Post by WickedCrustacean on Aug 21, 2018 13:35:08 GMT -5
Dark Souls is very infamous in gaming circles. Pretty much everyone has heard about it, and what it's most known for is the tremendous difficulty it presents to any player who is foolish enough to play it. The PC Edition of this game is even subtitled Prepare to Die. While that is certainly true, this game is a lot more complicated than that, and is a very interesting deviation from the modern casual approach to gaming by the mainstream companies.
Dark Souls is a game from the Japanese development studio called From Software, which has been developing games since early 1990s. Their previous games, such as King's Field and Demon Souls, were well received, but it was Dark Souls that really launched them into the public spotlight back in 2011. It was originally released on consoles, and then ported onto the PC in 2012, as the Prepare To Die Edition, which also included the game's solo DLC. The port was lacking in some ways, and required a fan-made patch or two, to make the PC controls and framerates work properly. More recently, Dark Souls Remastered has been released, which is just a graphically updated version of the same game. Since then, From Software went on to make two sequels in the Dark Souls series, and the also well received game Bloodborne, which is only available on the consoles.
On starting Dark Souls, the player watches a beautiful cinematic intro, which introduces them to the lore of the game, a rather interesting one. The world in the game started out in darkness, populated by dragons, but at some point in the ancient past, various Gods emerged, powered by light, and conquered it. But now, it seems like light is growing weaker, and darkness is returning, sentencing the entire world to slowly turn undead, and then hollow (losing your wits).
Your character is one of such undead, finding themselves sentenced to an asylum, to spend their waning days there until the very end of the world. But they find themselves unexpectedly freed by a visiting NPC, and later on, learn the gist of the game from the same NPC. There is a prophecy that a chosen undead may achieve great things, and you attempt to become that chosen undead. So escaping from the asylum, you find yourself in a sort of a giant megacity reminiscent of that city in Gondor in Lord of the Rings. There are multiple levels of castles, walls and fortifications, city areas, and adjacent woods, as well as sewers, slums, underground ruins, and other linked areas.
The game mostly consists of one giant area broken down into these smaller places, with some other areas accessed via cut-scenes and/or loading screens. So in a way, it's almost like an open world game, but with the key difference that many areas are shut off from the others until you figure out how to make them accessible. For example, you might have to fight your way through hordes of enemies including bosses to get to another area, but once there, you can kick down a ladder to the previous area, and be able to get from one to the other in 2 seconds. There is a beauty and elegance in the way all these places are sort of layered on top of each other, and inter-connected in the most interesting ways. In another game, they would have just been separate levels, but here, they are all part of the same space, which makes everything more immersive and believable.
At the beginning, you select your starting class, which determines your initial equipment and starting stats, and includes such fantasy mainstays as warrior, knight, thief, pyromancer, bandit, and so on. This isn't very important, because over the course of the game, you can change your character in every way, as you see fit. The interesting thing about Dark Souls is that in complete opposition to modern design principles, there is no tutorial, manual, or any information communicated to the player in the beginning, and the game has a lot of fairly complex systems. So the player is essentially left to their own devices, where they can figure stuff out themselves, or look it up online, or occasionally learn something from the loading screens.
This might seem frustrating, and sometimes does go overboard, but it also encourages a spirit of discovery and adventure, at a time when most mainstream games force the player to go through mind-numbing hours-long tutorial segments, and overly explain everything until nothing is left to the imagination.
Very much related to this, is how Dark Souls handles story-telling. This is a game with a fairly significant back-story, filled with all sorts of interesting and usually tragic characters, but instead of forcing this on the player, the game is extremely subtle in this department. After the previously mentioned intro movie, you will mostly learn the story only from small NPC tidbits (and even those often only if you come back and talk to them much later after first meeting them), loading screen exposes, item description text, and so on. Learning the story and lore of Dark Souls feels less like watching a movie (which is how most modern games do it), and more like being an archaeologist, slowly digging up tiny fragments of lost cultures and long hidden secrets. This might not be for everyone, but it is also a very interesting aspect of the game.
Aside from the combat, which I will cover in a bit, Dark Souls also has a lot of exploration. Everywhere you go, there are tons of passageways, doors, elevators, stairs, holes in the ground, and stepladders. In addition to this, there are also hidden doors (sometimes exposed by hitting them, sometimes by holding up a lamp next to them), new places you can find by jumping ledges (or sometimes off ledges), levers to activate, and a ton of other mechanisms to get to a hidden or hard to reach area. There are also a ton of consumable items with different effects, many of which you will have to use, various keys, items and mechanisms to repair armor, and upgrade your equipment. It is a very system rich game.
One of the more interesting things is how Dark Souls handles experience and gold. These are two things in RPGs that often cause issues, because at some point, your character will have too much experience and become too strong for the game, and also have too much gold, to the point where it becomes irrelevant. Well, in Dark Souls, both are handled with one thing, a mechanism called Souls. Every time you kill an enemy, you gain some number of souls (the stronger the enemy, the more souls). You can also get souls by consuming certain items and drops that you find.
You can spend these souls to level up your character or to buy things, so they serve as both experience and gold. You also spend them to repair and upgrade equipment. The thing is, when you die (which happens a lot in this game, note the name), you lose all your souls. You get one chance to get them back (if you can return alive to that place, and grab them), but if you die again, they will be lost for good. So this mechanism prevents you from hoarding gold, and you are pretty much always need to go on a farming run if you want to buy something nice. Experience-wise, the higher level you are, the more souls it costs to go up another level, so again, this prevents the player from becoming overly powerful.
Most of Dark Souls will be spent in combat, against the various undead and monsters that inhabit the world. There are essentially 3 types of enemies here: regular enemies (e.g. soldiers, archers, animals that respawn), mini-bosses (rare or powerful enemies that do not come back after you defeat them), and actual bosses, massive unique monstrosities that usually require many deaths to figure out. To fight them, many approaches are possible, as Dark Souls has a very deep and nuanced combat system. You can build a tanky character wielding heavy armor and a large shield, and essentially hide behind it and wait for your moments to attack. This is probably one of the easiest ways to play. You can also build a ranged archer/crossbowman, or a sorcerer/pyromancer. On the other side of the spectrum, you can build a light character who relies on rolling out of danger and quickly counter-attacking. The most skill-based way is considered to be mastering parrying, which means you learn when to parry various enemies, in the very short time-window that it's possible, and then you get a free riposte on them, which does tremendous damage. Although most bosses aren't parryable, so you will have to handle them in a different way.
There is a ton of different weapons and spells available, each weapon with its own unique moveset and animations. Everything from massive Zweihanders and Greatswords, that pancake your enemies with their inertia to precise rapiers and scimitars to various spears, axes, whips, halberds, and maces. Each weapon has 2 sets of attacks (fast and strong), and its own combos, as well as advantages. For instance, rapiers do more damage on ripostes and backstabs, while spears have a ridiculous range and can be used with the shield up. WEapons can be upgraded up to +15 as a regular weapon, or you can modify them to be a non-regular type: divine, chaos, raw, fire, lightning, or magic. Each one of those has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Armor also comes in different forms, from lightweight ninja suits to massive plate/stone armor that has amazing protection but also weighs so much, that you can barely move. It's up to the player to figure out what fits their playstyle best, and also sometimes to switch things up for a difficult boss.
Bosses are all very impressive both in stature and the amount of rage they will inspire in you, after you die to them many, many times. They range from giant wolves with swords in their mouths to gaping dragons to centipede demons to some sort of a female centaur except replace the horse part with a giant tarantula oozing lava. Yeah... There is a total of 24-25 bosses if you include the DLC content.
The combat does tend to be somewhat repetitive in nature because you will die quite a lot and have to redo various sections until you master them. This is the bad part. The good part, and likely why many people do love this game and the series, is that there is a definite sense of growing mastery that again, most modern games do not provide. The first time you play Dark Souls, you get wrecked by the weakest enemies, but by the end of the game, you can go through many of the game's tough sections and dominate some of the toughest enemies. This provides a certain sense of achievement, similar to someone mastering some sort of skill in real life.
There is also a very novel approach to PvP and multiplayer in this game. Dark Souls is somewhere between a single player and a multiplayer game. While you will mostly play it in single player, you will have a chance to have various interactions with other players. Certain drops in the game allow players to invade other players' world and fight them in a duel. You can also join a certain in-game covenant to participate in PvP. Occasionally as you play, you will see "ghosts" of other players and what they are doing in their own world for a few seconds, or right before they died there.
In conclusion, Dark Souls is neither perfect, nor everyone's cup of tea. Personally, I still prefer more "regular" rpgs, where there is more dialogue and exploration and less combat, and where the combat is not quite as punishing. But with that said, I was very impressed with depth of the combat system, the interesting exploration and understated low-key storytelling, and the decision to let the player figure out things for themselves. It's not the kind of game that will become my all-time favorite, but it is a game that has made a deep impression on me.
Dark Souls is a game from the Japanese development studio called From Software, which has been developing games since early 1990s. Their previous games, such as King's Field and Demon Souls, were well received, but it was Dark Souls that really launched them into the public spotlight back in 2011. It was originally released on consoles, and then ported onto the PC in 2012, as the Prepare To Die Edition, which also included the game's solo DLC. The port was lacking in some ways, and required a fan-made patch or two, to make the PC controls and framerates work properly. More recently, Dark Souls Remastered has been released, which is just a graphically updated version of the same game. Since then, From Software went on to make two sequels in the Dark Souls series, and the also well received game Bloodborne, which is only available on the consoles.
On starting Dark Souls, the player watches a beautiful cinematic intro, which introduces them to the lore of the game, a rather interesting one. The world in the game started out in darkness, populated by dragons, but at some point in the ancient past, various Gods emerged, powered by light, and conquered it. But now, it seems like light is growing weaker, and darkness is returning, sentencing the entire world to slowly turn undead, and then hollow (losing your wits).
Your character is one of such undead, finding themselves sentenced to an asylum, to spend their waning days there until the very end of the world. But they find themselves unexpectedly freed by a visiting NPC, and later on, learn the gist of the game from the same NPC. There is a prophecy that a chosen undead may achieve great things, and you attempt to become that chosen undead. So escaping from the asylum, you find yourself in a sort of a giant megacity reminiscent of that city in Gondor in Lord of the Rings. There are multiple levels of castles, walls and fortifications, city areas, and adjacent woods, as well as sewers, slums, underground ruins, and other linked areas.
The game mostly consists of one giant area broken down into these smaller places, with some other areas accessed via cut-scenes and/or loading screens. So in a way, it's almost like an open world game, but with the key difference that many areas are shut off from the others until you figure out how to make them accessible. For example, you might have to fight your way through hordes of enemies including bosses to get to another area, but once there, you can kick down a ladder to the previous area, and be able to get from one to the other in 2 seconds. There is a beauty and elegance in the way all these places are sort of layered on top of each other, and inter-connected in the most interesting ways. In another game, they would have just been separate levels, but here, they are all part of the same space, which makes everything more immersive and believable.
At the beginning, you select your starting class, which determines your initial equipment and starting stats, and includes such fantasy mainstays as warrior, knight, thief, pyromancer, bandit, and so on. This isn't very important, because over the course of the game, you can change your character in every way, as you see fit. The interesting thing about Dark Souls is that in complete opposition to modern design principles, there is no tutorial, manual, or any information communicated to the player in the beginning, and the game has a lot of fairly complex systems. So the player is essentially left to their own devices, where they can figure stuff out themselves, or look it up online, or occasionally learn something from the loading screens.
This might seem frustrating, and sometimes does go overboard, but it also encourages a spirit of discovery and adventure, at a time when most mainstream games force the player to go through mind-numbing hours-long tutorial segments, and overly explain everything until nothing is left to the imagination.
Very much related to this, is how Dark Souls handles story-telling. This is a game with a fairly significant back-story, filled with all sorts of interesting and usually tragic characters, but instead of forcing this on the player, the game is extremely subtle in this department. After the previously mentioned intro movie, you will mostly learn the story only from small NPC tidbits (and even those often only if you come back and talk to them much later after first meeting them), loading screen exposes, item description text, and so on. Learning the story and lore of Dark Souls feels less like watching a movie (which is how most modern games do it), and more like being an archaeologist, slowly digging up tiny fragments of lost cultures and long hidden secrets. This might not be for everyone, but it is also a very interesting aspect of the game.
Aside from the combat, which I will cover in a bit, Dark Souls also has a lot of exploration. Everywhere you go, there are tons of passageways, doors, elevators, stairs, holes in the ground, and stepladders. In addition to this, there are also hidden doors (sometimes exposed by hitting them, sometimes by holding up a lamp next to them), new places you can find by jumping ledges (or sometimes off ledges), levers to activate, and a ton of other mechanisms to get to a hidden or hard to reach area. There are also a ton of consumable items with different effects, many of which you will have to use, various keys, items and mechanisms to repair armor, and upgrade your equipment. It is a very system rich game.
One of the more interesting things is how Dark Souls handles experience and gold. These are two things in RPGs that often cause issues, because at some point, your character will have too much experience and become too strong for the game, and also have too much gold, to the point where it becomes irrelevant. Well, in Dark Souls, both are handled with one thing, a mechanism called Souls. Every time you kill an enemy, you gain some number of souls (the stronger the enemy, the more souls). You can also get souls by consuming certain items and drops that you find.
You can spend these souls to level up your character or to buy things, so they serve as both experience and gold. You also spend them to repair and upgrade equipment. The thing is, when you die (which happens a lot in this game, note the name), you lose all your souls. You get one chance to get them back (if you can return alive to that place, and grab them), but if you die again, they will be lost for good. So this mechanism prevents you from hoarding gold, and you are pretty much always need to go on a farming run if you want to buy something nice. Experience-wise, the higher level you are, the more souls it costs to go up another level, so again, this prevents the player from becoming overly powerful.
Most of Dark Souls will be spent in combat, against the various undead and monsters that inhabit the world. There are essentially 3 types of enemies here: regular enemies (e.g. soldiers, archers, animals that respawn), mini-bosses (rare or powerful enemies that do not come back after you defeat them), and actual bosses, massive unique monstrosities that usually require many deaths to figure out. To fight them, many approaches are possible, as Dark Souls has a very deep and nuanced combat system. You can build a tanky character wielding heavy armor and a large shield, and essentially hide behind it and wait for your moments to attack. This is probably one of the easiest ways to play. You can also build a ranged archer/crossbowman, or a sorcerer/pyromancer. On the other side of the spectrum, you can build a light character who relies on rolling out of danger and quickly counter-attacking. The most skill-based way is considered to be mastering parrying, which means you learn when to parry various enemies, in the very short time-window that it's possible, and then you get a free riposte on them, which does tremendous damage. Although most bosses aren't parryable, so you will have to handle them in a different way.
There is a ton of different weapons and spells available, each weapon with its own unique moveset and animations. Everything from massive Zweihanders and Greatswords, that pancake your enemies with their inertia to precise rapiers and scimitars to various spears, axes, whips, halberds, and maces. Each weapon has 2 sets of attacks (fast and strong), and its own combos, as well as advantages. For instance, rapiers do more damage on ripostes and backstabs, while spears have a ridiculous range and can be used with the shield up. WEapons can be upgraded up to +15 as a regular weapon, or you can modify them to be a non-regular type: divine, chaos, raw, fire, lightning, or magic. Each one of those has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Armor also comes in different forms, from lightweight ninja suits to massive plate/stone armor that has amazing protection but also weighs so much, that you can barely move. It's up to the player to figure out what fits their playstyle best, and also sometimes to switch things up for a difficult boss.
Bosses are all very impressive both in stature and the amount of rage they will inspire in you, after you die to them many, many times. They range from giant wolves with swords in their mouths to gaping dragons to centipede demons to some sort of a female centaur except replace the horse part with a giant tarantula oozing lava. Yeah... There is a total of 24-25 bosses if you include the DLC content.
The combat does tend to be somewhat repetitive in nature because you will die quite a lot and have to redo various sections until you master them. This is the bad part. The good part, and likely why many people do love this game and the series, is that there is a definite sense of growing mastery that again, most modern games do not provide. The first time you play Dark Souls, you get wrecked by the weakest enemies, but by the end of the game, you can go through many of the game's tough sections and dominate some of the toughest enemies. This provides a certain sense of achievement, similar to someone mastering some sort of skill in real life.
There is also a very novel approach to PvP and multiplayer in this game. Dark Souls is somewhere between a single player and a multiplayer game. While you will mostly play it in single player, you will have a chance to have various interactions with other players. Certain drops in the game allow players to invade other players' world and fight them in a duel. You can also join a certain in-game covenant to participate in PvP. Occasionally as you play, you will see "ghosts" of other players and what they are doing in their own world for a few seconds, or right before they died there.
In conclusion, Dark Souls is neither perfect, nor everyone's cup of tea. Personally, I still prefer more "regular" rpgs, where there is more dialogue and exploration and less combat, and where the combat is not quite as punishing. But with that said, I was very impressed with depth of the combat system, the interesting exploration and understated low-key storytelling, and the decision to let the player figure out things for themselves. It's not the kind of game that will become my all-time favorite, but it is a game that has made a deep impression on me.
