Fatigued Souls (Part 1)

My bugbear is that the exhaustion present as a theme of the game seems to have infected all discussion of the game – that the thematic presence was so felt that everyone shuffled to dust just playing it.

Maybe not their intent.

Or, more interestingly, maybe it was.

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wow, hard disagree

One of my main disappointments with bloodborne (which is a game I like but don’t rate as highly as most of the internet seems to) is how linear every area feels. Only the first area feels like what you describe, with its multiple branching paths that loop, intersect and block each other. Once you get past that, everything is pretty much a straight line with some turns thrown in and an occasional shortcut to the beginning of an area. Its not really a labyrinth in any sense. It looks complex because it has visually busy gothic architecture but if you look at a map you’d see just how straightforward everything is.

To be sure, nobody is calling for yet another Dark Souls sequel now. I think the theme might’ve been an attempt at providing closure in a series without a traditional narrative that can be concluded. From themselves believed the idea was fully explored with this game and they did almost too good a job of convincing their playerbase of the same

Farron Greatsword. I forgive most, maybe all flaws just because of this anime weapon. And yeah, I’ve come to understand that it’s definitely my favorite weapon in the Souls games, and probably of all the action games I’ve played.

It makes combat fun and you adapt to the weapon’s tactics and it’s just this great combination of feeling like you’re growing with the weapon as you figure out how to effectively wield it against enemies.

Basically what I’m saying is I want the next Souls game to just be composed entirely of dumb anime weapons. Miyazaki, more dumb anime weapons please. Please please please.

Anyway, I’ll shut up now. Gushing way too much about a single weapon.

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For my tastes I would like it to be much less linear within levels, certainly, and they’re not interested in returning to King’s Field-esque mazes, but compared to the other Souls games, it’s the densest since Demon’s.

Obviously tension and fear make the levels much more forbidding and complex while you’re first going through them, and I think their general audience only has so much tolerance for spatial complexity. I’ve heard many complaints about the forest (god, I love that level so very much (and the RE4 trap village beforehand? Amazing)).

the forest was just a curved line but with a bunch of trees in the foreground to make it seem more confusing than it was and a few wide open areas to hide the linearity! I went in expecting this vast confusing forest (because that’s how people talk about it) and it turns out that the actual path you take if you disregard shortcuts is always ‘opposite the direction you came’. In fact, by that point I had gotten so used to the structure of ‘any branches you find are actually shortcuts to the beginning of the area or seldom a path to a new area’ and I was never surprised.

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Nightmare Frontier tho. That one’s messy as hell for how small it is.

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Also, the boxy rooms of Lecture Halls transitioning into that nest of creepy crawlies is super good.

oh absolutely, that place was a delight to explore

One day I’m gonna lose my mind and merge a Souls thread and a final fantasy thread together just alternating every other post

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Remember when we had Castlevania threads

Okay, so looking at the forest subsection of a map of the zone:
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Each of those circles should represent one copse of trees. With the limited visibility of the area, they effectively represent a fork in the path. Though it looks open on this map, height differences block easy access and confuse the surface. The turnaround on the left (with the Celestial Emissary) is obscured enough from the critical path, and the pig enemy disorienting enough, that I’ve watched players get turned around simply encountering it.

Yeah, the linearity is obscured by trees and elevation but by the time you get to the first pig you’ve already cleared almost the entire map the cul de sac with the pig might be startling but even if a player somehow gets turned around its a pretty simple thing to realize “oh wait there aren’t any enemies this way I must have come from here” (at least it is for me, someone who gets lost on doom maps all the time and uses the heuristic of ‘are there living enemies in this direction’ as a way of orienting without checking the map)

by the time you get to the second pig, the environment art has completely changed and you know you’re in the home stretch because you can access a shortcut that takes you all the way back to the start.

dropping down to the celestial emissary area early confuses things a little but only if you’re trying to pick up all the items in an area; after you’ve dropped down the only way forward (as in, out of the forest) leads to the boss.

Compare to Sen’s Fortress.

this map is a little confusing to read but it can’t be meaningfully simplified without splitting it into separate floors. And even then, there are a lot of branches and loops and optional paths and they rarely follow the heuristic of ‘go here to unlock a shortcut to the beginning’.

Yeah I got turned around at the pig. Then you have the illusion you’re not backtracking because you haven’t seen these particular sections. And you don’t think of trying to go back to the pig until much later

Sen’s feels like a comfortable level of branching to me (my favorite level in that game, and it feels almost exactly like a King’s Field IV snake man level). It doesn’t feel twisty like the forest to me, though. Visibility is good and individual regions/rooms are well-identified. Certain boulder intersections were briefly confusing but not strongly.

Let’s see, there’s the early branch to head into the basement, the branch to go outside, and then the decision to ring the rooftop or not, is that right?

The tiny branch into the hidden bonfire is pretty important

I suppose the argument I’m trying to put forward is that twistiness and visual obfuscation doesn’t make an area more interesting to explore than actual branch/loop density and variety. I prefer visual clarity but architectural complexity to the opposite. The standard dungeon design trope of being able to see a goal but not knowing exactly how to reach it is one of my platonic ideals in dungeon design. Sen’s has this in spades all the way to the top while this is only present in how shortcuts are presented in the woods of bloodborne. Central Yharnam is also unimpeachable as far as level design and organization goes and it uses one of my favorite techniques to do this: one way gates that force you to have a sub goal of finding their way back to where they came from.

which, come to think of it the drop to the celestial emissary is such a one way gate but its the only one on the entire level!

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I agree with all of that.

I think it’s important for the mood of the forest that they break the ‘visible destination’ rule that they’re so good at in order to deepen the tension; this is a place where you’re intensely curious what Byrgenwerth is involved in and it feels like you’re entering something you’ll never return from. The indistinct writhing snake blobs mirror the hard-to-parse level geometry.

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Following up the “B-team” debate, I did a bit of googling and found this: Bloodborne and DkS3 development timeframe overlapped by a year and Miyazaki was literally the only staff member common between the two (EDIT: misread it, one of the only). But we choose not to say Dark Souls 3 has been developed by a B-team solely because it meets ideas of polish and shared the one famous name that we know about.

So yeah multi-game studio organization and factors that go into quality are far more nuanced than our simple-minded vocabulary accounts for.

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I know that around these parts we’re pretty critical or at least skeptical of video game auteurist ideology, but a director is a bit more than just a shiny celebrity name on an otherwise anonymous roster of equals (also the article says the projects shared some visual designers).