Guess we’ll finally be able to tell people they “had to be there” wont we?
I had a desperate shower though the other day after reading this about a supposed nightmare future of videogames that made me laugh and chuckle and feel bad basically all at once.
Games like Destiny and Overwatch and yes, even Souls-Borne-Likes wont be able to really be played in their proper form after a certain expiration date.
In the case of some of those games, you wont be able to play them at all! One of my favorite games was Battlefield Heroes and it’s literally impossible to go back and play once the company took the game offline. They’ve even gone as far as shutting down every fan ran-instance of getting the game back up again over some nebulous copyright law defense.
But Demon’s Soul’s - that’s a fucking game. That is not the loss of a Destiny Loot Treadmill, losing the servers of Demon’s Soul’s for final and ever seems like watching some great titanic creature be killed right before. Sure there are going to be other Souls fames for awhile but the original still had some unique kind of atmosphere that the developers were still kind of unsure how the cross-play features would work at all and implemented them thusly.
Well, I have more thoughts but it’s worth saying Good Night Souls of Demon’s
i was really fed up with videogames in 07-08 or so and discovering demon’s a couple of weeks after the asian release rekindled (wrong souls game) my love for these things
it’s atmospheric and beautiful and… endearingly awkward at the same time, a hugely important game for me and nothing since has had as much of an impact
i’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t get a ps4 port down the line
my PS3 died a year ago or I’d pop it in and play through one last time.
my last character was a low level faithy build centered around the Blessed Mace that you can pick up, along with the Istarelle and a kite shield. this worked bafflingly well both single player and pvp! the mace kind of rules tbh
this is actually the first game I actually bothered to platinum, which was an incredibly bad idea and I recommend absolutely nobody do this because it’s incredibly tedious
you can draw a straight line from early wrpgs like Wizardry to this game in aesthetic and style. a lot of the “mysteries lost in translation” really comes straight out of it
I got a paper published in a digital preservation journal a few years ago on this subject - documenting online game cultures so there’ll be a historical/ethnographic record of what it meant to play those games, even after the servers are long gone. I was a totally green Master’s in Library and Information Science student so parts of it are probably kind of ill-informed or basic! But I guess they thought it was good enough to publish. While snagging a PDF of it, I saw it just got cited by a paper on preservation of augmented reality games, damn!
Here’s the link if you want to read it: [LINK OMITTED BECAUSE IT TURNS OUT IT’S BEHIND A PAYWALL]
I think about it a little bit more every few hours and it almost feels fitting to close the servers to a Souls game, cutting off access to all of the people who couldn’t experience it as it was originally meant. Most of these games are about dying worlds or places in time losing their meaning that’s been built-up by generations and generations of myth and story.
It’s kind of fitting that the final state of a Dark Souls game would then mirror the state of the worlds contained within.
I’ve played through Dark Souls 1 and 2 three or more times each, but only ever did one Demon’s playthrough. Dark is perfect but in that perfection it lost the bleak severity of its predecessor. When I think of revisiting Dark, I think of fun builds and frustrating bosses and ah fuck it maybe later. When I think of Demon’s, I remember vague undercurrents of dread and hopelessness that permeated that virtual world, and I don’t really want to go back. Demon’s feels much more like a half forgotten dream that settled itself in the back of my head, like a story my elders told me to make me afraid of the world.
I think I’m still too intimidated by Flamelurker to ever play Demon’s Souls a second time through. I also value my memory of the game as a harrowing experience and I fear that revisiting it might diminish that.
flamelurker is a pretty funny boss in general, he’s not so much hard as he is full of hard counters to a lot of the ways people have learned to play the game up to that point
Demon’s Souls is one of the greatest games I have ever played. It’s hard to say much more about it, now. Souls has been talked here to death. Still, the idea that most people started with Dark and worked backwards is almost completely alien to me. I can’t imagine doing it that way.
The experience of finding it as a strange Hong Kong import with no knowledge of the King’s Field backstory – a complete and sudden tunnel to my first image of D&D and treacherous tunnels adds to the mystique of the game. It couldn’t be replicated with the hype wave & “Prepare to Die” of Dark Souls.
demon’s souls turned dark souls into one of the only two game preorders i have done in over a decade (the other being dark souls 2)
fun fact: for preordering dark souls, i got the collector’s edition. except apparently, they hadn’t made enough of those, so they ended up sending me the canadian copy (complete with french on the back cover) about two weeks after the game came out.
