At 2/14/17 05:08 AM, LauriJ wrote:
With the release of Nioh, it's become apparent that the style of gameplay codified by Dark Souls could indeed be a genre on it's own. For a game to be Soulsesque, it would contain the following traits:
1. Punishingly hard.
2. Enemies drops essence upon defeat that can be used to upgrade your stats among other things.
3. 'Bonfires' littered around the levels where you return to after your inevitable death.
4. Spectacular and often giant boss fights, usually fought in a room set aside for them
Do you agree on these points? Is there something that I missed?
I think your points are too narrow to capture it. Punishingly hard is somewhat subjective and applies to too many kinds of difficulty, XP is just a general action-RPG trait (though the threat of losing unspent XP is quite unique), spectacular boss fights isn't something that comes to mind with Souls for me, at least not with that phrasing.
Ultimately if it looks and feels like a Souls game it's a Souls-like and any more subtle influence is harder to pinpoint. Lords of the Fallen, Nioh and even Salt & Sanctuary are more like straight up Souls clones than 'Souls-likes.'
It's similar to the influx of Doom clones in the 90's, they weren't fresh attempts at first person shooters so much as straight ripoffs of Doom specifically with new visuals slathered on top.
Here's my own attempt at reducing Dark Souls to a list, landing more on philosophies than specific, easily gauged traits.
1. Extreme Mechanical Priority
There's probably a better term for it but this will do. What I mean is, the gameplay and the player's control takes priority over absolutely everything else. It's possible to play through Souls games and love it without seeing virtually any of the plot, and control is never taken away during gameplay. The level of responsiveness and tactility is also intentionally far above most games, there's no GTAV garbage where your character has an excessive amount of animations that need to be seen in their entirety. Even at the cost of some silly or less polished looking movements it never prioritises anything above the player's control.
As a result Dark Souls fights don't look as elegant or choreographed as other games, they look chaotic and jittery, with a dozen inputs going at once, but the end result is far more interesting to watch for a player who knows the game. Where other games seem to prioritise impressing a a non-gamer spectator in looking smooth but feeling sluggish. It's a type of tactility usually reserved for fighters and other multiplayer games, but Dark Souls uses it throughout an almost exclusively single-player experience.
2. Setting the bar immediately high
Rather than easing the player up a difficulty slope, Dark Souls sets the bar immediately high, higher than most think they can deal with, and forces you to meet it. It gives you a challenge you won't be able to overcome at first and lets you work your way up to it on your own, to earn that victory without compromises.
This part is not just for the gameplay either, the stories are often the same in forcing players to do most of the work and figure it out. This is a catch 22 however in that the vast majority of game stories just aren't good enough or delivered nearly well enough to be worth this type of investment from the player and to feel worthwhile once they've already invested.
3. Timing, and Death
Aka Live Die Repeat. Death is inevitable. You will die, you'll lose everything, many times, and that's okay. Unlike many modern games, Dark Souls isn't afraid to kill the player and interrupt their flow, but (other than a small handful of misguided instances) doesn't do so unnecessarily. A different type of 'flow' develops from this, one of incremental progress rather than constant progress. All of the best levels are purposely built around repeated death, with alternate routes and shortcuts along the way that you earn through pure gameplay, not being told or overtly guided toward.
Timing is the other half of this, and may be the centre point of Souls' minute to minute gameplay. Knowing when to roll, when to step away, when to light or heavy attack, when to hit and run and when to really lay into the enemy. Show the player an enemy, let them read its moves, kill them if they misjudge and they'll get it better next time. The pure antithesis to David Cage's un-fail-able QTE cutscenes.
My theory then, is that if you take a standard action/RPG template and add, say, at least two out of these three elements, you've probably got a Souls-like, and hopefully haven't fucked up the rest of it too badly. Of course there are smaller elements like a focus on boss battles, but the essence of a Souls game could remain intact without specific types of obstacles. It's more about how they're placed than what you're placing. I'm looking for the concepts, the line of thinking that cause From Software to build their games the way they are, rather than the physical pieces they're put together with.
What's more promising than these imitations is the idea of Souls' sensibilities and design philosophy being implemented into totally disparate games. Not holding the player's hand, not being afraid to kill the player, not being afraid to challenge them or throw them a curve ball. But doing so in an internally consistent way, so the game doesn't break its own rules so to speak. Giving us a set of mechanics and having enough faith in the player to assume they can handle it - and if they can't, giving them the chance to adapt without making the experience contrived.
I believe it shows a lot of respect toward a player if you can trust them to take a defeat and try again.
