A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty
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There's an elevator you can get on that if you don't get off in time will bring you headfirst into a bunch of spikes. The genius part is the elevator floor is covered in blood, a hint you would certainly notice if you take your time and proceed cautiously. This is the sort of thing that makes every death feel deserved, which is pivotal to the souls series.
I picked up the game during a Steam sale, spent a good few hours trying to make it playable with a variety of mods, fixes, etc. and then just gave up completely. And for those few hours I did play it, nothing about it stood out to me as being incredible or ingenious.
Some people make do with the mousefix mod (the default mouse targeting behaviour is beyond silly). It's quite a bad port indeed, but it's a good game so I guess it's better than nothing...
If you do a lot of gaming on PC buying a controller can be a pretty good investment anyway, it makes sense for a lot of games.
The port is shitty without the third-party fixes, but they also specifically said "we're not PC people, this will be a shitty port". They didn't launch the PC version with a lot of fanfare - and their customer base is on the consoles, not the PCs.
One of the weird things about the port is that the mouse movement is locked - it doesn't matter how quickly you move your mouse or how far, only how long you move it for. You move a set amount given a set length of time. Took me a while to figure it out.
And if they say 'Yeah, I picked that up on Steam!' I get really sad.
It feels like a game that is pretty exquisitely tuned, and that tuning is towards playing on a console with a controller. I'd even go so far as to say on a PS3 and a really nice TV.
Like how some people can't stand playing an FPS on consoles, only in reverse.
And making the port actually playable takes three libs, thats not /that/ much: DSfix for a better screen resolution and general candy DSMfix for better mouse controls DSCfix to instantly play with Windows-Live-Friends
With DSFix, it's actually better than the PS3 version, which I never go back to any more.
Was the PC port rushed? Yes, there's no doubt about it. Is it a broken product, though? No, not at all, because the simple fact is that it was never intended to be played using a keyboard and mouse. The developers, probably at the behest of the publisher, didn't really make that clear for the PC version, and that's a shame, but this game was designed from the ground up for a gamepad to a similar extent that Starcraft is designed for a keyboard and mouse. I think if this was communicated more clearly people would have been less caught off guard by the atrocious keyboard and mouse support in the vanilla PC port.
You need to pick up a gamepad, preferably an Xbox 360 one, to play Dark Souls on the PC the way it was meant to be played.
> And for those few hours I did play it, nothing about it stood out to me as being incredible or ingenious.
Of course, there is no way you can expect to appreciate the game itself if you're struggling with the controls.
That said, they both rank as my favorite games of the last ten years.
Edit: Also, if this has convinced you to pick this game up for the PC (it's often on sale on Steam for under $10), don't forget to get DSFix for the graphics and DSMFix fix for mouse and keyboard support. It wasn't a very good port, but the community has made it great.
DSFix: http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=dsfix DSMFix: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~petska/
But I might just do so with the fix.
Nope. It has a worse frame rate, just for a start. All the qualities you list are laudable, but they don't even come close to addressing "every other respect". For example, Dark Souls requires you to pick up way more items than Demon's Souls. More items is good - but not if it turns into a tiresome exercise in collection.
Demon Souls was also better in that there was no selling of inventory. Anything that you could not use, would not use, or was inferior to your current equipment, you just dropped. Dark Souls introduced the Frampt “merchant” and allowed you to profit from selling stuff, leading to a Diablo-style loot hoarding. Fortunately the prices were low enough to not affect the game too badly.
The linked-to article nailed it: Dark Souls had its own style of black humor, where your death was the joke. Frampt was whimsical and weird and felt out of place for lots of reasons. Other than the doggy-dragon, Dark Souls was the better game in every way.
I wish I could forget everything about this game so that I can innocently play it from the start again.
Demon’s Souls is a game that will make you into a man. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, after two hours with this game, will be grooming his muttonchops and ready to ship off on the next boat to fight the Kaiser. If you are already a man, it will make you into some sort of bizarre double-man. What’s that you say? You’re a woman? You don’t want to be a man? Too bad. Too bad. That’s the Demon’s Souls way.
You’ve probably heard that Demon’s Souls is hard. Pshh. Lots of games are hard. Some are even harder than this one. The difficulty is not the point. What sets Demon's Souls apart is the way that it doesn't just kill you, but also stomps on your genitals when you’re down. And it will make you realize that that’s what you needed all along.
It’s a lot like life. Sometimes in life you win, and sometimes the giant armored skeleton stabs your face off because the flying mantis monster you didn’t even see shot you in the back with a spike at just the wrong time. And when that happens in life, do you respawn at the same spot and carry on like nothing happened? NO, asshole. You go back to the beginning of the level, leaving all your hard-earned souls out there on the pavement, and you fight your way back. And you learn a lesson from the whole thing, because you should have been wearing your Thief’s Ring, now shouldn’t you? That’s life.
The trend in hard games these days is to unlock “Easy” mode for you once you’ve died enough times. Do you think Demon’s Souls does that? Do you think Demon’s Souls is so much as aware of the concept of “Easy” mode? NO IT IS NOT. If Demon’s Souls even knew we were talking about “Easy” mode, it would come over here and kick the shit out of all of us. And we would deserve it.
I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.
Have I told you about the online elements? At any time when you’re in Body form, another player from anywhere else in the world can invade your game and murder you to regain his own body, or just to keep you on your toes. This happens when you’re in the middle of fighting armies of unthinkable monsters that are probably already three-quarters of the way towards killing you. And no, you cannot opt out of this feature! This is what you signed up for when you agreed to be a man.
When this happened to me -- when a guy strolled into my game like it was Taco Bell and exploded my torso, costing me my body and all my progress in the level -- was I mad? No, because I was too busy being in awe at how fucking hardcore the experience was.
Now, don’t let this dissuade you. Demon’s Souls is a pitiless master, but let it never be said that it is not fair. The game rewards handsomely those who stand up to it, and the greater the challenge, the greater the glory.
What the hell are you waiting for?
www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/acz2t/let_me_tell_you_about_demons_souls/
There's still a learning curve even with a controller, but once past that the controls have a beautiful simplicity and responsiveness that I've seen in very few other games.
The "everything on one account" approach is really, really nice. All my save information is transparently synced across devices, and I can buy something from my computer (or even from my phone) and play it in my living room without any hassle.
That is the beauty of combat in Dark Souls: it's not mindless button mashing, and it's not about precision aiming. It's about timing, reading your opponent, thinking ahead, and getting the right rhythm - it's more like dancing than combat, really. On top of that each weapon feels different to the point where you choose to use the weapon that feels right for you, rather than based on stats. It's a bit difficult to explain why, but that connection is a lot harder to achieve on keyboard+mouse.
But... It does come with a giant red warning... From the Steam page itself:
Notice: Microsoft Xbox 360® Controller for Windows® (or equivalent) is strongly recommended.
One of the great things about the build system in Dark Souls is a build that is great for PvE may not be a great build for PvP.
Basically, the question is how many times you can hit the boss by taking advantage of their timing versus how many times you screw up trying to take advantage of their timing.
If you have more HP you can screw up a few more times but if you're not dealing much damage you end up having to avoid screw ups for a long time in some boss fights.
Then there are the fights like the Four Kings where you really want to be doing higher DPS or else things get really messy.
Personally, I found the easiest build for PvE to be a sorcery build focused on high DPS. With a high enough intelligence you can deal a lot of ranged damage, which makes avoiding being hit that much easier.
No, it's not - NG+ is much easier than NG, because you start decked with all your previous equipment. People who really love the game do NG runs staying at level 1.
I've put in lots of hours, and NG+ is dull because you already have anything and can go anywhere. The challenge is gone.
I mean seriously, your criticisms of the game are just generic whines because you've encountered a hard one. Finding a boss hard? Go do something else in the game, because there's plenty else to do. There's only a couple of points where the gameplay bottlenecks, and even then you have to try hard to get it to the point where there's 'only one boss/area to do'.
All speech is ambiguous. You're expected as an adult to try to understand other people. You failed to understand me, and looking back at my post it ought to be obvious that you didn't read it carefully at all. The connection with the preceding sentence (a given in any paragraph you dunderhead) does not amount to "everyone does NG+ on their second play through". Nowhere is this written or implied. It's simply pure lazy reading on your part, eager as you are to take issue with what I said. And if you're going to come back with me with this sort of bullshit, maybe you should have some kind of real issue with what you now realise I actually said. But no, we get...
>I mean seriously, your criticisms of the game are just generic whines because you've encountered a hard one.
I've played through both games 3 times each. I didn't find them overly hard. Dark Souls is harder, and some bits were tough. I like that. And alternating bosses is exactly how I dealt with the harder bosses. None of this conflicts with my criticisms at all. Do you have some kind of argument to make? Or are you just upset that in your rush to piss on my post you grossly misinterpreted it? The point stands: the first play through is largely about bumbling around wasting your time. It is disorganized. It lacks clues. Do you have an answer to this, the thing I actually said? It seems it's very hard for you to change your P.O.V. to a superior one, one that can actually be defended with an argument, rather than garbage attacks like accusing me of "whining" because the game is "too hard". In fact, I don't think it's all that hard at all! Which is why in this very thread I spoke about how easy it is to beat the game with vitality builds, which is what I did on my first play through. The only "whining" here is that you didn't read my post, were butthurt by my retort, and without responding with an argument - one that contradicts something I actually said.
Just in case someone was wondering about builds...
I, for one, started 3 characters and with every one of them I ran into a problem at around the time when the lightning spear becomes too weak. Pretty much the only option I saw was to craft a weapon, but the crafting system just isn't explained at all. The only way to learn something about the crafting is, as you said, trial & error, which is just frustrating, especially if you have to sacrifice rare resources for that.
Basically if you want to play the game without the wiki (which still feels a bit like cheating for me) you either have to put in insane amounts of effort (I mean come on, it's still only a game!), or you're fucked.
I really hope Dark Souls 2 is better in offering at least basic explanations of the friggin' game mechanics.
</rant>
In the end, this became what made it such a huge hit. The fact that you had to study character builds made a sort of meta game.
Minecraft is another example where you have a wiki tabbed while you play.
And lets not even get started on dwarf fortress - the awful UI is the game.
I believe the metagame is whats at work in all these. A lack of tutorials and good ui feels somehow more authentic and rewarding.
And if you want to PvP, then sure, you need to min/max... but if you're PvPing, you're going to be going to a wiki anyway.
It completely takes away from the sense of fantasy, as well. The whole point with these open world games is to feel like you have the freedom to make your own choices. But if you know that your best best is to go everywhere and pick up every item you can then it feels like janitorial work, not a grand adventure.
The game isn't really about trying a bunch of stuff until you find the "right" way to beat an area. If you think your best bet is to go everywhere and pick up every item, then you don't have a very good understanding of the character building mechanics. Of course the game does not go out of its way to explain its mechanics, and whether that is genius or bad design is up to you I guess. There are plenty of other games that hand-hold and don't have the time investment requirement of Dark Souls. I feel like Dark Souls respects the player much more than those games, because you truly do have the freedom to make your own choices.
Does this contradict me? I mean, I don't even disagree with it, nor can I see how you would infer that I would from my comments - except by guessing. How many bits of hidden and often counter-intuitive information do you suppose there are in Dark Souls? Demon Firesage is an EXAMPLE of how badly coordinated it is. The fact that you can still beat the boss is completely beside the point. How about: the location of all the fire embers, which is impossible to know by any means other than running around? But hey, I don't NEED the embers I can beat every boss by skill alone, so it doesn't matter how poorly arranged they are. So why even bother to put them into the game at all? Hopefully you can now see how silly this line of argument is.
>You also don't need to parry Gwyn to beat him, so why does it need to be spelled out?
First, I didn't say it needed to be "spelled out". Why do you feel licensed to put words straight into my mouth? Just sticking a sign on the door saying "parry him" is stupid, and a good example of why the lazy soapstone sign system is poorly conceived. One better way to handle this would be to make it so every character (no exceptions - unless there is a CLUE for the exception) with a certain characteristic is parryable. Or you could have disparate hints that can be combined to obtain that information. And so on. Just sticking random stuff like that in there and waiting for people to stumble into it is the kind of thing that is good for autistics who want to collect useless information, not people who want to experience an open fantasy world where decisions are meaningful.
Demon's Souls is more polished in spite of following the same basic design approach - because it is smaller and simpler, and so there is less room for inconsistency. For example, for the most part the boss dependencies go down five straight lanes. This is simpler and less interesting than Dark Souls' more complex boss dependencies, but it is very consistent. Bosses come at regular intervals and the archstones are warpable in the same way all the way through the game.
I mean, this ought to be the most elementary thing but some people in this thread just can't get it into their heads. What is the most interesting map for a small village? The answer: no map. You want to wander a bit and discover some things for yourself. There isn't much room in that sized place for things to become too messy. Does that apply to a city? No! Even with a quite a detailed map a city will always have nooks and crannies. But without a map or some directions you'll just wander around with zero clues as to where the interesting stuff might be. Of course, in a real city you can just ask people for directions, which is more interesting than using a map. But you can't do this sort of thing in Dark Souls, and that is the core of the problem.
>The game isn't really about trying a bunch of stuff until you find the "right" way to beat an area. If you think your best bet is to go everywhere and pick up every item, then you don't have a very good understanding of the character building mechanics.
What is the game "about"? It's about exploring interesting areas while fighting monsters. And part of the exploration is discovering detail like items, monster placements, bonfires and traps. But it is not done all that well, because most of the discovering comes about by way of trial-and-error. If you can't see that discovering things foreshadowed by clues and an organized system of placement is more interesting than stumbling upon stuff at random, then you should play more video games before commenting on them on the Internet.
>Although there is often a message by the door that says Try Parrying.
Which is sheer laziness. If From had put in their own hints then they could calibrate the level of detail in the hints so that the player gets just enough information to be HINTED without sticking neon signs on every hidden item or illusory wall. I mean, if your defense is "sometimes you get lucky and there's a sign telling you the answer directly", then I can only laugh right in your face.
>There are plenty of other games that hand-hold and don't have the time investment requirement of Dark Souls.
This is the classic conflation comment. You conflate my irritation with the disorganization and time-wasting of Dark Souls with an aversion to time investment and a love of hand-holding. In fact, I love to put lots of time into a game that I like. I like Dark Souls and have invested 200+ hours into it. I like to invest my time in things that are _enjoyable_. And Dark Souls has faults that detract from the experience relative to Demon's Souls, which is a less ambitious but more polished game. Just as Tetris is a far more polished game than Dark Souls even though Dark Souls has far higher potential and is overall the better game. It's like intelligence: a person with IQ 140 has the potential for not just cleverness but also stupidity far in excess of, say, a dog. The dog is a more polished animal mentally than many people, because there's only so far wrong it can go in life.
>I feel like Dark Souls respects the player much more than those games, because you truly do have the freedom to make your own choices.
Well, this just goes to show how little you've thought about this. It's only a "decision" in the most degenerate, worthless sense unless you have enough information to make a good one. That is the entire point of my posts in this thread. And far from respecting you it is in fact simultaneously (a) making a fool out of you by giving you the illusion of meaningful choice, and (b) showing contempt for your time by including so much trial-and-error.
Again for the people who still don't understand that I like this game, you need to realize that only an ambitious and interesting game can harbor these sorts of flaws.
Are you aware that this is a console game, and was for quite some time before it was ported to PC? It really isn't 'designed for use with a wiki', let alone 'clearly' so. Yes, for competitive PvP you need to know as much as possible, but that's the same with any game.
So tell me: how do you figure out that for the Demon Firesage - located in a fiery area, covered in fire - the weakness is.. fire?
You seem intent on min/maxing. I don't use fire weapons and every time I've beaten the fire sage, I've done it by reading its actions and responding appropriately - and this in particular is the absolute strength of the game. You really do not need to use a fire weapon to fight it; it's a matter of interacting with the game rather than just going "boss fight, wail away at it with $bigweapon".
What reason would you have to think Gwyn can be parried, when no other boss in the game can be?
You don't need to parry Gwyn to defeat him, same argument as above.
I relished the challenge that the game provided, a game that rewards skilful play more than decking your character (and I'm not particularly dextrous). You evidently don't like that, and prefer min/maxing and decking things. That's fine, each to their own, but it doesn't make it a shit game because you didn't like developing that skill.
So why bother with all the fancy environments (which are extremely costly to produce)? Why bother with all the character builds? What a load of garbage. The combat is in fact clunky and repetitive. You wouldn't play this game if it was just boss battles, which just goes to show that it's not the key strength of the game. The key strength of both games are the environments, with the boss serving the SECONDARY purpose of providing a climax.
And the point of my post is not that Demon Firesage is impossible without fire weapons. I've beat it without fire weapons, and it is one of the easiest bosses. My point is that the game is poorly organized and in many ways counter-intuitive. And Demon Firesage is a perfect example of this. So what is your rebuttal? Are you even making one? Do you have a brain? You look like someone who is so in love with Dark Souls that when someone (A FAN OF THE GAME NO LESS) criticizes it you run in all butthurt looking for something to take issue with, barely bothering to read what was said before replying.
>It really isn't 'designed for use with a wiki'
It has the URL of the wiki on the back of the PS3 case. So does Demon's Souls. They very clearly intended players to have the wiki available. Did you think I came into this thread not knowing it was on the PS3? Motherfucker I own it on the PS3 as well as the PC. It is quite possible to finish the game without the wiki. But the point of a game is to be ENJOYED, not finished. And the level of trial-and-error present in Dark Souls detracts from the experience. This doesn't apply in Demon's Souls because it's just that much simpler and smaller. Are you going to respond to this, or just post more reactive bullshit about Demon Firesage, which was an EXAMPLE?
>I relished the challenge that the game provided, a game that rewards skilful play more than decking your character (and I'm not particularly dextrous).
Good for you. Maybe you'll get around to making a point in this reply?
>You seem intent on min/maxing.
I'm not "min-maxing" anything. There's no need to "min-max" Demon Firesage. It's not a hard boss.
>but it doesn't make it a shit game because you didn't like developing that skill.
Are you a fucking imbecile? I finished this game 3x. I will probably finish it again. It is a nice game, and nowhere near as hard as the hype would suggest. But it is very poorly organized, and overall a less polished product than Demon's Souls. So here's a crazy idea I just had: maybe next time read the top-level comment so you know the general point being made and respond to that, instead of reactively scanning deep into the thread to find something to take out of context. And then maybe you will succeed in responding to something I actually thought or said. Like the fact that it Dark Souls is a messy game oriented heavily toward trial-and-error. So please just read what I said in this post, understand it (this is important when talking to people), and then respond to this last about messiness and trial-and-error, because (in spite of the fact that you are too stupid to see it), everything else I've written is just a minor elaboration on this one point.
Now there are many ways in which Diablo 2 is better than Diablo 3, but that is not one of them, unless your believe that Diablo 2 was made to require walkthrough, wikis and external tutorials.
Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress aren't exactly the same thing as Diablo 2; the complexity and lack of meaningful tutorial is intended right from the start. As for the UI... At least in Dwarf Fortress, I don't think it's bad once you get the hang of it. It's not well designed for beginners and its lack of micromanagement tools is clumsy in early game, but it's very efficient for late game.
I went blind for my first run in both games, and while I could finish demon's souls with a minimal amount of grinding I hit a wall in DaS because some upgrade paths are simply dead ends. Leveling up resistance, for instance. Certain weapon's upgrade paths. And you have no way of knowing that before you get destroyed in the next dungeon because "hey, occult weapons are useless! Tough luck".
I have to disagree. I thought the "here is the whole map, figure it out" aspect was brutal but brilliant. Dark Souls is the modern equivalent of Zelda for NES. You immediately have access to paths you have no business entering at the start of the game. But that makes it all the more gratifying when you come back later and concquer that path.
With ever advancing quest logs, way points, and real time navigation arrows, it's nice to see game designers go with the opposite approach.
It has nothing to do with "guest logs, way points and real time navigation". None of that is necessary to fix the game. I can't play games like Skyward Sword where there's some asshole computer jumping out of your sword dropping the most ball-achingly obvious hints. What's needed are carefully placed clues, of which there are very few. I think it's fair to say that the game is deliberately counter-intuitive in ways that serve only to waste your time.