okay, people don’t read this bit – they start at 1) below.

1) Dark Souls 3 leans more heavily on allegories to do with the Vietnam War

World War One is a surprisingly under-explored topic for video games, with the much more arcade-friendly World War Two: Axis Vs Allies proving the most fertile ground for gaming experiences. FromSoftware took a rather naive step in their attempt to explore elsewhere, picking very obvious allegories with the Americano-Vietnam war as its central theme, presumably in the belief that this would have it stand out from the conflict history crowd.

However, Battlefield 1’s move in the opposite direction could well prove to be the winning stroke, seeing Dark Souls 3 removed from its mantle in the process. More primitive weapons, rather than swords acting as metaphorical helicopters, will likely see the player given a far more gritty and realistic experience.

2) Demons don’t actually exist but World War One likely did

A criticism that most of the games media has hushed up is that Dark Souls 3 falls pretty short when it comes to realism. There’s no strong evidence for the existence of the Ashen One, and Lothric is still primarily considered to be mythical, with a huge lack of contemporaneous documentation.

However, The First World War is now widely accepted by most historians as likely to have occurred, making Battlefield 1 offer significantly more realism and authentic vehicles.

3) Dark Souls 3 isn’t first-person

Battlefield 1 will very probably have first-person combat, while the Dark Souls 3 developers were only able to get as far as third.

4) Dice have had more goes at making Battlefield games

Battlefield 1 will be the 15th game in the Battlefield series, the first – Battlefield 1942 – released in 2002. (Some have previously been confused believing the first game to in fact be the one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-forty-second game in the series, but this title was of course due to an infamous labelling error at the games factory. Hence the new name still being free for this game.) Whereas Dark Souls 3 is only the fourth game in its run, not including the Saturn’s The Mansion Of Hidden Souls. That means Dice have had nearly five times as many goes at practising making Battlefield games, and so are almost five times better at it. Sorry FromSoftware, get back to us in eleven Dark Souls time!

5) Dark Souls 3 is actually too hard

While FromSoftware have yet to release an official statement on the matter, it’s now widely recognised that the Dark Souls games are really, properly tricky. It’s jolly hard to kill even the early baddies, which is offputting to most gamers. No such mistake is likely from Dice, cleverly using human opponents instead of AI in order to prevent things from getting too tough. We also expect Dice to remember to keep opponents to the correct size, rather than the mismatched mess of scale discrepancies the entire Dark Souls series has featured. While the latter is likely to eventually be patched out of Dark Souls 3, it’s likely too late for the game’s reputation.

Let us know why you agree, below!