Dark Souls contains greatness but isn’t great

What other games should take from Dark Souls (and what they should leave)

A few months ago, I loaded up Dark Souls for the first time and made my way through several of the bosses. After about 15 hours, though, I ended up walking away. I might have gone back to the game, but I've since then seen most of the game played on Giant Bomb’s stream, and without the urge to find out what’s around the next corner, I just can’t motivate myself to devote the time. Still, I feel like I've played and seen enough to give my assessment, which is this: while I definitely hope to see elements of Dark Souls influence future games, I don’t think the game is so great as many people claim.

There certainly is stuff I like. The creature, armor, and weapon designs mostly start from Western fantasy tropes, but the Japanese spin makes them feel fresh again, and the game’s unflinchingly bleak world conveys a real sense of doom and impenetrability. I’m skeptical that the mysteries of the Dark Souls world add up to sensical answers, but the art and setting do fuel the player’s imagination (which is a rare trick these days).

I also really like that the environments are arranged with surprising points of interconnection, giving the game an exciting sense of exploration. My best Dark Souls moments came when I unlocked doors or went down elevators only to find myself back in an earlier area of the game.

The gameplay itself complements that sense of exploration. Unlike most RPG’s, which dump a million random stat variants of monsters and items on the player, Dark Souls takes the quality-over-quantity approach. Each monster has its own unique behaviors, each item has its own unique properties, and the player is trusted to experiment and discover these things for themselves. In general, the game gives the player very little overt guidance, and by foregoing the hand-holding typical of games of recent years, Dark Souls preserves a critical sense of player discovery.

At its core, Dark Souls is structurally a Metroidvania game—or a Zelda game, if you insist that Metroidvanias must be side-scrollers. Whatever you call it, Dark Souls adds an important twist to the formula: traditionally in these games, the combat obstacles that block the player’s progress are single-solution challenges with binary prerequisites—the player either has the right tool to defeat a boss character or they don’t. In Dark Souls, almost none of the bosses have single solutions or strict prerequisites for success. Certain mixes of player stats and equipment make a particular boss much easier, but a specific piece of equipment is rarely necessary. In fact, pretty much all of the bosses can be defeated by brute force if the player simply executes really well. By presenting the player with many solutions to each obstacle, again, Dark Souls avoids leading the player by the nose, and this greatly enhances the player’s sense of experimentation and discovery.

So that’s the good stuff. Now for the bad stuff:

Bad inventory

First off, the game has a really horrible inventory interface. For a game that’s largely about experimentation, the game sure makes it painful to change out your equipment. I often found myself reluctant to try different equipment just because I didn't want to bother using the inventory.

Bad controls

The game also just has a badly designed control scheme. In particular, the kick and jump attack seem deliberately designed to screw up the player: because of the finicky timing with which you must simultaneously push up on the left stick and hit the attack buttons, the moves often fail to register, such that your character does the wrong attack; even worse, it’s not uncommon to accidentally perform the kick or jump attack when you just mean to do the regular attacks. The result is that the player quite often does something totally different than what they intended and thereby end up missing their attacks or horribly vulnerable to enemies. It’s one thing for the player to fail a hit or dodge because of imprecise aim or timing: it’s another for the player character to do two completely different actions based on a few milliseconds difference in coordination between the player’s hands.

Not only does this sort of execution error induced by bad controls feel like garbage, as a way of making the game difficult, it’s just cheap. I’m sure some players get really good at performing Dark Souls’ kick and jump attack timing reliably, and so in that sense, you might say the controls are just another kind of challenge. But just because something is difficult and not everyone can do it equally well doesn't make it a good challenge. Why not make the player repeatedly mash the attack buttons to swing their weapon? Why not make the player balance plates on their head? That would make the game harder, and some players would be better at it than others…but of course, it would be stupid and exhausting.

I believe games should really only have difficult controls by virtue of giving the player fine-grained control. It’s OK to require the player to swing a weapon precisely, but don’t require the player to hit buttons precisely just to swing a weapon. The challenge I want as a player is to master controlling the game, not controlling the controls.

Bad hit boxes

Exacerbating these frustrations with the controls, hits in Dark Souls often fail to connect when they look like they should. It’s fairly common to swing your weapon and miss what looks like a hit thanks to the game’s murky rendering quality, janky camera system, and sometimes questionable collision boxes. (To be sure, these errors sometimes benefit the player…but it still doesn't feel right.) What Dark Souls seems to be going for in its combat is a real sense of momentum and weight that makes hits seem brutal (like the scene in Time Bandits where the Minotaur whacks the shit out of Sean Connery). I really like the idea of a game going for that feel, but every time a swing doesn't connect like it should, Dark Souls breaks that feeling in a horribly jarring way.

RPG guessing

Aside from its combat, Dark Souls also exacerbates a problem common to RPG’s. In a lot of RPG’s, the RPG elements amount to just distracting noise and inconsequential busy work. That certainly isn't the case in Dark Souls. However, at their best, RPG elements challenge the player to make informed decisions; at their worst, RPG elements punish the player for incorrectly guessing, and this is what often happens in Dark Souls.

Even if the game bothered to explain what its stats mean and what its items do, the player would have no way of knowing what stats they should invest in because the player can’t possibly know what roadblocks they’ll encounter later. Consequently, the Dark Souls player more often makes guesses rather than choices; the game then punishes the player for incorrect guesses with frustratingly difficult combat encounters. Having players make decisions with irrevocable consequences has its place, but it doesn't fit with Dark Souls’ long-form structure, opaque mechanics, and unforgiving difficulty. It ends up that the only way to really make informed choices in Dark Souls is to restart the game multiple times or consult the internet, both of which are extremely lame options:

• Long-form games these days don’t expect you to restart from the beginning for good reason: it’s a cheap, outdated trick to prolong play time, a way for developers to stretch the limited amount of unique content they produce.
• While I’m sure some players enjoy the communal experience of discovering each new Souls game together, I’d rather just play a game for myself. If I wanted the internet to play my games for me, I’d just watch long plays on Youtube.

Boss runs

Lastly, I think Dark Souls has a serious structural problem. The challenge of the game mostly revolves around its ‘boss runs’, wherein the player must trudge from a bonfire respawn point to fight a boss character. In my experience of playing Dark Souls and watching others play it, the common pattern emerges that players master the run to each boss after a few tries but then get hung up trying to defeat the boss itself. Effectively, the player is not only punished for failure with the tedium of replaying an already mastered challenge, they’re made to artificially wait several minutes in between each attempt at the boss. In a game that should be about studying the enemies and experimenting with different loadouts and tactics, the player’s process of observing and iterating is unnecessarily frustrated. If Dark Souls wants players to master difficult challenges, it should focus on making the challenges actually difficult instead of just artificially hindering the player from practicing them. While the proponents of Dark Souls insist that lengthy boss runs add tension to the boss fights and thus make the player’s victories more satisfying, the game wouldn't need to punish players with tedium to get that same effect if it simply made the boss fights themselves more difficult.

The other thing Dark Souls should do is let players somehow prove their mastery of a boss run and thereafter be excused from doing it over and over again. The solution that springs to mind is to let players create a bonfire immediately before bosses; by requiring the player to have some number of Estus flask charges to create these bonfires, the game could still effectively test that the player has mastered the run and not merely scraped by.

However the problem gets redressed, the important idea is to not checkpoint many strung-together moderate challenges but instead to checkpoint each individual challenge while increasing the difficulty of the challenges to compensate. Checkpoints don’t necessarily have to make a game easy: done properly, checkpoints simply let players focus on the content they haven’t yet mastered instead of forcing players to replay the same mastered content over and over again.

Sadly, for all its innovations in other respects, the Souls series suffers from the typical Japanese penchant for artificially stretching out limited game content. As a trick for getting players to play the same content over and over again, boss runs aren't nearly as egregious as the endlessly redundant combat in a typical JRPG—but they’re in the same moral territory.

Future imitators

Be clear what I’d like to see from future Souls games and their future imitators. The core innovation, the part of Dark Souls that really works, is the Metroidvania structure that discards traditional binary prerequisites to overcome obstacles. Dark Souls doesn't have Zelda’s open-world-on-rails feel because the player needn't always retrieve specific weapon X to defeat specific boss Y. In fact, the Dark Souls player will more often than not find that just about any approach will overcome the obstacles (though some approaches will certainly be easier than others). By accommodating many possible approaches to its challenges, Dark Souls gives the player a unique sense of agency: a sense that the player isn't expected to simply insert conveniently placed keys into conveniently placed holes—a sense that the game world is more than just a pre-packaged problem awaiting the player to solve it by cutting along a dotted line.

Unfortunately, Dark Souls also burdens players with no small dose of tedium, and despite what Dark Souls fans claim, that tedium is not the inextricable cost of the game’s core virtues. The successors to Dark Souls needn't force players to repeatedly replay mastered content, and they needn't rely upon janky controls to make combat difficult. The successors can have sensible interfaces that remove the tedium from experimentation, and they can explain their stat numbers and status icons.

Dark Souls deserves credit for reasserting the value of challenge—something which had been largely neglected in recent years—but Dark Souls isn't always challenging in the right ways.