Bloodborne's Gameplay and Difficulty: On the Mainstreamification of the Souls Series

 

With all the recent info that has come out on Bloodborne this past week, I've decided to write-up my own thoughts about the game at the moment. Mainly, I've noticed a couple of things about the game that I think people have generally missed because they require you to read between the lines of all the various press releases, interviews, and demonstrations that have come out over the weeks leading up to and including Gamescon. These points have to do with the nature of Bloodborne's gameplay and its difficulty, as well as with how these things fit into the evolution of Souls series toward what can be called the "mainstream gaming audience."

First, regarding Bloodborne's gameplay: After reviewing the leaked footage from Gamescon and assessing it in light of From's past statements about the game, I've come to the conclusion that although Bloodborne's dark aesthetic is reminiscent of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, its design is much more influenced by Dark Souls II. In the first place, Bloodborne will return us to Dark Souls II's emphasis on mob combat with renewed force. Watching the Gamescon footage, you will see that players come against many enemies who attack in groups rather than one-on-one. This was a gameplay direction introduced by Dark Souls II and it marked a significant departure from the previous two Souls games which favored single enemy encounters. It's safe to say that the mob combat style will be a staple of Bloodborne as well, as From has said more than once that the threat of being overwhelmed by multiple enemies is part of the game's core design philosophy.

Another point to consider is how Bloodborne constructs player's combat repetoire. Like Dark Souls II, Bloodborne will emphasize the agility of the player. Dark Souls II made this into its own stat within the RPG mechanics of the Souls series. Its function in that game was to increase the character's ability to react swiftly and dodge enemy attacks. In Bloodborne, this stat has been made into an obligatory feature of  gameplay, with evasive swiftness now being a necessary part of the player's toolset rather than an optional playstyle. In essence, what was a new, experimental mechanic in Dark Souls II will now be a crucial, required component of Bloodborne.

There are lots of other little things that suggest that Bloodborne and Dark Souls II are conceptually connected in terms of design. The return of torches and dark spaces in Bloodborne hints that this attempted and seemingly abandoned mechanic in Dark Souls II is being re-attempted in Bloodborne. Also, at least one character revealed in the Gamescon footage appears to be a near copy-and-paste of an enemy from Dark Souls II. I am speaking here of the cloaked monster banging on the gate that appears around 2:45 in this video. The enemy is very similar to the Undead Jailors fought in the Lost Bastille section of Dark Souls II.

I think these links between Dark Souls II and Bloodborne should be seen as very significant. For starters, it undermines a hard and fast division between the two games that many fans have imagined to exist within From Software's development process. In an interview with Miyazaki (the director of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls), it was reported that Dark Souls II was developed by a separate team of which Miyazaki was not a part. At the time, Miyazaki was actually working on Bloodborne with another team. Some have used this fact as a way of asserting that Bloodborne will be cut from a whole other cloth from that of Dark Souls II. I think these initial comparisons between the games that I have made suggest a different relationship between the two games. Rather than happening in separate isolation chambers, it's clear that there was a good deal of communication and shared design ideas between the two teams. Indeed, it appears that the two games grew out of the same pool of ideas and were guided by same overall plan to re-tool the series into something else. It is this something else that I think fans of the first two games should take time to pause and consider, because it is part and parcel with From's apparent plan for the series since the success of Dark Souls.

The plan, in brief, is to make the Souls series into a more mainstream affair--a plan that, however beneficial it may be to the game's creators, conflicts with what some, including myself, would call the "purity" of the series. This purity, for better or worse, has to do with the uncompromising sense of difficulty, both in terms of figuring out how the overall game system works and mastering the individual challenges presented moment to moment, that the series reintroduced to the world. This is probably the most touchy subject for the games. In the past, any hint that their "hardcore" aspects would be pared back has been swiftly denounced by the most ardent fans. At the same time, there has been a consistent appeal from the wider gaming community that the game be made less unwelcoming to less dedicated gamers. Like it or not, From has shown itself to be more interested in reaching out to the latter group than in satisfying the hardcore desires of the former, and this is an attitude and approach that is written all over what we've been shown about Bloodborne so far.

Going back to the game's release at E3, snippets leaking out of a press meeting about Bloodborne being a less difficult game have been making the rounds. At Gamescon, some of these rumors became more concrete through some of From's own statements. According to multiple outlets, its developers are saying that "the sense of punishment is much less" this time around, explaining that they are aiming for a "wider audience." Some high profile fans, such as VaatiVidya, have been quick to dismiss the concerns rising from this, telling us to "trust in Miyazaki." Well, we've already been around that block before with Dark Souls II and its own "accessibility-gate," and we know where that ended, don't we?

Dark Souls II isn't a bad or easy game by any stretch of the imagination, but most fans of the first two games agree that a number of key elements that made Dark Souls and Demon's Souls so special, such as the large gaps between save-points and the regeneration of enemies, were significantly watered down in Dark Souls II. Other areas of compromise included the addition of voice-chat and targeted co-op, both of which I wrote about before the game came out. These were concessions to vocal gamers who weren't happy with the past entries and wanted to see the series remade along more popular conventions. From reps, including a Namco-Bandai Community Manager in response to my article, assured that these changes were not indications of series dilution (see the comments section of my post linked above). Once people finally got their hands on the game, however, it quickly became clear that something had happened to the Souls series over the course of Dark Souls II's development. Its vitality had been lost. Players weren't as moved by it as they were by the other games. Even diehard fans like EpicNameBro seem to have become apathetic to Dark Souls II at this point, despite having worked on the game's official strategy guide. Following its release, he hasn't done anything with the game in months.

Now, on the eve of Bloodborne's announcement, we are faced with the same situation, the same worries and apprehensions. From is once again making sounds about decreasing difficulty to reach a wider audience, and certain individuals are once again out in full force putting down anyone who dares to raise an eyebrow at these statements. My point is that we should learn from history and read these signs for what they are. Since Dark Souls, From has sought to market its series to an increasingly mainstream audience and the consequence of this is that it has become incrementally less compellingly intense and more banally accommodating.

Watching the demo footage from Gamescon and reading journalists' reports, it seems that Bloodborne will continue this trend by being a more forgiving game. Not only is the player character more agile than ever, making dodging considerably easier, the game further decreases the difficulty by installing a "regain" mechanic that lets player's quickly recoup lost health by (wildly, from the footage we've seen) striking back at enemies. In the demo footage leaked, one can see relatively inexperienced players gain back large swathes of health in this way simply by button-mashing. Some will defend this by citing reports that the difficulty of the demo was toned down to let players experience the full package. I remain skeptical of this. If thought about, the idea doesn't make much sense. Wouldn't that be tantamount to deceiving potential customers about the nature of the game, while at the same time alienating the series' biggest fans? I'm of the opinion that From's claim about the demo being dumbed-down is probably just a cover to stop diehard Souls players from finding out the truth until it's too late.

Some people say that we should simply trust in From. The same thing was suggested for Dark Souls II. Others try to blame Dark Souls II's failings on the absence of Miyazaki from the project, and using that as proof that Bloodborne will be better. I say such thinking is naive. There is clearly a great deal of overlap in terms of the concepts and design for both games, developed in tandem. If Dark Souls II failed to live up to the undiminished intensity of the prior games, it was not because Miyazaki wasn't involved in it. Rather, the shortcomings of Dark Souls II reflect From Software's new view of the Souls series as a mainstream title. Far from disappearing from Bloodborne, this broad-appeal philosophy clearly continues to be a driving force in its creation.

I worry that Bloodborne will  likely continue From's search for a wider audience by being a less demanding and less punishing game. I doubt it will be an easy game, and I hope there will be some good challenges along the way, but overall, I can't help but wonder if it will be part of the series' incremental slide to the lowest common denominator of video game culture, at which point violence, instant gratification, and accessibility become king.

Titanite or Tediumite? An Argument for a Purely Stat Based Equipment System in the Souls Series

Going back to the Dark Souls PvP scene, I've found the decision to include a weapon/armor upgrade system perplexing. From my perspective, it only achieves three things. 1) It limits one's weapon options by adding tedium to the PvP process, 2) it creates an artificial gap between players who have time/desire to grind out gear and players who don't, and 3) it results in unfair inequities between player builds. What is truly frustrating about these things is that they are totally unnecessary. They could all be fixed by a simple adjustment: make equipment upgrades a purely stat based process.

First, let me explain the problems as I see them.  As things stand in Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, fully upgraded equipment is a requirement for competitive PvP. If your weapons and armor are not leveled to the highest degree, you will be at a distinct disadvantage against the majority of opponents you come up against. This means that to have a chance, you will have to collect a large number of items (called titanite) to bring your equipment up to par, a tedious process that will mainly involve grinding enemies in certain areas of the game.

This is especially infuriating given the large number of weapons potentially available to the player. In Dark Souls 2, for example, in theory the player has many weapon types to chose from and experiment with. But in practice, the player will have to focus on only one or two of these in order to consolidate upgrade materials. The other weapons are left collecting dust as a result because without upgrading they remain vastly inferior.

Some will object here and say, "Don't expect the game to cater to casual players." The thing is, the equipment upgrade process isn't about skill, but the willingness to sink large amounts of time into a repetitive process of killing the same enemies over and over again.

This brings me to my second point. The upgrade system creates a gap between players who have fully upgraded equipment and those that don't, and what that gap essentially represents is not a difference in skill but a difference in time devoted to repetitive play. The division here is not between hardcore players and casual ones, but between players willing to engage in hours of mind-numbing gameplay and those who demand that gameplay always be engaging. The former is not something that should ever be encouraged in game design.

Finally, the current weapon upgrading system enables all sorts of loop holes through the checks and balances built into the game. Soul level, and now soul memory in Dark Souls 2, is used to match players evenly with each other. Weapon upgrading can evade this kind of check, especially when you get people "muling," i.e., gifting low level players powerfully upgraded items. It also brings imbalance to the game by allowing magic based characters to wield extremely powerful melee weapons that in theory should only be available to players who have invested in melee stats.

A switch to a purely stat based equipment system would fix all of these issues in one fell swoop. In this system, the strength of a weapon would be determined entirely by the stats it scales with. For example, a greatsword's damage output would depend entirely on a player's strength stat, or some combination of strength and dexterity. The particulars aren't important. What is key is that there is no upgrading of one's equipment independently of upgrading one's character stats.

Consider the impact this would have on the issues I raise above. The tedium of weapon upgrading would be eliminated. By simply leveling the appropriate stats, your equipment will grow with you, becoming stronger as you become stronger. The process is far more elegant, as leveling up is a natural part of the game, while titanite collecting is more an artificial graft/side-quest.

All the weapons you collected would now be viable so long as you invest in the stats that they scale with. Thus, the available range of weapon options would be dramatically widened for players, introducing more variety and more strategy to more players.

Players would no longer be divided into those willing to grind and those who don't. Instead, skill along with effective stat management would become the deciding factor of PvP encounters. It's the players' builds that should be pitted against each other, not their equipment upgrades.

Finally, muling would be rendered a moot point. It won't matter if some experienced player gives a low level player a powerful weapon, because the weapon won't be effective unless its user invests in the stats that it scales with, thus increasing their soul level and soul memory appropriately.

Indeed, this solution is so simple and so effective, it truly perplexes me that From has not already implemented it. The only reasons I can think of for them not doing it are 1) it hasn't occurred to them, or, and more likely, 2) they are worried that certain elements of the fan base would react negatively to it.

Why? From might be concerned that certain "hardcore" gamers thrive on the idea that by investing hundreds of hours into a game they will get a guaranteed competitive advantage over other players. I emphasize guaranteed because this advantage is not about accruing skill but about accruing goods. The difference is this: gaining skill cannot be guaranteed. One can simply remain bad at a game, no matter how long one plays it, if he/she doen't grasp certain fundamentals. Goods, however, will be gained no matter how smart or talented the player is. So what we're really talking about here is a desire for a structural advantage over other players, i.e., one built into the system itself rather than being dependent upon the talent of the player.

I'm very interested to hear others' thoughts on this. What do you think about this stat based system? Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments below.

Is Dark Souls Better than Dark Souls II? A Critique of Nostalgia

Now that we are a month or so past the release of the latest entry into the Souls series, people are beginning to make comparisons between it and the previous game. Unfortunately, many of those comparisons have veered towards the negative. People have been quick to point out Dark Souls II's faults and shortcomings vis-a-vis Dark Souls. And while I agree that there are grounds for criticism, I think in many cases people are letting feelings of nostalgia get in the way of objective assessment.

More often than not, when people compare Dark Souls II to its predecessor, they are viewing the latter through rose-tinted glasses. They aren't thinking about the entire experience of Dark Souls I, but isolated moments remembered fondly, such as the run through Sen's Fortress and Anor Londo. Who could forget  those swinging guillotines or those archers guarding the palace? The icing on the cake was, of course, Ornstein and Smough, perhaps the single greatest boss fight in video game history. People bring such examples up, and feel convinced that the first game was pure and simply better. And no wonder, in such unbalanced comparison (the highlights of Dark Souls versus the whole of Dark Souls II) there really is no question about which appears better. But the truth is, Sen's Fortress-Anor Londo was a mere sliver of Dark Souls, a piece of a long game with high points and low points.

The lead-up to AL is quite good, so long as you ignore the tedious nature of most of the enemies you come up against and the overall linear nature of the journey. You start in the Burg and things are pretty interesting. But then you go down and spend hours fighting rats, dogs, and frogs, baiting them to strike your shield so you can hit them back safely. If the enemy was bigger than this, you circled him and stabbed him in the back.This is pretty much the first 35 hours of Dark Souls. Block with your shield and strike, circle around your opponent and strike. Now get to a bonfire and level up and then continue down the corridor filled with more dogs, rats, and frogs.

The fact is, there is very little adventuring in Dark Souls, especially in the first half. You can briefly visit a few areas early, if you're feeling suicidal, but the reality is, these areas are designed to seriously deter you from going very far into them. Instead, you are pressured to take the "correct" path, and this is how you'll spend much of the game leading up to and including Anor Londo.

Contrast this with Dark Souls II. Once you get to Majula, there are two paths immediately obvious to you. One is clearly harder than the other, but not impossibly so. You could realistically take it on first and there are good reasons to do so, including opening another path. There's also a big, empty well in the town with platforms for you to drop down on. A simple to acquire ring will open this area to you very early as well. So near the beginning of things, you have four different paths to take, each with its own challenges and rewards. Moreover, you aren't stuck with any one of them once you start it, because you can always warp back to Majula and take another route.

This is real adventuring. Carving out one's own path through a game according to one's own inclinations and luck. There's a lot of variety in player experience in DSII compared to DSI consequently. I didn't realize there was another way to get to the Lost Bastille outside of the hawk that transports you after the Pursuer battle until way later in the game. Others found it but never fought or beat the Pursuer. Some went down into the well early. Others waited and ventured into Huntsman's Copse. All were legitimate pathways that made for unique journeys. Locked doors and sealed passageways also gave you fresh reasons to return to earlier areas--something Dark Souls really lacked.

There are challenges that come with this more open design, mainly dealing with enemy difficulty. It was easier for the creators of Dark Souls to consistently match difficulty of levels with the progression of the player, as they always had a fairly good idea of what level a player would be at a given segment of the game. DSII made this calculation much harder because it gave the player real choices. But despite this, they managed to have challenging scenarios and bosses along each path, no matter when you took it.

Speaking of bosses, Dark Souls II has some great ones. The whole line running from the Pursuer to the Ruin Sentinels to the Lost Sinner was fantastic, particularly if you do it early and don't summon. Each boss meaningfully ramped up the difficulty and provided new challenges to overcome. Other notable battles include the Charioteer, Iron King, and the Ancient Dragon. All of these were well-designed bosses that presented unique scenarios for the player to take on.

Dark Souls II has its share of less impressive bosses, but so does Dark Souls. Don't get me wrong, the Gargoyles were intense, and the Iron Golem fight had great atmosphere. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. Most of the bosses in DSI are just giant damage sponges that hit hard and move little. More often than not, the mechanics of the battle are wonky, making the confrontation feel more like a clusterfuck than the elegant dance that is achieved in many DSII encounters.

This elegance, by the way, has a lot to do with the refined combat system of DSII. The mechanics of battle are just flat out better in DSII than Dark Souls or Demon's Souls. Animations are smoother and more realistic. Sword swings are weightier and more visually discernible when incoming. The timing and mechanics of rolling are better implemented too. All around, the battle system is more precise.

Dark Souls II also manages to give us a much better second half than the first game.

And if Dark Souls II doesn't have anything to quite match Ornstein and Smough, it makes up for this with a superior second half. After O&S, you are sent back down to the deep, dark depths of the world. People forget how anti-climatic this is. Narratively, this just doesn't work. You can't repeat the rising structure after it has happened once and get the same results. Going back down is a drag. As a result, the second half of the game becomes a chore. It doesn't help that the bosses and levels in this half aren't very inspired. The main thing motivating you to continue on at this point is the sheer investment of time and energy already sunk into the game and the desire to see it through to the end.

It's a strange fact, but the quality of Dark Souls directly corresponds with the relative elevation of your character on the world map. The higher up you are, the better the game.

Dark Souls II does better. In its second half, there are once again choices to made about which path you will take. They lead to some exciting and devious places, and previews of the game let you know that there are some real treats yet to be seen which keeps you motivated. I was still wondering when I would find the Mirror Knight. I also knew that dragons would come into the picture sometime. Finally, I wanted to find the King. This kept the latter half of DSII a lot fresher and more engaging than the second half of Dark Souls.

Some people have taken issue with the lack of world interconnectedness in Dark Souls II. The incongruous transition from Earthen Peak and Iron Keep is the chief example brought up in this context. This is a good point, and I don't want to come off as simply dismissing it, but people really exaggerate the quality of interconnectedness in the first game. The way some people laud it, you'd think the game is very open and that you can get to all areas of the map from tons of different directions. But this isn't the case. You can see The Demon Ruins from the Tomb of the Giants, but it's not like you can get down there from that vantage. You're still bound to the preset path determined by the game's designers. So the interconnectedness exists visually, not materially. It gives the illusion of depth where there really isn't any, like a matte painting in a film.

This doesn't excuse Dark Souls II for lacking the interconnected of its predecessor, even if it is largely cosmetic, because it did clearly show the care and thought the first game's creators put into it. For me, however, the contrast highlights the need for a marriage of the two in a future game: a deeply interconnected world that also facilitates truly open exploration. 

I haven't mentioned the online components of the games. Suffice it to say, the online component of Dark Souls was a real step back from Demon's Souls. The switch to P2P meant far fewer messages and phantoms appeared while playing. The balance between human and hollowed was totally under-thought in the game as well. The effect of which was to severely diminish the quality of certain PvP elements, namely invasions. DSII, by returning to a server based system and by allowing invasions regardless of the host's status rectified both these serious flaws of the predecessor to some degree.

None of this is to say that DSII doesn't have its faults. It does, certainly. But most of them are faults that are common to the series as a whole rather than unique to DSII. Both games have anti-climatic final boss fights which is something FROM has yet to getting a handle on. The series still relies too often on bosses that essentially require circling and dodging. FROM need to press themselves to come up with more innovative encounters or reduce the number of bosses and focus on making a few great ones.The same goes for level designs. They need to stop re-using the Valley of Defilement/Blighttown template and come up with something new. Also, they need to give the multiple gargoyles boss a rest, because it's no longer exciting.

If Dark Souls II has an individual fault, I would say it is a lack of commitment to some of its best and novel ideas. The torch mechanic ended up being implemented half-heartedly and consequently has no real purpose in the game. The gradual hollowing of the character upon each death (with corresponding reductions to the health bar) was a bold move that FROM significantly undercut by including the Ring of Binding early in the game. Finally, the frightening prospect of always being vulnerable to invasions never fully materialized because of the scarcity of red orbs and lack of incentives for invasions.

On the whole, however, I would argue Dark Souls II represents a substantive step-forward for the Souls series. It loses ground in some areas, such as interconnectedness and having a truly breathtaking, stand-out boss fight, but gains in more important areas such as combat depth, exploration, and online play. So let's take stock of this and try not to let our nostalgia for what never was prevent us from appreciating what now is.