Dark Souls is an Action-RPG,
renowned for its challenging difficulty but good balance and design. The target
audience is definitely longtime, experienced hardcore gamers. I have played the
game for about twelve hours, and I have barely scratched the surface of all the
game’s mechanics. In this game, death is frequent, and not knowing where you
need to go next is a common occurance, but all the tools you need to succeed are
there in the game. It’s got heavy RPG elements, with a robust character
creation system and detailed amounts of stat building and weapon upgrading and
so on. It’s also heavy on action elements with a bend towards realism in
combat, with armor weight, character agility, and other elements weighing
heavily into success in combat, with
powerful backstabs. There’s a nice tutorial level to start the game, and you
kill a very large boss early on. Also notable about the game is the complete
lack of cutscenes, other than the opening cutscene. All the story is told
through NPC conversations, or what you make of it yourself, though it does have
a deep story and a lot of mythos to the world. I started playing the game as
the knight class, a rather tanky build that gets heavy armor and can both dish
out the hits with good starting strength, high balance to take a hit and keep
swinging, and high HP. However, I got lost shortly after getting to the meat of
the game after the tutorial level, butting my head against a challenge that was
way above both my skill level and character and equipment level. And it wasn’t
some boss that was ruining my day, it was simple skeletons. However, eventually
I learned an efficient strategy to beating them… And shortly after that I found
the route through a place that was appropriately challenging without being
overbearing. I then proceeded to scythe through the game… Until beating the
second area boss at which point I became hopelessly lost again, as the
straightforward path dead ends until
The
dynamic I’m going to cover is the death system, which creates a very
complicated abstract dynamic with the game. The game heavily rewards and is
weighted towards trial and error, but the game is balanced in such a way that
every time you die it FEELS like it’s your fault. Every time you die, you
respawn back at the nearest bonfire, which acts as a sort of checkpoint and
home base all in one, and you can do more things at a bonfire as you acquire
more key items and so on. However, you drop all your souls, which serve not
only as your experience bar but also your currency to buy everything in the
game and are often needed to solve puzzles or get hints, and all your Humanity,
when you die, also leaving Human form, an essential component for online play and
well… Looking nice…, and leaving all these things where you died. Not only
that, every respawnable enemy (See: ALL OF THEM) respawns back into the world.
HOWEVER, you can only have one bloodstain waiting in the world at any given
time, and if you die again before recovering your things, they’re gone. This
mechanic means that death can leave you not only set back but penniless, and
encourages the cautious nature of the game. Death is also designed to be a
common occurrence, but each one is set to be a learning experience, as instead
of being a bad design point, it uses this in a clever way, as all the
encounters are SURVIVABLE if you act cautiously and be prepared, and being
skilled at the combat system. Enemies have specific, memorizable attack
patterns that are usually well telegraphed, and, with proper timing, can be
blocked, or parried, which will leave your opponent open for devastating
critical attacks, most of which will either kill in one hit or take a
significant chunk of the enemy’s life away. The entirety of the game works in
one fluid system, expertly tested and well balanced to make the rather
punishing deaths seem, once again, like it’s an obstacle to overcome rather
than bad design. For instance, compare the system in this game to something similar,
like Skyrim. In Skyrim, if you die, you have to load a save and lose ALL your
progress. But in Dark Souls, you just head back to a checkpoint with a lesson
learned. The difference is that death is Punishing, but Recoverable. Every
mistake that you make can be fixed in another go.
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