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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I heard about these gamed and watched a few hours of gameplay each. I was unconvinced and closed the YouTube tabs after it became too boring.

I guess I have to play it to feel it? But most of the games I enjoy playing are fun to watch. Duke3d and Baldurs Gate are two examples. Can someone elaborate why Dark Soul is actually fun to play, and more importantly why sold for so many copies? I read other comments and the thing they mentioned (world building and music and game design) isn't really particularly recognizable from the few hours (actually about 10 hours) I watched, and even if they are excellent surely there are other games that match?

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Very simply, no other game series does the "mastery" thing so well. The game is both wide and deep, and even though there's superficially a leveling system, it won't save you if you can't actually play.

This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next. (Or another studio, there are plenty of great Souls-like games out there.) Especially as I'm getting older, I definitely feel like I have a lot more "knocking the rust off" to do when I start up each new Soulslike game before I'm competent enough to play well.

But once I'm in the zone, once I've achieved that mastery, enemies that I had previously been decrying as "absolute bullshit, what the hell am I even supposed to DO about them?", I'm just carving through casually, while theorizing in my head what stats I'm going to raise at the next level up or where I should head next.

At least for me, there's no other game series that does that quite so well.

> This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next.

> Especially as I'm getting older, I definitely feel like I have a lot more "knocking the rust off" to do...

I would definitely appreciate novel takes on accessible mastery. I likely [1] have visual memory (immediate + delayed), subtle but measurable visual motor difficulties, and ADHD:I. Having zeitgeist games feel so thoroughly inaccessible is alienating.

One thing that feels like it helps (no concrete data, placebos and all that...) is high refresh rates. My guess is that it frees my visual memory from being used for interpolation. Ironically, From Software seem almost antagonistic to providing this.

[1] Measured definitively ~15 years ago; who knows what's happened since then.

Why that sounds very familiar. I'll have to see what I can do about increasing refresh rates, seeing if that helps.

Weirdly, what I've found helps is restarting games. Like, play 2-3 hours, go offline for a day, then come back and replay those 2-3 hours. I find I have a lot less "newness" fighting for attention, and my subconscious has had time to assimilate a lot of it subconsciously, and then I have a much better "second play" experience, and then I can continue on happily after that.

Also, same tactic for boss fights. Sometimes I'll be stuck on a boss for an hour or so, and all I really need to do is go to sleep and try again tomorrow. I actually spent like 1.5h on a miniboss in the first major castle, then the next day, came back and beat him first try. Feels bad to set it down, feels great to smash through that barrier later.

Hades really scratched that itch for me. It's very easy to get going and have fun, but requires investment to completely finish it.

I'm pretty terrible at most games so it took me quite a while to actually finish a whole run, but it was a lot of fun once I did.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I got into Dark Souls 3 last year and have only fallen in love more and more with the genre. Like many, I absolutely hated it at first, but as time went on I started to "get" it. Now I don't really have any interest in playing anything else, including previous favorites like Breath of the Wild and Skyrim.

At this point the only (Souls-like) From game I haven't played is Sekiro.

Avid Dark Souls fan here.

Somebody in another comment said it... but they're not action games. They're puzzle games.

The satisfaction of playing a Souls-like is in trying a challenge over and over again, recognizing the patterns and actions that will get you through it. The game puts a challenge in front of you, and through practice and tenacity you get through it.

It's almost never unfair. Most of the time, if you fail it's because you didn't understand how to win. Seeing yourself do better at the game not just because you've leveled up your character (in fact, even low-level mooks can wreck you up if you lower your guard), but because you have gotten better is one of the most satisfying feelings.

You're not gonna have fun by just watching (though there's plenty of content creators that make Dark Souls fun to watch. YMFAH is my favorite). You also need to be aware that the formula takes practice. If you ever feel like giving it a try, I feel either Bloodborne or Elden Ring would be good games to start.

Chiming in to say that I think DS3 is the best intro the series. I tried a couple, including Bloodborne, and swore them off claiming I hated them. But then I tried DS3 and for some reason the whole thing clicked. It benefits from the faster gameplay and lessons learned from Bloodborne, but is a bit less difficult than Bloodborne, and still gives you a shield (very useful for newer players).

Yeah I agree; DS 3 is a lot more versatile in terms of playstyle than Bloodborne and especially Sekiro is.

DS3: Dodge, shield block, shield parry, stick to ranged attacks, heavy armor, your choice. Bloodborne: Dodge or parry with a gun, which sometimes works. Sekiro: Deflect or you die. Lrn2play noob.

I'm oversimplifying probably, but the point is DS3 is the most versatile while Sekiro is the least. That said, as one overly long youtube documentary took an hour and a half to say, Bloodborne's restrictions in playstyle can actually make you a better Dark Souls player. For a lot of players, they get a sword and shield and that's how they expect to have to play - defensive, turtling, slow, etc. But Bloodborne actually rewards aggression; if you get hit in that one, you can regain some of your lost health by damaging the enemy.

Referring to hbomberguy right? I love his videos.

And yes, I agree -- even if BB isn't your first (could be a good first for some people, but it wasn't for me), it more than any other From game affects your play style for the better. Starting as a knight in DS3, using the shield and hiding behind it, was pivotal in allowing me to start to understand and appreciate these games, but my enjoyment and skill skyrocketed when I took a page out of BB's book and ditched the shield.

I have a different take on what makes the Souls game interesting (but it has changed somewhat with Elden Ring).

What I enjoyed most about the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne was the sense of adventure/exploration/dread that comes with leaving a safe zone (bonfire, lamp) and venturing out into the unknown. You don't know what to expect, there will be new enemies that you don't know how to deal with yet, there might be traps but somehow you forge on, not knowing when you will reach the next save point. With every enemy you kill you gain currency you can use to level up, but one mistake and it's all gone. Then you have to be extra careful to get it back. The sense of relief you feel when the level design all of the sudden brings you around to an old safe zone is beyond anything I have felt in other games.

That's also why I didn't care so much about the boss fights initially but I came to enjoy them for the challenge. To the point that I spent 2 hours yesterday in Elden Ring trying to defeat a boss that was totally optional.

I tried Dark Souls multiple times and I just find it dreadfully boring.

I like video games to challenge my mind, not how fast I can duck-roll-dodge-hit-dodge-roll-hit and so on for 10 minutes to kill a boss or whatever.

You might not be into the medieval-ish theme of Dark Souls or Elden Ring. I know I wasn't for awhile. You see it and you instantly think Skyrim, the Witcher, or any number of other similar looking games.

I would check out Bloodborne. It has a Lovecraftian horror vibe going on. The environments are simply incredible. Not to mention the music and sounds. There is also Sekiro, if you prefer samurai and old Japan.

> Can someone elaborate why Dark Soul is actually fun to play

The fun part comes when you successfully defeat a boss you've attempted ten times. In addition, the exploration of the world is great. You generally progress down a path for a while and eventually unlock shortcuts back to your "safe" points (bonfires, lamps, etc.). If you die, all enemies respawn. That sounds stressful, and it can be. If nothing else, this game teaches you resilience. Not many AAA games are willing to stick it all on the line like that. Most games offer easy/medium/hard options. Not FromSoft.

> Can someone elaborate why Dark Soul is actually fun to play

Enemies actually feel real, actually feel like they're making their own smart choices, instead of merely being pylons for the super powered player to knock over.

I wouldn't say that applies globally however. Plenty of NPCs get locked into sequences of attacks when they have no chance of hitting you, simply because they started an attack sequence.

And that isn't a problem, because these games aren't about smart enemies. They are all about complex enemies that challenge you till you figure them out. It may sound nitpicky, but there is definitely a fine line between them.

Smart enemies are simply not fun to play against. You need to give players that "aha!" moment, when everything clicks and something that was otherwise tormenting you is now doable, all because you figured the mob out. These games are still about power trips, but relying on pattern-finding in addition to just mechanical prowess.

For actually smart enemies, PVP games are the go-to. But those get tiring, and come with their own host of issues.

I will say: I find these games to be extremely fun to watch (and a lot of others do as well, as they consistently get very high views on Twitch and YouTube), but maybe not so much if I wasn't already into playing them as well. I think the viewing experience is greatly improved by having a personal experience of the game itself, and the skill that goes into what you're watching.

This is perhaps similar to watching a fighting game: it's probably hard to enjoy watching somebody play Street Fighter if you haven't actually put hours into it yourself, and understand the depth and nuance of what you're watching.

Honestly, I think both Souls games and Street Fighter are very watchable for non-players. Both rely on a very strong link between animation and gameplay, which I find reads more intuitive than something like watching someone play a shooter I'm unfamiliar with.

I actually think the hit volume based damage in both makes this rather untrue. Both Souls games and SF have moves where damage happens completely incongruously to the animation. This is partly what makes both ‘hard’ because there is this piece of hidden knowledge that when you first encounter it seems really unfair because you get hit by attacks that look like they missed. It’s somewhat remedied in fighting games because they incorporate practice modes that expose all the hidden state.

It’s not really “completely incongruous” though?

Big haymaker swings deal massive damage. Or a jab/stomp from a gargantuan creature. Small/quick attacks from small creatures deal small damage.

What’s the problem?

The thing I said, that you get hit by attacks that don’t visually connect.

I would say that to a casual observer, i-frames (invincibility frames) from dodge rolling are not intuitive. Why would an attack clip through them just because they rolled? (or in the case of Elden Ring, mounted or dismounted their horse)

It feels very intuitive when you've played games that include mechanics like that, and there are more and more games that implement it nowadays, but if you've never seen a game with i-frames as a core combat mechanic, I'd imagine it can be very jarring.

>Why would an attack clip through them just because they rolled?

See, I actually do find that a very intuitive situation, and not because I have a great grasp of i-frames, but because I'm not really thinking of "Why" questions. I'm just focused on the spectacle in front of me, with no regard for the underlying set of rules that produced it.

I might just be atypically disposed to enjoy watching things without needing to understand them.

I cannot recall if they were popular games that matched it at the time. Let's not underestimate the online elements of the game (and the lack of difficulty levels, lack of saving game, that goes with it). As for the combat, that was the height of "Batman" combat on consoles. Cue internet discussions where fans of DS praised its combat design, while PC players with Mount&Blade were not impressed much.

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