Dark Souls: Let's Be Honest
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culture, debate, mechanics [http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/?p=3538] , November 6, 2011 [http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/?p=3538] by Anjin Anhut. Tweet 25 Like 80 4 Sharre StumbleUpon This article is filed under game criticism. Dark Souls: Let’s Be Honest If you like it, that’s great, buy it, share it, hug it. You go! But don’t give me that crap of Dark Souls being a worthwhile game and whoever doesn’t like it is either not as bad-ass, patient or resilient as you. Or simply doesn’t get it. That cake, son, is a lie. Hard Done Right Before I dive into Dark Souls, I’d like to tell you about Vanquish. Vanquish is a very well crafted action game and it has multiple difficulty settings. God Hard is, like the name implies, hard as hell. The high difficulty in Vanquish comes with carefully balanced game mechanics, spot on controls and tight play-testing. The player is always in full control of his avatar and has a wide range of offensive and defensive options at his disposal. The difficult scenes are a result of well done enemy AI, well designed and diverse enemy classes plus thought out level design and arenas. A game like Vanquish on God Hard is a punishing experience. But the strategic options to try out, the levels to exploit and the search for weak spots in enemies keeps the gameplay from getting repetitive, even if you have to retry a checkpoint multiple times. The most important aspect is the fact, that the game just works smooth. You may be overpowered by the enemy onslaught, but the controls, collision detection, physics or usability never fail you. Here is a screenshot, I took with my camera after beating a certain checkpoint on God Hard. I knew I’ve already died quite a few times, so I thought it might be interesting to document how many times. After days and days of fighting I finally beat that pack of enemy robots and the checkpoint was passed. The statistics showed, that the game design was able to keep me entertained while I was retrying and failing the same sequence for 422 times. I died 422 times in the same battle sequence, sometimes lasting just a few seconds. But there were so many tactics to test, enemy patterns to learn, weapons to experiment with and never ever did I feel handicapped by controls or any other aspect of the game. It always just were the odds of the fight, that were stacked against me. And repeated exploration of options, learning and practicing made me slowly but surely even the odds. That was satisfying. Gnashing Teeth I got Dark Souls as a rental and after 20 minutes of playtime I had to turn off the console to not get anymore frustrated with the design of that game. Not because the warrior I was playing was facing hard to beat enemies and dangers, no, I as a user was facing a hard to use piece of software. Since everybody was promising this holy land of satisfaction and sense of accomplishment once I would get the hang of it, I gnashed my teeth and tried again. After over 6 hours of playtime, I finally gave up on finding any glimmer of a hint of a whiff of that great game everybody was telling me about. It is just not there. That’s not to say, that Dark Souls doesn’t try a lot of promising concepts and ideas. The souls system, where you lose your grinding rewards when dying, adds tension to the game. Great, there is something at stake. And the idea to allow the player to try to reclaim his lost souls, if he dares to fight his way back to his place of death, is a super great risk- reward-element. Also the shoulder button controls for the left and right arm in combat are refreshing and could have been a attractive alternative to the standard face-button mashing from other third person games. Where Dark Souls really shines is level architecture. The way in which regions are build, the scale, the vertical distances are simply impressive and remarkable. Not to mention the clever online multiplayer mechanics. Nostalgia VS Laziness My list of complaints with this game is long. Pages and pages of notes long, to be more precise. But nothing on that list comes from the good ol’ days of gaming. Just ignoring decades of progress in game design is not the same as providing a throwback to the unforgiving days of retro gaming and arcades, From Software. I grew up on Contra, Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, Ghouls’n Ghost, Double Dragon and many similar titles. I know what it means to sweat and shiver, fighting my way through the final stage, only one life left, with a total Game Over only one collision detection away. Yeah, those games had issues too and difficulty often was a result of cheap deaths and technical limitations. But those games made up for it by being fast paced, simple and short. Dark Souls doesn’t even get close to recreating that. The problems in Dark Souls are to be found in almost every aspect of the game design and software design. Character controls are unresponsive and the lack of auto-targeting made controlling the player character similar to giving voice commands to a blind person. The targeting mechanic (clicking the right stick) adds a completely unnecessary and clumsy extra command to picking enemies, but is basically required to hit an enemy with any vertical sword swipe or stabbing attack. The fact that the player character can’t climb over small obstacles made me get stuck in corners and on ledges. A five year old would have been able to get out of those situations but I had to restart the checkpoint. Small info dialogues don’t stop the gameplay but block your character from being able to attack. Plundering a treasure chest takes three seperate inputs from the player before he can swing his sword again. The list goes on and on and on, but I don’t have all day. Those were just a few examples, which may appear to be nitpicks. But if you add up all the nitpicks, the game dies the death of a thousand cuts. There is so much stuff From Software didn’t take care of, didn’t polish to a decent degree or just ignored. Making a game work, making it playable takes work and effort. What gametrailers.com calls bold design decisions in its review of Dark Souls is just laziness and severe neglect. Edit: I think I need to state, that I was playing the XBOX360 version. Since there appear to be lag issues. Sense Of Accomplishment Okay, I don’t like a particular game. That happens from time to time. Nothing out of the ordinary. I normally just put games I don’t like aside and that’s it. But what really blows my mind with Dark Souls is the widely spread positive reception of that game. Dark Souls gets praised for crap, no other game could get away with. To be fair, this statement of course would be better directed at Demon Souls, since this is where the hype started and Dark Souls just repeats a selling formula. Still, back to Dark Souls, since I did not played the predecessor. One key claim to sell the game is, that it would provide a sense of accomplishment. Well, I guess to the people claiming that, it might have. But how come the standards for “accomplishment” are suddenly so low? The average enemies are weak, predictable, have laughable AI and beating them is just hard because controlling your fighter is complicated, sluggish and unresponsive. A gamer picking Dark Souls is the same as a race car driver picking a broken car with bad steering and just three wheels, so he can feel a sense of accomplishment for reaching the finishing line at all. The challenge in Dark Souls is not beating tough enemies, finding hidden ways, solving puzzles or any test of skill. The challenge simply is adapting to the gaping holes in game design and software design. Not For Everybody Now we get to the meat of my beef with Dark Souls. Or more precisely my beef with the praise for Dark Souls. I don’t know where it came from, but there is a meme surrounding Dark Souls (and Demon Souls for that matter). The game is “not for everybody”. You need to “understand it”, “be patient”, “be resilient” and “appreciate the old days of gaming” and if you “are good enough” the game will open up to you and you will experience its magic. In short, you can only like this game, if you are a true hard core gamer. This is so messed up and it drives me crazy. You tell anyone you don’t like that game and suddenly you lose your gamer credibility? I already experienced it myself. I complained on twitter and the first response I got was “Seems like the game is kicking your ass. ;)”. And later people calmly tried to explain to me that I probably don’t like Dark Souls because I probably just recently started gaming and can’t appreciate the unforgiving nature of an 80s or 90s action game… Those people didn’t know me at all. But me disliking Dark Souls seemed to tell them enough. Let’s assume From Software actually made the game inaccessible, hard to use, frustrating, repetitive and unrewarding on purpose.