What are you Playing Now? - Right Now at the moment edition

[majestic]

Dark Souls, which was a replay. I replayed on Steam after trading my Switch cartridge for a Steam key with a friend.

First of all, in spite of doing a whole lot of grinding to find out whether one can make do with the Greatsword of Artorias if you waste all the stats for it (short answer: yes, but it is not worth it, outside of making it really easy to beeline for the Rite of Kindling after starting a new cycle), it only took me half the time to achieve everything in the game, compared to Dark Souls 2. Which is to be expected, Dark Souls is a lot smaller, and on new game cycles a lot of the game can be skipped.

The achievements and the game systems were also designed to waste a lot less time compared to Dark Souls 2 while playing offline, but between completing all Dark Souls, Dreck Souls 2: Scholar of the First Suck and Sekiro achievements, one thing has become abundantly clear: FromSoftware has no idea how to design interesting achievements. They are all just either related to playing the game, achieving all possible endings and looking for equipment. Contrary to the usual edgelord opinion, achievements can be interesting, the ones in FromSoftware games, so far, were not.

I think I might have found the reason why Dark Souls feels better to play - for me - than Dark Souls 2 did. The recovery animations are a lot shorter. One can - more or less - smoothly transition from an completed attack animation into a roll in Dark Souls, while in Dark Souls 2 there is a recovery time between finishing the attack and being able to roll away. Combined with the boss attack patterns of Dark Souls 2, that makes it a game of baiting out an attack and punishing it or dodging through a combination and then get an attack in. While Dark Soul's combat cannot be called fast paced and frantic, it feels a lot less slower than Dark Souls 2's: the bosses have more openings to attack and their movesets are not employing as many two or three hit combos. I got lucky in my early game, getting the Black Knight Halberd right at the start, and while that meant playing most of the game semi-naked due to the rather hefty equipment load requirement of the Black Knight weapons, it never limited me to hitting an enemy once and having to prepare a roll because the follow up attack would just end with me being hit.

Now, having played the game again, and a couple of times at that, and having listened to lore videos while playing to break the monotony of the grinding and replaying the more annoying parts of the game, I can say with some confidence that, lore and story wise, the only two really interesting parts are not related to the player's quest, which will always be the quest of someone else you just happen to accept because you have nothing better to do with your time anyway.

I am, of course, talking about the two NPC related quests in the game, of which Solaire's might be less involved and harder to miss out on, but is the better one, so it is fine. There's some personal tragedy in Siegmeyer's quest, plus some statements by Sieglinde that make you question what happened (girl, what exactly do you mean when you say you have to kill your father again?) but the two outcomes of Solaire's quest are simply fantastic. He either finds his sun, and loses himself, or you help him fail his quest by finding the Sunlight Maggot first.

It is the consequence of Solaire failing his quest that is most poignant and which elevates it: he becomes disillusioned and depressed because he did not find his sun, which is what he became an undead for, out of his own volition. He then can be summoned to fight Gwyn, Lord of Sunlight Cinder, and he's so ludicrously strong that he can basically solo the boss for you. Not only can you summon him to fight the very lord he worships, but his rage is strong enough to overcome him without much of your input. Not that Gwyn isn't more of a jokey fight, I wonder why people complain about Nashandra and Aldia in Dark Souls 2 being a boring pair of bosses to end the game with. Gwyn certainly is not much better, even if you do not or cannot parry him, you just need to stay close to him so he misses half his attacks without you having to do much, so is that sort of complaining coming from players working their way backwards from Dark Souls 3?

So, anyway, back to Solaire, I found his personal story to be really on point. Was it all lies? Why, yes, it was, although that does not come out as much in Dark Souls, I suppose. It is a part of the game that was made retroactively better.

Still, and there we are back at something I already wrote about, at lenght, is how much Dark Souls did not live up to the hype for me. The story is not that great, and while it is undoubtely genre defining in the sense that there is now a "Soulslike" genre, I am not sure if the combat system alone is what defines a whole genre, and even that is blurred with additions like Bloodborne and Sekiro. It is a "difficult" dark fantasy third person action adventure game that just seems to have come out at the right time.

I put difficult in quotes because replaying the game just cemented my opinion. The game is not that difficult, outside of a few areas that are not really well designed, and gimmicky fights that are more frustrating than fun. Yes, I'm looking at you, Bed of Chaos. Then there's the issue that Dark Souls falls apart after the first half. Everything that comes afterwards (well, and in the case of New Londo, technically before, because it is possible to complete it before getting the Lord Vessel, as long as you're willing to kill Ingward for the key) is just terrible, with the worst offenders being Lost Izalith and the Tomb of Giants, which one could easily consider to be contenders for the worst areas in any game, period. The forced death to Seath and the run through the Crystal Caves would be high on the list too, if Seath wouldn't be so easy. Well, once you have cut his tail. Cutting his tail is the worst. It is even worse than the Kalameet tail cut, which is annoying becaus you basically have to bait it out, but at least one can bait it out. Seath can just move in a way that makes it impossible to hit his tail - for long, long stretches of time.

Now, well, I cannot say anything about the state of gaming back in 2011. That was a time when all I did was play MMORPGs. Maybe Dark Souls really was the moment that brought actual difficulty back to games. Maybe that was Demon's Souls already, and maybe all of that was just Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, both games that were a much greater success than Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2.

As far as my experience goes, it certainly would not have been, because the game is just not difficult enough to count. Lastly there's the dopamine release and adrenaline rush aspect of the game. I understand that being stuck at Ornstein and Smough for a longer while makes one feel really good once the challenge has been overcome. I just did not get if from Dark Souls - but also not from Dark Souls 2 or Sekiro. Having to fight a boss, solo, for a handful of times to understand its moveset and find counters is nothing next to having to deal with your raid group and having difficult raid encounters lasting up to fifteen minutes. Pulling them over, and over, and over, and over and over again. Not five times, ten times or even twenty. Hundreds of  times, in the case of the really difficult ones. I realize that does not apply to a whole lot of people, given the MMORPG population that usually partakes in its most difficult content, but, yeah, this is relevant for my experience. Insofar, well, Dark Souls is a good game with a terrible second half, but with me not really being interested in the world, unlike in Hellpoint, I can say that Hellpoint, while being the much worse game in terms of combat and movement, was still the better experience for me.