![]() While navigating Lordran, the player meets dozens of undead who are also trying to follow the path of the Chosen One, abandoned the prophecy, or even rebelled against its lies. There’s always another undead to blindly believe the sweet words that claim their life is more important than everyone else's. You become the Chosen One if, and only if, you manage to beat every challenge. ![]() In Dark Souls, you don’t surpass every obstacle in your way because you are the Chosen One. Nevertheless, Dark Souls’ difficulty would not be particularly memorable if it didn’t serve a greater purpose: It’s the game's worldbuilding that should get most of the praise. It is not random that the PC port of Dark Souls is named Prepare to Die. It didn’t help that FromSoftware realized the difficulty of their games was attracting a lot of attention and started to use this as a marketing tool. Unfortunately, many players, including fans of the franchise, got blocked in the somewhat false perception that the game is “super hard,” and all you need to do to beat it is to “git gud” (“get good” in Annoying Dialect). Instead of claiming that the game was just too hard, though, players had the opportunity to understand how they could adapt to a new way of understanding difficulty and then enjoy one of the freshest experiences in gaming ever. So, it makes sense that many people (myself included) were unsettled by Dark Soul’s introduction. Player’s were not used to solving problems with AAA games in 2011, with button-mashing being sometimes the only strategy used to beat any and every challenge. For example, instead of killing a boss with a broken sword, you might want to wait for better gear and maybe even find an advantage point to plunge attack. In the tutorial area, it teaches the player that not every challenge can be beaten by brute force, and sometimes you've just got to be clever. On the other hand, Dark Souls is all about problem-solving. ![]() While adjustable difficulty is always a welcome addition to increase a game’s accessibility, especially for people with disabilities, many AAA titles have a straightforward approach that makes them dull, even at harder difficulty levels. Dark Souls only became so divisive because the AAA industry, at the time, followed a completely different path regarding difficulty, by adding long tutorials and holding the player’s hand during the entire adventure in hopes that an easier experience could reach more people. However, in general, the game is not that difficult. Let’s get something clear: Dark Souls does have its unfair moments. On the other side of the discussion, people were happy to find a AAA game challenging and blamed the lack of skills of other players for their own failures. That’s because many players hated Dark Souls with all their, well, souls, claiming that the game was unfair. Also, as PC gamers are pretty vocal about their gaming experiences, Dark Souls would soon get a lot of free publicity when it came to the PC in 2012. However, contrary to Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls was not exclusive, which means many more potential players had access to it from the start. Demon’s Souls, however, was confined to the PlayStation 3 when it was first released in 2009, and the franchise didn’t make as big of a splash as Dark Souls would between 20.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |