The subtle genius of Dark Souls

Apostolos Piperis
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read
A screen you’ll be seeing a lot of…

Have you ever, while playing any of the Souls games, had a feeling of genuine distress, being loaded with souls from a distant farming spot, desperately trying to reach the safety of a bonfire? I think it’s safe to assume every player has had that moment. Whether you are a veteran of the series, or new player who just picked up the game literally hours ago, you have encountered a situation where the journey to the nearest bonfire seemed hopeless. You were low on HP, healing items and were faced with a horde of mobs. Inevitably, you died. And on the journey back to recover said souls, you died again. All those souls, all your blood, sweat and tears gone. Vanished. Like they never existed to begin with. That pushover, usually, of an enemy, had single handedly erased all of your last couple of hours’ worth of grinding. And then, you took a break, got up from your chair or sofa and wondered to your self “why do I keep playing this game? It’s unfair!” But so is all of life. These games reward patience and caution over everything. Aggressive play styles are usually punished and only the most skilled of players can keep up with these relentless game mechanics when going in blind, while most are punished for it. Which is something that happens in real life as well.

There are times when you believe you have “gotten gud”, as they say in the Dark Souls community. You stop being as careful as you were one hour ago, when you hadn’t figured out the trick to clearing out an area or facing a certain type of enemy. So, when you return to recover some lost souls, you decide to farm some more before recovering them, thinking that you couldn’t die, because you knew the enemy’s attack patterns. You let your greed run rampant, you stopped being careful and you died. You died and lost everything you worked for. Despite having more than you need to upgrade your stats, or maybe buy an item, you decided to gather some more souls or kill a certain enemy in order to see if an item you have been trying to farm will finally drop. And so, comes the realization that this game is unforgiving. It will take everything from you without remorse and guilt. And you will be left wondering why you keep investing time and effort on such a game, a game that crushes you into a pulp without a second thought.

Thus, continues your adventure, driven by an unexplained urge to keep playing, a silent conviction to prove that you are indeed stronger that the game. You progress to the next area and, after wandering about for a good while and devising the best route to the boss, from the nearest bonfire, without taking damage, it is time to finally enter the mists, where you’ll fight said boss. Where you’ll die. A lot. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary at this point, is it? And so comes a point in time after heading to your certain death over and over again, when you are confident that you have learned all of the boss’s attack patterns. And while that is indeed true, you have forgotten an extremely important detail: the boss’s Phase 2, a transformation it undergoes after its’ health bar drops below a certain threshold. And so, alongside its’ appearance, its’ patterns of attack change as well. Congratulations! You are officially stuck fighting an enemy different from the one you were facing one light attack before.

The new enemy before you is faster, does more damage and is way more aggressive. So, instinctively, you fall back, focusing on dodging and defending, while waiting for the perfect moment to strike. But after a while, you realize that this tactic isn’t going to pan out. The intervals where the boss is on “cooldown” between attacks don’t create a large enough time window to deal substantial damage, not unless you’re somehow over-leveled and over-geared, which isn’t likely to be the case on your first playthrough. While you certainly could follow through with this tactic, it has its’ shortcomings. You can sit back for as longs as it takes for an opportunity to present itself and chip away some damage, but, to be frank, most players aren’t patient enough to do that. Plus, all bosses deal multiple times the damage of the corresponding area’s other mobs, so, especially early in the game, you can’t sustain your health in prolonged fights, seeing as that your estus supply is relatively low. In addition to that, the finicky dodge system sometimes allows enemies to land hits that shouldn’t have landed.

Which is why, unless you are using cheesy speedrunning strats, you will die again and again, facing a berserking boss with devastating attacks that drain half or more of your health bar. Some many (or few) deaths later, you will observe an irregularity. A blind spot or a pattern previously unnoticed, which will allow you to punish some attacks or deal free damage.

Said observation will allow you to finally defeat the boss. And what follows that is an overwhelming feeling of relief and joy, the feeling of your hard work and determination paying off. And this is where the subtle genius of the Dark Souls games hides. This relief felt from the overcoming of a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is what fuels the progression of the game. It’s the climactic finale to a series of heart wrenching, depressing and borderline masochistic events, delivered in such a way that the positive feedback you receive for defeating an area boss vastly outweighs the negative feedback that builds up during your progress through said area and failing to defeat the boss numerous times.

Because at the end of the day, most, if not all humans prefer positive to negative feedback. If presented with the same amount of positive and negative feedback, if feedback could be quantified, the positive would make that person happier, than the negative would make him/her sad, with “happy” and “sad” being a generalization of all the complex positive and negative emotions a person feels. The way that positive feedback is delivered, in few and far in-between instances is the core, the foundation where the whole game is built on. The concept of rewarding the player with not that important, in the grander scale of things, victories that in the context of previous defeats seem huge, is a great way to keep the player engaged. It’s the game quietly respecting the player’s intelligence that keeps him going, makes him refuse to give up. Because the player knows that it isn’t a case of an otherwise relentless game making an exception and letting him win. And he feels proud of that. So he continues his journey, achieving victories and facing defeats. Mostly defeats, though…

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Essays about whatever I feel like writing.

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