Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Yep, it’s been more than a month since my last post. One reason is that I went on vacation for two weeks in October. The other is that I’ve been playing Dark Souls. And anyone who knows anything about gaming can tell you that finishing this game (for a first-timer at least!) takes a lot of time. But yes, I beat Dark Souls. Some preliminary notes:

• I’ve been wanting to play this forever. But Steam has region restrictions on sales of this game. I finally discovered that GamersGate would sell the game to me here in Malaysia and it activates on Steam. Lesson: regional restrictions on digital goods are stupid in an online world.
• The game looked shockingly ugly when I first started it up. I was very dismayed. Then I went digging and found the mod that unlocks the game’s resolution. Wit it installed, the game looked awesome. Dark Souls is unplayable without the mod. Get it. Also I played it with an Xbox 360 controller. The very idea of playing this with a mouse / keyboard horrifies me.

These problems aside, this game is truly fantastic and more than lives up to its reputation. I have often heard it called the best game of its generation and I can certainly see why this may well be true. On Broken Forum, the main gaming discussion forums that I frequent, this is the only game for which a dedicated subforum exists. I think the first question everyone asks is: is it really as hard as everyone says it is? And this question ties in closely with why it’s so good, so let’s go into this.

My answer would be that on the whole, this game isn’t really all that difficult. However it does feel very difficult, especially at the beginning, and there are a number of reasons why this is so:

•  Dark Souls deliberately flouts common videogaming conventions for the RPG and action game genres. For example, from years of videogaming, we’ve been trained to expect some downtime after each difficult boss battle. This is when we get to collect our reward, catch up on a bit of lore, engage in some sightseeing and so forth, so it should be perfectly safe to venture forwards just after beating a boss, right? To that, Dark Souls says: nope, we may or may not give you downtime but if you go in expecting downtime you will die. The first time it happens, you feel cheated, especially since this is a game with a death penalty. That’s so unfair, that’s not how games are supposed to work, you think. But once you get over it, it opens up so many more possibilities. Now you really don’t know what to expect so there’s real tension all the time and everywhere. It’s just like how a good movie will break normal conventions to continually surprise the viewer.
• There’s very little hand holding and nothing scales to your character. This means that completely new players will have no idea where to go and will be continually killed as they explore and learn where to find enemies that are level appropriate. Again, this is in stark contrast with current RPG conventions which scale encounters to your level so that it doesn’t matter where you go. It’s also up to you to discover for yourself what works, either through astute observation or trial and error. The same strategy or fighting style won’t work for every encounter. This includes not only how to fight enemies and what equipment to use, it also includes how to efficiently navigate around a level, avoiding traps and dropping down ledges as a shortcut etc.
• The combat is based around deliberate, purposeful action rather than twitchy reflexes. It is almost impossible to cancel actions, so if you input an attack, it will be carried out. All actions of consequence, attacking, rolling and blocking, cost stamina. This is particularly important when fighting bosses. Players become skilful at this game not because they have quick reflexes. You get good by knowing the movesets of the enemies you are fighting and the movesets of your own weapon of choice. The speed of each swing, its reach and its arc, how hard it will hit when blocked by a shield etc. all come into play. All this requires tremendous attention at the beginning to learn. This is particularly important when fighting bosses when you have to go into each fight with a plan.
• Sometimes you just need to know where to go first and what to get for a particular area or a particular boss. This is probably the most unfair part of the game, which you can and probably should mitigate by looking it up in a wiki. For example, certain types of terrain, such as tar or water above a certain height, greatly decreases your travel speed over it. Having a certain ring eliminates this effect and getting this ring requires knowledge that probably no casual gamer would find on his or her own. Similarly a certain area of the game is constantly shrouded in darkness and you most likely will want a light source for this area. The game does lead you to one such item, but it is far from ideal, and the difference between using this and another item that you can get by somewhat convoluted means, is literally night and day.

Once you get past this initial learning curve, understand that this is a game that requires constant attention and concentration and know basic mechanics about attacking, rolling and blocking, the game ends up actually being only about as difficult as any other game. For this reason I personally found that the starter area, just after the tutorial dungeon, to be by far the hardest area of the game. If you do persevere, here are some more reasons why it is so good:

• Absolutely fantastic level design. Some people call this game gorgeous. I wouldn’t. Its graphics technology isn’t ahead of the curve and there’s nothing especially pretty about its views. They’re good but there are plenty of games out there that do better. What is unquestionably great is how the levels themselves are built and how the player is forced to navigate them. Especially good are the vertically built levels: Sen’s Fortress for example is basically a giant death trap. You start at the bottom and work your way up but it’s all just one gigantic room and you can see the whole thing right from where you start. Then there’s Blighttown, which people love to hate, but is a fantastic implementation of a vertical maze, with platforms connected by tenuous bridges, ladders that you need to climb up and climb down, and snipers waiting to ambush you. Or the Crystal Cave which forces you to navigate over invisible bridges.
• What I love most of all is how you can see the way that all these levels connect together to form the whole world. For example, you run around the starter Undead Burg for a long time and see the street level far below you and wonder how you’d ever get to it. Then you go away and do something else for a while and then discover a stairway that ‘lo and behold does lead to the street level. Or when you travel to Ash Lake and look up at the sky and realize that holy shit, you’re at the bottom of the world and above you are Blighttown, the Depths, the Undead Burg and all the rest of the world.
• Melee combat is immensely satisfying. I think it is pretty much the best in class in gaming right now. Block, strike, roll, kick, leap attack, back step, parry, backstab, smoothly switch between one-handing and two-handing your weapon, the options are endless. Then consider the wide variety of weapons available and the fact that each has a different moveset. Each moveset needs to be learned separately and balanced against the rest of your equipment. For example, if you use large and slow weapons, you may have to rely on heavy armor to prevent your attack from being interrupted. All this explains why the most common advice regarding weapons in Dark Souls is to ignore damage numbers and use whichever one that has the moveset you like the most.
• The world is unique and atmospheric. I won’t say the story is great. I found it unexceptional. But I did like the low-key storytelling method. There’s relatively little dialogue and few NPCs. Some parts of the story show in in descriptions of items and spells. Other parts show up through in-game events. It is an incredibly depressing story however. Don’t expect anyone to have a happy ending.
• I love the smooth integration of online community-based features with the single-player experience. I don’t care much for PVP and actually only got invaded a handful of times. And I ignored coop as well. But I loved the messages that players would leave each other, the fact that you can sometimes see ghostly images of other players going about doing their own thing and see the bloodstains of other dead players for a clue of how they died.

Finally some downsides:

• The DLC content that is automatically included in the PC version of the game becomes available take place roughly just past the mid-point of the game. Narratively it makes more sense to play it the moment it becomes available rather than waiting until later. Yet the content there is markedly more difficult than anything in the base game. The terrain is easier since some of the areas in the base game are harder / scarier to navigate, but the enemies including both trash mobs and bosses seem much harder in the DLC. This means that for a first-time player going to back to the base game content after finishing the DLC content feels like a distinct step down in difficulty.
• Some boss fights are gimmicky and uninteresting. I consider Bed of Chaos a completely uninteresting fight because all you need to do is a series of scripted actions to defeat him. Normal combat doesn’t work at all. I also dislike the Four Kings since it is a straight out damage race in which taking the time to maneuver will actually reduce your DPS and so kill you.
• Relying on Games for Windows Live for net connectivity is finicky. I got dumped out a bunch of times because the game lost connection to GfWL. Also there is apparently no security against hacking online.
• I didn’t find the NG+ experience compelling. Apparently everything is the same, except that enemies are beefed up. But you the player pretty much has nothing left to upgrade because you are easily able to fully upgrade most of your gear over your first playthrough and earning more levels above the soft cap doesn’t do much.
• I don’t find magic very interesting in this game. It’s just so bland and ordinary compared to how visceral melee combat is. Apparently magic really can do serious damage at range in this game, making it the easy mode.

Anyway Dark Souls is an awesome game that fully deserves its glowing reputation, the kind of game that pushes the envelop of what you think games can do. It really isn’t as hard as many people make it out to be and it fully rewards you for your time that you invest in it.