Dark Souls

Dark Souls is a 2011 action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware? and published by Namco Bandai Games?, a spiritual successor to the studio’s 2009 title Demon’s Souls rather than a direct sequel.¹³⁵ Set in the decaying kingdom of Lordran, the game casts the player as a cursed undead who escapes the Northern Undead Asylum and journeys through a vast, interconnected world of swamps, ruined towns, castles, and subterranean caverns in search of the fate of the undead.³¹³ It is remembered for its punishing difficulty, deliberate combat, and unusual online interactions, and it went on to define a genre of challenging role-playing games.¹⁶

The game was directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, who had also directed Demon’s Souls; in a pre-release interview he described Dark Souls as “a totally new game with similar concepts,” created by the same producers and director so that the “ideologies, concepts, and themes have carried over”.⁵ Miyazaki stated that the team intended to increase, rather than decrease, the difficulty of the game, using an analogy of a dish “as spicy as possible” that remains edible and leaves the player wanting more.⁵ He emphasized that difficulty would not depend on reflexes or button-pressing speed, and that enemies and the player alike were designed with high attack power but low defense to encourage strategy over grinding.⁵

Gameplay and world

Combat is third-person, deliberate, and precise, with light and heavy attacks, parrying keyed to memorized enemy animations, and weapons ranging from swords and axes to bows and spell-casting catalysts.⁷³ The game does not force a playstyle: players can switch between a heavily armored tank and a nimble thief simply by changing weapons and armor, or become a mage or healer by equipping a sorcerer’s catalyst or talisman.³ Magic was reworked from Demon’s Souls, replacing a magic bar with a fixed number of spell casts per rest, making it harder to rely on ranged attacks and pushing players into close melee combat.³

The central new addition over Demon’s Souls was the bonfire system, necessitated by the game’s open world.¹⁸ Bonfires dotted throughout Lordran serve as checkpoints where players replenish health flasks, level up by spending souls, repair equipment, and revive to human status.³¹³ Resting at a bonfire respawns all non-boss enemies in the area, making the decision of when and where to rest a core strategic element.³¹² Souls, dropped by slain enemies, function as the game’s universal currency for both purchases and leveling; dying causes the player to become Hollow and drop all accumulated souls, which can be recovered only by reaching the bloodstain at the site of death before dying again.¹⁸³

Humanity is a scarcer resource, earned from items or by defeating bosses, and is used to kindle bonfires for extra health flasks and to revive to human form, which increases the discovery rate of rare items and permits summoning other players.¹³ Rather than presenting a hub with attached levels as Demon’s Souls did, Dark Souls offers a single seamless realm in which distant areas glimpsed on the horizon are real and explorable, and where shortcuts and secret passages progressively connect the map.⁸¹¹³ The world offers little direction, with only cryptic hints from scattered non-player characters, and several reviewers criticized the resulting confusion over where to go next.²⁶ The game’s story is told obliquely through item descriptions, cut scenes, and NPC dialogue, leaving much of the lore for players to piece together.¹⁹

Online interactions

Dark Souls carried over the asynchronous and cooperative online systems of Demon’s Souls, in which players could summon others as helpful phantoms or be invaded by hostile players.²⁶ Human-form players can summon up to two others to play cooperatively in one player’s world, or invade other worlds for player-versus-player combat.⁷ The game introduced covenants, factions joined through NPCs that shape whom the player faces in PvP and enable indirect interference with others’ games, such as dropping an item that summons monsters into another player’s world.²⁶ Players also leave and read messages for one another and see the ghosts of other players, producing a sense of shared experience in an otherwise bleak world.⁷¹³

Reception

The game was released in 2011 to strong critical acclaim, with reviewers describing it as the hardest game they had played while praising its atmosphere, combat, and design.²¹¹ Game Informer called it “without a doubt the hardest game I have ever played,” reporting around 60 hours of play and nearly 100 deaths.² IGN framed the experience around its tagline “Are you prepared to die?” and estimated 50 to 60 hours of play.³ GameSpot called it “a landmark game,” though it and several outlets noted an inconsistent frame rate as the chief technical flaw.¹¹ The Xbox 360 version in particular suffered slowdown.⁷

Ports, expansions, and legacy

In its first three months the game sold 1.3 million units and shipped 1.5 million.¹⁰ Namco Bandai confirmed a PC port in April 2012, crediting an online petition of nearly 100,000 signatures for the decision, having originally had no plans for a PC version.¹⁰ The resulting Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, released in 2012, added the Artorias of the Abyss content — new bosses including Artorias, new areas such as Oolacile Tomb, and new enemies, NPCs, weapons, and armor.¹⁰¹⁶ The producer, Daisuke Uchiyama, acknowledged that the PC version was “strictly a port from the console version” with no specific optimization, and it was widely criticized for poor performance, non-adjustable resolution, and capped frame rates.⁹⁴ In 2018 a remastered version, developed with QLOC and Virtuos, was released, running at 60 frames per second and including the Artorias of the Abyss DLC; it reached PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on May 24, 2018, with a Nintendo Switch release on October 19, 2018.¹⁵²⁰ Online services for the Prepare to Die Edition were retired and not restored due to an aging system.⁴

Dark Souls was the first entry in what became a trilogy, followed by Dark Souls II in 2014 and Dark Souls III in 2016, later collected with their DLC in the Dark Souls Trilogy.¹⁶¹⁷ Its foundation grew directly out of Demon’s Souls, from which it inherited its deadly environments, rewarding combat, phantom-based multiplayer, and difficulty as a defining feature.¹¹² The wider Souls lineage reaches back further to FromSoftware’s own King’s Field, a real-time 3D action RPG for the original PlayStation whose gameplay and atmosphere influenced Dark Souls.²² The game in turn became a global phenomenon that inspired an entire genre of challenging RPGs — the “soulslike” — which remained active more than a decade later.¹⁶²⁰

Dark Souls - Official Trailer #1ACROFAN