According to steam I've played Dark Souls for about ten hours, only three of which were spent in loading screens while I attempted to change various native and mod settings to make it playable on the PC. My experience with the game was that you talk to NPCs who give nonsensical monologues, then you fight a bunch of skeleton guys who kill you fifteen times before you figure out how to beat them. I loved the first two Gothic games, so I can say with certainty that shitty controls and sadistic difficulty levels aren't a problem for me. But Gothic had the advantage of an interesting world and characters. The world of Dark Souls is empty in a way that's not particularly interesting.
If this is your take away from the game, you're doing it wrong. Unless you're playing on mouse+keyboard, which is a Hammett only insanity.
To clarify, I was playing with the mouse and keyboard. It seemed less crazy than buying a new piece of hardware for a $40 game.
Interestingly, the moment I got the controller I pretty much stopped buying console games*. Savings in the long run! :) *chiefly because they load faster, run better and play the same on the PC.
Let me be the first to say - you're doing it wrong. Now before you get all miffed at that asinine comment - I get what's wrong and I had that thang wrong too. Point One - Dark Souls is NOT a roleplaying rpg. You're of course free to imagine all kinds of stuff that your character is and has been, however the game doesn't care about you in that way. Pointo Due - The interactions with other characters have no roleplaying element in the traditional sense to them. They are there to trade, smith and give vague general hints about the world, the area and what it's all about, really. Well, except the ones that try to kill you, of course. Puenta Drei - Dark Souls is in many ways a ... puzzle game. It's about how to figure out how to get to the next place. You could even argue that you don't have to get a single thing about "the story" in order to enjoy the game. Pong Fyra - Enjoy the gorgeous combat and game mechanics and the insanely creative world it all takes place in. But you are not a central character, or if you are, you're not going to hear your story told by anyone else. It is the opposite of Mass Effect. Edited to add: Also, if you want to give it a shot, use the mouse mod pointed to in the original post in the original thread. If you want, I'll be happy to share what we poor mouse+keyboard users has to deal with. I could even give you a rough key guide since you can just forget that the game has one.
I'm not miffed. I purchased and played the game for ten hours, and didn't like it. So I was hoping for an explanation about why everyone in this subforum loves it. What you've given me is a bunch of unconnected thoughts about the expectations you thought I would have for the game. I spent an hour making that thing work, but when I finished I wasn't sure why I had bothered.
The game has a deep story that is told primarily through the setting but also through riddles, and item descriptions, and pieces of conversation; in a way, it's a radical attempt to move away from expository storytelling although they certainly aren't purists and throw in some of that if you're paying attention. More importantly, it has the best melee combat system ever created in a game, so your primary means of interacting with the world (unlike, say, Skyrim) is glorious and rewards skill and knowledge over grinding without simply privileging people who memorize levels, because there's always something new to try that might work better. For instance, if you get past the tutorial and get to the firelink shrine, you have at least 3 directions you can go. As a starting player, 2 of them will kill the shit out of you, and they both show you that not with big warning signs or by railroading you into the third, but by presenting you with escalating "natural" indicators that you are out of your league. So you go the third way, and you find enemies who still kill you on occasion but you can immediately tell that killing something relatively human in 2-3 clumsy hits or a lucky backstab is far preferable to being eaten by ghosts or having skeletons beat the hell out of you while you scuff the finish on their bones. And then you have a number of options about how to proceed: are you going to pay attention to the game or are you going to insist? Well, there's a platform up ahead, covered by an archer, with up to three enemies engaging you at once. Is it better to fight them aggressively and all at once? To lure them out, get out of crossbow line of sight, and pick them off methodically? The great thing is, both are right answers *if* you have a plan for getting it done, but if you rush forward and just start hitting things and relying on your reflexes, you're going to run out of stamina right before you run out of life. And it's that process of evolution that makes the levels interesting in ways that other games simply aren't exploring sufficiently. The fact that I can start a new game now and go in any of the 3 directions right off the bat and get something for my troubles means not that I have suddenly developed incredible reflexes or that I know exploits, but rather that I have a plan for them derived from experience and talking about it with others in the community. That's without touching the PvP, which is the other great experience the game affords.
I don't think the controls suck; they're just not designed for mouse and keyboard. It's kind of like a flight sim in that respect. You can play a flight sim with mouse and keyboard, but the controls will be much less satisfying compared to a yoke or joystick.
If DS is not your cup of tea, so be it, but to dismiss it with factually incorrect information makes it hard to take the OP seriously instead of as a troll.
I note however that your first post doesn't actually contain either a question about the game nor a request for explanation, just several takeaways which pretty much anyone in here will agree are ill conceived. So that's we addressed. LK pretty much said it all, however. It's a fascinatingly dark and refreshingly (in this age of handholding) obtuse game of discovery and exploration with what happens to be the best melee combat system ever made.
I listened for thirty-five minutes, and all I got out of it was that you all really like Dark Souls. It was a lot like having the previous Dark Souls thread transcribed for me. Your point in the podcast about it being a social game was fair from the, "you're not doing it right", standpoint though, since it wanted to do multiplayer through Games for Windows Live, and I'm flat out not willing to deal with that shit in 2012. Oh, fuck, Boss Fight! I can't disagree with that. The melee combat was really hard, but it was also satisfying, to the point where Bethesda won't be catching up until Elder Scrolls 7. And yet, Mount and Blade did the same thing for mounted combat, and that doesn't make up for its massive flaws. If you're into a game for one mechanic it might be nice to warn the rest of us, who are into games for other stuff as well. It's hard for me to argue with you on this point after just ten hours of play, but none of that shit was apparent to me by that point in the game. I play games in part for the story, and I was unable to detect a story beyond a bunch of undead guys trying to kill me, while the other undead guys tried to sell me useless junk.
Nobody here plays it just for the melee combat mechanics. It's fine if you don't like the game, but you're coming across as an obstinate troll. If you want to dig, there's an amazingly deep story. If you don't, there's not, but there's still tons of atmosphere. If the atmosphere isn't doing it for you, and you're not interested in reading item descriptions and piecing together the background from the various clues scattered about, then yeah, the game probably won't work for you. Have you played Fez? If so, did you enjoy the New Game+ puzzle solving aspect of it?
I sincerely suggest you give up. This is just not for you. There are ways to convey a story that you don't seem interested in understanding. There is nothing that is apparent in Dark Souls. (There is also no useless junk but that's another story.) Same goes for the earlier versions of Mount & Blade. If you're not into the combat, you might as well just walk away from this one. Too bad you'll never get to fight the Balder Knights, what with your name and all.
"Amazingly deep" story is a stretch. The story-telling is very cool in the sense that you are mostly required to figure it out for yourself based on incidental details. In this respect (and others) it reminds me of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I'm not convinced that the story itself is dramatically better/different than other fantasy games, though it is certainly more original.
My intention isn't to elicit an emotional response. Everyone here liked the game; I purchased it, played it for a bit, and wasn't satisfied. I was kind of hoping that someone here would give me their overarching vision of why they love the game, and I would either be drawn in enough to try it again, or realize that it just wasn't for me. I will agree that the atmosphere aspect of the game was well done, it just wasn't enough to maintain my interest. I've actually never heard of it before. I didn't get a lot out of Gene Wolfe's Sevarian books, which a lot of people like, so it may just be an issue with me.
I don't understand why you're framing this in a confrontational manner, when I don't owe you or "the rest of us" a goddamned thing when it comes to the imaginary offense of not having the game accurately described to you. I'm happy to try to explain different parts of the game's appeal to you, but you're not giving me much to work with. Obviously, I don't think Dark Souls is a one trick pony. The depth of the mechanics are most obviously expressed in the melee combat, but there are a lot of subtle things about the problem-solving in the world that make up the meat of the game. You grade things things all of the time, yes? What would you give your polemic so far? Did you ask about the appeal of the game in the thread before buying it or while suffering through it? Why not? Why now? Why are people here that have never engaged with you on the topic responsible for the catastrophe of you not enjoying a game that you never talked to them about? Are you trying to provoke me into insulting your intelligence? I mean, there are literally dozens of symbols and story aspects revealed by the time you head out of the asylum, but you have to be interested to be paying attention. And in general, the game has to click with you a bit mechanically before you have the luxury of enjoying the view and seeing how the parts of the game fit together narratively.
ITT: Someone says story when what they really mean is narrative (or perhaps even more specifically, plot). EDIT: For me the way I knew I wouldn't be interested in these game is that without fail, the first thing that anyone ever talks about, and 95% of what people talk about in general with it is mechanics. The mechanics of combat, the mechanics of specific boss fights, etc. I think this is the first time I've ever seen anyone mention story elements at all, and that's only in response to someone saying they didn't like it, that it even came up. To me that's a dead giveaway that my favorite aspects of RPGs are mostly missing here and that I'd probably end up frustrated with it. But, you know. It doesn't hurt me any that the game exists and other people enjoy it. The tone of this thread is really oddly defensive and I don't understand why.
This is easily one of my favorite games ever, and I have a hard time explaining why I like it so much when recommending it to various friends. Sure it's easy to point out a few technical things, like that it has a satisfying combat system or that the level design is absolutely superb, but it's hardly the first game to accomplish either of those feats. I think what really strikes me about it though is how thoughtful and coherent the game is, which is a lot tougher to convey. Sometimes it's the the things that run throughout the game. When I was a kid I played the original legend of zelda (Hi Charles!) which really held a lot of secrets that it would have been pretty much impossible for any one person or kid to figure out. The solution at the time of course was to gather around during recess and talk about it . Various people knew which rocks to bomb for the heart pieces or which bushes to burn and that knowledge was passed along to anyone else who played and between siblings until you had sufficient information to actually make it through the game. Or maybe you didn't talk to anyone and you just muddled through a game on your own until you either got stuck or didn't finish it just being innocently unaware of all the things you might miss (Really? You could save Cid in FFVI?). Gamefaqs and then wikis came along (or I guess hintlines or strategy guides before that if you were willing to spend the money) and all of a sudden that was moot. The price of that being that I'd always hate whenever I felt obligated to follow a guide in order not to miss things (hahaha zodiac spear) as the designers were aware of this and just made things more and more obtuse in order to keep some element of secrecy in the game. There are many many secrets in dark souls. Do the designers hide them from you? Perhaps, but they let your fellow players tell you about them via the in game messaging system. A remarkable call back to my youth and an absolutely incredible way of community building. I love when games are respectful enough of you to both hide things for you to find and to give you the actual tools to find them. Sure, you'll miss some things depending on which messages show up when you're playing, but there's always a chance they'll show up later and you never have to look up anything if you don't want to, you can just keep playing. Add that to the fact that the level design really is so spectacular and every person who plays this game will end up with a few secrets or tricks of their own and a few blindspots as well and you really get a game which creates a unique experience for everyone who plays it. Sometimes it's the little things that you appreciate. There are a few parts of the game where you essentially have to hold still for 10 seconds after doing something in order to trigger an event. Now, the game essentially signals to you that you should do this, which is nice, and in a clever enough way that you don't feel beaten over the head with it. Even better, if you ever have the occasion to repeat that action, you don't have to wait the 10 seconds any more. I still marvel that they took the actual time to do that. Sometimes it's the things you take for granted. Let's take dying, in which you not only are sent back to the place where you last checked yourself in but also you lose all currency that you have for making your character better. Which is precious early on and when first playing, and sure you have a chance to get it back but now you must do it again and now it's more stressful and easier to make a mistake. Seriously game? How am I supposed to progress when the punishment for death is that severe. Which is why it gets the "sadistic" label even though that couldn't be further from the truth. The game is sadistic like some cinematic sensei seems to his spoiled star pupil. "I've already proven I can do this. In fact I've done harder things. I've beat bosses. The capra demon? Never lost to him. Why do I keep having to do these simple tasks over and over? Let the lesser students do that." But like all spoiled pupils, you lack perspective. You die, you learn, you get better or you die again the same way. So you get better, and what was once hard is now trivial. Eventually you don't just learn to get past each challenge but rather how to approach new challenges so that you don't have to learn by dying. It all clicks in your head and you now have the tools ready to face the tougher challenges. You play again and wonder how you ever though things were hard in the first place. Then you get truly crazy and play SL 1 builds because this once "sadistic" game now needs to provide a new challenge. This game is spectacular at teaching you how to be good at it. I could probably go on. I could talk about how amazing the world building is and how the hands off approach is a wonderful example of show, don't tell. Or how the npcs being so few and far between really does play up how hopeless and lonely the world is. Or how I still feel rude when I forget and walk off mid conversation with them and they cry out to me. Or how the co-op is a neat way of giving people a boost if they ever do get stuck. Or how, if you prefer, you could talk to maybe one or two npcs all game and just kill your way to the end. Everything is there for you to appreciate, and the game is confident that you will. No bonus points for super combos or achievements for finding easter eggs. Just a thoughtful and well crafted world for you to explore and take in. TL;DR The game isn't constrained by traditional game conventions and cleverly comes up with new ways of doing things, all without insulting you.
I think it's dramatically better in how it's told, where much like Demon's Souls the setting reflects and guides the story along with core mechanics of the game. Incidentally, I also think it gets short shrift from people who like mythology as fiction in and of itself rather than also as a literary instrument to be manipulated across a story. Which is the kind of person most of us who like mythology are when we are growing up, but it's a tricky evolution to make to an aggressively culturally hybridized, deeply mechanically integrated sense of story. We cling to the fictional approach (I Like x God or y Monster is Cool) which is what something like God of War brings to life in terms of raw description, but actually making you play out a piece of mythology from the inside is a different thing altogether. Theseus gets handed a ball of yarn, a sword and a mission. He kills the minotaur and ditches the woman who helped him. But actually experiencing what he does and seeing the hints of why things are without a convenient narrator to giftwrap it for you is an altogether different proposition from "then he found the center and killed the bad guy".
Well, I linked you to a podcast of us talking about why we like it so much, and you complained that it was too much like the superlong thread where we also talked about why we like it so much. I find it hard to believe that after all that you're still earnestly asking "Why won't anyone tell me why they like this game so much?!?" If you're trolling, which is certainly how you're coming off at this point, you're not being anywhere near as clever as you think you're being.
This a curious clarification, absent context. You have a conversation between people who know a game relatively well and a person who is determined to describe it in reductivist terms, which would seem to me especially hard to re-classify usefully into a specific literary taxonomy if you are coming from knowing very little of the game. It's not odd at all. Read the OP again. Whether it's desirable or optimal is something else entirely, but people usually get the kinds of threads they ask for.
Sorry I was not clear; I meant the OP's posts specifically w.r.t. the defensiveness, not that you guys feel the need to defend the game, since you know, that's what you were asked to do. I don't know if he's just looking for a fight but that's how it comes across.
I am confused by all the aggression in this thread (also talking about the original post, naturally you are defending a game you like). I wish I could appreciate this game (because it looks amazing and you all make it sound amazing), but I am far too much of a casual gamer. It's just too difficult. /hides in corner of shame
It's not entirely correct to even call Dark Souls an RPG, or at least it exposes the growing uselessness of phrase "RPG" as a descriptor. It's an action game with very deep RPG mechanics as opposed to the very shallow ones that most action games nowadays have. It does in fact have a very deep and engaging story, one of the best in recent years and one that is at times one of the most emotionally affecting of all time, but it does not have a story that is told in the typical cutscene-heavy JRPG fashion or the "go into a town and talk to everybody and get to know the factions at work" style common in WRPGs. If you go in looking for either of those things you're going to be disappointed.
My main impression is that the story elements are not participatory, but rather ambient. Is that a fair assessment? (I am still trying to decide if ambient is the right word for what I mean here.)
Amazingly deep compared to what they superficially present to you. Maybe I meant surprisingly deep? If you're commenting on it, I assume you've read some of the discussions by superfans who've dissected the story in microscopic detail? The lore isn't anything wildly original or superbly well-written (it is fairly interesting, though) - it's just surprising how much of it you can find when they make you sit through so little of it. It's more than just letting you ignore the lore if you're not interested in it - which a lot of games do. They specifically hide it and make you puzzle it out if you care.
Whether or not it's the right word, I know what you mean. I think it's only partly true. Your actions only directly affect side plots (except for one big decision at the end)... but then again those side plots are far more impactful than 99% of games' entire stories. Also, you have to be much more mentally engaged in the story to even follow what's going on (and what went on) in Dark Souls, because you have to piece it together bit by bit instead of having it spoon-fed to you. In this way, the act of taking in the story is much more "active" from the player's perspective than in most games.
I think it's both. There's a lot more going on than most people realize; nearly every item, NPC, and enemy in the game has something to offer to the story. It's deeper than most games' stories, it just doesn't beat you over the head with it.
I think that's fair, especially until you get a feel for how things work and can piece things together a bit. One thing that gave me that feeling was the experience of exploring the wasteland in in Fallout 3, where you would piece together these vignettes that gave you a window into some really cool things in the setting. A lot of differences beyond that, of course, but it's that same kind of vibe that provides the entry point to the story, which then has more conventional elements that you fit into it.
I guess it depends on what you think counts as story. A lot of the item descriptions and incidental dialogue is very cool and hints at a very deep background, which as you say the superfans have digested. I love that stuff. It gives the world a real sense of place and history. But I would consider that to be more like theme, flavour or lore than I would "story" per se. The clues that are there to find relate to things that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago, rather than things that relate to the plot. It's a bit like the flavour text on magic cards, or the readable books in Elder Scrolls, though I'd say the flavour text in Dark Souls is generally much better written. I don't mean this as a criticism; I'm tired of game stories and narratives that are not well suited to be expressed in the medium. But at the same time, if someone is looking for a Bioware-esque "choice and consequence"-type story, they are mainly going to be disappointed. On those terms, there's barely a story at all, beyond "go here, hit the switch, get the foozle". Again, not a criticism, just trying to explain why I don't think a fan of traditional Bioware-style stories would find much of interest in Dark Souls.
I agree in part, as the heart of the game is not a choose your own adventure or dialog tree type mechanic. As I said above in more detail, I think there's a mythological component to it that is often passed over when people assess what they've experienced. What I really like about it is that while we tend to regard dialog trees and choose your own adventure as "authentic" story-based game, in many cases it's just efficient delivery of writing that is well within the comfort zone of both designers and gamers. When you look at what games do well mechanically, it's often completely detached from what they do through relatively awkward abstractions that deliver the story. For instance, I like Alpha Protocol a lot, mixed writing and uneven mechanics and all, and one of the reasons is that they worked hard to refine the abstraction of dialog trees into meaningful choices. For many players, that was undercut by the production values, but structure of the story alone was bold new territory in the age of voiced games. But Alpha Protocol was very much refining an abstraction on top of what a core third person stealth/shooter does well. What DS does is give you an integrated package. How things fight and how they exist and how you die and how you progress are all tied inextricably into the setting, even if on the surface it's just guys milling around waiting to kick your ass in a gloomy place. The solitude is not the uncanny accident of failing to flesh out a world, but rather a deliberate product of making you a mythical character rather than an action hero or a power fantasy or a soft fantasy cliche. There are bits and pieces of those things, but only if you completely miss the forest for the trees.
Ah, but you see, the things that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago *are* directly related to the plot. :D Ultimately, it's pretty much the reason you (the player) are here, and the people/things/deities it happened with/to are frequently the ones in your way.
I like your description of it as playing through a unique mythology, and I think it's apt. I think there is also allusion to mythology in the sense you described above as "literary instrument to be manipulated across a story": Dark Souls has its own "theft of fire" thing going on which alludes to the Prometheus/raven/etc. myths. So obviously there is a lot of mythic theme going on. For me, where I think Dark Souls falls a bit short in terms of story is the nature of your journey through the world. It's not very mythic or interesting to be told that you must collect the four souls in order to confront the big baddy. It just seems very video-gamey. I don't know how much that matters, since I enjoy progressing in the game for its own sake and I don't really need a plot reason to keep exploring, but that aspect does seems like a missed opportunity. I kind of felt the same way about the level structure in Demons Souls: having 5 worlds with 4 levels each (or whatever it was) felt very incongrous and gamey. These are minor criticisms obviously.
Also, the flow of time is distorted in Lordran, like the man says. The concept of things having happened hundreds or thousands of years ago is itself suspect.
Time out for a second. If you're referring to the first post, I was giving a toned-down accounting of my experience with the game. I honestly didn't have fun in the ten hours I spent with it. So, now that the game has its own subforum, I decided to make a post about how I didn't like it. Part of me feels that I should have fleshed out that post a bit more, but the other part thinks that it wouldn't have changed the responses. I honestly wasn't expecting this level of antagonism at the time of the original post, which may be due to my deficiencies as a writer. If you want a comparison point, Planetside 2 is my favorite game of the year, there are a lot of people who hate it, and I can understand why. If you're referring to subsequent posts, it's because I'm having a simultaneous confrontational conversation with eight different people, where the replies are a mix of, "Troll!", "Doing it Wrong", and "Charles Is Gonna Gettcha". Charles hasn't even responded yet, and I'm a little nervous about how that's going to turn out. I'm not interested in joining Brettmcd on his cross, in fact, I think all of that is fair and in good fun if some guy doesn't like the same game you do. But you can't expect me not to bite whatever I can get a hold of when I'm being dogpiled. That's also in good fun, and you also shouldn't take it personally. Regarding your main point, I agree that you don't owe me anything. You like some games, I like some games, and when the two don't intersect, we're not going to sue each other for damages. I still value your opinion. And I've spent $30 or more on dumb shit at least five times this month, so you're not the problem there. Your podcast, up to 35:00, is basically speaking to insiders. You discuss how the icon system in Demon Souls probably threw people off, how most outsiders probably weren't likely to find the path to the Undead Burg, and when I turned it off you were discussing a non-obvious jumping puzzle in the tutorial to get a fog ring required for a later area. I'm cool that you're into that; I'm into some games like that. The problem is that you never made your experience accessible for a larger audience. You never explained why you love it. There's an internet argument gambit I call the homework assignment. You link someone to a reading or discussion that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, and you effectively tell them to read it or they can't be taken seriously. I was charitable enough to listen to thirty-five minutes of your podcast, even though I'm pretty sure you'd never extend the same courtesy to me. There was nothing in that thirty-five minutes that approached Thursday's post, and so I figured you were just fucking with me. If you were, I don't mind, it's fair play in this sort of discussion. Hi Let's Play Person. I think you're looking at this from the standpoint of how you would react if someone rolled into your latest thread and said that they didn't like your game. I wouldn't do this, for a lot of reasons, but primarily because it wouldn't be fair to someone who isn't used to it. Time in. Amuse yourselves.
I was referring to what I quoted there as well as your tone generally. I don't think you should be unfamiliar with the idea of removing incendiary adornments if you want to have an analytical vs polemical discussion about it, but labeling a game in your very first post as having shitty controls, an empty world, and [a bunch of reductivist summaries of the play experience hinging around the hype of its difficulty] is going to draw a strong reaction. You're not leaving any room for people who self-identify as having different opinions to start from a neutral position with you. If you want to have a conversation around that unfortunate starting point, that's what I was trying to do, but you can't just quote what I said and say some dickhole thing in response to it and then expect neutral responses forever. I don't see anything wrong with your writing except that it's advancing an argument (this game sucks) under what appears to be the classic move of "just asking questions". SO WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS SHITTY EMPTY GAME? WHAT? OH YOU'RE SAYING COMBAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT'S GOOD ABOUT IT? WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THAT WHEN WE NEVER TALKED ABOUT THIS? It just feels like an interview run by a lunatic. Personally? This is not me getting personal, and this is not a dogpile. But you keep wrapping yourself in steak and demanding to get mauled by saying things that are needlessly combative in the form of a question. He wasn't fucking with you. You're being weird and paranoid while at the same time asserting that others are taking it personally and aren't used to your awesome thick skin form of discourse. I agree with you that the podcast is a bit inside baseball, but it's certainly not the dishonest homework assignment you point to. If anything, extar suggested it because one of the main responses to it was "oh, now I get what you see in this game, thanks". That it didn't work for you is something where you have a valid point about why but are completely out there in terms of having a constructive way to frame it. That's condescending and unnecessary, and they went out of their way not to attack you personally or say you had shitty, empty points. Again, there's nothing wrong with your writing except that it's utterly tone-deaf in ways that actively undermine your points, and this collateral damage inflicted just because you think you've got a soft target is kind of a low point. I will. By playing Dark Souls.
