Paragons of Game Design 1: Dark Souls

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Commence a new series of blog entries: Paragons of Game Design.

In these posts, I'll be highlighting games that are examples of outstanding design and highlighting just why they are. First up on our list is one I've hinted before:

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Dark Souls is a serious contender for my favorite game to have come out in over a decade. It's that good.

And there are so, so many reasons why it's that good. It's not just huge, it's not just beautiful, it's not just diverse, or unique. It's a masterpiece down to the fundamental level of its design. I'm going to try to explain some of the finer points here, though I'm sure there will be some I miss.

"Real" Difficulty

Most of the publicity Dark Souls gets is for its ridiculously hard difficulty. But the truth is, Dark Souls isn't that hard a game, depending on how you define it. And that definition matters, because Dark Souls does difficulty so well that talking about it in context of another game is almost like talking about something entirely different.

Dark Souls does not require pin-point precision, complex muscle memory, lightning-fast reactions, or any of those other factors commonly relevant to what it means to be good enough to beat a game, if the game is even one that expects you to have to try. Dark Souls asks for something deeper, and much more meaningful. It asks that you slow down, observe, think, and learn.

As I mentioned in a previous post, skill, at least in the sense of skill we want games to encourage, isn't always what people think it is, and this goes for some game designers as well. To cover the aforementioned elements: Precision is mostly a training of oneself to become accustomed to the game's control scheme. And becoming accustomed to a game's control scheme is actually a function of procedural ("muscle") memory. The problem with procedural memory is that it's not trained by application of knowledge so much as it is by raw practice. It's basically grinding, but for a more intangible reward. "Reaction time" is generally not something a player will significantly improve over the course of a single game. What is actually being trained is the ability to anticipate. Reactions are then based on those anticipations, giving the illusion of a faster response (when in fact, you're responding to an earlier stimulus, or more efficiently recognizing one that was already there). 

What Dark Souls does, by contrast to most other games, is target things you have direct influence on. Things you can actually learn from. And the nuance it does this with is spectacular. The primary tool of education in Dark Souls is telegraphing. Every threat in the game is hinted at before it appears, through sight, sound, or even intuition. It even provides (very creatively) a method for you to learn from other people's mistakes and successes through use of bloodstains, ghosts, and signs. At the same time, every attack in the game can be blocked or dodged, so there is always a good answer. If you follow general common sense and good tactics, you can get through levels just fine, even with mediocre innate "skill". Technically speaking, it is entirely possible to get through the game without taking a single point of damage (save that one point where you have to die to Seath to continue through the Duke's Archives, and you can even bug your way around that one). 

But you're not expected to. And that's where the second part of Dark Souls' education of you comes in. You are expected to fail. And that's okay. We have been conditioned to see failure as frustrating. But Dark Souls is not unfair. Nor is Dark Souls punishing. In fact, the game is quite forgiving. Bloodstains allow you to retrieve your losses, while simultaneously providing impetus to press forward and try again. If you loose your bloodstain it feels like a significant loss. Which is a good thing. Because largely, it isn't. Neither souls nor humanity are essential to progress, nor irreplaceable, but that loss still strikes a chord of real consequence for failure. ...And now you have another bloodstain to retrieve. This same spirit is carried in the game's saving system. There is no manual saving. The game saves after every significant action you do, every bridge you cross, every door you unlock, every enemy you slay, and every time you die. The game literally will not let you not accept your own death. Trust it. It knows best. 

Even if your character has lost progress, you, the player are progressing. Reinforcing this design is another thing that makes Dark Souls different: it is not random. The same enemies are always in the same locations. The same attacks always do the same damage. All allies and all enemies follow the same set of rules. Because of this structure, you have reliability and predictability, which means every lesson learned is a lesson you can use.

You can look back after every death and say 'I could have done that better.' 

And next time through, you do. The design teaches you to learn from your mistakes, and in doing so, every death does not feel like a punishment so much as a learning experience that gives you drive to continue forward and try again. Whereas other games have learned to counter frustration by never frustrating you in the first place, Dark Souls teaches you to overcome frustration. Other games will give you the victory. Dark Souls will give you the tools to earn victory for yourself.

(click here to enlarge)

It's why so many people who talk about how hard the game is say it with that undertone of love that they do. Dark Souls is a game about overcoming yourself. The game provides a sense of accomplishment beyond that of other games. It is tough love. It respects your intelligence and your ability. It will not hold your hand. It will not pull its punches. But it does not strive to punish you. It strives to teach you. It wants to see you succeed.

It believes in you. 

I could go on for pages and pages about this, but let me just link you back to my Mega Man gameplay article and its linked videos, because all of it is relevant for Dark Souls. All of it.

But the difficulty of the game serves another purpose: It shapes the experience of the game. It forces you to make meaningful choices, draws out tension, accomplishment, and reinforces it's themes, not only through storytelling, but through the player's own experience.

Theme, Ambiance, and the Value of the Unknown

The game's central theme is that of despair. It is ever-present, though rarely mentioned. It doesn't need to say it, because the ambiance leads the player to feel its presence. It's far more natural, and far more powerful. And it is poetic brilliance in how both the game's presentation and mechanics push you to fight against that, and feel the mirror image: Hope. Determination.

Point: Enemies often have long range and lunge forward as they attack. This ironically means it's usually more dangerous to dodge away an attack rather than into it. The game literally punishes you you for being a coward, and rewards you for bravery.

When it comes to story, some people's first impression watching bits and pieces of the game is that it doesn't have much of one. Au contraire. Though I don't blame them for not seeing it at first, because of how Dark Souls presents its tale. The game does not hand you its story. In fact, when you exclude the opening cutscenes, there's only one point in the game where you're simply fed boldfaced plotline. No, Dark Souls feeds you pieces, hints, results - the context and process is for you to figure out. The story is hidden in tones of voice, item descriptions, subtle details in the environment, implications.

The first rule of horror is, 'Don't show everything. The imagination is scarier than reality ever can be.' It's the power of the unknown, and how our minds respond to it - running wild with countless simultaneous possibilities, none of which are reliable. Once you know, there's only one possibility, and your brain is free to stop thinking about it. If you never get that answer, your mind is never released.

What FromSoftware has realized is that this concept is not specific to fear. It is applicable to storytelling in general. And we can in large part thank Dark Soul's director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, for this. To quote this article,

"...the veil of ambiguity hovering over the Souls games grew out of his experiences as a child poring over western fantasy literature. Due to his patchy comprehension of English at the time, there were large chunks of each book he couldn’t decipher, leaving him to fill in the details with his imagination. He set out to create that same sense of awe and bewilderment in his games, letting players fill in the gaps with their imagination instead of having every plot point and objective clearly articulated through in-game text or cutscenes."

A game, or any other storytelling medium, has a finite amount of space. Your imagination is only as boundless as you are. By tapping into your brain's ability to extrapolate and make connections, the game is utilizing a medium far more powerful than words can ever be. It's one of the reasons I tout the NPCs of Final Fantasy VII and IX as being strong elements of what makes those games so great. They are characters beyond your immediate plotline - ones with their own personalities and backgrounds that open up the world, Because you are not the only one. And in FromSoftware games, everyone is like that.

These are the kinds of stories that stick with you, that you will be having discussions with your friends about years later. Because you're never quite done interpreting it. I can point you to no fewer than five channels on YouTube who have dedicated playlists to their theories of Dark Souls' lore. Not bad for a game with supposedly little story.

FromSoftware are masters of minimalism and subtext. You can see it throughout all their games. There's nothing wrong with a more longform approach, but it's not From's style, and they doesn't need it. They can create more character development and deeper plotlines in a few lines of dialogue or a couple well-placed details than some games can in their entire playtime.

For the spirit of the game, it fits perfectly, so well its hard to describe. Not only only does it make for a deeper, more engaging, and lasting story, it follows the same spirit as the gameplay. It has faith in you. But it will not patronize you, it expects you to try.

Instinct is to say 'I want it, just give it to me.' Dark Souls' strength is that it knows to say no. It knows that you will appreciate it more that way.

Good art leaves you feeling satisfied. Great art leaves you wanting more.

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(Credit to pengusaur, whose fantastic review of Dark Souls influenced some of the tone and language of this post.)