Death, Dark Souls and I

Note: This was a school assignment so the text formating is done to match that, but I hope you still enjoy it nevertheless. It's about my relationship to games and I have used Dark Souls to reflect certain things I enjoy greatly about games.


I am very open minded when it comes to games (and other stuff too but lets just concentrate on the game part). I play tons of different games and always try to analyze them as I play but I usually do it from a very neutral standpoint, thinking what is so good about this game for its intended target audience. I obviously think why I like this game I'm playing right now but I don't delve very deep in to it, because the chemical reactions in my brains already tell me I'm liking or hating this game and inside my head it's obvious why so I don't put too much deep analysis in to it, so this was a very interesting subject to write on.

Dark Souls is an action RPG, developed by From Software (one of the worst studio names ever) and published by Namco Bandai. It is a spiritual successor to Demon's Souls and the only reason why Dark Souls didn't live on to become Demon's Souls 2 is probably because Sony owns the copyright for that name. Dark Souls is known for its high difficulty that is not actually that high, but also not adjustable and it gets higher every time the player completes the game. The game also definitely does not hold the players hand which was a new experience for a lot of players. The game only teaches the basic controls and then drops a huge demon on the player and that is the only tutorial in the game.

I picked Dark Souls for this essay mainly because I wanted to pick a game that had enough content so I wouldn't run out of things to write before reaching at least that fourth page. Another big reason why I picked this game was definitely the fact that Dark Souls is one of the best games released in the last decade and it was a very new and fresh experience for me. I think it's also very interesting how the game systems are laid out in the game.

The first time I played Dark Souls was on its launch day and it took me only an hour to get frustrated and put the game to my shelf. I didn't think the game was bad, but it was clear that I would need to soak a lot of time in to it to get the best experience and immerse myself in to the game and at that moment I just didn't have the time. Going by this I could say that the game doesn't offer much incentive to really get in to it at the start, only thing is the cool CGI opening scene. My main incentive to get back to the game however was the character progression. I had played a lot of World of Warcraft (7 years) and I always enjoyed making my own character better and cooler by obtaining new loot (I however think Diablo series sucks ass). I had seen screenshots of player characters wearing extremely diverse and awesome looking armor that I too wanted to obtain, so judging by that I am very attracted to a certain aesthetic aspect and collecting in games like that.

Another thing that had me very attracted to the game was the fact that in the magical world of internet, the game had been flagged as extremely difficult. I consider myself an achiever because I play games not only to analyze them and know things about them, but to get better at them and push myself to better performances so Dark Souls sounded like a game that I really wanted to complete to get better and also to get recognition in the internet gaming community where I hang out at. I guess this could be looked at as a way of self expression, because I wanted to impress other players and tell them that my gaming skills are above average because I have completed what people call the hardest game in the market. This also tells me that I highly enjoy applying my gaming skills gathered over time as Pierre-Alexandre Garneau explains it in his Gamasutra article (Fourteen forms of fun).

A big thing I found myself enjoying in Dark Souls is the thrill of danger. The game world is very dark and unpredictable and the game gives the player zero hints about what is up ahead. Around 90% of the time I found myself walking forward very slowly and being very tense since I knew pretty much anything could happen at any moment. This way I found out that keeping information from the player is also a very effective way of immersing player in to the world, but there would have to be some other motivation for the player to keep playing then.

A lot of the areas in Dark Souls are laid out with traps but it should be mentioned that even though unpredictable, they were never unfair. I could always see them coming, sometimes on shorter notice and sometimes on a bit longer, but I could always see where they were laid out. Those traps were also one thing that kept me moving forward very slowly, which definitely helped in deepening the thrill of danger. That thrill is present all the time in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls the player loses all his currency (souls) when killed so the fear of getting killed is much higher than in other games, because in other games you can just load a checkpoint and try again, but not in Dark Souls.

One of the biggest thing I enjoyed about Dark Souls were the boss fights, because they gave me a variety of different pleasures. The first one is the aesthetic side of those battles. The boss' graphical design is done so that it invoked fear and excitement in me at the same time. The boss enemies are usually huge, from around 10 to 50 times larger than the player character. Even the normal enemies in the game will kill the player very fast if not prepared properly, so when a 50 times larger enemy attacked me, it was terrifying at first.

Depending on the boss, the battle also has a certain feeling to it. For example the boss "gaping dragon" is a huge, terrifying and very brutal looking foe (it's a dragon with its chest ripped open and the ribcage bones just sticking out of there) where as "great grey wolf Sif" is in a way a sad battle, because the player needs an item from a grave that the great wolf is guarding, so in a way the wolf is an unnecessary casualty and I found the fight especially sad when near the end of the battle as the wolf starts to limp and move much slower. I think my reaction to this fight was much because I like all sorts of furries, so I'm sure a player that doesn't like them would be just thrilled to hack the wolfs face off and grab the item. The encounter music also helped a lot in creating this sad atmosphere.

Gaping Dragon

All the bosses in the game employ different attacks and tactics against the player and while there is some need for reactions and such, what I found the best in these encounters gameplay wise was that deep down Dark Souls is almost like a puzzle game. The trick to all the boss fights is to figure out the boss AI and find a hole in its tactics and not so much about rushing the boss and mashing attack and dodge buttons. Where the reactions and overall skill come in after that is taking advantage of these holes. I found this sort of fighting very satisfying, because it had the fun of puzzle solving, applying my own personal skills and the feeling that I as the player character was completely in control of the encounter after I had figured out the patterns. After figuring out the pattern I literally just could not get hit anymore by the boss and I found this extremely satisfying.

Adding to the thrill of danger and excitement was definitely the way the bosses were suddenly "introduced" to me. Before a boss, there is always a fog door that the player has to walk through and after that the encounter instantly just starts. Since I hadn't seen any of the bosses before it was always extremely exciting to see what kind of a boss was waiting for me behind the fog door. The thing with the doors though is that they also work for splitting the game area into parts to narrow down the area where players can fight each other, so there is always at least one "fake" fog door, where there actually isn't a boss encounter after. I found it adding an extra layer of excitement for me since I could never know if there was a boss behind the door or not, so that one second it takes to walk through the door, it was such a huge adrenaline rush for me.

To add still another layer to the thrill of danger part, I should probably mention the players versus player gameplay in Dark Souls. In short, players are able to invade other players worlds and kill them and take all their souls. I think it's a great system and works very well. It also definitely adds to the excitement of exploring the world when I suddenly get a message saying "Player X has invaded your world!" and suddenly the area feels completely different, because I have no idea where the opposing player has spawned, he could come at me from anywhere.Another big motivation for me in the boss fights was also the character progression. 


I was always super excited to get to a new boss because I knew that killing the boss would get me a huge load of souls (as mentioned before, currency, but also used in leveling up) that I could use to get my character to higher level and then tackle new bosses, so that was a very good hook for me. The best part is it didn't even stop after I had completed the game, because the game just instantly threw me in to new game+ where the boss statistics had been scaled up and I could keep my equipment and current level and fight against all the bosses all over again! Yay! Even better, in new game+ the bosses dropped even more souls. Each boss also dropped an unique soul that could be used to craft unique equipment so that was a big thing for me as well because it meant bigger and heavier weapons.

Tied to the character progression is also the games crafting system. As I mentioned at the start, getting better and badasser (is that even a word? Nope I don't think it is) armor and weapons is a huge motivator for me. On one of the bosses I saw what the game calls "demon machete" and that thing was huge, so I decided I want to use one of those. The best part was that the game let me. That hunk of iron was two times the size of Clouds buster sword and I felt very satisfied having it equipped. Turns out the sword sucked because it was so slow, but because I was so attracted to the aesthetic side of equipment, I still would keep it with me and use it from time to time.

What my character ended up wearing

I'm a very big guy in real life and I think that other things definitely reflect in to my character creation and progression not only in Dark Souls but in RPG's generally. I'll just concentrate on the game at hand though. The character I created was a barbarian, a nickname I got back in the day when I jumped from World of Warcraft to Age of Conan for a while. Barbarian also had the highest strenght of all the classes and I always make heavy melee based characters because that's a style of fighting I can relate to. For a while I was thinking of going with a rogue class and concentrating on agility because I sometimes with I would be very nimble and agile in real life but then I just go back to my heavy melee, because I feel I'd rather have good defense and destroy thing with one heavy hit, rather than jump around like a ninja. So in a weird way I first think what would be more useful in real world (if guns didn't exist) and then in a weird way I put myself in to the game world through the character creation and I had lots of fun with it.

Overall I feel that once I got in to Dark Souls its biggest and best thing for me was how immersive the game and its world is. A lot of this had to do with me putting myself in to the game as that character and being always on my toes for traps and such, but also the aesthetic side of the world. I thought the background story and lore were very interesting but the game was being a dick and basically just didn't reveal any of it, which was a bit disappointing because I enjoy stories and would have liked to get to know the Dark Souls universe better. I had lots of fun doing exploration in the world and trying to find out bits and pieces of the background story from NPC's. The areas in the game are also very varied so I greatly enjoyed exploring them just for their aesthetic aspect.