What is a Souls?

This question comes out of the Waypoint podcast and also @bib in quick questions:

What makes Nioh or Bloodborne a soulslike? What makes them not a soulslike? The Waypoint folks suggest high and low factors like enemy respawn-upon-checkpoint and animation priority.

I think e.g. Monster Hunter is not a Soulslike because of the choppy world design. A Monster Hunter could be a roguelike if the world was contiguous and more populous.

wouldn’t castlevania qualify then

:wink:

Contiguous world requirement out Demon’s, though.

Behind-the-back melee combat with right-stick camera seems pretty important. For example, I wouldn’t say Salt & Sanctuary is a ‘Souls-like’ because it has an entirely different combat/movement system.

Ah, should have said more contiguous. If each level were one interlocking piece instead of 10-15 zones.

honestly i think the really innovative part of souls was the multiplayer element. everything else is just recontextualizing, is it not?

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the combat & the way death works are definitely both way up there, even if you take a “greater than the sum of their parts” view neither of those was done as well and as accessibly elsewhere and they’re both pretty huge

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RIP Demon’s Souls being recognized as the starting point of the Souls games instead of Dark

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Hard to say! Like Halo 1, it landed like a bomb nearly fully-formed with a half-dozen stealable ideas.

I’d still love it 90% as much without the mp, and cover bands like Lords of the Fallen still make it obvious what they’re going for without including the multiplayer ‘twist’.

A more fruitful way of looking at it: how much of the emotive experience of playing a Souls game comes from the multiplayer? I’d argue mp supports the isolated, deadly feeling without being its primary component.

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rip shadow tower and king’s field ;_;

idk souls to me will always be hard zelda with lots of smart decisions and brilliant aesthetic design

the multplayer element and the lack of pause seem pretty vital, though

but people here don’t like zelda (not actually true but relatively) so i can understand their reticence

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It’s weird because I know Patrick knows Demon’s and he judiciously calls it the Souls series to include it but headlines always fall into this. Obviously we wouldn’t have this problem if it was called Demon’s Souls 2 but ‘Souls series’ is too clunky and nonspecific for a headline.

Is one smart decision the economy? Souls are in infinite supply most of the time, but not all items are, and some items help you mitigate risk. In order to make anything liquid or usable you have to risk losing it.

Contrast with rupees/hearts/arrows/bombs which are always in the grass.

While Souls clearly evolved out of King’s Field I think it’s definitely a strong break from it, this doesn’t bother me.

Zelda doesn’t feel like a strong tie to me because the focus is very different. Especially since the N64 days when Zelda was no longer the ‘biggest’ or ‘most epic’ Nintendo has struggled to define it; I think they believe ‘adventure’ defines it and try to support that through a mythic tone and the variety of activities. They will never go all-in on any aspect though and so won’t tip over into action game or puzzle game. This philosophy is closer to AAA open-world games which ask a small participation on everything.

Souls, on the other hand, is a well-developed action game that demands precision, as well as a competent loot-RPG. Maybe Zelda birthed action RPGs but even then King’s Field feels like it descends from dungeon crawlers and not ARPGs, and from dungeons is birthed Souls.

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definitely a smart decision

shadow tower has souls too, but they are not the only form of currency (not really a form of currency at all, just a collectible that allows you to increase your stats). i definitely think the souls mechanic is a pretty integral part of the actual souls series, but i don’t think it’s a requisite for a game to be “souls-like” for me

the death mechanic is actually really important, too. that one is a lot closer to requisite.

i don’t know. find me things that are remotely like souls in 3d before zelda and i’ll move in that direction. when i inquired before, no one had much

3d zelda with castlevania theming feels adequate summary to me, but ymmv

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Would any of y’all so far put Bloodborne outside of the scope? I think of it as an aesthetic branch with fewer character options.

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I don’t really see Zelda as like souls at all. Just because there weren’t many console-style 3D melee combat games before 1998 and souls has Z-targeting doesn’t make them all that similar…

Yeah. My belief is that they trimmed the stats and equipment and systems to give themselves scope to redo and tighten combat and holy helldogs it paid off.

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I believe this if the excision of the torch lighting block pushing switch boomeranging filler verbs in 3D Zelda is deliberate.

Yeah, after I played a couple of the KF games I realized that Demon’s Souls was that, just faster and capitalizing on the main strategic mechanic of circling around enemies, and an external explosion of the level design