- The Dark Souls of Armored Core*
This is the last in the very long line of PS2 titles, and thankfully it’s a “real one” unlike Nine Breaker, but other than that I’m running out of things to say about them individually, mostly because From was running out of things to do with them. Like the last few entries, they’ve added a few parts, tweaked some mechanics and adjusted some stats to change the game in increasingly imperceptible ways, but honest to god, by far the most significant thing is that they’ve finally replaced the clunky old UI for assembling your AC that had been more or less unchanged since the original game with a much better one. It’s actually a really nice change, but it’s not much to write about.
So instead let’s take a detour into something I was curious about when I first embarked on this journey. Nowadays everybody knows FromSoftware as “The Dark Souls company”, and the world has fallen madly in love with every little intricacy and idiosyncrasy of the Souls games. I wonder, though, how many of these ‘Souls-isms’ are actually unique to those games, and how many are actually just ‘From-isms’? To attempt to answer that, let’s take a look at a few similarities I’ve noticed:
Look familiar? If nothing else, we can say that someone over there clearly has a deep and abiding love of spreadsheets. The similarities go beyond the abundance of statistics and the way they’re displayed though. One of the peculiarities of Dark Souls that caught my eye when I first played it was that someone over there clearly despises the role of dice in RPG combat, because they’ve gone to great lengths to eliminate any randomness in outcomes from several concepts that are traditionally settled via RNG even in most action games: damage variance, stun, status effects and critical hits. It stuck out to me because I, too hate the idea of having my fate be determined by a pair of virtual dice, and so this is a design aesthetic that I really admire. What you probably won’t be surprised to learn is that half of these systems come from Armored Core and the other half are just further extensions of the same philosophy. Dark Souls’ way of handling status effects, (which you may notice popping up in lots of other recent games, because it’s really smart) is ripped almost verbatim from AC. Likewise, the (in)famous poise stat is a more robust version of an AC stat called ‘stability’. And getting away from the elimination of randomness, the concept of differing weight classes with tradeoffs between protection, utility and mobility is one that should be very familiar to players of either series.
Or how about the saving system? Rather than the manual systems of the past, or the “modern” at the time system of regularly spaced checkpoints, Demon’s Souls aggressively saved at every available opportunity and would chide you for turning the game off without first selecting the option to save and quit from the menu, all to ensure that every time you booted up your console, the game world would always be exactly as you left it, or as close to it as was practically possible. At the time it seemed like a very forward thinking way to handle saving, leaving players completely free of the responsibility of having to think about save management while also preventing them from abusing saves to subvert the game’s design, but without the usability pitfalls of manually placed checkpoints (“How long has it been since the last checkpoint?” / “How close am I to the next one?”). But did you know that Demon’s Souls wasn’t the first time they attempted such a system? Way back in 2004, Armored Core: Nexus tried something very similar. It even complains at you if you quit without saving! Unfortunately for From, the realities of the way the PS2 handled memory cards would’ve made constant autosaving (or really any saving outside of the player’s direct control) impractical, leaving them powerless to stop any player who wanted to subvert the system by simply turning off their console if things didn’t go their way, making the whole thing kind of quaint. Still, it shows that the idea had been floating around the studio for quite a while.
There’s also the matter of the controls. Many first time players of a Souls games are initially put off by its unconventional control scheme, putting attacks on the shoulder buttons instead of the traditionally used face buttons. It has a certain inherent intuitiveness due to the way it maps actions performed by the character’s right hand to buttons pressed by the player’s right, and vice versa, but players who were used to jamming on the face buttons to attack were in for a bit of an adjustment period. Anybody who had been using Armored Core’s “new” control scheme for the past 5 years would’ve felt right at home though, because it’s the exact same paradigm. Dark Souls extends the idea by adding additional actions for each hand to its corresponding trigger, but the core idea unmistakably arose from the same school of thought that came up with a way to “modernize” Armored Core in the first place.
Oh, and then there’s this from the original Armored Core:
But that’s just an amusing coincidence… Or is it? (it is.)
So there you have it: a loose assortment of trivia that nonetheless shows a common thread of predilections and ways of solving problems among the people who made these games. The two series may be very different in some ways, but neither of them could’ve come from anywhere else.
Before they started focusing on projects with massive Dark Souls sized budgets, FromSoftware (or From Software as they used to call themselves before they got self conscious about their goofy ass name) was a very prolific developer, releasing a ton of games across a variety of genres, so it can be tough to pin down any one common aspect between all of them and call it a house style, but if I were to pick one, I’d say it’s an unwillingness to compromise. From’s culture seems to engender a focus on a particular vision for each game, and any conventions or standards that get in the way of that vision are immediately bulldozed over without a second thought, even if they might inconvenience players. Where other developers might balk at the idea of requiring players to join or form an online team before they can even participate in a game like Chromehounds or the latest Armored Cores, From seemingly doesn’t even think twice about it, because to do otherwise would be to compromise their vision of a persistent, dynamic online war. Likewise, they would gladly force you to fight an invading black phantom in Dark Souls, even going so far as to remove your option to exit the game to do so. Or maybe if they were to make a local only coop game that is almost impossible to play by yourself… I’d call that a very FromSoft move.
*Not really
