Darksiders 3 is finally out and, being the third entry, it’s worth asking if you need to play the other ones to understand the story. But not all games require that people play the previous games and some only will give some extra nuggets of information to those with prior knowledge of the characters and world. So do you need to play the other Darksiders games to play Darksiders 3? The answer is simple yet complicated.
Darksiders 3 – Do I Need to Play the Other Darksiders First?
You do not need to play the other Darksiders games to understand what is going on in Darksiders 3. Its plot is fairly self-contained and only truly tasks you with destroying the Seven Deadly Sins. It mostly just concerns Fury, her Watcher, the Lord of Hollows, and a brief few cameos from the returning Charred Council.
However, you will likely get just a little bit more out of the story if you have played the prior two games. All three games do happen at roughly the same time around the same event, after all. Fury sees War, the protagonist of the first game, in the beginning as he is chained up from the apocalypse in the beginning events of the original entry. They don’t have much of an interaction but you’ll have a better understanding of what’s at stake and why he’s there, even though they do mention what has happened to him. There’s also a cameo at the end of a certain dragon from the first game.
Darksiders 2 is slightly less important to the story as Death only shows up in a flashback and one other tricky scenario that I will not spoil. Fury jokes about him a couple times and he shows up in an item description. Ulthane from Darksiders 2 also serves as your blacksmith.
Overall, the game does mention overarching aspects of the world like The Charred Council and the war between angels and demons but you’ll likely gather how everything relates since it is conceptually pretty simple to grasp. All of the small nods are pretty minor stuff for people who have played the first two games but nothing is essential.
However, it’s not that simple. Given how each game is building towards something, it is likely that Darksiders 4 or 5 (given it goes that far) will probably be better if you know more about each individual game. Each of the three installments has given some different view on the same event and is likely serving as some sort of buildup to a bigger story with them all in it. So whatever collaboration Gunfire Games is likely planning might be better if you’ve played them all. Although that is the future and a look at the grander scale of the series as a whole and not just Darksiders 3.
