So I hear people complain about diversity a lot in Dark Souls. In a sense, I don’t think the situation is too bad, but it could use a lot of improving. Still, many people look at several ‘over powered’ options that are commonly used and suggest that removing one would improve the game. I think this is missing the point.

Dark Souls PvP lacks diversity because, mechanically, Dark Souls PvP lacks diversity.

Okay, that’s not satisfying, but the point is, the diversity isn’t there to be unlocked, because Dark Souls is loaded false choices and relatively meaningless options.

Lets start with rolls. There are 3 weight classes in Dark Souls. Under 25% equip load, under 50% and over 50%. The Dark Woodgrain Ring ( one of the several items people want to see disappear) gives a roll slightly better roll than 25% equip rate and the same walk speed at 50% equip, but for all intents and purposes it’s the 25% equip rate ‘class’ of movement’.

And it is only that class that is viable n any way. If you are slower than your opponent, you can’t do too much to avoid a backstab. Even a defensive roll can often end up with you getting backstabbed. The faster player can also kite you indefinitely. To be viable you HAVE to be in the fastest possible weight class. It’s suicide otherwise.

What of Armor? Armor has 3 factors. Stamina Penalty, Defense and Poise. Well, and weight, but generally you’re picking the armor for the weapons.Stamina penalty is almost ignorable, defense is weak on most things and poise is the most meaingful stat, which helps you not get staggered by hits. Playing with 0 poise is a doable, though not very recommended thing though. so generally you get a certanin amount of poise (usually 55 for those wondering) and try and get as much defense as possible while looking cool and staying under weight. It’s mosty meaningless though. Poise does matter, but not to a great deal. Even if Light Armor was ‘viable’ all it would do is change how people look for the most part. No interesting choices are being made because armor isn’t particlarly interesting.

As already established, most magic is also not viable in PvP.

For rings, we have a few usable options. Wolf Ring (give spoise), Hornet Ring (increased damage on parries/backstabs), Dark Woodgrain ring (see above), Havels (doubles equip load. Only worth using in conjunction with DWGR for super weight bonuses) and the Ring of Favor and Protection (which boosts health, stamina and equip burden but breaks if removed). There are a few other rings that are somewhat usable, but generally these are the best and most run DWGR and the Ring of Favor and Protection.

The issue here is not that these rings are ‘too good’. It’s that most other rings are “30% Fire resist”. The DWGR and the RoFaP are possibly too good, but in general, the problem is that most rings are just damn boring.

That leaves weapons, which has a lot of samey choices, but is still relatively good.

As such the only real choices you have are ‘what weapon do I use’ and a few supplmentals. “Do I use buffs and/or scaling weapons”. As the game is now, it’s good that you can wear a lot of armor and carry a bunch of weapons, because mixing and matching weapons/shields is possibly the only way you can really make your character have any sort of flavor.

So how do we fix this? The sad answer is, we don’t. Not in Dark Souls at least. Maybe they’ll somehow patch the game with some carefully made decisions that will turn things on their head, but that’s not the type of stuff I can theorize about. So what can a sequel to Dark Souls do? This is tricky because the changes will also exist in PvE too.

Okay one of the big problem is that attacking is inherently risky and defense is really strong. It can be quite tricky to do real damage to an overly defensive player and your aggression opens you up to the ever dreaded backstab (or even getting parried!). Part of this is it’s hard to catch up with a retreating opponent who has his shield up and tag him with a slow weapon. If you can’t keep that aggression up, they can put down their shield and recover their stamina fairly quickly. So lets start with a few things. Backpedeling should be slower than normal movement and moving while blocking should also be slower. I also constantly think that Dark Souls needs a way to punish people who block to much directly. Some sort of guard break. Sadly the Kick doesn’t function in this role quite well enough. The guard break should be slower, but far more effective. Perhaps a benefit for certain weapons or heavy shields (better shield bashes would be sweet)? Perhaps in exchange for even slower movement while in use. Conversely a dagger might not have a shield break, but it’s low stamina drain and speed of attack allows it to put on pressure and chisel down an opponent, while also letting it punish roll attempts. Less damage resistance amongst smaller shields could also work. Limiting 100% resist to great shields so chip damage could play a better role.

Then there are weight classes. I think that all weight classes should physically move at the same speed. This might not be required if other abilities were in place (like say, being able to have a charge attack or something to close distance). Turn speed should definitely be the same for everyone and the medium roll should be better (It should be of AVERAGE utility, not awful). Hopefully with this, they wouldn’t get backstabbed all the time. Also linking armor type to the various rolls would probably help. Like, if Heavy Armor could NEVER do a 25% roll or something. As part of the tradeoff.

So now heavy and light armor need to be viable. RIght now heavy armor doesn’t defend THAT much better than light armor and it’s mostly the poise. First, having armor that DOES stuff is awesome. Be it light armor that increases critical damage, or ability to use magic or whatever. This might make playing dress up harder, but could be fixed by making it an element of a Demon’s Souls style upgrade tree, allowing all armor in a class to have various abilities (maybe even the charge, or other types of buffs). Stamina penalty if necessary could also be higher to offset the improved defense while also maintaining PvE balance.

Spells are their own thing, but making them usable would do a lot to help the game..

So basically, while I put out some suggestions, the whole idea goes like this

*First, the weight classes have to matter.
*Then the armor has to matter (and no, poise isn’t enough)
*Then aggression in combat has to matter.

Once you get those 3 things, you can start adding in all sorts of other elements (like better magic and rings) and then get a game with some actual diversity going on. Basically what you need are meaningful choices to make betwen different ideals. Dark Souls lacks this. There is one viable weighclass — not because it’s the best, but because the slower weight classes lose to it cleanly. There is no armor variety because armor has very few properties to meaningfully distinguish pieces. Weapons DON’T have this problem because there is something to be said about fast weapons compared to slow ones. One is not clearly superior. In fact, the Lighting Zweihander people complain about is not nearly the ‘best weapon’. It’s slow attacks leave it extremely unsafe, but it only has to hit you once or twice. A fun and interesting tradeoff! So if we do that for armor and make attacking a little safer, we know have a ton of new design space and everyone wins!

I don’t know if I’m going to make a series out of this, but I might as well set my self up just in case. Anyways, this should be a quickly.

The Covenant system is both one of the biggest differences between Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls, but also one of the least polished parts of the game. While everything functions to a somewhat acceptable degree, there is clearly room for a lot of improvement. That said, it was probably time rather than effort that lead to such a flawed covenant system and I’m sure many of the things I mention were at one point planned or talked about. Doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it, though!

Also before anything else, let me just say that every covenant would benefit from the changes I suggested in my in-depth review. Lower level cap, better matchmaking, etc. So I’m not going to bother talking about any of that unless it’s extremely relevant.

Way of the White

Lets start with the most boring. Clearly this is the least spectacular covenant. You gain nothing material — simply matchmaking and, by virtue of the dedicated server-less lobby system, less of a chance to be invaded. The covenant has no rank and little purpose, outside of being the baby version of the Warriors of Sunlight. Perhaps this is fine, as it is the first covenant that you encounter and can be seen as a way to coddle new players. I would speculate that the coin Petrus gave you would have been a covenant item in the same way as the sunlight medals would be. Due to the complete emptiness of this covenant, it could be improved any way someone wanted (sunbros-lite, story based covenant where you level up by doing things like getting the rite of kindling and kindling bonfires, etc etc etc). Any of these would work. Personally and fluff wise, kindling bonfires seems like the best way to level up this covenant.

Princess’s Guard

Almost, but not quite as unspectacular. This covenant gives us some direction. I would imagine both the miracles that are exclusive to this covenant would have been given as covenant items (perhaps using the gold coins, but that is entirely speculation). Clearly the way to improve such a covenant would be more support miracles (a spell like the channeler’s dance, mayhaps!), but the question remains: How do they gain covenant items? In a way this is the same problem that plagues Way of the White. Do we need three different sunlight warriors? Perhaps they were to function in the same way as the darkmoon ring, before it was decided that it was a better fit for the Blades of Darkmoon (probably due to them having a hard time getting matches). That said, I think, assuming the way of the white had a non co-op leveling system, that it would be okay to have a second style of Sunbro. While the Sunlight Warriors gain offensive spells, the Princess’s Guard gains healing.

Blade of the Darkmoon

These guys are so broken. They have a naturally hard time finding matches and their covenant rewards require an absurd amount of kills. Obviously that can be fixed, but that’s not mechanical. Two things would particularly help though – the level cap I said I wouldn’t get into (but it would make being summoned into Dark Anor Londo less of a joke), and, humorously, making it easier to be a Darkwraith (but we’ll get to that later). Blades of the Darkmoon SHOULD be able to invade and be summoned to any sinner, anywhere, but that clearly doesn’t work well with the lobby system. Perhaps another system that might be workable would be using the book of the guilty to display players that are currently playing and then selectively invade them. Problem there is while it is probably possible (in the same way the lobbies share messages with each other) but would probably be too much of a network burden. Invading darkwraiths who are alive, regardless of whether they defeated the areas boss is probably the best solution, though that could create a chilling effect among darkwraiths. Perhaps what would be the funnest, but most technically challenging solution is ALSO having the ability to “counter-invade” and come to a phantom’s aid. The biggest difficulty would the host getting offed before you can connect, so the idea is sadly probably not workable.

To make the ‘invading darkwraiths anywhere’ thing work, I think it would have to be linked to the Darkwraith invading. Perhaps a way to do both is that an invading Darkwraith leaves a mark (or may, depending on their current level of sin?). By touching the mark, the Darkmoon can either invade the Darkwraith OR whatever game the darkwraith is currently invading. Perhaps a little difficult to implement, but it would certainly be fun.

Warriors of Sunlight

One of the few fully functional covenants in my opinion. The Sunbros are pretty great. They have great rewards, a great requirement and are all gold and awesome. No changes required, outside of more rewards for later covenant levels (Solaire’s stuff without having to kill him plz). Jolly Co-operation is apparently it’s own reward, though.

The Forest Hunters

I always have mixed feelings about the Forest Hunters. The forest is one of the goofiest and most unreliable PVP zones as far as ‘fairness’ is concerned and the only places that the zone attracts is trolls. That said they have some of the best rewards and an amazing merchant. I think the best way to make the covenant work would be to make it possible to invade players who are hollow and nonhollow and to have the invasions occur regardless of the state of Sif. If you litter some more goodies throughout the zone and make it an even better place to farm souls, then it should receive the attention it needs from non-troll characters.

Chaos Servants

Clearly a lot was planned that never came to fruition. Straight forward leveling mechanic with only sporadic rewards, a lot of room for more fluff an d a servants roster with no particular purpose. If I were to guess, an original purpose of the covenant would have been to infect online players with eggs. Instead of having another redundant PVP covenant, they made it a rather lackluster one. You pay 30 humanity and get two spells and a shortcut. Linking it to Queelana may have helped make it more valuable but would make less sense for fluff. Perhaps another zone like the Forest and Dark Anor Londo would be good, where infection gives the rewards of humanity. It could almost be seen as taking Queelag’s place. Though what this covenant more needs is a bit more story progression and more spread out rewards. Temporary plot driven covenants seem like they would be both fun and a good alternative for players who aren’t much interested in the online elements of the game.

Gravelord Servants

Ouch, if only this covenant worked as well as everyone hoped. The concept is so cool, yet it has no tactile feedback. This is the first issue. Originally everyone thought you gained souls by having people die in other worlds and this should be brought back. It gives tactile feedback and could come with a message (“Player XXXX was defeated at the hands of your minions”). The sign should also be visible and show how many worlds you have infected, just to let the gravelord know it’s working. I have a suspicion though that gravelord infections and invasions are not perfectly interconnected. I think it may be possible that if you invade a gravelord through a symbol, you might invade ANY gravelord in the area, not the one that was infecting you. Upon success, you would get a flag that you’ve successfully defeated a gravelord (thus stopping any BP enemies). If this is the case, giving you souls would be extremely difficult. Gravelords in an area would either have to benefit communally or we’d have to deal with the broken system we have now. Perhaps Form feared that such a system would plunge the game into permanent “Pure Black World Tendency”. If these limitations are true, that’s a shame, because this covenant NEEDS tactile feedback to be successful.

One way to also do this would be to let the gravelord lay down multiple signs that each spawn BP enemies in their vicinity. Since we know how White Soap Stones work, we can assume this method would also work. This would add to the level of planning a Gravelord could do and make sure that gravelords weren’t ‘hiding their summoning sign’. What would make this a homerun would be if the Gravelord then could go to his symbols, collect the souls and eyes they collected by killing players and perhaps then even watch a bloodstain of that players death. I’m sure From would have loved to do something like that, so we can only hope they succeed at it in some other game (or.. in DLC D:).

Path of the Dragon

The Path of the Dragon functions and gives some of the coolest rewards. If the game threw in a few dragon weapons in the covenant rewards, things would be perfect (outside of matchmaking issues). While those matchmaking issues can be problematic, for the most part this covenant works as intended.

Darkwraiths

Mechanically, Darkwraiths work great. They even have a full reward tree! The problem is, they don’t work for everyone else per-say. To re-iterate what I said in my in-depth review (since it IS extremely important here), being a Darkwraith SHOULD be easy. This makes it so worse players are invading. This makes more sinners, for the Darkmoon Blades, and this leads to less curb stops. Combine this with a reasonable level cap (so Darkwraiths also don’t get mercilessly stomped themselves) and you create a healthier ecosystem with less incentive to twink (again, if you beat the four kings at a low level, you’re ALREADY twinked, so why would you ditch your gear?). This still isn’t the perfect world where gear factors into matchmaking, but it helps.

Anyways, that might not be the most interesting thing I ever wrote, but it only took a little bit and was fun to think about.

Featuring: Kayin, April, Patito, Eric, Ben, Flick, Smiler

Not our best work, but we’re back after a month! Episode ends kinda abruptly because the internet died, stopping the stream — though honestly we were out of material at the end. Enjoy!

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Before I begin, let me thank long time listener of TMT, Trynant, for sending me this and Demon’s Souls. I had no idea the joy I was depriving my self of by passing them up.

My Other M: In Depth post was a tear down of a significantly flawed game. This time is different. Now it’s time for me to heap praise on a superficially flawed game as well as an analysis on how future games of it’s ilk can improve. It’s time for me to expound the virtues of perhaps my favorite single player experience in the last five years and time to get into the nitty gritty of why this game works. So if you’re looking for a spoiler free review because you don’t know what to do with the GameStop gift card you got for Christmas, all I can say is “If you like hard, skillful games, buy it”. So just like last time, be wary of spoilers (not that the game has many). So anyways, lets do this thing!

The Premise and Mechanics

The Sunk Ruins of New Londo

Dark Souls is a dark fantasy themed, metroidvania-esque, combat driven action RPG, with a heavy focus on combat mastery and accumulating knowledge. Despite putting an emphasis on learning, the game also has many ways to instill a fear of death in the player. Death often involves replaying long sections of an area again — forgiving checkpoints are a rare. The player can also risk losing all of their unspent currency/experience in the game by dying. A bloodstain is left where the player died, but if the player dies again, it’s gone forever. This is problematic because the game is also trying to do everything in it’s power to kill you. Unlike most action RPGs, levels and stats play second fiddle to skill. The game, played by an expert, is beatable at level one (though using powerful equipment). You are never expected to be able to tank near-unavoidable damage and running up to a boss and mashing at them blindly is often a fatal strategy.

The player character is a classless entity (the classes at character creation are merely starting kits) comprised of numerous stats, most of which only have to do with equipment pre-requisites and damage scaling(Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, though dex does decrease spell casting time), and a few others. Attunement gives you more spell slots, Vitality gives you more health, Endurance gives you more equippable item capacity and Resistance does what it says and should never be leveled up (the stat probably shouldn’t have been in the game). Every level up also increases your defense a little bit. How generous! You got 4 weapon slots to define your offensive capability with and two actions for each hand (mapped to the appropriate shoulder buttons). Left is defensive (generally block and parry, but for wielding two weapons, one is often a block and the other is an attack. Or an attack and a parry), right is offensive (two attacks. You’ll attack even with a shield if you put one there). There are tons of melee weapons, shields, bows and three classes of magical implements (talismans for miracles, cataylists for sorceries and pyromancy flames for.. pyromancy!), so what you equip your self with really defines the capabilities of your character. Sure, you can change equipment in the menu, but considering that the game plays even when you’re in the menu, that’s not always practical. Thus, your loadout is an important decision making process.

Kindling a Bonfire

The key ability in the Souls games is the roll. Much like Bayonetta and newer games, avoiding damage is one of the biggest challenges. Unlike new games, Dark Soul’s roll does not have staggeringly large windows of invulnerability (well, unless you get a certain ring…), doesn’t give you any bonuses for dodging successfully and doesn’t always give you a brisk recovery. Yet somehow this move is of critical importance. The reason is, unlike games like Bayonetta, attacking is very dangerous too. You need to use your ‘mediocre roll’ to survive until you get into position to attack. You also need it to cancel a portion of your attack’s recovery when you whiff. Contextually, this weak roll is amazing and given both your flawed offensive and defensive abilities. As such, even simple foes can do significant damage if you’re not careful! Despite these flaws, your attacks still feel powerful. The slow windups just add to the impact of individual hits. Which swing is a build up and release of tension and a key point of excitement and fear. Instead of feeling like a loose and clunky game, it feels like a tight game where every decision matters — because every decision DOES matter.

Attacking, blocking and rolling all use the stamina bar. The stamina bar recharges very quickly (in a few seconds while not holding any buttons), but in the heat of combat, it never fills up fast enough. It’s a resource to manage and it makes even blocking relatively weak. Damage done while blocking is turned into stamina damage (With some portion hitting your actual health, depending on the stats of the shield) so if you attacked too much, you cannot roll to escape and any hit to your shield will stagger you and do normal damage. When you run out swinging and mashing attack, you have to either expect your enemy to die or prey you will have just enough energy to roll away when you’re done. This adds a rich tension to combat. Even relatively easy enemies require a methodical approach to kill safely!

The player has two states — human and hollow. By using a semi-rare humanity item (or doing some other stuff that’s not worth talking about) the player can resurrect themselves. This has only a small handful of advantages (unlike Demon’s Souls where you lost most of your life!) — the ability to summon other players and get invaded, as well as the ability to kindle bonfires. The exact mechancis of humanity are arcane and silly, so we’ll just ignore them and move on to the kindling and the bonfires.

The bonfires shattered about the world act as both a source of healing and your checkpoints. Going to one fills your health bar but resurrects all (non boss/unique) enemies in the stage. You have no ready access to stores of healing items like Demon’s Souls. Large stockpiles of grass have been replaced with the Estus flask. Every time you go to the bonfire you get 5 swigs of the flask, which provide significant healing that must be rationed carefully. You can kindle your bonfire with humanity to give you larger amounts of Estus (Normally you can only kindle once to get 10 flasks, but later you can kindle more for up to 20 flasks) and you can upgrade your flask to have it heal more per swig. This controlled healing gives the developers a better way to balance levels and bosses as well as giving the player a new resource to manage. It also removes the desire to ‘horde’ healing items, while also punishing their overuse. In short, it gives the player the perfect amount of healing! With about two bonfires per boss, you get a pretty traditional level structure, despite the game’s free roaming nature.

The rest of what you do is simple. You proceed through parts of the game to achieve relatively simple tasks. Less ‘fetch quests’ and more ‘just kill all these fuckers’. So you roam the land finding new areas to clear and more fuckers to kill, with any progress in any direction bringing you closer to the end of the game.

I suppose I also should not ignore the difficulty of this game. It’s hard. Very hard and very unforgiving. But it is also fair. Luck in Dark Souls can always be replaced with skill and planning. It is when one relies on luck that one dies the most. Sometimes you die because the game is teaching you a lesson. If you roll with the punches, next time can always be different and you will get a little farther. This game questions the entitlement gamers have to not die. Despite the punishing aspects of death, as soon as one stops worrying about losing souls, the game gets a lot easier. The pressure is relieved and you can just continue to play through this fierce meritocracy. Many reviewers paint the game as horrible, oppressive, soul crushing experience, but I find that to be downright hyperbolic. If you’re the type of person to like a real challenge and self improvement, you will find the majority of this game to be deeply enjoyable because you will have earned but of success you receive. If you’re soul is getting crushed, it’s because you’re probably not respecting the game. You are hoping to luck your way through a boss battle that you have to learn and it’s just not going to happen.

Enemies in this game are dealt with through careful observation. Often a new area may seem overwhelming, by analysis of their attack patterns. Getting to a new room might lead to quick, brutal death, but each subsequent attempt will increase your ability to cope with your situation. Your handling of a situation will get progressively more refined until once difficult sections become relatively easy. Each Boss often starts out feeling like an effort in futility, but knowledge is power. Often when you finally win, you don’t feel lucky, you feel mastery. You might often feel like if you fought the boss again, it’d be easy! It’s that deeply satisfying feeling that drives a player through Dark Souls.

Wonderful Level and World Design

Outside the combat, one of my favorite thing about the game is how the world is constructed. Not so much the lore — we’ll get to that later — but the structure. Firstly, the world is amazingly and complexly interconnected and incredibly easy to navigate. If you can see something in the distance, you’re probably going to go there at some point. The world is so interconnected that often it’s surprising how to areas link, but once you find the link, it makes sense. The world is also ecologically sound. Areas reasonably blend into each other and, in fact, the deeper you go, the more you can infer about the world. The dark and shadowy places of the world are deep in the lower ravines of the world. Looking up from the dark sewers of Blighttown, you can see the sun, sky, and the walls of the castle above you. It doesn’t cease to exist because they demanded a dark atmosphere for a segments of the game. It’s right there where you can see it, confirming the validity and persistence of the world. It’s a place you could draw a map, if not for the staggering 3d aspect of it. It’s also darn easy to navigate and this is accomplished with a few simple, but invisible tricks.

First, main path branches never lie to you. Forward is virtually always forward. Rare do you come to a crossroad, not sure which direction to go in and even rarer does the ‘wrong’ path have any significant length to it. Going down these harder to reach, short paths usually reward the player with treasure and other items before quickly setting them back in the right direction. This might seem minimalistic and rather shallow, but this conceit allows them to construct a staggeringly 3d world. Another tool is showing you what is ahead. In say… the Prime series, you are restricted by doors. While mostly a concession of the times, these doors created sealed environments that that often prevented you from telling what was ahead of you (that said, I wanna play a 3d Metroid that goes “Metal Gear Solid 3″ and embraces a super open map, but thats another story). The only hints you get are the door frames. In Dark souls you can SEE the tower where you fought the Demon and the Dragon and you can just run in it’s direction and mostly find your way pretty easily. Remember a few key sights and paths and you can get virtually anywhere you want with minimal effort. While being open ended, the world is, for the most part, a series of linear paths with a hand full of relatively large areas that have very obvious goal points.

Dark Soul’s dense cylinder of a World perhaps navigates better than any large 3d game I have ever played and does so without a map screen.

Individual areas are designed for distinctness and well crafted combat encounters. They are not afraid to put enemies in the most annoying spots possible and as such, they squeeze all the mileage they can out of their enemies. This is a design trick used famously in older Castlevania games but has been forgotten in modern times. But as long as a situation can be learned, it can be dealt with. The decaying nature of the world also makes it easy to create a world that plays like a level while not breaking suspension of disbelief. Collapsed walls, makeshift bridges and destroyed structures are a staple. The areas that do not abide by the decaying aesthetic are designed to resemble places. The pristine Anor Londo has bedrooms, filled with paintings and furniture. It has a church, a tomb and other important sites. Not-pristine-but-not-decaying Sen’s Fortress gets a pass, having been DESIGNED to be a complex, trap ridden structure. The aged nature of the world also makes it great for creating dangerous and precarious combat encounters where falling to your death is a real possibility.

Dark Souls also hits it’s aesthetic elements spot in. it embraces the classical medieval look and feel in ways that their competitors cannot not. Some games go crazy and anime-esque with their armor (which is fine), while others tole and rot in almost a medieval uncanny valley, much like Oblivion and Skyrim. Dark Souls owns it’s look. It’s equipment feels real and functioning. Function surpasses the rule of cool and when the rule of cool is applied, it’s because some weapon or set of armor came from an unlikely source, such as a demon or long dead entity. It embraces the awkward helmets and odd armors that rarely make an appearance in fantasy and use them to add a sense of reality to the world. It’s simple, yet amazingly distinct.

Story and Lore

A criticism commonly levied on Dark Souls is it’s poor, primitive story. I want to set the people who say this on fire. The story and lore of Dark Souls is “shown”, not told, and it is shown so subtly that one can blink and miss a lot of it. Details of the world, bits of dialog and small excerpts from item descriptions allow the player to piece together many details. The world is not centered around you — the world of Dark Souls feels no responsibility toward you and doesn’t require that you understand it. You stand as ignorant as the numerous NPCs that inhabit Firelink Shrine. In a world like Dark Souls, why should you be any different? This might even add to the joy of victory one feels while playing. Your success is not preordained in a significant way and even when the weight of the plot is finally put on your shoulders, it’s hard to tell if you have the whole truth. You are just an entity in a dying world and while you can piece together quite a bit you will never have all the answers.

Let me give an example of a deduction that can be made in Dark Souls.

In the Duke’s Archive (a mad laboratory for a crazy magi-science dragon), there is a section filled with Cells. There are a bunch of squid-headed-snake like enemies — Picasas — crawling about and being driven to attack by a sound. When you turn this sound off they hang around in a cell and if you fight through them, you’ll notice two at the back that avoid you and won’t attack you and seem to be crying. If you kill them, they scream out like women and drop two spells. One of the spell descriptions reads…

Bountiful Sunlight

“Special miracle granted to the maidens of Gwynevere, Princess of the Sun.
Gradual HP restoration for self and vicinity.

The miracles of Gwynevere, the princess cherished by all, grant their blessing to a great many warriors.”

Well this isn’t going anywhere nice. Lets read more item descriptions! How about some of the jail cell keys!

Archive Tower Giant Cell Key

“Key to the giant cell below the Duke’s Archives Tower.
The giant cell once imprisoned countless maidens, but is now empty, save for a few key persons. They struggle to uphold their sanity, as the horde of “mistakes” writhe at a fearfully close proximity.”

Archive Tower Cell Key

“Key to the cell of the Duke’s Archive Tower.
The Archive Tower, once a trove of precious tomes and letters, became a prison after the onset of Seath’s madness. The serpent men who guard the prison know not the value of what they hide. In the basement of the tower are the writhing “mistakes” of the terrifying experiments which were conducted there.

Okay so these things are probably Maidens of Gwynevere who have been horridly experimented on…. Oh wait there are these enemies called Channelers in the level! Let’s read what their weapon description is!

Channeler’s Trident

“Trident of the Six-eyed Channelers, sorcerers who serve Seath the Scaleless in collecting human specimens. Thrusted in circular motions in a unique martial arts dance that stirs nearby allies into a bloodthirsty frenzy.”

Well isn’t that wonderful. It makes it all the worse when the hollowed body of a female NPC end up there later in the game. An NPC who you saved. From murder. By someone who claimed to be her friend. Several characters in the game game warn you about Petrus the Cleric and most of them are unsavory folk. Somehow this guy is looked at pretty lowly by some of the biggest creepers in the game. if you do enough talking you can find out at one point that she abandoned him and hints at wanting her to die. If you save her and leave the two of them unattended for too long, he’ll murder her. And you’ll know he murdered her, because after you find her body, you can kill her and find her casting talisman on him. Oh such sweet little details.

A lot of this might feel like “telling” and one could make the argument that it is, but I think the big difference is this sort of plot discovery leads to active thought among the player. They feel like they are putting together a puzzle if they choose to look. It’s active participation. This also clears the game up of a lot of the cruft, such as cut scenes and other non-interactive elements. Not that cut scenes are necessarily bad, but they certainly do something to the tone of the game and that change of tone is not befitting of Dark Souls melancholy world. None of the Bosses give you a pre-bossfight speech. Only two optional bosses talk to you at all and the final boss doesn’t even have an intro cutscene. This does not necessarily mean the bosses are aimless and shallow. For example, we can learn that Queelag was using the second Bell of Awakening as a place to hunt adventurers to collect humanity for her dying, blight ridden sister. You can find the bottom of the world — a giant sea of ash with giant arch trees that support the world above it. In there you can find a large fledgling Dragon, pulling into question the accuracy of things said in the introduction as if it was a story told to you and not necessarily the truth. The world does not feel like it’s there for you — it seems like the answers are there, but you are simply not privy to them. Not out of spite, but because the player can only gather information that would naturally come to him. This helps paint a world that is beautiful, sullen and lonely.

Only one character, Kaathe, ever goes out of his way to illuminate the truth of the world to the player. His “Truth” though can be hard to swallow and possibly not even honest, but serves to call into question which of the games two endings are the good and bad ones. This game, which is derided for it’s shallow story and world have spawned numerous threads and conversations involving individuals nit picking every carefully chosen detail in the game to squeeze every ounce of knowledge they can out of this fantastical, dying world. Dark Souls tells it’s story in a way that is hard to emulate, yet so perfect for the medium of Video Games.

Online Elements

While the game stands without it’s online elements, they do add significantly to the game experience. Unlike Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls does not use a central server, but still has all of the features of it’s predecessor (just with more connection issues). Without ever even being alive, the transparent phantoms of other players can occasionally be see, fading into existence and either running off or getting killed before fading away again. You can look at blood stains to see how other players in an area died. When sitting at bonfires, you can the transparent aura of other characters who are playing at the same time. The two bells you have to ring in the game toll when other players close to your network(the ad-hoc network the game forms to make up for the lack of central server). You can also leave messages from from a pre-existing list of terms to try and give hints to others, telling them about ambushes, secret passages and suggested tactics for dealing for enemies. Even when not directly interacting with other players, the world feels like an occupied, haunted place.

The interactive elements are pretty good too. One gets a stone early on that allows the player to be summoned for co-op in exchange for humanity. Only human characters can summon (and can only summon two phantoms at a time), but if someone succeeds in helping someone else, the idea is that he can unhollow and then summon help of his own. Human players can be invaded by other players though (assuming they haven’t beaten the area boss yet), who will attempt to kill them for various rewards. Thus being able to summon help comes with the risk of PVP combats. Phantoms that summon and invade are likely around your level but cannot access their estus flask (though when the Host uses his flask he will heal any phantoms he summoned to help him). so the invader has to be skilled and have strong gear for his level to stand a chance. Fighting another player can be one of the biggest rushes in the game and, for an unprepared human player, one of the scariest.

There are covenants that the player can join that can help with both co-op and invading. Three of the Covenants are Co-Op based (Way of the White, Princess Guard and The Warriors of Sunlight). Not only do they tend to make you favor networks with other people of the same covenant (thus reducing invasions and facilitating PVP), successful PVPing can grant you access to new spells and equipment. For the PVP side of things, you have the Covenant of the Eternal Dragon, which allows players to partake in mutual PVP in exchange for dragon scales (used to level up the covenant and upgrade dragon weapons). By doing this, members of the covenant can earn items that allow them to convert their head and torso into that of a humanoid dragon. The Darkwraiths are a hard to join covenant that allows members to freely invade other players without using a normally limited item. By defeating their enemies, they gain humanity that they can turn over to their covenant in exchange for gear. The Blades of the Dark Moon allow players to invade the worlds of Sinners — players whom have invaded other games, betrayed covenants or murdered innocent NPCs. This allows players who don’t want to be jerks the ability to invade other games and feel like they’re delivering justice. They also receive a ring that, when warned, basically will randomly let them invade the world of players in ‘Dark Anor Londo’, an area that can only be accessed by killing one of the world’s Gods. The Forest Hunters have a similar mechanic. By wearing the appropriate ring, players may be summoned to defend a second of forest and can also bypass the usual “single invader” limit. The Gravelords (which unfortunately don’t work too well) can lay down a sign that will corrupt 3 game worlds, populating them with stronger enemies. If they kill the player of those worlds, the Gravelord collects a portion of their souls. If the player finds their soul sign, they can invade the Gravelord and attempt to murder him, thus ending the corruption of your world.

As such the game has countless ways for players to interact, but in this strange, impersonal way that is befitting of Dark Souls.

Criticisms and how the Souls games can Improve

First I’m going to talk about PvP and what is both great and bad about it. At this point, it is perhaps my favorite aspect of the game while also being heavily flawed. First off, despite all the stats the game has to offer, characters play mostly the same. Currently, levels could be discarded and the game could be built around equipment/spells. Unfortunately, while this method would be simplier, it is perhaps better to induce more character variation into the game. Many weapons are viable currently, but they all fit into a handful of classifications. Off the top of my head, Fast weapons, slow weapons, weapons that can attack while blocking and weapons with reach. Sometimes these things are combined (Spears for example can attack while blocking and have reach) but in short you deal with most of these problems the same way. Sure, you might have a trick or too for getting in against a spear user, but ultimately you get in and smack the shit out of your opponent. The game has another problematic element. Attacking is also not a very strong option! This game can be very turtlish, especially among competitive, level 120 1v1 pvpers. It’s much easier to wait for a mistake than to attack and ‘chip’ damage is usually insignificant (until you run their stamina down, break their guard and hopefully murder them). Boring games are created when inaction is the best strategy.

Most spells are not particularly useful either and also have the worst kind of balance (Does insane damage but shouldn’t reasonably ever hit) with a few exceptions. Most useful buffs in the game only increase damage output. No spells increase stamina regeneration, teleports, stun or allow you to move faster or to lay traps, or have any decent area denial (all the clouds are far too weak for that purpose) or basically any kind of spell that would be common in a competitive game. I could think of a million spells that would be super cool in the game and the only one that exists is Wrath of God — a fast cast, area of burst damage that does a lotta hurt. It’s rather ‘lame’ but has that ‘it’s so good it’s fun’ feel that a lot of spells need. I could go on forever describing spells that would have rocked in Dark Souls for PvP and PvE but they’re just not there, leading to a lot of saminess. Equipment is also pretty boring. A few novelty weapons are cool, but there are few interesting effects granted by equipment. You basically pick the weapons you want and pick armor to get as much poise as possible while keeping to the weight class you want. As such I never found much fun in the mutual PvP stuff. I think From Software was actively trying to discourage it, but that’s a fools game. Still, invasions are where it’s at for me. The host has a purpose — to get to the end. You have a purpose — to kill the host. He can heal and is probably well supported. You can’t heal, but probably have much better equipment and can create ambushes with the enemies. It’s the massive situation asymmetry that makes things shine.

That said, there is still too much variance in who you get matched up with. You cannot re-spec your stats and builds are easy to mess up. Since PVP players are going to know this better than new players, PVPers will have better stats for their level. An unaware player can be, strength wise, 10-20 level lower than what is appropriate for the invader. Also the level cap is absurdly high (level 711, compared to the level 1-200 most people get to). Invaders have no upperlimit on who they invade, just a lower limit, so invading a world with 3 max level characters and getting ganked is somewhat common. Now, in the multiplayer ecosystem of the game, you take your lumps with the gankers and get lucky with unprepared newbies and then a get a few fair fights, but that’s not OPTIMAL. The upgrade system isn’t optimal either. Weapons that scale with stats are outclassed by elemental weapons that are the same strength at any level. Why do any weapons not scale? Perhaps SOMETHING could not scale, but that should not be a common thing. All this allows is for invaders to have overpowered weapons well before their victims can. Now, this is necessary with how the game is now, but you could balance it in much better ways. Why can’t invaders heal? Why isn’t say, their health tied to how many phantoms their are? Or maybe them being able to heal is enough? Then you can remove the elemental weapons that dominate the sub-100 level range. The numbers could be crunched in so many other ways that aren’t as abusable and scale better with levels. When levels are the determining factor of who fights who, why does equipment matter so much more? It’s far from optimal and just barely works. When it works, it’s brilliant — a brilliance that eclipses any flaws the multiplayer has. This shows how much room this “Genre” has to grow. You can adapt to the players who want to do 1v1 while also enhaving PvE and invasion gameplay. You can improve the matchmaking and help players not ruin their characters and help equipment scale better off of your level. You can cap levels at a reasonable point that doesn’t lead to insane shenanigans and focus on a limit that forces interesting choices. By doing so you improve all aspects of the game — the guys who want to 1v1, the guys who want to invade, the co-op guys who can run interesting support spells or even the guys who are playing Solo. Limiting the levels also helps put players within reach of each other, maximizing the amount of players available to play with at any given time. The games that follow in Dark Souls footsteps have a lot of room to improve from the multiplayer component that that’s amazing.

The game also seems to have over-reached it’s budget and schedule. The Covenant system is somewhat broken and unfinished Rewards are limited and often too come quickly or far too late. Some covenants don’t even have rewards, or rewards after the first level. Gravelord BARELY works. Actually seeing powered up enemies due to a curse is super-rare. Some of the later areas, while architecturally interesting, are lacking in interesting enemy encounters Lost Izalith was clearly rushed, both in enemy placement AND the bed of chaos boss battle, which is perhaps the worst in the game. I also imagine that the Valley of Drakes was originally hoped to be a bigger area (possibly with a hellkite wielding a spear, like was pictured in many early screen shots). Demon’s Souls clearly had a lot of cut content. The Land of Giants (I wonder if it became the Tomb of Giants? Most probably, but I’m not sure). Every archstone was also probably intended to have an additional area. The game reduced it’s self a way Dark Souls couldn’t — with grace. Perhaps it was for the better to have those weak areas instead of no areas at all? I’m not entirely sure, though the 1.05 patch did smooth out the worst bits, making those sections at least somewhat worthwhile.

As wonderful as I find the story, I do sort of wish there was more direction and a little bit more “showing”. Not in the ‘hunting for clues’ way, but literal showing. Just the tiniest, most careful bit more, to just give a little be of cohesion to the game and allow for a few areas of closure. It is definitely that they were conservative with story elements, but they haven’t quite struck the perfect balance yet. Having to really examine the world to understand it is amazing, but the fact people think it doesn’t exist is a real tragedy. Just enough needs to be shown to help encourage players to look harder. They just need to know that something is there, waiting to be unearthed.

Most of Dark Soul’s flaws are very easy to get over. If the game play the game provides jives with you, you will probably enjoy even the worst segments. It’s faults instead point to a greatness that is yet to exist. Perhaps from From Software, perhaps from future clones like Dragon Dogma that might truly establish these conventions as a genre. If they do, it will be a victory for gaming in general.

Edit: E-W-G-F, a prominent Dark Souls youtuber wrote a nice rebuttel to some of my points on reddit. While some weren’t entirely applicable to what I meant, it’s all interesting. So please, give it a read.

This is going to be a situation where I just repost something I wrote in a comment. It’s a waste to leave it there, where it probably will never get replied to. Anyways the article is from, Grumpy Daddy where he writes about people being lazy parents about buying violent content for their kids and ignoring the clear age labels on the case. But by what merit are these age criteria established and why should we agree with them? Is it lazier to let them play violent video games, or trust some nebulous rating organization to dictate what is or is not moral for a kid to see? The comment I left on his Blog follows…

(also remember, if you read his article(which you should), he’s the Grumpy Daddy, so part of his rage is his shtick, so try and ignore some of the hyperbole)

We actually don’t have real rules for movies — not in the same way as alcohol and tobacco. Movie ratings have no legal merit or weight, it’s all self enforcement. Just sayin’.

Now, while lazy parenting is certainly a problem, I don’t think you paint this issue fairly at all. Granted, you are the Grumpy Daddy, so I’m ready to accept some hyperbole, but I think you’re putting far too much stock into what other people determine.

The MPAA rating system and the ESRB are not made up of brilliant child psychologists trying to carefully determine, with strong moral conviction, what is appropriate for what age group. It’s a bunch of people with a guideline and some opinions trying to avoid government regulation. While them supplying a content guideline is useful, who is to say they know more about how to raise their children than me or my parents? Is it okay for a 14 year old to watch the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where a beating heart is ripped out of a human being, but not okay for him to hear the word “Fuck” and see some breasts? Now, maybe they shouldn’t be watching the Temple of Doom either, but ultimately these ratings do not come from infallible moral authorities.

Same goes with alcohol, which also is not as clear cut as you make it sound. Many European (Italy and France I think, possibly among others) cultures commonly give some amount of wine to kids at a young age and it is legal to do this in a number of US states. Now giving your 12 year old a 6 pack of natty-ice and a copy of Mortal Kombat 9 to play over XBLA would clearly be a pretty outrageous thing to do, there is still a lot of moral wiggle room.

I know personally I grew up with a lot of media outside of my age range. Terminator 2 was one of my favorite movies in my early teens and I was playing Mortal Kombat 2 and 3 over the SNES modem service, XBand. I’d go to a friend’s house who would have various nudie games on his computer like Leisure Suit Larry. His mom was from England and they apparently don’t care as much about breasts as we do (apparently at the time, nude ads were frequently in British newspapers). My parents were invested in me, though. I grew up, going through Special Education with an undefined (and possibly non-existing) learning disability which required constant interaction from my mother to make sure I was developing in a healthy manner. None of my issues were ever behavioral or violence related. I was also a late reader, but video games helped, rather than hindered. They were an important part of my development and are also now game design is my trade.

… If I have a child, why should I think he is less capable of separating reality and fantasy than I was? Why should I think the MPAA or ESRB know perfectly well whats fit for my theoretical child or any child? So while I partially agree that there is a ton of lazy parents, I think you’re putting too much stock in the guidance of some non-government organizations (not that a government organization would necessarily be much better).

Also, is it worse to expose a child to violent images or deprive them of modern forms of social interaction? It’s hard to say and I could see it going either way. I know violent images didn’t turn me into a fuck-up (I was in special ed way before Mortal Kombat was around), but I know what stunted social development can do to a person and I did not like it one bit.

In short, all I’m saying is that this isn’t nearly as simple as you’re making it out to be.

As always, if I get an interesting reply, I’ll repost the discussion here.

So I was checking an old design forum I used to read. I see a post by an notoriously awful poster there. Now this guy isn’t INHERENTLY stupid, he’s like a smart numbers guy, but he has totally stupid, inflexible views on things. The threat was (and this is referring to competitive multiplayer games, fyi) “Why do so many games *CONTINUE* to have uncontested skill barriers to entry?” (so if you want, you could probably good the thread but it’s so not worth it). Now if you can’t parse what the question is, what’s being asked is “Why do games continue to have you do things that have nothing to do with your opponent?” If you’re arm wrestling, you’re skill check (Strenght) is competing with your opponent’s directly. If you say, golf, you are indirectly comparing skills. The question is also asked almost sarcastically. “WHY would they CONTINUE to do something THIS stupid?”

If you’re asking that question about something successful, you’re probably being the stupid one. You’re depriving your self of real information to act like your opinions on the matter are so amazingly correct and no one else ‘gets it’ or ‘understands it’. Feeling like ‘no one else gets it’ is a good sign that you’re thinking in an unreasonable way. The poster does not value uncontested skills or execution tests. He goes to refer to the parts that aren’t that as ‘the real game’ (…. says who?). He puts himself in this box where he cant’ understand why games succeed and games that, in his mind, should be popular, fail. PERHAPS IF HE ACTUALLY, REALLY, THOUGHTFULLY ASKED THE QUESTION HE’D GET SOMEWHERE! He’s so stuck in his tiny little box that he’s incapable of actually talking about game design in any real, useful sense.

Why DO competitive multiplayer games test skils like this? Well, there are a number of reasons. For the most part, people don’t want to play games where they feel like they’re just rubbing their brain against someone else’s brain to see which one is bigger. One of the ‘problems’ with contested skills is that it’s so easy to be denied the mental reward of success against a skilled opponent. Theoretically, when outclassed by your opponent, you don’t get any positive reinforcement. In a fighting game though, you get the reward of all the things you’ve been working on. “Hey, at least I hit my combo”. You also get to practice those things without needing another player. The more facets a player has to improve, the more a player is likely to continue. It’s hard to ‘hit a wall’ when you have many different ways to improve your play.

Now the important part of this, is you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing or even agree with how things are implemented. You can go “I wanna make games with nothing but contested skills” (or whatever your pet issue is), but you’re probably not so much doing things “the right way” as much as you are doing them in… a way! And if they succeed in their goal (or even some other goal by mistake), then thats all good. I know I wouldn’t want to play any game this guy would like — not because they’d necessarily be bad, but because that’s not where my interest lies. You can’t tell me the thing I deeply enjoy is somehow ‘wrong’ because it doesn’t embody the virtues you approve of. Well , you can do that (and I do it sometimes), but it has to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek or hyperbolic. If you put your tastes on a pedestal of purity and virtue, you only blind your self. Also, you gotta LEARN about the thing you wanna get rid of or add. How do you compensate for the removed element? Can you wiggle things in a way that allows you to leverage some of the advantages of that-thing-you-hate without embracing it? ASK GOOD QUESTIONS. If something you hate is successful, FIGURE IT OUT, or at least try. If your answer is seriously ‘people are stupid and blind and don’t get it’, then you are a hopeless fool. Even if you feel that way, you should at least be able to muster some sort of respectable answer, even if that answer is as shallow as ‘Strong branding, coupled by mediocre, comfortfood-like gameplay to retain the fanbase”. You can probably do a little better, but it’s something.

As an example, I hate Zynga and those kinds of social networking games. I don’t respect them. But damn, do they do their job well. I could vilify the audience for being fools, but all that does is make me a prick. Understanding how the leverage psychological hooks though is a USEFUL. You can use that information in ways that isn’t destructive. Do you know how well they have peoples attention spans measured and how crisp they have the timings of rewards on? Do you know the amount of metrics they gather to test this stuff? As awful as these games are as games, they are carefully crafted machines. So ask questions and try and give them a real, heartfelt answer — ESPECIALLY about things you don’t like. At the very least it will help you do the thing you like instead!

(side note: No TMT Tomorrow. Holidays and that. Maybe I’ll stream? Who knows.)

So my cool-ass music guy, Warg, is having trouble keeping up with the development of BE:P and we sorta both agree that he has way too much pressure on him. So Warg needs some help! I’m looking for some chiptune artists who can do authentic NES style stuff, like in famitracker. Warg has been writing in a mod format using ripped samples, but I’ll take whatever people are comfortable with, as long as they can get a Castlevania-ish vibe going. The more willing you are to collaborate, the better!

If you wanna help, send a demo of your work to kayinnasaki@gmail.com and I’ll get back to you. I can’t promise any sort of payment, but you will retain rights to any pieces you write and if the game does well, I’ll do my damnedest to try and compensate everyone who helps.

Featuring: Kayin, April, Patito, Eric, Ben, Flick, Smiler, Maggie

My sister is around, babbling incoherently about disney and the rest of us are babbling incoherently about disney porn. A web friend, Smiler also joins us and contributes a few comments. Topics include motion controls, Dark Souls, Competitive games and.. well, seemingly nothing surprising?
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Featuring: Kayin, April, Patito, Eric, Ben, Flick, Niko, Jimmy, Tyler

Another gosh darn crazy episode. We had a full house for a monday and also had Tyler Doak from Eternal Rival Studios. Tyler is a friend of mine who has been working on the manic brawler, Aces Wild.

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Recently Notch has tweeted about what happened with him and the Yogscast guys, which basically involved them apparently being assholes at MineCon. Now Notch might (though I really doubt it) be embellishing the truth, but even if he was, this would be an interesting topic anyways. So while on Twitter I could mostly just make a series of curt, 140 character tweets, here I can go into more details. Anyways…

The tweet from Notch that stood out to me was this…

And they claim they’re the reason minecraft is big and that we should thank them more than anyone else in the community. They’re total dicks

Now, I find this particularly interesting, because I got a lot of attention for I Wanna Be the Guy due to Lets Players Ultra J Man and Cloud…. but are they the reason IWBTG succeeded?

No, they’re not. Not exactly, anyways. If you make something good that’s spreading with word of mouth, and the game is fit for LPs, of course someone is going to LP it. A great new, unknown game creates potential opportunities for LPers and in turn, they create the necessary buzz for your work. I benefited from J Man and Cloud and I’m pretty sure they benefited from my work. It was Win Win. If they didn’t do it, someone else would have gotten the notoriety instead. If I didn’t make IWBTG, well, their are plenty of other games to play. It’s not always an even exchange, but at the end of the day, no one is beholden to anyone — this is a symbiotic relationship.

Yogscast has over a million youtube subscribers and they have ads. Clearly they’re doing well for themselves. But I refuse to believe they brought over a million views to Minecraft. Surely a lot of their success has to do with having minecraft to play…. but making videos while having over a million subscribers certainly creates positive buzz, even if every single one of those subscribers owned the game. Notch seems to understand this (or at least isn’t a dick) and Yogscast doesn’t.

So basically, if you’re a game maker, be happy if you get wonderful, funny and talented people LPing your game, and LPers, just be happy that games are being made that you can use to display your talents (be they gaming skills of comedy)! No one entity is the king of this ecosystem and acting otherwise is just being a dick.

Edit: Makaris has a good summery of the events that transpired after Yogscast had a chance to respond. Notch was probably just mostly talking out of his ass. I recommend clicking on the comments section.