Dark Souls 4 Story: What Could Happen If the Series Ever Returns

The Problem With Continuing Dark Souls

Let me start with what everyone who finished The Ringed City already knows: Dark Souls 3 ended the story. Flat out ended it. Not in a vague "maybe there is more" kind of way. In a "the literal end of the world" kind of way.

The final boss of the entire series, Slave Knight Gael, fights you at the heat death of the universe. Ash covers everything. Every civilization that ever existed has risen and crumbled into dust. Gael consumed the Dark Soul itself, or what was left of it. The pigment he wanted to give to the Painter Girl so she could create a new painted world.

When you defeat him and deliver the blood of the Dark Soul to her, she says she will paint a new world. A world that is "cold, dark, and very gentle." That is the ending. A new world, made from the ashes of the old one.

So if Dark Souls 4 ever happens, and I want to stress this has not been announced and Miyazaki said he is done with the series, it would need to get creative. Really creative.

Option One: The Painted World

The most obvious narrative hook is sitting right there at the end of The Ringed City. The Painter Girl creates a new world using the blood of the Dark Soul. She explicitly calls it a "cold, dark, and very gentle place." That sounds like a direct setup for a sequel to me.

A Dark Souls 4 set inside this painted world could start completely fresh. No Gwyn. No linking the fire. No chosen undead prophecy. New kingdoms, new gods, new rules for how fire and dark work in this particular reality. The Painter Girl could even be a major NPC, a creator figure observing her own creation with some mixture of pride and concern.

The challenge is that painted worlds in Dark Souls have always been prisons, not homes. Ariamis was a dumping ground for things the gods feared. Ariandel was rotting because its inhabitants refused to let it burn and be reborn. Would a painted world created freely, without fear, be different? Honestly I think that question alone could fuel an entire game. And tbh, that kind of thematic territory is exactly where Dark Souls shines.

Option Two: The Age of Dark, For Real This Time

Every Dark Souls game lets you choose. Link the fire and prolong the Age of Fire. Or walk away and usher in the Age of Dark. But canonically, the fire always gets linked. The cycle continues because someone always chooses to keep it going.

Dark Souls 3 introduced a third option with the End of Fire ending. The Fire Keeper extinguishes the flame completely and the world goes dark. The final DLC ending, the Painter Girl creating a new painted world, feels like the "true" conclusion the series was always building toward.

But what if Dark Souls 4 took place after someone chose the Age of Dark? An entire game set in a world without fire. Light sources would be rare and precious treasures. Hollowing might work completely differently. The old gods would be dead for good, and new powers, abyssal creatures maybe, would fill the vacuum.

I would actually love to see this explored. The series spent three games convincing us that darkness is scary and bad. But the Dark Soul is one of the original lord souls. It is not evil, it is just different. A game that explores what "dark" actually means in this universe could be genuinely fascinating.

Option Three: A Prequel, Before the First Flame

Dark Souls lore begins with that iconic line: "In the Age of Ancients, the world was unformed, shrouded by fog." Then the First Flame appears, and everything changes forever.

What was the world like before that? The opening cinematic of Dark Souls 1 shows archtrees and everlasting dragons. That is basically it. Gwyn, Nito, the Witch of Izalith, and the Furtive Pygmy found the lord souls within the First Flame and used them to overthrow the dragons.

A prequel set during the dragon war would be tonally unlike anything the series has done. You would be fighting alongside Gwyn's knights, seeing Anor Londo in its prime, witnessing the birth of the undead curse. It would not be a traditional Dark Souls game. More like a mythological epic. But it would avoid the problem of undermining DS3's ending completely.

Hidetaka Miyazaki has said in interviews that he is interested in stories set in completely different eras. And in 2024 he mused about letting another director tackle the series someday. A prequel feels like the safest entry point for a new director. Established lore, clear stakes, no need to retcon anything from the original trilogy.

Option Four: A Spiritual Sequel Is the Most Likely Path

Let us be real for a second. If FromSoftware ever returns to "dark fantasy action RPG with bonfire checkpoints and interconnected world design," they will probably call it something else entirely. That is what Elden Ring was. That is what The Duskbloods seems to be, albeit with a vampire twist.

The studio clearly prefers building new mythologies from scratch. And every time they have done it, Bloodborne pivoting to cosmic horror, Sekiro reinventing combat around posture, Elden Ring going open world, it resulted in something more interesting than a direct sequel would have been. These were not iterative improvements. They were full reinventions. Not even close.

I suspect "Dark Souls 4" as a title will never happen. What will happen, and what is already happening, is other games picking up the torch. The soulslike genre that Dark Souls created now includes hundreds of games. Some are derivative to the point of embarrassment. Others, like Lies of P and Hollow Knight, do genuinely new and exciting things with the formula.

The One Thing a Dark Souls 4 Would Actually Need

If someone at FromSoftware does make a Dark Souls 4 someday, it needs one thing above all else. A reason to exist that is not just "the franchise prints money."

Dark Souls 3 already felt slightly redundant when it launched. It relied heavily on Dark Souls 1 nostalgia. Anor Londo returning. Andre the blacksmith inexplicably still alive after who knows how many thousands of years. The final boss being an amalgamation of every previous Lord of Cinder, complete with Gwyn's piano theme kicking in during phase two. The Ringed City gave the series the conclusion it deserved, but the main game would not have needed that redemption if it had stuck its own landing better.

A fourth game would need its own identity. Not "remember Gwyn?" Not "here is Solaire's armor again, please clap." Something genuinely new that justifies reopening a story that already got its ending. And a damn good one at that.

I do not know what that thing is. But I know Miyazaki does, if he ever wants to find it.