Dark Souls: Prepare To Sting A Little Bit
Hey, here’s an idea! While I’m taking a break from The Player Character, why don’t I write about video games on my own blog? I haven’t done that in ages! It’s for good reasons, naturally – I don’t want to run out of good ideas when it comes to my professional writing space. The news doesn’t stop for web development, anyway. I’d like to write about this while it’s still relevant.
“This” is Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s interview with Metro, in which he talks about a potential easy mode for the legendarily insanely brutally cruel and unforgiving game. When asked how he feels about Dark Souls’s reputation, he was… surprisingly negative about it. He’d prefer that people think of his games as “satisfying rather than difficult.” Regarding people like me, who will never play the game as it is, he said “This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about whether I should prepare another difficulty that everyone can complete or carefully send all gamers the messages behind our difficult games.” He also identifies hindrance as a possible characteristic that makes games less worthwhile to play and notes that if games are trending towards being easier, then difficulty may not in fact be related to what makes games appealing. Read the thing yourself. I can barely believe he said it, either.
I don’t even need to explain WHY this threw me for a loop, right? Dark Souls‘s slogan is “prepare to die.” Discussions about Dark Souls focus on its difficulty to the exclusion of anything else, like the characters or even the plot. Everyone is preparing to die, and nobody will say what for! As far as I could tell, difficulty is the only reason to play it. I’ve heard good things about the atmosphere, but not that the atmosphere is special – in fact, one of the most common defenses of Dark Souls‘s difficulty from its fans is that if people don’t like it, they should play a different game instead. So, what, there’s nothing irreproducible about Dark Souls? There’s no heartrending story or thought-provoking message or, I dunno, a totes adorbz animal mascot that no other game has? Well, awesome for me! It means I don’t have to feel like I’m missing anything by ignoring the game.
It never, ever occurred to me that the team at From Software might be disappointed about this. I assumed that they were like Team Ninja or like their own fanbase, and thought of Dark Souls’s non-difficulty-related attributes as being a prize intended only for the worthy. I mean, how could it be any other way? When you lock content behind a difficulty barrier, many players will refuse to play and many players who don’t refuse won’t stick with it. That’s inevitable! You can’t have it both ways; you can’t be inflexible about difficulty and then get upset when the hard work you put into a world goes unnoticed. Well, you CAN, but it looks pretty stupid.
I found it hard to believe that Miyazaki was dense enough to not realize this sooner. It’s much easier to believe that he likes how success tastes and has decided he wants more – maybe he just got his first solid gold yacht, but came up a few credits short when he went to buy a team of strapping young mermen to pull it for him. I really WANTED him to be sincere about wanting lots of people to be able to play because, fuck, that is a mission statement that every fucking game developer needs to have hammered through their skulls and tattooed on their genitals. Fortunately, this is one of those things I can fact-check! I didn’t have to wander and wonder; I could Google other interviews he’d done and see what Miyazaki said about difficulty in the past.
As it turned out, the man has always said that difficulty is incidental to Dark Souls. In this interview with G4 from September of 2011, Miyazaki states that he did not want to make “…a difficult game for the sake of simply making a difficult game – our goal is to deliver that immense feeling of satisfaction you get when you conquer something incredibly tough.” He repeated that sentiment two months later for Game Informer, saying that “…setting a high level of difficulty was to make players feel a sense of accomplishment, not to simply make players suffer.” It’s the same as what he said in the interview with Metro a year later. His position has been consistent for at least a year. I understand it, now. What I’d heard and believed about Dark Souls is that its purpose is to be difficult. That is incorrect. Its purpose is to make people feel triumphant when they complete challenges. Making the game fuckballs difficult was just the only way Miyazaki could think of to make that work. If being fuckballs difficult is preventing some people from getting the good feelings he wants them to have, then it isn’t working and it is reasonable for him to look for alternatives.
When I looked at people’s responses to a possible easy mode, I was unsurprised to see a huge negative reaction from the usual gang of hardcore elitist shitbats who can’t stand it when people who aren’t great at games get to have fun with them anyway. Naturally, there were a lot of people saying that an easy mode would violate the purpose of Dark Souls. I knew they were wrong, but I thought they were only wrong in the moral sense that it is wrong to want to prevent other people from doing as they wilt, an it harm none. I didn’t realize that they were also just plain factually wrong, that the game’s director is on record stating that being hard is not the point. I can’t blame anyone – “anyone” being a category that includes myself – who made that mistake, though. The Souls franchise speaks louder than words, and what it says is “lol noobz GTFO.” Hearing that the point of the game is the feeling you get when you win it comes off as an insult to people who can’t win it. Being told that difficulty isn’t the point sounds false when there is no attempt at ameliorating the difficulty. Why is Miyazaki only considering an easy mode now? How did this never come up before? These are mysteries.
Still, this is EXCELLENT news. I’m always happy to hear about a developer trying to make their games more accessible. I never expected Dark Souls to be on the table for such a change, but that was because I was ignorant. I’m glad I did my research. I really hope people are reading this – I think it’s important that more people realize that an easy mode is consistent with Hidetaka Miyazaki’s true goals for his games. And don’t worry, hardcore gamers! Even if Dark Souls gets an easy mode, Battletoads will always be there for you.
Fold-Away Disaster Shelter 