Dark Souls Learning Environment: five methods, 22 bosses, and every RL agent scores essentially zero

arXiv·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

DSLE is a containerized Gymnasium-style benchmark wrapping all 22 boss encounters of Dark Souls: Remastered, with each environment step a real action executed against the running game — real-time combat, high-dimensional visual input, sparse terminal rewards. On the DSLE-5 subset, an expert system and an evolutionary baseline defeated only the tutorial boss (63% and 43% peak win rates), while PPO and DQN showed no measurable learning at all (at most 0.33% on the tutorial boss, 0% elsewhere). None of the five methods beat any of the other four bosses, which makes this a rare agent benchmark with genuine headroom rather than one already saturated on release.