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thinking again about what an incredible own goal it was that I started off streaming Dark Souls because I was like "it'll be easy engagement bait, playing something popular that I can tolerate and encouraging people to backseat me through it will be a great way to get a strong start to the channel before I switch over to playing the stuff I actually want," and then ending up getting so into it that I was actually annoyed at myself for making it a streaming game and therefore only being able to play it two days a week. even now I REALLY WANNA GO START DARK SOULS 2 RIGHT NOW AND I'M GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT THREE WEEKS??? like I was optimistic that I would enjoy it okay with some guidance, but I did not think that it would sink its hooks into me like that.

I think a big part of it was that years of counter-discourse of "actually, it's not that hard!" or "it's designed around summoning people for help!" or "winning in dark souls is about being cheap and exploiting enemy behaviour!" that I think are all well-meaning attempts to add nuance to the series reputation of being very hardcore and challenging... really kind of turned me off? Like, "get good!" is really appealing as a fantasy and I think those other things sound really boring! So I was really delighted to learn that, no, as far as the action goes, this really was in fact, a game about getting good after all. A lot of people in chat ended up using fighting game terminology when they realized that was my frame of reference and I was surprised by how much that ended up being a really great analogy: winning a fight is basically all about learning enemy hitboxes, figuring out when you're plus or minus, weighing risk/reward on block/dodge, and managing attack/block/dodge all using the same meter. It really just is about getting the download and intuitively understanding all those things! And I was really impressed that even though its approach to mechanics and interactions is very much engineered to allow extremes—there are a lot of things you can pull off that I would describe as "bullshit"—it never really feels that unsatisfying, because the boss diversity is such that you can never really lean on one trick.

For example, I learned that with enough damage, Smough was actually possible to put into a stagger loop, allowing me to skip learning to dodge a lot of his stuff. But it doesn't work on most other bosses! And even just learning that was a fun process! It's bullshit in that it elides certain mechanics, but it didn't feel "cheap" in an unsatisfying way, it felt like learning why a matchup was strong in my favour. And like... you know, it took like two hours to learn. Or Gwyn's AI being built around trying to interrupt you during an estus meaning that the best way to heal is either right after parrying (and giving up damage) or after dodging a command grab (insanely risky) does mean you're technically exploiting behaviour, but in a way that feels like a natural conclusion of the frame data rather than some gross edge case of bad math—even the cheap shit feels honest and well-earned. Sometimes a mechanic works in your favour, sometimes it works in the enemy's favour, and you just gotta work around that.

Everyone in my chat kept making fun of my build for having high damage and low health—it didn't really seem that way to me, but I'll take their word for it—but the thing was that even with a build that was supposedly busted, all the harder bosses ended up taking me at least a couple hours to get down, which is great, that's exactly what I wanted. (Although I'm sure it must have been tedious for Twitch viewers to watch me die over and over again.) And I did in fact have to learn totally new approaches for each of the tougher ones, I couldn't just coast by on build decisions. Or getting lucky, for that matter—the long boss fights with long runbacks feel like a great solution to the problem of not being sure if you actually learned something or just got lucky after mashing "retry" repeatedly while heated, because of the calming effect of the runback forcing you to take every attempt seriously. Also, you can definitely avoid summoning the whole game, and one of the best fights was a 2v1 against you just to prove it. The adventure/puzzle components DO feel very cooperative and collaborative to me and I think that helped a lot with how much I don't care about them, but as far as the action goes, it really was the satisfying "get good" solo power fantasy that the unnuanced discourse had promised after all!

guess there really was a reason why this is one of the most influential and beloved games of all time, huh. who knew. god dammit. why do I gotta make myself wait three weeks to play the next one, I fucked up


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in reply to @love's post:

My go to tends to be some kind of high dex/stamina build because I just really like the playstyle of quickly roll dodging out of everything's way but of course every boss is still a super unique experience despite that. I think that's why Bloodborne is my favourite... however that's also the reason others don't like it as much! Have fun with Dark Souls 2 it's a good one!!

Yeah, I like that high stamina rewards a lot of different playstyles—I ended up having more stamina than health until the end (where I ran out of things to put points into)—because it's also good for blocking, but it's EXTRA good for being able to chain together extra of those huge zweihander hits that use up like a third of the max bar.

Also blocking is goofy as hell. It feels so silly to me. Like, I'll do it because it's good, but like... I can just shrug off getting hit by an arm the size of a truck because I had a piddly little shield out? COME ON, I CAN'T TAKE THAT SERIOUS. So Bloodborne and Sekiro getting rid of that makes a lot of sense to me!!!

Yessss it's good. I definitely still fall back on blocking when I'm maneuvering through an area/do not have a handle on on a boss yet. However Bloodborne specifically dunks on you for trying to use a shield and it's great.

I had a very similar experience with Bloodborne. The fan base (or at least at my exposure to it) kind of soured my initial impression of the game, and the Souls games by extension. When I finally played, I was initially unsure. But it didn't take long for something to click, and then I craved playing all the time. I also made the fighting game connection, which is a pretty apt comparison I think! It turns out the game really does provide a framework to build up a set of skills, and that learning process CAN be fun. Especially because the game does a good job of giving you a variety of build and weapon options to solve the situations it throws at you.

I do think the surface level discussion of all this is often... not the best. Even now I struggle to convey why the games are so compelling. So now I just annoy my friends who express even a modicum of interest in playing lol

I think the "how do I get people to play Bloodborne" discourse is a lot harder than other Souls games because you have lategame plot stuff you want to try to avoid spoiling even in a general sense, and also you have an early game boss in Papa G that is a significant roadblock (with a painful runback) that really does chase people away from the game. So your natural inclination is to solve the early boss issue by telling folks how cool shit's gonna be on the other side, but you can't really talk about all the best stuff, so you settle on "trust me it's worth it."

I do think the big appeal of the game is that, in a way very unlike what open world games promise and kind of can't deliver, you actually can play these games almost any way you want and still succeed. "Any way you want" being in the fighting game sense; you still need to pass certain tests to beat the opponent, and those tests can be hard, and those tests can even be just plain bullshit, but you get to bring your OWN bullshit to bear in those fights, and craft a way of winning that's exciting and personally fulfilling.

In much the same way certain fighting game scrubs have this personal code, whereby they consider throwing and spamming fireballs 'cheap' and unworthy of honorable victory, I think Souls scrubs (both newcomers and gatekeepers) think it's playing the game 'wrong' if they find something cheap and exploitable that works. But Dark Souls allows you to be as unfair to it as it is to you, something I think gets lost in some of the series' imitators. You can cruise through half the game with a strategy and then a new boss will force you to learn an entirely new set of skills because it completely defeats what you were doing before.

So I think the advice commonly given to newcomers is tailored towards explaining that these games are a lot more flexible than they appear, that there's a lot of different ways to 'get good' and you can usually find one that works for you. I think that's a pretty unique kind of nuance compared to other kinds of games that demand a very particular kind of perfection: Nioh, for example, has a more shmup style of perfection where you really need to do the exact thing the game asks you at the exact time it's asking. I love that too, and Dark Souls has plenty of it, but it also lets you come up with your own answers to its nonsense (or at least makes you feel like you're doing that). I think that's as much as what makes it feel like a fighting game as its demand for perfection.

Setting aside the Nioh angle (I think that game actually does achieve exactly the kind of flexibility and BS that DS1 does so well, but it stumbles by holding back the most busted stuff until later in the game, when you've already had to really reckon with the complicated basics) I think the best evidence that Dark Souls is really, really meant to be played using whatever BS you can lean on in any given situation is that later games let you use the words "sniper spot" in messages. If the mere fact the devs gave you bows and the ability to shoot dudes when they can't retaliate isn't enough evidence that they're totally cool with you shooting dudes when they can't retaliate, they have given you the vocabulary to tell other players how to do that specific, cheesy, unfair thing, using words that can have no other meaning. It ain't subtext, just text!

Yeah, I guess, like, as an open-world hater, I just don't feel like it's all so open-ended that you have to worry about playing it "any way you want"—like, there is a little bit of that while figuring out your build, but once you know how stuff works, you can be pretty confident in your kit with a reasonable scope to adjust within. Obviously it's not quite to the extent of say Sekiro where you usually feel even more confident that the problem is your playstyle and not your build, but still, I think it worked out okay! In general I think the way that sort of flexibility is talked about was a huge part of what turned me off from the game for so long, and I DID need the advice of what direction to start in—which I do wish the game had given—but it didn't ultimately turn out to be as bad as it was made out to be. The options really didn't end up being so daunting once I had the sword I wanted and could build everything around that.

Yeah, I think what makes it so hard to describe is that both the openness and the strictness exist at the same time; maybe fighting games really are the best comparison? Dark Souls doesn't have the flatness of an open world game where all options are equal and thus equally boring and meaningless. The breadth of choices are supported by a strong fundamental and universal skillset you have to master. In fighting games you won't get far if you don't master the fundmentals, but there are also many possible ways to win depending on your skillset and interests. Sometimes those tools let you ignore whole parts of the game, but you'll eventually encounter matchups where those fundamentals really are crucial. I think that core is the spine that prevents these games from feeling so floppy? There really is something tangible at the center, and avoiding the work requires also requires a very different kind of work, like a zoner who forces everyone to play according to their rules.

It's hard to articulate that the two sides of the system-the numbers and the skill- interact in a way that is both fully achievable for anyone and also challenging in a pleasurable way. I think like fighting games there are qualities to these games that on paper sound like they'd be so annoying the game couldn't possibly be for you but they are actually far more accessible if you try to meet them halfway.