this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Dark Souls 1. It's tutorial is decent for controls but it doesn't go nearly far enough. It doesn't explain rolling, weight and stats are only in level up screen, at least for prompting. So many things about the game you need to know that they leave to expensive trial and error.
I like The Backlogs' video on it. It's a flawed masterpiece.
I'm pretty sure Dark Souls is intentionally obtuse, that's like a core part of the game's philosophy. It doesn't explain them because it wants you to try and figure it out on your own or discuss with others.
Nah, I don't think so. It actually explains everything you need to know, but it's buried in stat and item descriptions that, especially in 2011, we weren't trained to read through to understand the game. So if it's all that missable but still in the game, I think it's fair to say that it just sucks at teaching you.
Well, sure, it sucks at teaching you. But you can learn enough through the tutorial and checking stat and item descriptions to be able to learn and discover the rest on your own, you won't get to a spot where you have absolutely no idea what to do, and if you do, you havent explored the available space.
Part of that game's specific appeal when it released was that most other games at the time treated you like a child that needed every detail explained for you to learn and enjoy yourself, they grabbed your head and said "go RIGHT here, right now". It both sucks as a tutorial, but succeeds at establishing a baseline level of expected effort, resilience, perseverance, and experimentation from the player.
That game specifically is not trying to thoroughly teach you how it works. Its job is to provide a world and mechanics that provide a sandbox for you to roll around and suss it out for yourself.
They've sanded that frustrating learning experience in subsequent games to the point where Elden Ring now has more traditional tutorial pop ups, and unsurprisingly, it's their most successful game to date. That and the aforementioned evidence lead me to believe that the experience a lot of people had with Dark Souls was not what they intended. And you can absolutely get to a few points in Dark Souls 1 and get stuck without a guide; I know it happened to me when it came time to walk the abyss, and even having read item descriptions, it's very easy to forget the one description of one ring you got potentially hours and hours earlier that would solve your problems.
It's hard to talk about Elden Ring's learning experience the same way since by that point the world had enjoyed around four or so similarly constructed From Soft souls like games that had entered the cult popular internet gaming vernacular.
It was no longer as uniquely obtuse as Dark Souls was at its time. But yes, it does teach better, and is more straightforward in a lot of ways, it aligns more with most gamers' common understanding. It has a map.
And I'm not saying Dark Souls is entirely impervious to the argument that it's obtuse, I mean look at the resistance stat. What I'm saying is that you can understand enough to become intrigued by the world and become hooked if it's your sort of game. At the point that you really get hung up you've got incentive to discuss it with others and do that legwork.
It gets you into the game well enough while also establishing that you may totally have some mental hoops to jump through later. If there were to be some Dark Souls full remake with some arguable quality of life improvements, I'd bet there'd be a number of areas you could make less obtuse while still preserving a sense of genuine discovery, and that'd be a very fun "ethical" discussion as well with so much grey area to be had.