Demon’s Souls an experiment in design over accessibility
October 12th, 2009Demon’s Souls, as you may have heard, is a difficult game. There is no “Easy” mode that you can play to just make it through the game. The tutorial is very brief and basic and actually doesn’t give you nearly enough information about the game before it literally ends in your death. Unlike other unforgiving games like Ninja Gaiden that ask if you want to reduce the difficulty after you die, Demon’s Souls actually takes away half your maximum life and makes the game even harder (and getting back that half of your life is not an easy task). And if that weren’t bad enough, every time you die you drop all of your experience/money (they are one and the same in the game), and can only recover them if you make it back to where you died the first time from the beginning of the level (the game auto-saves this, so no cheating your way out of death). Oh, and there’s no “pause” function in the game. Yes, really.
Such a punishing design apparently came from a developer that doesn’t care about the “lessons” learned by modern developers, which typically include some combination of frequent checkpoints, “anywhere” saves, adjustable difficulty, and/or regenerating health. The lack of a “pause” function can be attributed to the fact that the game is played in a strange sort of quasi-online mode where you can read messages other players leave, watch how other players died, or even join up to fight with some other players at times. But even online, the developers, From Software, decided to ignore modern conventions for online play:
- There is no voice chat when playing with other players.
- There is no real way to “party up” or arrange to play with your friends or past players you may have met online.
- You cannot choose to continue playing with someone after you’ve defeated a boss. You are automatically booted back to your own “realm”.
- When playing with others, only 1 player (the “living” player) may make progress in their game (though everyone does get experience).
Since these are pretty much standard in other online environments today, the fact that they’re not included must mean that that they were deliberately omitted by design. It is amazing to me that a design with such limited accessibility was allowed to exist, but the developers have managed to create a very compelling world. Still, that doesn’t mean they were right, and I still question some of these design decisions.
I think that the online functionality was probably thought about early in the design, but From Software wanted the game to still basically be a single player game. Reading messages other people placed would sort of be like an in-game message board. Summoning other players to your game would kind of be adding an AI henchman to your game, only the AI happened to be human. It’s a pretty odd way to think about things, but in the context of the game it works.
The problem is, its still an online game, and when you make an online game, people like to socialize and strategize. If I had to pick one design choice from above as my biggest gripe, it would probably be the lack of voice chat. People want to communicate with each other, whether its their first time through a level or your guiding someone else through it. It is extremely annoying losing your group when in multiplayer mode because you have no easy way of finding them. And its even more annoying when you’re fighting a boss for the first time and have no way of communicating with your ally to discuss strategy. The only way of communicating in game now is a pre-defined list of about 10 gestures, but they are also extremely slow to use and completely worthless 99% of the time. I have literally had to use PSN messaging with a few people just to discuss options, and when people are resorting to using a slow-ass, out-of-game virtual keyboard to send messages to each other, maybe it’s about time to just give the players what they obviously want. I hope that it gets patched in, but I doubt it will.
It might be nice to see some sort of “Casual” mode too that allows for players to party up and play the game in a group as they like, but I’d understand if they didn’t put something like that in. It might stratify the community too much, and maybe not enough people would be playing the “Normal” mode.
Overall, despite its difficulty and lack of online features, I’m actually quite enjoying the game. Perhaps that will change as the stakes for dying get ever higher as I progress through the game, as you need ever more souls (experience/money) for each level you gain. Its easy to see how dying could literally make you lose hours worth of work, and that’s something I probably won’t relish.
Posted in Impressions, Jeff, PS3 |
October 16th, 2009 at 11:55 am
I’m really excited about this game. I like it when developers make the game they want to make rather than what they think the market wants. Obviously the demographics will be much narrower, but it helps defeat the homogenization I feel is plaguing current game design.
One of your statements had me scratching my head,
“the developers have managed to create a very compelling world. Still, that doesn’t mean they were right, ”
What does that mean “right”? It seems to imply there is a correct way to make a game these days.
While I agree that some of the things you mention could be annoying, I also think that ones annoyance will be in relation to ones expectations. If you think you SHOULD be able to do something you can’t, it will likely be more frustrating.
I guess my point is that gamers expectations are getting in the way of creative game design and it pleases me when a developer is bold enough to disregard convention, even well established convention. Gamers (as a group) are, by and large, not very creative, simply because at our core, we are a culture of consumers.
October 16th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
After I posted this I reread that sentence and thought it was written poorly, but I left it for posterity. =)
What I think I was trying to get at was that if a developer is going to ignore what’s considered current design conventions, then it needs to make sure that their choices outweigh the negatives of not adhering to them. I mean, they’re conventions for a reason.
For the most part, I think they’ve succeeded here. The game is very punishing, but is built around a very rewarding combat system, and gives you just enough support to not make you completely hate the game when you die. For instance, while it’s true that you drop your souls when you die, if you make it back to your bloodstain you’ll gain them back. While that sounds brutal, what it means is that every time you make it back to your bloodstain you increase the number souls you have. For instance, say you start with no souls, then gather 1000 before you die. Then you gather another 1000 when you make it back to your bloodstain and pick it up, so you now have 2000 souls. Of course, as you progress in the game you need more and more souls, so you could drop 50k souls at one point, and the level could be so difficult that you die when you try to get them back, which would mean you lose everything… I could see that making someone want to quit, but… I haven’t hit that point yet. Another example… maybe you die on a boss, but don’t want to try it again until you know what you’re doing. You can setup a message to be summoned outside of the boss chamber (assuming you’re still in “soul” form), someone else will summon you to their game, and with any luck, you’ll be able to take down the boss and understand how to get him the next time in your own game. If you die while in someone else’s game there’s no real consequence (you keep your souls), so it’s a good way to practice a boss before dealing with him “for real”.
That’s all good unconventional design. What’s more of an issue to me is, as I mentioned, the voice chat. I have been in several games now where I’ve literally had to communicate with another player via PSN messages. That’s surely a sign that something is amiss. It’d be one thing if it was all PvP, but most of the time when you’re playing with someone else it’s in a Co-op manner, and when people are playing co-op they want to be able to communicate. Maybe it was their intent to frustrate people by not adding voice support, but my point was that just because it was their intent, and they succeeded in their intent, does not necessarily mean that it was better for the game. I’m just not sure the positives outweigh the negatives here. I think it was the wrong design choice, in other words, and I hope that they patch it in.
October 16th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
That makes sense. Having said that, I’d be curious to hear their reasons for excluding it.
Although, I would further my comment by commenting on the following….
“I mean, they’re conventions for a reason. ”
Absolutely, I’m just not sure that the reason is always a valid one. I’ll give you the voice chat thing, no argument there, but I think “convention” really is hampering creativity in a lot of ways. I think the REASON many conventions of gaming exist is that gamers have gotten lazy, or that they have become intolerant of failure, etc.
December 15th, 2009 at 2:24 am
Ok, so I finally got a chance to play the game. I’m pretty much in agreement with you. However, it’s not winning me over as time goes by. At first, I was really loving it. I love looking at blood stains and watching how others died. I thought it was a great idea and almost a tutorial really. If you watch the stains, you can see whats coming, whether its a trap or a monster, and basically see what NOT to do. I liked reading the messages too. Although, saw several that were jarring me out of the world, “I have a problem…please vote for this message!”.
But, as I got further and died repeatedly, I started to get tired of it. I found myself rushing through the level, then dying even sooner. It took me a while to realize that you keep your heals after dying so that if you want to beat a level, you can just stock up by not using them between deaths. But by the time I realized this, my main weapon had just broke. I had no health, a useles weapon and no souls. Thats when I quit and sent it back to Gamefly.
December 15th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Doh… sounds like it wasn’t able to get its hooks in you. Despite its flaws, this might be my game of the year. I stopped playing after I got stuck on a boss on my second playthrough (New Game+), but they did something right when nearly every game I’ve played since then I’ve been thinking to myself “I wish this were more like Demon’s Souls”.
I hope to get back to it at some point, but I just started Final Fantasy XII, and with Mass Effect 2 coming out next month, who knows.
December 15th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
The timing was just so bad. RIGHT when I figured out that a good strategy would be to play the early sections repeatedly (dying in a specific spot) to build up souls and and heals, my weapon broke. Then I was unable to get to my stain and unable to buy a new weapon. I was pretty much screwed. In order to continue I would have had wipe my character and start a new game. I was too depressed to do it so I sent it back. Had my axe lasted another 15 minutes, I probably would have upgraded, beat the level and been pretty enthusiastic about figuring it out.