Dark Souls
Slapping all the souls games here as there's too many to make an individual page for each.
The Dark Souls Franchise
The dark souls franchise is one of my favorite ever. A theme I've noticed with some of my favorite
games is that many of them are very mod-able and in a specific way where they seem to work well with
either randomizing the game, player made versions of the game working well with the game, or challenge
running the game. Dark souls is no exception.
On their own they are a class of game that has a higher skill ceiling and that rewards the player extremely
well based on their game knowledge. There are a ton of things in Dark Souls that will only "get" you the first
time around. I would argue the entirety of the first Dark Souls is easy when you've played any of the other games.
This is because of a power creep, later games in the Souls franchise gave enemies more, and faster attacks.
The high skill ceiling and importance placed on game knowledge also lends very well to challenge running.
Probably one of the more popular game video genres is the Souls game challenge run. Speed runs, no hit runs,
no leveling runs, specific weapon runs. There's a million different ways to make the game harder, and people
love doing it and love watching it.
The Souls series are a series of third person action RPG games. A theme within these games is upon death,
all your currency of the game is left near to where you died, and you have to go back and get it. If you die
again before retrieving the currency, it's lost. In that way it's a somewhat unforgiving game series, but I
enjoy it as it gives more weight to your failures.
Dark Souls
The first Dark Souls was my second Dark Souls game. As in, I played Dark Souls 3 before I played 1. This made DS1 easier for me than for most people who played it first, as DS3 had a much faster style of combat, and a much less tanky character. In DS1 you could realistically suit up in some heavy armor and tank through enemy attacks, thanks to armor giving actually defense (this could all be in my head but DS3 made me feel squishy no matter what level of armor I equipped), and a mechanic called poise, which DS3 seemed to have left out.
Poise was basically stagger resistance, when you equipped heavier armor or some rings (rings have added effects to them such as increased poise or stamina regeneration) that boosted your poise, you could basically shrug off attacks. Where an attack may stagger your character with no armor, poise allowed you to ignore the stagger and keep attacking/walking/whatever else you were doing. This effectively let you trade hits with enemies, which works well for newer players as it removes something to manage. Instead of thinking about dodging attacks and keeping an eye on your health and amount of health regen available, you could drop the dodging and just be thinking about how to maximize your damage and keep your health topped off.
This Dark Souls was amazing due to it's openness. The map was mostly connected in that there were only a few spots where you needed to go through a loading zone to get to a new area. Many games are level based, or instance based, where when you start a level you go through a loading screen, play the level, go through another loading screen. There's nothing wrong with this approach, it just makes for a much more linear game, where it's almost more like playing through a movie. This open world design, enabled a more free playstyle and encouraged exploration. One of the downsides of this is that if you didn't know where to go next you could spend a hefty amount of time scouring the game for the next thing you needed to do to progress.
I mentioned randomizing the games earlier. This is when you mod the game so that enemy placement is changed, to, well, mostly random. There are some settings you can change in the program that makes it so the boss enemies have less weight when randomizing the overworld, which can be good if you want a more balanced run. I think this Dark Souls also worked well with randomizers due to it's simpler enemy design. If you got stuck fighting the final boss at the start of the game because that's how it randomized, it wasn't the end of the world. The final boss has like four attacks and it's easy enough to cycle through them until you find the safe one to attack on. It becomes a patience game in some aspects.
You can also randomize items, which makes it like a treasure hunt, you never know where the item you need to progress the game is. I've probably had more fun playing the game "wrong" like this than the base game itself.
Dark Souls 2
DS2 is widely known as the "worst" souls game. I would probably agree, but being the worst souls game still
puts it above most other games in my book. It's a little jankier and has a different visual style than the
other games. It feels a bit brighter at times and the storyline of the game is somewhat disconnected from DS1
and DS3.
I have played this the least out of the Dark Souls Trilogy, and I haven't played this one randomized yet, as the
randomizer wasn't working until recently. That's on my list of things to do, but honestly not very high up on
it.
I did recently, within the past year or so, play through it again on my steam deck, runs like a dream on there,
and was great when I was doing a lot of traveling. An interesting, and annoying thing, that happened though. I was
invaded by another player at one point, who used some form of cheat to fill my inventory with a weapon in a way
where my game would crash every time I opened my inventory. This makes the game functionally unplayable. I don't
understand the headspace someone would have to be in to do this to another person, they weren't even able to see
the results of their "handiwork" other than to immediately get kicked from my world once my game crashed. Luckily
I was able to download cheat engine and use it to remove all of that weapon type from my game. Still though, this
wasted a good two hours or so of my time between researching my problem, getting the resources needed to fix it,
and doing the actual fixing.
Is inconveniencing people like this fun for some people? I imagine some less tech savvy people would just call it
for that character, which would really suck. So this is a PSA to play DS2 offline.
Dark Souls 3
This was the first Dark Souls game I ever played. Back in the far off year of 2016. I remember needing to
restart at the first boss because I couldn't make the class I took first work. I had take the herald class
which gives you a spear and shield. For whatever reason I was brick walled by the tutorial boss, who, notably,
in DS3 was a solid bit tougher than it had been in previous soul games. I switched to a different class with a
stronger weapon and got past Iudex Gundyr.
I got really into Dark Souls around this time, on youtube there was a guy I watched called "Praise the Sun", he did
mostly pvp battles in DS2 and 3. Unfortunately for me he got rid of his youtube channel, probably around 2019ish.
I believe he was going to start a new job and decided he didn't want his online presence to be there anymore. I
know people say the internet is forever but I certainly have not found a way to watch any of his old videos.
Sometimes I'd like to go watch one or two for nostalgia sake. Hope he's doing well.
I have been playing through DS3 again recently, also on my steam deck, and I have to say, my level of experience
with these games does show. I've been flying through the game, defeating most of the bosses in one go. It's been
a good time to come back and feel how much skill I've gained. Which, I mean, I would hope so. I've put enough time
into these games I would hope I would have at least some level of competency.
Speaking of playing it on my steam deck, a problem with DS3 is that all it's saves are local. If I wanted to play
on my desktop pc I would have to manually move the save over to my computer. Which is a pain in the ass.