DS is a landmark in gaming - any genre, any platform, it was innovative and has been hugely influential. Transcends its genre in a way few titles are able to do.
A surprising aspect to this, though, for a game with elite status in level design, is that the back third of the game is actually pretty bad. Two of the late levels (Demon Ruins and Izalith) are legit unfinished - the developers clearly had a rush on. The whole rep of the game rests on the first half.
I’ve been playing a lot of DS2 recently - the black sheep of the franchise, and starting that game is difficult for all the wrong reasons. Miyazaki stepped back from this one and it’s clear the developers didn’t understand the difference between hard and Dark Souls hard. Having played through it I think it’s a great game in its own way (although shame about the bosses), but that is a fierce learning curve at the start - started it with 100s of hours under the belt on 1 and 3 and still found the early levels to be intensely aggravating. The OP’s criticism of DS does not hold water, as has been clarified up thread, but it does to an extent for the sequel.
Invaded a guy in Sanctum City last night, easy work as he was swinging an ultra round like a naif. Messaged me a wave of invective so I offered to lay my sign down and help him through the level (facetiously, I admit, but he was pretty abusive). He ended up almost crying to me how getting invaded in DS2 was so unfair as he just wanted to enjoy his PvE game. Can see his point - hollowing doesn’t protect you from the Red Game in DS2 like it does in the other titles.
Except, well, to me… It doesn’t. Perhaps, to get why I’m feeling this way (and I get that you feel differently, and that’s perfectly valid), imagine watching a movie where, time and again, the protagonist dies, the film rewinds, and you get to sit to the previous couple of minutes again, till they get to the same point, die again, and so on.
First of all, it’s just incredibly tedious. Boring. Repetitive. I, at least, would much rather watch the story where everything unfolds as if the final rewind had been the first run—a coherent narrative composed of the best-effort scenes, so to speak. This is the sort of thing I construct in my mind when playing most games. For instance, right now, I’m playing Just Cause 4, because it was free recently on the Epic store. Every now and then, I screw up, and faceplant into the terrain and die. This doesn’t bother me at all: it’s clear that this wouldn’t have happened in the in-game reality, so to speak. There’s still a consistent, unbroken narrative where Rico never jumps out of a helicopter, miscalculates the distance, and breaks his neck crashing into the foliage.
That narrative never really exists in a soulslike. There isn’t—at least not to me—a way to suspend disbelief such as to pretend that the protagonist didn’t actually die a gazillion of times, because to me, there’s no realistic way that I could’ve gotten it right the first time, if I had just paid better attention, reacted quicker, whatever. Dying’s a necessity, or feels like one, and that means the sort of narrative I look for in a game flat-out doesn’t exist.
Now, of course, the Dark Souls franchise gets this better than other games like it, in that there’s an in-game narrative around dying again and again. I do appreciate that—but then, it’s still a game with a lot of boring repetition, and I, at least, never found myself caring enough about the resulting narrative to really bother engaging with it.
Other games in this vein then don’t even bother with that. Darksiders III just has you inexplicably spawning again where you last met the demon merchant, with all the laboriously killed monsters back in place. With Jedi: Fallen Order, you get back up at the last place you meditated. In both games, it’s simply an asshole mechanic, to pad their length and inflate their difficulty. A quicksave option, a little less reliance on overpowered boss enemies and gotcha moments wouldn’t have spoiled anything regarding immersion, but would’ve made constructing a narrative much easier.
Sure. You couldn’t brag online about how you just finished the game on ultra-nightmare difficulty without dying, but thought it was a little too easy. But nobody cares about people who think that’s anything to brag about anyway.
Everyone also says how these games need to be played a second time to really enjoy them, because only then are you good enough. But why would I play a game a second time if I didn’t enjoy it the first time? I’d rather just play a game that’s fun from the beginning.
Edge of Tomorrow was pretty much that and a very decent movie. Groundhog Day too, for that matter.
But I agree that this “get gud” feeling does absolutely nothing for me. Certainly not in that stupid trope that Kobal2 mentions, because I have no idea if the game is cheating or not (and in my experience, it mostly *is *cheating: the unkillable monster is in fact unkillable). There was one of these at the beginning of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and it almost put me off the game right there.
Amazing that it took you hundreds of hours to figure out that for some players, getting invaded makes the game less fun. Here’s some newbie, just trying to make it through the story, and you come in with hundreds of hours under your belt and kick his ass. You seemed to get some bizarre delight from doing so, too.
Nah, I take delight in spanking ganks and beating good players, and I take responsibility for waxing noobs trying to play DS on easy-mode - playing human so they can summon friends to help them through the level. It’s the responsibility of all experienced players to uphold standards in the Burgh, IMHO, and play the Red Game every once in a while.
This was something different, I was genuinely surprised when he told me he was hollow as I’d forgotten DS2 allowed those invasions - I’ve never encountered it before, and I sympathise with his view. The game should allow you to get your head down and enjoy PvE without threat of invasion if that’s your style.
[It actually does allow this, but it means burning a valuable consumable - DS2 is very quiet now with few invasions, so he probably felt it wasn’t worth doing as no one will invade. An example of a game mechanic that has lost relevance as the player population dwindles].
Ahh, the ol’ “people aren’t playing the game the way I think they should be playing it, and it’s my job to make them miserable until they do” schtick. So enticing.
Groundhog Day is an interesting example, because it actually exemplifies both of the approaches people are describing in this thread. What do I mean? The first way Bill Murray tries to “win the game” is through rote memorization, which is how us haters are describing DS-like games; the second way is by improving his skills. In the first method, he fails, and in the second, he succeeds, but what’s important is that we barely see him grinding, because otherwise the movie would be boring as hell.
Yes. Both Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow are examples where the repetition is justified by the narrative, but the boring, aggravating bits are cut out, or at best, only hinted at, for either dramatic or comedic effect. In Dark Souls, there may be a dramatic justification for the repetition, but that doesn’t mean the repetition itself is any less boring.
Oh that’s not what I’m saying - the games are also definitely great the first time ; for the rush of adrenaline when your forehead finally dislodges that one brick and you see the light on the other side of the wall
I mean, in DS (DS1 at least, the others are more hazy about it) you’re explicitly an Undead due to some sort of curse (presumably brought onto the world by the shit the gods of the world have done to become gods) and branded with the Dark Sign, which is a circle on your chest that means you’ll never, ever die and are doomed to rise again, forever (and, judging by the game’s NPCs, losing a little bit of your self/mind/sanity every time until you go Hollow, which is what the mindless husks of decayed flesh that roam the world are called).
So, when you die, you… well, die. It’s not a save/reload, it’s not “you could have done it and let’s pretend the narrative is uninterrupted from the protag’s PoV”, you died, period. Ceased to be, but got kicked out of the choir invisible because you couldn’t sustain an E flat. Also all those husks you killed, they died… and then they came back because they’re cursed, same as you. Only the bosses are spared from the respawn - because they’re the aforementioned gods, or were otherwise *actually *alive.
There’s even a point in the game where you have to die in order to progress, in a way instrumentalizing your own death (although not quite to the point The Nameless One can do so in Planescape:Torment).
So I’m not sure what suspension of disbelief is missing, plotwise ?
Nothing’s unkillable in DS - wait, I lie, I’m not sure you can kill the cat from the forest covenant ? Other than that, there are no tricks. Some enemies you need a Special Thing to be able to kill (for good), but that’s it.
Oh, right, there is also that boss, the one that is supposed to kill you (and you can’t touch him) that one time. But it’s a one shot fuck you move, and you get to avenge yourself.
Yes, I said that Dark Souls does have a narrative reason for the coming back again and again thing; still, it feels (or felt to me) mostly like window-dressing. After all, you could’ve had the same narrative effect without forcing you to grind again through the last ten minutes of goons you’ve cleared out thirteen times before. Just assume you’ve gone through that, and get to the point where you failed—that’s what e. g. Edge of Tomorrow does: you’re not shown everything up to the point where Tom Cruise died again and again, because there’d be no point to showing it. So why does Dark Souls insist on shoving the same stretch of game down my throat again and again? I’ve been there, done that; hence, it takes me out of the narrative.
Dark Souls has sold millions of copies, which makes it an objective success by any measure. How bloody hard is it to grasp that other people can enjoy something you don’t?
I’ll add that there are numerous ways to make Dark souls easier without cheating, nor grinding.
One can use the (now iconic) multiplayer mechanic to summon help -praise the sun- from NPCs or other PCs. There are items that drastically improve your base stats. If you do not like getting invaded you can play while hollowed OR just play in offline mode. You can cheese your way through the entire game using only ranged attacks at a safe distance.
While this is a strategic-fighting focused game, it is versatile enough to offer countless ways to progress. It is challenging, but not limiting. There’s no brick wall, where if you can’t do the exact button prompts at the right time you won’t advance, a la some sort of fantasy themed Dance Dance Revolution.
It is also not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s achievements are near unmatched in both influence and success.
Back in the day, Team NINJA responded to criticism about the difficulty of their Ninja Gaiden remake by adding an exploration mode to Ninja Gaiden Black. Probably would’ve been a nice thing for From to do. It’s dumb that such a topic is basically verboten in its community because of the idea that the difficulty is what makes Dark Souls special.
It ain’t. Difficult action games are a dime a dozen. There are also much harder games out there, like Ikaruga.
I guess some people see games as an opportunity for growth and rising to a challenge rather than a power fantasy. I’m not saying either is wrong, just that people are different and games probably need to be too. Personally I’m not into survival games. The whole gameplay loop of picking up sticks to build an axe so you can chop down trees and build a better axe…I’m just not feeling it. But I don’t think they need to change those games to conform to my taste, or that they should stop making them. There are literally tens of thousands of games out there, I’ll just play something else.
To be honest, I don’t even have the time to play all the games I am interested in, so it seems odd to me that people put so much effort into harping on a game they don’t like when there are so many alternatives. To me that’s a bit like complaining that rom-coms don’t have enough shootouts and car chases. I think everyone agrees that Dark Souls isn’t a game for everybody, but some people like the idea of a bleak, undead world where even the ground can kill you and every step of progress is a victory in itself. They are who Dark Souls was made for.
No one in the DS community thinks the game is difficult, by definition. If you play and like the game that much to consider yourself part of the community then you no longer find it difficult. But we (in the community) do all think it is special so why is that? It’s an interesting and pretty deep question that gets to the heart of level design in gaming, immersion, story, lore - everything. Some great posts above articulating these ideas, plus a couple of good rebuttals.
What it is not about, though, is simple difficulty. DS2 suffered from this - we’ve got a good level here with these three mobs. But because it’s Dark Souls let’s make it 6 mobs becasue that’s harder. That is not Dark Souls - DS2 is a great game but in a generic way, doesn’t have the DS magic.
