Hi, I’m Hamish Black, and welcome to Writing On Games.
It’ll probably surprise none of my regular viewers to know that I am unbelievably excited
for From Software’s upcoming release Dark Souls 3.
Hell, Dark Souls 1 helped me cope with major depression, and revisiting Demon’s Souls
after becoming enraptured with its follow up illustrated just how fully realised these
games can be.
Their worlds are consistently beautiful even at their most macabre, their lore is deep
and respects the player’s intelligence enough not to shove it in the player’s face, the
action is about as visceral and perfectly tuned as action games can possibly be, and
whilst the player’s losses are hammered home time and time again, their achievements
and victories are made even more apparent.
Essentially, every single, micro element of these games felt like they were placed with
the most acute precision, and judging by trailers and gameplay footage released by Bandai Namco,
it looks like Dark Souls 3 will mark a grand return to this truly artistic level of world
building and weighty action (with perhaps a slightly darker vibe potentially taken from
the latest From Soft release Bloodborne – a game which, sadly, I have been unable to play
due to my lack of a console to play it on).
Notice how one game in this venerable series has yet to be mentioned here, and how I use
the term ‘grand return’ to describe the upcoming release.
That game, as the more astute viewers may have already guessed (probably by looking
at the title of the video), is 2014’s Dark Souls 2.
I can say without a doubt that Dark Souls 2 is one of the most disappointing games I
have ever played (and I say this having played through the original release once and having
only recently begun playing through Scholar Of The First Sin, whilst also having completed
Dark Souls multiple times, so take that for what it’s worth).
It’s not bad, per se – just disappointing.
That distinction is important, because if Dark Souls 2 had been released without the
baggage that comes with following perhaps the most fully realised game of all time,
then it could have at the very least been considered an above-average action RPG.
Whilst none of the features present in the game retain the polish that so elevated the
other games, the combat still feels relatively weighty and largely feels more involved than
many of its contemporaries.
That said, there were many elements of Dark Souls 2’s design that left me genuinely
confused as to who thought their implementation would be beneficial to the game as a whole.
So many deliberate design decisions seem to illustrate (and obviously it will be impossible
to know the true impact of this for sure, but it’s an interesting consideration nonetheless)
that without previous director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s input (and his subsequent return to the series
in both Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3), the team simply did not understand what made those
games tick on an absolutely fundamental level.
In this episode of Writing On Games, then, I want to attempt to break down as much as
possible why this game left me longing for the older games.
In order to exemplify all of this, it’s important to break the games down into their
key components and examine why they so worked in previous instalments, and why the system
updates present in Dark Souls 2 didn’t.
To begin, let’s discuss arguably the main thing that draws people to these games in
the first place – the action.
In many critiques of the game, I have seen much ephemera used to describe the action
in Dark Souls 2 – how ‘it just didn’t feel right’ or ‘the action just wasn’t
as immersive or fun’.
Whilst I believe that these assertions are largely correct, I also believe that there
is evidence to back up the idea that the way combat encounters were designed in 2 did not
lend themselves well to what many believe the core tenets of the series to be.
One of the key areas where I felt this to be most prevalent was in the enemy placement
of all things.
The beauty of Dark Souls is that the player never feels fully prepared for what’s to
come in an area their first time through and it feels like anything could happen at any
moment, yet every enemy is placed very specifically in order to test the player’s skills in
a number of different ways.
In one way, this precise placement of enemies is what allows the game to truly teach the
player what they need to know mechanically in order to best the obstacles their next
time through, as the enemies all return to their original states, allowing the player
to better prepare for the encounter after they die.
For example, take the first time the player sets foot in Lordran at the Firelink Shrine
– the player has many options as to where they can go, yet the way the quote-unquote
‘correct’ route is illustrated to the player is almost entirely through its enemy
placement.
If the player goes down towards New Londo, their progress is halted by an ambush of ghosts
that they won’t be able to attack without a certain item.
If they head towards the catacombs, they will be ambushed by skeletons that are likely to
be significantly more powerful than the player at this early stage.
Not only this, but if the player does decide to persist down this route or simply choose
to run past it, they will be greeted with more and more skeleton ambushes as they progress,
eventually leading to a cluster of skeletons, as well as massive skeleton that will likely
kill the player in one hit.
If ever there was a clearer indication of ‘I might be going the wrong way here’,
I have yet to see it.
Then, when you do hit upon the ‘correct’ path up the stairs towards the Undead Burg,
you are greeted immediately with what you will face in this situation – there is no
ambush here, simply one enemy placed after another, clearly visible to the player as
soon as they reach the location.
The player takes on the first enemy to find that this enemy is unquestionably weaker than
the enemies on the other paths, giving them a better idea of what to expect going forward
on this one.
There is an item hanging from a corpse next to a slightly more armoured enemy, and as
you approach you discover that the enemy above you is throwing firebombs down your way, suggesting
that in order to get this item you will have to either take a risk, or deal with the threats
first.
When you discover you can aggro the armoured enemy to a point where the firebombs no longer
affect you, you can take him out with slightly more effort than previous enemies.
As you progress up the stairs, you find yourself confronted with a group of weaker enemies
– a slight escalation of challenge, but the game only requires that you prioritise
enemies based on their position and risk to the player.
They share the same design so there is a visual indication that they will all follow the same
set of rules as each other, meaning that all the player has to do is manage the situation
slightly differently.
After this, they can progress to the Undead Burg with the indication that they are on
the right track, and they have also learned important dynamics in terms of combat between
individual enemies and groups of enemies.
None of the other options are locked off to the player in terms of where they go, but
everything about the enemy placement suggests that this is where the designers wanted you
to focus your attention at this early stage.
Compare this situation to early encounters in Dark Souls 2.
Whereas with Dark Souls 1, at least early on, enemy ambushes are used as a means to
deter the player from continuing down a path that will likely get them killed time and
time again, in Dark Souls 2 the areas that aren’t just straight up blocked off by rocks
or statues almost seem to use ambush as their primary means of assaulting the player.
If you decide to head towards Heide’s Tower of Flame, for instance, it is easy to see
what lies ahead of you, but these enemies are huge and take a lot of hits to beat, so
the game doesn’t exactly encourage you to take this path.
However, take the path towards Forest of the Fallen Giants, and the circumstances change
only slightly – this whole area thrives on bombarding you with enemies that you have
very little chance to see coming, and so it is easy to become overwhelmed.
This is exacerbated when you climb the ladder to the more open courtyard and see huge amounts
of corpses lying around which come to life as you get close to them, meaning that as
you’re trying to deal with one group of enemies, it’s highly likely that another
will spring to life and begin attacking you as well.
This is the technique implemented in Dark Souls 1 in order to discourage newer players
from heading towards the catacombs, one of the most difficult areas of the game.
Difference is, this is one of the opening areas of Dark Souls 2 and is one of the few
ways you can actually go at the start.
With the emphasis on ambushing the player in 2, it feels like the jump scare riddled
trash flick to the first game’s sombre horror experience that truly gets under your skin.
On top of this, whilst the enemies are still relatively low level, they don’t stagger
nearly as easily as the early enemies in Dark Souls 1, whilst you can be staggered in as
little as a couple of hits.
This is actually an interesting point, as one of the key differences between Dark Souls
1 and 2 is the level of fairness.
Again, much ephemera is spouted about the first game’s ‘harsh but fair nature’,
which again is absolutely true, but I think it goes deeper than that tagline alone.
The way enemies stagger compared to the player is actually one of the biggest indicators
of fairness within the two games – in the first game, if you hit an enemy and they had
their shield up, you would either be staggered yourself, or suffer a massive penalty in terms
of stamina, leaving you at least partially open to a counter attack.
Thing is, the enemies were just as open to this risk themselves.
One of the most effective strategies for some early enemies is to goad them into attacking,
only to stagger themselves and leave themselves open to a player counter.
The enemies follow the same rules as the player does in Dark Souls 1 – this is why the game
is considered so fair.
Even with the Ornstein and Smough fight later on (one of the most difficult boss battles
in the history of gaming), the tension and anxiety comes from the fact that you now have
to manage two very different bosses as opposed to just one – it’s a way to test the player
on enemy management and prioritisation between dodging and attacking rather than just two
powerful enemies with longer health bars than most (exemplified by the fact that the first
half of the battle is arguably far more difficult than the second when you only have to fight
one of them).
The enemies never cheat, and as I’ve stated in previous videos, difficulty is not the
be all and end all of the Souls series.
In Dark Souls 2, however, it often feels as if the enemies follow a completely different
ruleset to the player, rarely opening themselves up to counter attacks whilst bombarding the
player with flurries of their own, and at an early stage the player can only effectively
block a few of these hits before their stamina runs out and they become staggered.
Layer on top of this the fact that it takes more souls to level up in 2 than in 1, and
you are at a clear statistical disadvantage between games.
This isn’t even to mention the way enemy placement was handled in the game’s rerelease,
Scholar of the First Sin.
This was supposed to fix many of the issues people had with the initial release, but for
me only ended up exacerbating them.
For example, in Dark Souls 1 it would feel incredibly off if suddenly the amount of enemies
in an area or where they were placed was changed in any way.
As I have stated previously, every enemy feels as if it is placed there for a reason, and
it usually comes down to minutely tuning the exact challenge the player will face at any
given point.
If you head to Forest of the Fallen Giants in the second game, however, you’ll find
that there are quite simply random enemies placed there in Scholar of the First Sin,
including one that especially early in the game would be near impossible to beat.
Make your way to the more open area up the ladder and there are far more enemies, as
well as one of the white knight guys taken away from the area.
Head to Heide’s Tower of Flame, and suddenly there are two of these white knights that
weren’t there before.
Why are they there?
What purpose do they serve narratively?
Why do they not aggro unless attacked first?
It is not made clear to the player, and so their placement in the rerelease when they
weren’t in that area at all to begin with just makes the design of the game feel inconsistent,
as if any enemy could just be forced in at any point for the sake of difficulty.
It’s as if the developers of the second game looked at the marketing push for the
first game, saw how well the idea of a ‘difficult game’ with ‘PREPARE TO DIE’ as its slogan
resonated with masochists complaining about ‘too much handholding’ in modern games
and thought ‘we need to up the ante’ as opposed to examining why that difficulty was
implemented both mechanically and thematically.
Which brings me onto my final point – the ways in which both games handle the idea of
difficulty in terms of their plots and general tone.
If you watched my last video on Dark Souls, you’ll know that I posit that the game actually
maintains a celebratory tone rather than merely wallowing in the macabre.
This is apparent for many reasons – for example, the way the game handles death is
far different to the way its sequel deals with the concept.
The key to Dark Souls 1 is that the world ultimately is grossly indifferent to your
presence, and ultimately the reason you are fighting through this harsh world is to gain
enough agency over your own existence to recognise triumph as well as failure and appreciate
the little moments in life.
Death is trivialised – it happens so much and the enemies trudge so lethargically back
to their positions after cutting you down that it almost takes on a humorous quality.
This means that when the player succeeds, however, it is highlighted by the game – whether
that be through a moment of precious respite from combat, or a new area to explore or an
item, these occur just rarely enough and are brought about solely by player skill (remember,
all enemies in Dark Souls 1 follow a set of rules just like you do) that when the player
wins, the sense of accomplishment is palpable – this, in turn, encourages the player to
keep going.
This is why, as I have previously argued, the game is such an effective allegory for
depression and how to cope with it or overcome it, even if it seems insignificant at first.
Dark Souls 2, on the other hand, from the very start, illustrates to the player a complete
misunderstanding of the tone of the series.
Like I say, it feels like the developers thought that ‘more difficult’ meant ‘better
game’ and this is clear from the piss-poor excuse for narrative at the start of the game.
You are told at the very start of the game, with what feels like scraps out of a particularly
emotional teenager’s poetry journal, that ‘like a moth to a flame your wings will
burn in anguish’ as ‘that is the fate of the cursed.’
It hammers home the inevitability of succumbing to your curse, which if we’re looking at
the idea of being cursed as allegorical to suffering from major depression, is actually
kind of dangerous.
The women in the house laugh at you, talking to you like a child as if they understand
your condition far better than you ever could.
It insinuates that the idea of trying to fight is absolutely futile, before laughing at the
idea that you could possibly survive in this world, and that you will lose the very thing
that makes you feel like you’ve conquered something, your souls, ‘over and over again’,
before descending into fits of laughter once again.
It may sound like I’m being somewhat pedantic or looking into this too much, but this was
genuinely one of the worst first impressions a game has ever left on me, and arguably soured
the experience.
Most of the NPCs in the first game, like the enemies, felt like they were operating on
a similar emotional framework to the player.
That is to say, regardless of whether they acted hostile or friendly, they were all informed
by a sense of fear of losing themselves, and so for the most part they encourage you to
keep going.
As the pyromancer you rescue from the Depths says to you as you return to Firelink Shrine
(and as expertly analysed by my fellow YouTuber Fork whose video on Dark Souls you should
definitely check out), ‘don’t you dare go Hollow.’
The game and its characters want you to succeed, if only to show them that at the very least,
someone in their predicament can succeed.
Dark Souls 2, on the other hand, revels in the grim and the macabre in a way that feels
completely opposite to the message Dark Souls 1 communicates to the player.
As I previously stated, it feels like the enemies all follow completely different rulesets
to you and they can often overwhelm you in sheer numbers and without warning, and so
overcoming them unscathed often feels like sheer luck rather than skill.
This transition from luck to skill means that as opposed to the first game, winning feels
trivialised as opposed to losing.
The developers, like the women at the start of the game, laugh at the idea of you succeeding,
and by pummelling you with hordes of stronger enemies, limiting your abilities through stats,
renovating the healing system so that healing items are limited and you only start off with
one Estus Flask, modifying weapon durability so weapons can break well before the enemy
numbers are depleted, and various other mechanical and design factors, the developers state in
no uncertain terms, that difficulty trumps all, regardless of what it’s used for.
As opposed to all the characters that tell you they don’t want to see you go Hollow
in the first game, everything about the second game suggests that that is all the game wants
for you.
The only way you can overcome any of this is if luck happens to favour you, and that
is exactly the opposite of what I look for in a Souls game.
So yeah, that is a very abridged version of the basic ways Dark Souls 2 got it wrong.
It’s a slightly longer episode today, but only because I feel there is so much to be
said on this game and its place within the series.
Like I say, I don’t think it’s a bad game necessarily and there are certainly some mechanical
elements that still place it above many contemporary RPGs in my mind, but within the canon of the
Souls series, it just doesn’t hold up.
Hidetaka Miyazaki’s absence as director for 2, and his return to the widely revered
Bloodborne suggests that without that singular vision at its helm, the developers completely
missed the point of why these games are supposed to be difficult.
It’s important from a mechanical, design and narrative point of view – it permeates
every element of the game’s design.
In 2, however, as opposed to merely informing the design, it felt like the primary objective.
There is so much I didn’t get to talk about here regarding world design and such, and
I was only able to analyse a couple of early encounters in both games, but I feel they
are indicative of the larger issues here.
I dunno, have I got this all wrong?
I know of some defenders of the game, but I also know that the general consensus is
that the game is disappointing (I’d highly recommend checking out Matthewmatosis and
Matt Lee’s videos on the subject for more reasons why this game just doesn’t work).
I’d be really interested to know what you think, so leave a comment down below regarding
your thoughts on the game, whether they be positive or negative.
Anyway, thank you all very much for watching, and as an aside, thank you all so much for
supporting the channel!
New subscribers are coming in every day and I genuinely appreciate every one.
If you like the videos then if you considered sharing them with other people you think might
be able to take something from them then I’d be eternally grateful.
You guys give me the energy to keep doing this on a semi-regular basis, so thank you
all so much.
I know the channel is still relatively tiny compared to others, but that doesn’t mean
that your support means any less to me – quite the opposite, actually.
In short, you guys are the best.
And with that said, I’m Hamish Black and that concludes another episode of Writing
On Games.
I’ll see you next time.