The Stack

Apparently Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of Dark Souls, has said that the bonfires dotted around the lands are meant to symbolize hope. They’re sites of light and warmth kindled by the hero in an otherwise relentlessly dark and dangerous landscape. I have doubts about their efficacy as metaphor, but they’re definitely one of the most mechanically crucial things in the game. They serve as checkpoints, but simply calling them that sells them short. They’re more like base camps, where you not only refill your health but level up, perform maintenance, upgrade your equipment, and prepare spells. I’m told that you eventually get some kind of fast travel between them, but I’m not there yet.

Still, their greatest impact on the gamefeel is simply as checkpoints. But that means something very different in a game based on free exploration than it does in a more linear game, and the way Dark Souls treats death makes it more crucial still. It all has to do with Souls. “Souls” doesn’t mean what it sounds like; it’s just a sort of combination of experience points and currency. You get them by defeating enemies, and you spend them to either level up or to buy stuff from vendors. And that’s often a difficult choice. Levels cost a lot — the value of “a lot” increases, but the game is balanced such that it takes a considerable time to level up by grinding for Souls in the areas you can handle easily at your current level.

Now, when you die — and you die a LOT — you respawn at the last bonfire you touched, without your accumulated Souls. The Souls are recoverable, dropped in a green-glowing pile at the spot where you died (or, if you died by falling off a cliff or something, the last place you stood on the ground — a welcome mercy!) But you only get one such drop spot at a time. If you die again, your old Souls are lost. Crucially, there’s no way to “bank” unspent Souls. Anything yet unspent is always at risk, and the farther you are from a bonfire, the greater that risk: if the drop spot is on the far side of a tough fight, you might just resign yourself to the loss. This is where the sense of tension comes from in exploring new territory. It’s not the fear of death itself. Death is nothing. You can’t die for real. It’s the fear of losing your Souls.

And that’s why finding a new bonfire is such a big deal. Suddenly, the sense of risk in the surrounding area is drastically decreased! The feeling is less one of hope than of relief.

Now, this game isn’t exactly designed hub-and-wheel, but the closest thing it has to a hub is the Firelink Shrine, the first area after the tutorial, which provides access to three other zones from the beginning and shortcuts that can be opened to a couple others. It’s got the most prominently-presented bonfire of them all, and the game encourages you to think of it as home by making it the place that vendors and other helpers go after you rescue them from dangers. At a certain point in the story, the bonfire there goes out and can’t be rekindled, or at least not immediately, and it’s a fairly big moment. I don’t think this is the start of a trend, but it makes me think: What if other bonfires started going out? That makes the “hope” interpretation more plausible again. Not so much that it makes me feel hope, but that its loss would make me feel a loss of hope.

One thing I’ve found fairly impressive about Dark Souls is the variety of melee weapons available. It isn’t just a matter of varying some stats and which damage types they do. Weapons vary in how they move. You have to learn how to effectively handle them.

That’s a large part of why I’m still sticking to my trusty halberd in most situations: it’s familiar. But another part is its versatility. See, weapons generally have two attacks, one that’s faster and weaker and one that’s slower and stronger. (They can also be wielded one-handed or two-handed, but this usually only affects the resulting damage.) For some weapons, the fast attack and the strong attack are essentially the same: a spear just gives you a fast poke and a strong poke. But a sword might give you a a fast poke and a strong swing, for example. Or it might give you two different swings, the strong attack being slower because it goes wider. The halberd’s fast attack is a slow poke, more or less like the strong attack on a spear, and its strong attack is a swing that goes in a full circle around you, hitting everything close by and things directly in front of you twice. I like to fight just one thing at a time when possible, but it’s good to have options when you’re suddenly mobbed.

I’ve seen two main places where the halberd isn’t the best option, though. One is in Blighttown, where you encounter giant flies that spit poison. They move fast enough to sometimes dodge the halberd, but more importantly, they’re frequently simply above where its attacks go! Target-locking an enemy lets you poke it when it’s below your normal line of attack, but there’s a limit to how far the halberd can rise. A lighter weapon solves this, but sorcery solves it even better: the best way I’ve found to deal with them is to take them out is at a distance, before they can spit poison at me, using magic missiles.

The other is in the Tomb of Giants, where your main enemy is giant skeletons. Skeletons are traditionally more vulnerable to crushing than to slashing or piercing damage, and so it is here. For normal-sized skeletons, I don’t really have to worry about this, but the giants take enough more damage that I need to optimize. And so my main weapon against them is a Greatclub — essentially, a tree trunk, taller than you, that you carry over your shoulder. Its fast and strong attacks are both ponderous but unstoppable overhead blows. A more nimble enemy could easily step out of the way of such an attack, but these giant skeletons are just as slow as I am. Essentially, it turns the fight into a contest between two similar opponents, trying to out-giant each other.

The Dark Souls that I’ve been playing is more fully titled DARK SOULS™: Prepare To Die™ Edition. If I understand correctly, this is simply the original PC version of Dark Souls with some DLC bundled in. It’s not the most recent version of the game. That would be DARK SOULS™: REMASTERED, which is the same thing with a facelift. And that makes me think: Does this game really need remastering? Perhaps my aged eyes are behind the times, but the the graphics in the version I’m playing look perfectly fine to me, and the remaster doesn’t look noticeably different — looking at a comparisons, the only really noticeable difference is the bonfires, which got a lot more detailed. (The blurb for the remaster even emphasizes this by staring with the line “Then, there was fire”…) Other than that, I can look at two side-by-side images and have no idea which one is supposed to be the improvement. But perhaps my standards for this sort of thing are higher than those of Kids These Days: in my youth, if a game got remade years after its original release, that usually meant switching from EGA to VGA, which really made a difference to the look of the thing. (And not always an improvement — skilled artists working thoughtfully within constraints can produce effects that are ruined by haphazardly slapping in color gradients.) Remastering Dark Souls seems to be less a matter of updating it to utilize new technology and more just a way to get a new SKU on the market and revitalize sales.

Even though the visuals are mostly up to modern standards in the original, there’s one thing that really strikes me as having aged badly: the ragdolling. That is, the way that fallen enemies wiggle and flop around and tend to get caught on your feet so that they’re dragging behind you as you run about, even if it’s the body of a huge stone knight whose footsteps shook the earth. It’s as if everything gets replaced with a hollow rubber dummy at the moment of its death. Maybe “aged badly” is the wrong way to put it; maybe this came off as ridiculous ten years ago, too. I remember people being very impressed by the ragdolling in Half-Life 2, but the context was different. There, you were picking people up with your physics gun and throwing them around the room, so perhaps the whole situation was bizarre enough to excuse some bizarreness in the visuals. Also, I don’t recall the corpses being nearly as clingy there.

Anyway, I have no idea if the remaster changes the ragdolling at all. It’s hard to tell just from pictures.

In the Undead Burg, the lowest-level area adjacent to the hub, there is a treasure chest visible on a balcony near the main path. You can see the open doorway leading onto this balcony, but the building leading to it is locked tight, and I couldn’t seem to find the key. This lack of completion troubled me whenever I went back to the Undead Burg. It wasn’t the loot that I desired, really. Whatever was in the chest, chances are that, a few dozen hours into the game, I already had something better. But it bothers me to leave anything unopened.

Well, last night, I finally found the key. It’s sold by a vendor in another part of the Burg, off the main path forward. It’s possible that I’ve passed right by him before — he’s sitting on the floor amidst a bunch of clutter, and kind of blends in with the clutter. Finding him solves another mystery as well: I had obtained a crossbow early on, but couldn’t find any ammo for it until I reached the smith way at the end of Undead Parish, who sells bolts and arrows in addition to weapon upgrades. Well, guess what? That vendor in the Burg also sells bolts and arrows. I could have been doing ranged attacks a lot earlier. If I had, I might not have gone down the path of the Strength-based melee fighter the way I did.

If you’ve been reading my previous posts, you know that this is not an isolated incident. It keeps happening. I take a break from pressing ahead, and I wander around an area that I think of as “completed”, and I wind up finding new stuff that could have been old stuff if I had been more diligent. But I think this is just part of the structure of the game. When you first come to a new area, your ability to explore is curtailed by the fact that you’re fighting for your life all the time and have to make it to a bonfire (checkpoint) before your healing supplies run out. It’s only on returning with greater power that you have the luxury of true thoroughness. Every new player’s experience will be constrained by what they’ve found, but probably in different ways from person to person. And that’s fine. I didn’t absolutely need those arrows at that point in the game. There’s always an alternative.

I continue to get the impression that the difficulty of Dark Souls is overrated, or at least it is if you play it like an RPG rather than like an action game. In a typical action game, if you can’t make it past a boss, you’re just stuck. The progression of levels is linear and when the game says it’s time to fight the boss, you fight the boss. There are exceptions, of course. Metroidvanias. The Mega Man series. Like Dark Souls, these offer the possibility of backing off for a while and trying something else and coming back later with new powers.

And yet, apparently there exist people who consider it dishonorable to do this in Dark Souls, as if repeatedly banging your head on the same wall is the intended experience. I say that if the designers wanted you to play linearly, they would have made a linear game. Instead, they made a voluminously branching one. Indeed, the need to put a fight aside for a while and go exploring is tutorialized. The Asylum Demon in the intro area is absolutely not meant to be beatable in your first encounter, when you don’t have a proper weapon yet. You are absolutely meant to escape that fight and return to it when you have the means. This is the prototype for the whole game. (But then again, it also reminds me of the way that a lot of JRPGs include an impossible or nigh-impossible fight near the beginning specifically to teach you how to run away from combat, and usually that’s the first and last fight where I actually take advantage of that ability…)

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is to emphasize my hypocrisy. I spent much of last night in “git gud” mode, repeatedly attempting the same area, making slow incremental progress not through improved stats or improved equipment, but just getting better at the fights in that area. (And it really is mostly a matter of getting to know those particular fights, learning what to anticipate in specific places.) This is because the game all but forced it. There’s a status called “Cursed”, which cuts your maximum health in half, and unlike most status effects, it doesn’t go away when you die. The only way to get rid of it (at first) is to consult a wizard in the New Londo Ruins, which are full of ghosts that can’t be fought with normal weapons unless you’re cursed. So it’s all very tightly controlled by the designers: you’re meant to go there when you start encountering enemies that can curse, and no sooner. And the curse interferes with your ability to survive enough that exploring new areas isn’t really a serious option until you’ve got rid of it. Your only real options are to make repeated runs against the ghosts, or to grind in places where you feel safe enough that your diminished health doesn’t make a lot of difference. And in fact I did a bit of both — after some upgrades, I could kill a ghost with one blow, which helped a lot! But there are a lot of ghosts, and they gang up on you, and you can’t control the battle easily because they can pass through walls. So it took a while.

Anyway, it’s over now, and it’s a big relief. Exploration of new areas has been so much faster since I got rid of the curse. One side benefit to the experience: I ran through the area leading to New Londo often enough to finally find a side-path leading to a third blacksmith, who sells a few sorcery spells on the side. So now I have access to all three schools of magic, as well as someone who can upgrade my weapons if I accidentally kill the other remaining smith. This guy is in a cage that presumably protects him from your attacks — not that I’ve risked trying.

I’ve had a little success in the hunt for NPC assistance: I found a pyromancy trainer! He was, as predicted, in a place I had passed by multiple times, a storeroom where he had been stashed in a barrel by an insane cannibal chef. After rescue, he made his way to the game’s central hub, where I found him and learned my first spell. One thing I had been wondering about: Spells in this game are items of equipment, and one of their attributes is “number of uses”. Did this mean that I would use it up and never be able to cast it again unless I re-purchased it? Or was it like the “Estus Flasks”, the health potions that replenish themselves whenever you either die or sit at a bonfire? I’m relieved to report that the latter is the case. “16 uses” means 16 uses per sally.

But I’ve also had something of a setback: Vamos, the skeletal blacksmith who can upgrade your weapons with magical fire, is dead. This is the result of an accident. He has his forge set up in the Catacombs, in a hall adjacent to a cavern where skeletons stuck to spiked wheels roll around and make a nuisance of themselves. At first, I didn’t understand that these were monsters that needed to be killed, because you can’t easily make out the skeleton part while they’re rolling. Even once you realize this, they’re tricky to catch — they move fast, so when one is temporarily rendered immobile by a wall or something, you have to pounce on it quick before it starts rolling again. Anyway, one of the skeletons managed to roll itself into Vamos’s hallway and get stuck on the anvil, and when I tried poking it with my halberd, I wound up hitting Vamos as well. Vamos did not like this. I tried letting him kill me, in the hope that it would calm him down, but he was still hostile when I returned to the area. So I killed him instead.

As far as I know, I haven’t killed any other peaceful NPCs. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it seems to be permanent. At least he drops some pretty good loot: a cool golden horned helmet with good damage resistances, which has become a permanent part of my wardrobe, and a hammer that does fire damage. Apparently the hammer is considered substandard, but it’s the best I’ve got for melee fire damage, and the best I’m likely to get for a while now that the only smith who can imbue weapons with fire is dead. Thank goodness I’ve got that pyromancy trainer around. I’ll try not to kill him too.

Earlier, I said that every single enemy in Dark Souls other than the bosses (which tend to be various kinds of demon or dragon) is a zombie, or “Undead”. This turns out not to be true. I suppose I should have known: very early on, you get to meet skeleton and giant rat enemies. But skeletons are, from a certain point of view, just zombies in a more advanced state of decay, and the rats are diseased-looking enough to plausibly be zombie rats. And when you meet dark knights in full armor, they’re not exactly confirmed zombies, but in context, when the vast majority of things you’ve encountered are zombies, it’s a natural first assumption.

But once you get into the Darkroot Garden and areas beyond it, this stance becomes more difficult to maintain. It starts with some sort of plant-people, with spiky bushes growing out of their heads and bodies, who attack with vines. That could still be a kind of zombie, I guess? Just… zombies that spent so long lying still that plants started growing in them. In an adjacent zone, there are these crystal beings, basically big lumps of quartz with stubby arms and legs. This seems even less likely to be a kind of zombie, but the mere fact that it’s humanoid, that it moves like a person, means that the possibility of a zombie crystallizing at least crossed my mind. Giant figures in stone armor, lying on the ground and covered in patches of moss, that stand up as you approach: Giant zombies? No, these have lore attached to them. When they drop a weapon or a shield, its description states that they’re stone statues, animated by sorcery.

And past that, you get some creatures that aren’t even a little bit zombie-like. There are these bright red manta-ray-like creatures that crawl along the forest floor and attack you with froglike tongues. The Valley of the Drakes has exactly what it says on the tin. The sewers under the ruined city have amorphous slimes and weird leaping bug-things. Apart from the slimes and the rats, though, there’s a general tendency towards the humanoid. If you ignore the wings, the drakes have suspiciously human proportions, and walk upright when they’re not flying. When the manta rays die, they flip over to reveal incongruously human arms and legs, which is at least consistent with pictures of baby manta rays you can find online. I suspect it’s all due to motion capture.

Oh, and those skeletons? Turns out they’re not Undeads. As I’ve said before, an Undead in this setting is a person marked by a curse that makes them come back with diminished humanity when they die. The skeletons are just ordinary bones animated by a necromancer.

Immediately after the tutorial area, you’re told that your mission is to ring this bell. I forget why, but it’s important. It’s magic or something. But shortly after you’re told this, the keeper of the Firelink Shrine chuckles and informs you that actually there are TWO bells, one far above and one far below, and you have to ring them both. It’s a pretty minimal revelation, a modification of information you received less than a minute prior, but it’s an easy way for the writers to convey the intended vibe: that things are going to be harder than expected.

I bring it up now because I’ve now rung one of the bells. It’s likely that I could have done this a while ago; the gargoyles guarding it were entirely too tough for me when I first found them, which is basically your signal to go exploring for a while until you have better stats and better gear, and I spent long enough at this that the gargoyles were fairly easy when I worked up the courage to give them another try. As a result, I’ve seen ten of the game’s twenty-odd zones, albeit only briefly in some cases. I keep finding passages to new zones in areas that I thought I had explored thoroughly but hadn’t — the level design is good at exploiting 3D to hide stuff.

I’ve basically been playing as a pure melee character, but only half by choice. This is one of those RPGs where there isn’t really a hard distinction between character classes, where your choice of class determines your starting stats and starting equipment but both of these things change as you progress. I chose the Wanderer class, who starts off with a scimitar that can chain attacks and a cool coat with a bunch of resistances, and I had a vague plan of being a Dexterity-based fighter, dodging and weaving and killing with a flurry of fast blows. But I’ve wound up sinking a lot more points into Strength than Dexterity, and it’s mainly because I’ve found several weapons with very high Strength requirements and none with very high Dexterity requirements. Also, I’ve come to really appreciate the way the high-Strength weapons end fights quickly, often with a single blow. My preferred weapon for most things other than bosses is a halberd that I’ve upgraded to +5: it has the power of a greataxe and the reach of a spear, and its only real drawback is that you can’t just wave it around in the hope of hitting something like you can with the scimitar; you pretty much have to target-lock enemies to have any chance of hitting them with it.

So that’s me now: the heavy-hitter with a halberd. I’d hoped to have some spellcasting ability by now, if only to try it out and see how spells work in this game, but it hasn’t really worked out. The only spell merchant I’ve met is a cleric, whose offerings didn’t impress me enough for me to put enough points into Faith to be able to use them. There are supposed to be Sorcerer and Pyromancer spells, so where are they? It’s entirely possible that they’re sitting around perfectly accessible in some nook of the map that I’ve passed by a thousand times. That’s the downside to discovering new stuff every time you explore: it means there’s always been stuff you could have found already but haven’t.

If I had to describe the overall feel of Dark Souls in one word, that word would be “rhythmic”. This is a game with a pulse — which is perhaps ironic, considering the subject matter. Your footfalls as you run around the ruins establish a steady beat. When you break into a sprint, your stride gets longer, but your pace keeps the same rhythm. Enemy footsteps are synchronized to yours — sometimes, I think their sounds are my own until I come to a stop. Even the clang of sword-blows seems to fit the same tempo. Combat is all about finding the right timing, and having the rhythm constantly in your head helps, both to find and to remember it.

I suspect this is a big part of what makes the action so comfortable, so welcoming. Following a steady beat is something humans are good at. I’ve seen 2D platformers compared to dancing before, but there’s something similar going on here. And just as music is based on repetition, not just of beats but of higher-level patterns, so is Dark Souls. Either you’re spending a lot of time grinding for Souls, or you’re spending a lot of time trying to get through enemies that are too high-level for you because you haven’t been grinding for Souls enough, and in either case, you’re fighting the same enemies repeatedly, and running though the same scenery repeatedly to reach them. The beat has a slight hypnotic effect that makes this easier to bear. Why haven’t other grind-intensive CRPGs picked up on this?

There’s been a small online kerfuffle about Elden Ring‘s UI. What do I think of the Dark Souls UI?

Mostly it’s fine. It’s designed for a controller, and that’s how I’ve been playing, and it’s serviceable enough. There’s a useful health gauge permanently affixed to the top left, and below it, a stamina gauge that’s less useful, as stamina refills so quickly that it’s going to be full any time your attention isn’t on the stamina-draining actions you’re performing. I think the stamina gauge is mainly there to explain to the player how stamina works, rather than to provide up-to-the-moment information. To give you a strong intuitive sense of why sprinting into battle is a bad idea. At the bottom, there’s a readout of what you currently have equipped, which is a little redundant with what you can simply observe in your character’s hands, but less ambiguous in situations like “I’m climbing a ladder so my hands are empty right now” and “The graphical representation of my weapon is penetrating a wall and partly occluded”.

The one really troublesome part of the UI is the menu that comes up when you press the “Start” button on the controller. This is how you access your inventory, so you bring it up whenever you want to change weapons or chug a potion that isn’t in your quick-select slot or something. And the inventory sub-menus are perfectly fine, just your standard equip-slots and scrolling lists, with a nice set of different information displays to toggle. But the parent menu is troublesome as a result of a combination of two things. First, it’s not a full-screen menu. The sub-menus are full-screen, but not the principal one, which sits up in the upper right of the game, not drawing attention to itself. Second, it doesn’t pause the game. In fact, you can still run around while it’s open — although you can’t do much of anything else, as all the button presses you’d use to perform attacks or interact with the environment are absorbed by the menu. The combination means that it’s way too easy to not notice that it’s still open. A noticeable fraction of my deaths in the game are caused by switching weapons in preparation for the next enemy (fast, unarmored zombies being better suited to a light, quick weapon, while zombies in full plate need something that can punch through it), only to discover too late that I only closed the equipment sub-menu and my attacks aren’t doing anything.

And look, I kind of get why they made it possible to run around with the menu open. This is a game with a multiplayer component, so you can’t just freeze the world. And since the controls for maneuvering around the menu are distinct from the controls for running, the decision to let you run away from stuff while the menu is open is, if questionable, at least understandable. But if you’re going to let me run around, you should really let me perform attacks as well. And contrapositively, if you’re going to lock away my attacks, I’d prefer that you just take away my movement, and in fact all of my in-world interaction. It’s the partial disabling that’s so confounding.

Anyway, I assume that all this has been hashed out online a thousand times already, but you wouldn’t be reading this blog if you didn’t like seeing decade-old games relitigated.