For a guy who canât seem to survive two minutes in the foreboding, swords-and-dungeons world of Dark Souls, I must seem unnecessarily worried about how difficult the game will be.
Demonâs Souls, Dark Soulsâ predecessor, was as much known for its brutal level design and lack of save points as it was its unique approach to cooperative and competitive play. It was a game that created genuine fear in players not through plot devices and monster design, but by the threat of stripping a player of everything they accomplished between levels if they died.
But in Dark Souls players can find safety as they wind their way through dungeons, working their way from one behemoth to the next, simply by camping out at a bonfire.
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âDonât you worry youâve made the game too easy,â I ask Namco senior brand manager Brian Hong as my character dies for perhaps the fifth time?
Hong isnât worried at all, nor is developer From Software, he tells me, because the bonfires were simply a way for the developers to make the game harder.
âThe best way to explain bonfires is that the developers wanted to make the game harder,â Hong said. âWhich they did, but they were also very concerned with game balance. With the increased difficulty of play it is much harder, but harder to the point of not being fun.â
So essentially the bonfires, which can replenish health and refill life-giving flasks, are a way for the developers to make a hard game even more difficult without creating something that only the most devoted of fans would want to play.
Itâs worth noting too that unlike Demonâs Souls, Dark Souls is not a linear game that leads players along a narrow channel of adventure through a series of dungeons. Instead Dark Souls is conceived as an open world that allows gamers to explore, and die, at their own leisure. So in a way, the bonfires serve the same purpose that the breaks between levels served in the previous game.
âThat makes this the hardest game. Harder than Demonâs Souls.â
And the bonfire isnât always a playerâs friend.
âIf youâre one of those players who get to the checkpoint and then fight ahead for 45 minutes to clear a level and then decide to go back to a bonfire to replenish your health and flasks everything will respawn,â Namco brand manager Brandon Zien said.
And when those creatures repopulate the dungeon you just made safe, they will come back tougher, angrier.
The bonfires are also pretty spread out. Zien tells me they are âstrategically placed throughout an area.â
âJust when a game is kicking your ass you can find a bonfire,â he said. âIt balances the frustration, because theyâve toned up the difficulty in other areas: The bosses, the hit points, the spawning of mobs.
âThat makes this the hardest game. Harder than Demonâs Souls.â
From Softwareâs decision to not just include save points, but to give them some teeth reminds me of some of the clever design decisions the team made when creating Demonâs Souls
When you died in that game you were sent back to the beginning of a level, but if you paid attention as you fought your way through a level you may have opened back doors and short cuts. These new paths inevitably made getting back to where you died a much quicker journey. It was a clever way of getting around save points, something Iâll miss if it doesnât find its way into this game.
Hong declined to tell me if this sort of shifting level design was going to appear in Dark Souls, but said that From Software wants to âmaintain all of the good parts that people rememberâ from the previous game.
âThat feature youâre talking about was a pretty important first for them,â he said.
Thereâs a lot that Namco and From Software are keeping to themselves about Dark Souls. Thatâs not just because they want to dribble out new details of the game going into its fall launch, itâs also because theyâre trying desperately to recapture everything about Demonâs Souls launch and its surprising success.
Players will be able to temporarily become inanimate statues and then break free of this form to attack another player in their game.
A big part of the gameâs success, both Hong and Zien say, was that it was such a surprise to everyone who played it. The game sort of appeared out of nowhere with very little interest leading into its launch. It went on to sell nearly a million copies, they said.
Because of that relative obscurity, the game was able to deliver not only a bit of tough, throw-back gaming, but also a lot of design surprises.
Thatâs why the developer and publisher are still hesitant to talk about Dark Soulsâ story, some of the new mechanics, like the characterâs ebbing humanity and how it can be fed into a bonfire to strengthen it.
We donât even know all of the gameâs characters yet. So far the developer has said there will be a soldier, knight, witch and pyromancer. They also discuss a black knight and the Solaire of Astora.
While much of the Demonâs Souls experience was single player it had some interesting ways to interact with other players online beyond online cooperative play. You could, for instance, leave messages scrawled on dungeon walls and floors for others playing the game. These messages, shared automatically across the Playstation Network, would warn away from or sometimes trick players into ambushes and falling deaths.
This ability returns in Dark Souls, which will now be coming to the PS3 and Xbox 360. Players will also still be able to âinvadeâ another playerâs world, taking on the form of a Dark Knight to stalk and try to kill another player online.
In Dark Souls there will be other ways to harass online players. The pyromancer, for instance, will be able to summon a gravelord to another players game. The gravelordâs appearance in the other game brings with it a slew of new haranguing monsters. The only way to stop the flood of new enemies is to destroy the gravelord. While the pyromancer can summon this creature, he or she canât decide in whoâs game they appear or directly control them.
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âWeâre trying to put in as many surprises as possible,â Hong said.
So players will sometimes be able to hide in coffins and ambush other players when they walk by. They will also be able to temporarily become inanimate statues, blending in with the statues that already dot the gameâs landscape, and then break free of this form to attack another player.
Namco wasnât able to show me any of the online aspects of Dark Souls in action, but the promise of endlessly helping and harassing other players in creative new ways sounds as inviting as the gameâs challenging level design.
I think I dread Dark Souls release nearly as much as I anticipate it.
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