You can’t get away with that in normal games. If you know a player is going to walk down the same street about ten, fifteen times then you can put tiny things there and hope that they will notice them. Allowing for these eureka moments rather than overt plot revelation that makes you go, “Oh yeah that was something about that earlier….” Spending hours in the same locations before the significance of what these places were suddenly falls into place out of nowhere–you’re just halfway through a bossfight and then you go “UHHHH!” and you realize something. But by controlling the pace of how you progress through their worlds, FromSoftware allow these details the time they need to ruminate. You can place a tiny seed of an idea into the brain of players, but if they then move on and get exposed to new stuff too quickly then that thought might not ever come to fruition. And it’s why souls games are divisive, but it’s also why they get away with sparse, subtle narrative. If you aren’t sure that players are going to hang around in this area, are you sure that people are actually going to notice the thing that you want them to notice? And hey, that’s a really difficult problem, alright? People hate backtracking and a lot of people hate feeling stuck and feeling like they’re being kept in one area for longer than they want to be. Largely, single player games are designed as rollercoasters that players trundle through at a reasonably consistent page.
#Dark souls too much of a time sink series#
I encourage everyone to watch these videos and read the article in full.įirst up is Matt Lees in his comparison video about the Souls series and Bloodborne‘s narrative design: I’ve transcribed video below for people who would prefer to read, and I excerpted a chunk of Smith’s RPS article. When I watched and read these individually, I thought “oh, I don’t agree here,” but when I started thinking about the pieces as making similar arguments, I thought it might be worth responding to the bundled claims shared by all three pieces. Three critics that I really like and respect, Matt Lees, Chris Franklin, and Adam Smith, all weighed in with reasons why an “easy mode” wouldn’t work for Dark Souls. I would love to fight enemies with reduced health (or no health, or with no AI) so that I could wander around, read item descriptions, and just see the world.įor some reason that I can’t quite trace, this topic has been huge for the past couple weeks. But, due to the way I like to play games, I mostly have to get those things packaged for me from Twitter convos, wiki readings, and channels like Vaati’s. The relationships between those characters, the ruins, and the grand narrative of the world are balanced in such a perfect way. However, I love the way the game is put together.
#Dark souls too much of a time sink how to#
I don’t enjoy doing something over and over again in order to learn how to do that one thing (I bounced off Bloodborne for this reason). I’m not bad at the game, but I certainly don’t possess the personality traits that would make me excel at it.
I understand the game on an intellectual level, and in my first play session years ago I basically zipped all the way to the Taurus Demon without much pause. But that moment is stapled into my mind as a great moment in Dark Souls, and the only reason I was able to see it is because she was a good, patient Dark Souls player. The revelation of causality surprised the hell out of me she’d had so much trouble with the boulders and here was the damn giant who had caused all of that trouble! We were both so sure that this giant was some kind of boss, and she jumped over to the rooftop to kill it (if memory serves it took a couple tries). When she got outside, there was a giant standing there dropping the boulders into a hole in a ceiling. She was in Sen’s Fortress, and there were these weird boulders rolling around the level. One time I was hanging out with a friend while she was streaming Dark Souls.
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