This is less-so a review of Dark Souls 1 itself (a great game, play it) and more-so a review of the surrounding social conventions of playing the game. If there is anything the franchise – and, indeed, the rapidly growing genres of “soulslikes” which seek to imitate it – is known for, it is an almost unfair level of difficulty. The reputation it has garnered is of unforgiving bosses, swarms of enemies around every corner waiting to stunlock you into hell, losing your ‘souls’ (essentially XP, for those less familiar with the genre) over and over, and clunky, slow movements which leave you wide open for attack. If you were to believe this notoriety, the games would seem downright unfun, a pointless exercise in cruelty without story direction to give reason.
And while these tropes could certainly be argued to be true for more modern copycats of Fromsoft’s games, if you come to the first Dark Souls, as I did over this past summer, you’ll find it… rather tame in difficulty. I don’t mean to boast – there were many bosses I had to try over and over, and areas that I struggled to get to the end of, but nothing was unfair. There are many systems designed to help you through the hardest parts of the game. Shortcuts to make runbacks to bosses easier, summonable NPCs to help you fight them – drop rates for key consumable items are even increased in areas where you haven’t beat the area boss, ensuring you never run out of supplies if you’re stuck.
Yet, the culture around Dark Souls 1 is that of it being an unfair game. Not as much these days, now that both harder games in the franchise and harder games in the genre have come out, but on release, beating Dark Souls was a badge of honor – a social signifier that you were mechanically better than a player who bounced off the game. Why is this, when my experience was so comparatively tame?
What’s cheating anyway?
“Cheating” a single-player video game is hard to quantify. In competitive environments, it’s easy to define – anything that the group agrees gives an unfair advantage to another player. Usually this is done via the modification of game data – hacking the game to give yourself a higher critical hit chance, more health – or using a third-party software to improve your mechanical inputs, like making a ‘macro’ which will input a series of frame-perfect button presses, or using an aimhack. Sometimes it comes through the exploit of bugs which the community looks down upon, but are technically possible in the vanilla version of the game – for example, a glitch that allows a player to make their hitboxes no longer align with their character’s model would be frowned upon even if it involves no “hacking” by the cheating player.
But what about when you’re alone? Does it matter if you play through, say, Doom with all the cheat codes? Does it count as beating the Sims if you give yourself infinite money to build your house?
Generally, what people settle on is that singleplayer cheating is anything that makes the game… not fun. You’re perfectly free to play a game with godmode turned on, but you’re probably not getting the intended experience when nothing is interesting in playing through the levels. You’ll get bored, turn it off.
Dark Souls 1, though, is different. Despite being largely singleplayer (the game has many online features like invading other players games to start PVP, or being a summonable ally to help a player through a section up to the area boss, but is completely playable in offline mode), the game’s significance as a social badge creates a competitive culture which views completions done in a different play-style to be suspect. The award of beating Dark Souls, a “hard” game, is less valuable if more people have it – thus, as more people got into the game, a higher barrier of “valid” victories were created. Some of these are clearly joking; for example, did you not help Solaire, the fan-favorite helpful NPC? You didn’t beat the game right!
Some, however, are clearly serious even through the constant veil of irony that coats online communication. The game’s story is that of struggling through a difficult, hostile world, and helping others through it even as you struggle yourself; however, the game’s best way of integrating this storytelling into the mechanics, the aforementioned summonable players to help in difficult encounters, is viewed as a “cheap” way of beating a boss by many in the community. Even if you did not enjoy the content of a boss, you have to struggle through it to have “really” beat the game, even though it is an intended way by the developers to help players get through hard fights. Someone who summons to complete a boss has not cheated themselves or altered the game’s contents in any way from intended, yet there is a broad cultural perception of this being cheating – not a real defeat of the boss, and thus an incomplete run of the game.
These social rules, of what constitutes an acceptable run of the game, extends to disqualifying entire builds. Though a less common opinion than viewing summoning as cheating, you will genuinely meet players who view anything beyond a ultra-greatsword strength build as a less legitimate experience, something that the game never indicates within its text. Social convention, rather than the actual mechanics, have come to dominate players’ experience.
This Sucks… but it’s meant to be hard, right?
When you first exit the tutorial area in DS1, you have many paths to explore before you. Down below, an elevator to the sunken, ghost-filled city of New Londo; off to the right, the skeleton-filled, difficult Catacombs. Forward, Undead Berg, where you’re meant to go at the start of the game. With the master key taken as your starting equipment, you can go even further into mid-game areas before even fighting your first boss.
How the game is designed, a new, lost player might venture off into one of these side paths from the central hub, die quickly, and turn towards the intended path. It’s a classic way of balancing a game; a new player shouldn’t get too deep into an area they aren’t ready for, as they’ll get annoyed with the difficulty and turn to other pathways, while an experienced returning player can take the risk to unlock things early.
But, when a new player is getting into Dark Souls 1 carrying with them the social context of it being a difficult, unfair game, this design can be destroyed. A player could head immediately right from Firelink Shrine, find themselves getting killed by the skeletons of the Catacombs over and over due to not being leveled high enough, and… keep going, expecting this to be the intended experience, because “Dark Souls is meant to be hard, right?”
This isn’t a hypothetical – this happened to my girlfriend on her first playthrough of the game. A more famous example is how many people hate the Capra Demon, a mid-game boss with an infamously tight arena, for… a difficult and long runback, which is, in reality, not the runback for the boss at all. They simply miss the shortcut stairs back to Firelink, because when you die and get frustrated at the idea of having to run back all the way to the fog gate – well, Dark Souls is meant to be punishing and frustrating, right? This must be the intended experience, and thus they don’t think to turn right and find the easier pathway.
How the game wants you to react to these situations is to adapt; don’t rush into fog gates without exploring the entire area first, seek alternate paths if something is too difficult. It’s encouraging you to outsmart it and avoid moments of frustration with planning. But this is ruined by a player expecting to be frustrated due to these social conventions constructed around the game.
Prepare to die edition
These social pressures explain modern perceptions of the game – how this gatekeeping, self-policing community has projected an image of unfair difficulty where the game is largely the opposite in reality. But where did this come from in the first place? I don’t have answers, but I do have a lot of conjecture. Feel free to disagree with my conclusions.
To put it simply, marketing and reviews. The skill of game reviewers at games has been a contentious and partisan debate the last 10-odd years, but I think the answer is far easier than a blanket statement of reviewers being good or bad; game reviewers are under time pressure. A week, two weeks, a month to both play a game to completion and write a review of it is a lot of pressure – and, when a game has elements that punishes mistakes with lost time (as Dark Souls often does), that makes that pressure even harder. It is my opinion a reviewer will declare a game harder due to this subjective experience of having to write about it, quickly, for a living. And many, many reviewers said Dark Souls was hard back in 2011.
Secondly, the marketing around Dark Souls leaned into an image of difficulty before the game had an established public image. The PC version was titled “Prepare to Die Edition”, and before the game even came out on consoles, there was a trailer of the same title featuring a compilation of different player deaths. Other trailers featured similar montages.
Now, I can only speculate as to why the marketing was done this way; perhaps it was from Bandi-Namco, the publisher, forcing a more aggressive message on the developer’s vision. Perhaps Fromsoft was entirely okay with it, given their previous game, Demon’s Souls, had a similar reputation for difficulty. But what I can say is the game, as a finished product, is not reflective of this reputation. It’s certainly hard; you will, in fact, die over, and over. It is a technically demanding and mentally stimulating game. But you are not cut loose by the design to suffer, as so many believe. There are many, many paths to assistance, and the game is distinctly not unfair. People just want it to be.