Dark Souls and Punishment

Prepare to die - we literally designed it to be unavoidable.

Dark Souls and Demon's Souls get a lot of well deserved praise because they do so many things right. In a time when most games will shy away from difficulty or challenge in the name of mass appeal these games will kick you to the curb, hold a knife to your neck and make you beg for more. They have great combat feel, immersive worlds, variety in gameplay, and epic bosses.

But I'm not here to tell you what the Souls series does right - I'm here to tell you about the few things they do wrong and how it sabotages the entire experience.

Before I go any further I want to preface by saying that I do not think that either Dark Souls or Demon's Souls is a bad game. As I said before these games not only do a ton of things right but stand out from a crowd in fresh territory where few games are willing to tread. Most of the praise they get is indeed deserved, and I will definitely keep an eye on the series moving forward.

Skill and Knowledge

I'm no stranger to difficult games and I find that hard challenges are one of the most fun and engaging aspects in gaming. I loved Super Meat Boy, I finished Ninja Gaiden Sigma, I bested Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, and I used to play NES Battletoads for fun. Hell, I even beat Simon!

...alright, that last one might have been a lie. My point is that I love games where you can feel like a badass with some skill, and the Souls series is no exception. There are opportunities everywhere for a variety of combat options with different skill requirements, ceilings, and styles of play.

But let's back up a moment and break down difficulty into two separate types: skill challenges and knowledge challenges.

Skill challenges are simply an execution challenge - an instance where you know exactly what you need to do and the difficult part is actually pulling it off. Simon is a one example of a pure skill challenge - the only thing you need to do is duplicate a pattern, so everything in that game is about how well you execute on the task.

Knowledge challenges are instances where the execution is easy or trivial but what it is you need to do is not. Sudoku is one example of a pure knowledge challenge - writing numbers in boxes is as easy as it gets (for most people) so the entire challenge is about working through to figure out where each number goes.

Most of the challenges we encounter in video games are a combination of both skill and knowledge. In Dragon's Dogma when I fight a dragon I need to know where he can be damaged, what his attacks look like and how to dodge them before I can then rush in and actually execute the attacks, blocks, dodges, and counters to actually kill him. The result would be the same whether I were executing actions perfectly but randomly or if I were performing all the right actions with horrible execution - either way I'd probably die.

I wonder what that glowy thing on his chest is. Oh well, time to go stab the shit out of his tail!

The major difference between the two types of challenges in gaming is the fact that you can usually practice for skill challenges whereas knowledge challenges you usually can't. It's uncommon for the mechanics to drastically change within a game, but encountering new enemies with different abilities and weaknesses is commonplace. This is important to keep a game fresh and interesting, but it creates a new problem of how to go about giving information required for knowledge challenges.

There are several ways to go about teaching the player, but the most commonly used methods are to tell your player (either explicitly or subtly), show your player, or through trial and error. While all of these can work well the most important thing is to teach them in a manner where you aren't severely punishing them for not knowing something that you never taught them, and this is the one area where the Souls series fails.

Unfair Failure

The Souls games primarily teach you through trial and error. Even if you include the online player messages there is little to no information on specific warnings or strategy and it must be discovered by the player through playing the game, and for the most part it works well. General rules are established early on that the majority of enemies follow - larger enemies are more powerful and will knock you down easier, melee and ranged attackers usually look aesthetically different, etc. You may not know exactly what to expect when you walk up to a new enemy but you'll have a fairly decent idea after a few hours of play, and as a result most of the time when you die you feel responsible for it.

There are two times when that isn't true though - bosses and world exploration.

Many of the bosses in the Souls series have unique strategies or mechanics to them, and if you don't take advantage it will land you in the grave. That isn't an issue in and of itself, however when combined with the fact that the only way to learn about said strategies or mechanics is through trial and error it means that you are not only likely die but expected to die - that is how the developers designed the game.

Similarly the open world nature of the games means that you are usually provided with a variety of choices of where to go at any given time. Unlike most open world games however there are severe differences in difficulty in each area and no indications, meaning at some point you will take a wrong turn and land yourself in a deathtrap for your level.

In both of these cases the game is clearly designed to teach you through killing you, which necessarily means the game is punishing you for being unaware of something that it failed to tell you.

I'm beginning to think that this isn't the way to the item shop.

Even this practice isn't necessarily a problem in games. Many games in fact do this - Super Meat Boy (a game I've already stated that I loved) does this constantly, sometimes multiple times in a single level. The key difference here is the severity of consequences, or the iteration time.

Super Meat Boy has a tiny iteration time - when you die you usually lose around 10 seconds of progress. This means that the game can kill you on a whim and you never feel like you've lost a lot of progress. Unfortunately this is where the Souls series deviates, where dying can not only set you back upwards of an hour but also rob you of your experience and currency when you die in an area where you're unable to retrieve your corpse, effectively erasing several hours of play time.

What this means is that on the occasion when the Souls series kills you simply as a teaching tool rather than because you made a mistake the game has wasted a significant amount of your time because the developers were too stubborn to add in additional teaching methods into the game.

To state it plainly, the game punishes you because the developers wanted to waste your time.

Difficulty vs Punishment

The unfortunate thing is many people will defend this decision by claiming that it increases the difficulty of the game, but that just isn't the case. Pushing you farther back in an area doesn't make the area more difficult, it just increases the iteration time. Removing your experience likewise doesn't make the area more difficult, it just encourages grinding in easy areas when you need to make up for the loss.

These consequences are not an increase in difficulty, but an increase in punishment. You are forced to waste more time doing things you've already proven that you can handle.

Having severe consequences for failure is important for games like the Souls series where the player needs to feel that there is actually something at stake to feel the full weight of the game. This however means that any situation where you slap your player with the consequences of failure when it's not really their fault they will feel like they've been cheated and be demoralized, potentially to the point of quitting altogether.

The unfortunate part is there are several ways that the Souls series could have mitigated the issue without any changes whatsoever in gameplay. Simply by including scattered lore, NPCs, signs, etc. they could have given you ways of learning where to go and what to do against certain enemies to eliminate the feeling of being cheated. Being able to actually go research and prepare for a big fight would feel so much more satisfying to the player than waltzing in cold and being stunlocked in the corner until they're dead because they didn't know they had to immediately run past the Capra Demon and up the stairs in order to stand a chance.

Not that I'm bitter.

If you are going to have such a massive consequence for death it is absolutely vital that the player be able to look back after every death and identify something that they could have done to prevent it, and by in large the Souls series does that. However, instances where death is used purely as a teaching tool with nothing the player can do to prevent beyond luck are just common enough to significantly demoralize players, often to the point of quitting - how many people do you know that have actually finished either of the games?

I really want to like the Souls games because of everything they do right, but they have far too much missed potential for me to be anything but disappointed by them. There are absolutely amazing games hidden somewhere within them, but they are surrounded by just enough unfair demoralizing punishment to poison the overall experience.