Dark Souls: An Engine of Punishment
Videogames are meant to do several things for the player. They introduce players to new environments and pit them against foes of different sorts, whether those foes be game mechanics or time itself or physical antagonists. Videogames also introduce a story, or at the least, a purpose for playing, like killing enemies or exploring, or, at its simplest level, experiencing something you wouldn’t normally experience.
This and many other things were clearly considered by the developers at FromSoftware when developing their genre defining masterpiece, Dark Souls.
Dark Souls is the sequel to Demon Souls, a game popular for its incredible difficulty and unforgiving boss fights. It was very popular across seas, in countries such as Japan, but never gained as much traction in the U.S. market. The games subsequent entries faired far better and are now some of the crown jewels in action-RPG’s. But what makes Dark Souls such an incredible game, and how did the developers use the videogame as a medium to influence the player?
Where Dark Souls succeeds is that it is unapologetically made, at its core, to punish the player. It does this in several key ways, but overall, its crown achievement is the way in which it challenges the player by introducing systems that provide a whole new take on the worth of their in-game lives, especially when compared to the life systems of other games at the time, i.e. Call of Duty, etc.
This is different than other games because it challenges the player to put more value and stock into what they choose to do in the game, whether it be by mastering the challenging control scheme, the specific timing for parrying, health and item balance, or varied enemy patterns.
Overall, this still seems a little strange to be making a big deal over. So, it’s a hard game with difficult systems. Why would players want this?
To answer that question, several aspects of the game’s systems need to be further elaborated on. However, at the core of those systems is the same belief: reward for that punishment. The game was made brutally challenging on purpose, but not because of someone’s ability to rage quit. It makes the entire process of beating the game and mastering those systems that much more rewarding and thus dares the player to keep coming back, even when they fall just shy of finishing off a boss.
That being said, let’s get into some of the nitty gritty and evaluate some of the game’s design choices.
To Equip or Not Equip
One of the things that Dark Souls does so uniquely is that it challenges the idea that your gear is permanent. In other games, such as some titles from the Legend of Zelda series, you get an item, and then you have it for your entire playthrough. This isn’t the case in Dark Souls, at least not on the face of it. In Dark Souls, weapons have durability, and they break down over time. In later entries in the series, this system is even further elaborated on, because your weapon will break faster depending on what surface you strike. However, this isn’t the only thing that makes its weapons different than other games.
To explain the next part, some of the game’s lore has to be interpreted. More or less, you are an undead knight, soldier, or wizard looking to save the land of Lordran by killing your way to the top of the food chain and killing the mad king. The player gathers souls by killing enemies in the game, and certain powerful enemies, such as bosses, produce twisted or altered souls. These souls can be either spent outright to upgrade your character’s stats, such as Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, and so on, or they can be used to craft unique weapons and armor that the boss had.
Doesn’t seem too groundbreaking, though does it? Players are usually rewarded for killing a boss and can use that reward in differing ways, it’s true. Where Dark Souls differs, however, is that you can’t do more than one of these options. If you get, say, the Soul of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, the soul from the last boss of the game, you can choose to consume it for more currency, create a powerful greatsword or shield out of it, or make a gnarly piece of armor. You have to pick one, however, and you won’t be able to beat the boss again (or get those other rewards tied to him) until you play through the whole game and kick his ass a second time.
This leads directly into a second thing that Dark Souls does to punish the player, and that’s the idea of changing the game nearly every time you complete a playthrough.
New Game Plus..what?
The idea of new game plus itself was rather new at the time, though titles like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed had a mode similar to Dark Souls’. The concept of this is that once you beat a game, there’s new stuff to do in the subsequent playthroughs, like new armor or items to collect or some other completionist objective. So after beating the final boss one can restart the game from the beginning, where they can replay the game with all of the items and upgrades they had in their first run.
Where Dark Souls pushed the genre was that not only do you carry your equipment over from your previous playthrough(s), but everything gets MORE DIFFICULT. Enemies are harder, bosses have more health, and item placement in the world is different than before, so don’t expect to pick up that Gold Pine Resin you got in Undead Burg in the same spot you found it on your first playthrough. In some instances, there are also just new enemies, or more enemies, to really push the player to rethink how they want to play the game to win.
YOU DIED
The most memeable and noteworthy addition to this game series is the final aspect of Dark Souls I feel needs explicit mention. All of these previous points can lead to a challenging game for sure, but what makes the game not just difficult, but fun? Surely some people see the series as a form of self-masocation, or nothing short of torture. The game asks a lot of you at any given time, but this alone wouldn’t amount to a fun experience.
This player punishment has to be coupled with player reward, down to the very systems of the game. Dark Souls strikes a good balance between these two in several areas, but one example is by making your currency another level of difficulty. When a player dies, whether it’s accidentally rolling off a cliff or getting stabbed by the stupid giants in Anor Londo, the player gets a message in broad red letters: “YOU DIED”. Upon seeing this, a dismal chord plays as the character goes through a death animation and enemies continue to pummel your corpse. When the player dies, they lose every single soul they’ve collected up until that point, and can only recover them if they go back and actually interact with the spot where they died, which forces players to go toe-to-toe with the enemies that killed them over and over if they have to. Not only does this utilize world feedback to entice the player into retrying the game’s challenges, but pushes the player to overcome them.
Not only this, but, if you die twice without recovering those souls, they’re gone: FOREVER. You will start your next life at the last save point, as you did when you first died, and have to fight your way back, with not a single soul in your inventory (save for boss and enemy souls you haven’t “redeemed” yet).
This ties back to that core loop of punishing the player. It wouldn’t be as fun for the player if their death had no consequence. By changing things like this, the player’s life has more value, and as a mechanism of engagement, creates a deeper investment in the game as a whole (along with the other notable systems I mentioned). If there’s a game that ever had this idea of risk v reward perfectly balanced, it’s safe to say that that game is Dark Souls.
Through the Valley of Death
I remember when I beat one of the hardest bosses in the game, Onrstein and Smaugh (yes, that’s fighting two boss level characters at once!) and literally screaming for joy at my television. How on Earth could I enjoy dying over and over and over again, just for an in-game weapon? Because FromSoftware crafted the game to make me want them, because they’re unique, expensive, and overall just freakin’ cool.
Whether it was the decision to make players choose how to spend their rewards, or punishing them for failing, or even increasing the difficulty AFTER the final boss fight concludes, it’s clear that FromSoftware used the genre to its fullest extent to engage players. A player engagement of this magnitude wouldn’t even be feasible for other mediums. It’s true that movies can challenge your way of thinking, and books and music to boot, with the latter two having you physically pacing through them and deciding where to begin and end, just as videogames do. But books or movies don’t have you controlling the character’s actions, and even in most videogames the actions of your character don’t have as dire of consequences as in Dark Souls. That is why Dark Souls is so beloved by its fan base, myself certainly included.
You can catch me always going back to Lordran, Anor Londo, New Londo (I hate the ghosts in that place), or just being mesmerized by the bonfire and music swells at Firelink Shrine, because at the end of the day, FromSoftware created a uniquely challenging and brutal action-RPG that pushes a player to overcome adversity and keep trying no matter how many times they lose. Oh, and that’s just the first one. Let me know when you get to Prince Lothric in Dark Souls III…ugh.
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