Soul Fatigue
Originally published July, 2018If you've been to this website more than once, there's a strong chance that you know how I LOVE the original Dark Souls. The Souls series is probably the single biggest franchise that has had its hooks in me since the very start when Demon's Souls was released back in 2009. I struggle to think of any other franchise in the past ten years that has had such a significant impact on the games industry, as well as my own personal tastes and interests. It revitalized my interests in particular types of games, introduced me to genres that I would never have touched before, and even taught me the importance of small details and how they can have such a significant impact on the atmosphere and story of a game.
After Demon's Souls hooked me, Dark Souls came out two years later and blew me away, becoming my favorite game of the past 10 years. Since then, there have been 2 full sequels to Dark Souls, the similar-but-different Bloodborne was released, and just recently, a remastered version of the original Dark Souls has been released for current game consoles and the PC. However, I feel the fatigue for my favorite franchise setting in. Much as I like Dark Souls, I see no real reason to pick up the remaster, especially after watching a hacker burn it all down. Even with the recent announcement of Sekiro, the game From Software has been working on for the past 2 years hitting E3, I'm interested, but I do not feel the vigor or excitement I once did.
You may recall my trepidation for Dark Souls 3 when I was debating if I wanted to get in on it when the game was still new or not. I typically wait for games to go down in price, and for enough patches from the developers to improve the game to the point of actually being closer to a satisfying, finished product. However, I have made exceptions to the Souls series for a primary reason: the zeitgeist that occurs with these games at launch is unlike anything most modern games provide. It is the best time to experience these games when everyone is still figuring out what sort of weird, obtuse secrets are hidden in the rich and dense world the developers have created. I decided to jump in the pool relatively early with Dark Souls III and was able to enjoy it a great deal. I don't think the zeitgeist directly contributed to the experience, but knowing that not everything had been discovered and figured out helped me accept and enjoy the stranger, more obscure nature of the game. Bloodborne, however, is a different story for me.
Soul Fatigue: Bloodborne
Bloodborne was the exception to my zeitgeist rule. Since it was a PS4 exclusive, and I had no desire to get a PS4 at that time, I had to let it go. Now that it's been out for several years and I finally have the game and console, I've been putting some time into Bloodborne, expecting to like it a lot more than I actually do. On paper, it should easily be a slam dunk for what I want from the From Software team: Lovecraft influence, horror, faster Dark Souls combat, Gothic architectural design, versatile weapons that can transform in combat, Victorian era guns, etc. Nonetheless, the game is not clicking with me. I don't find the combat as fun and the weapons are not as satisfying to use. I also struggle to completely understand the mechanic around using the guns in the game, which is immensely frustrating.
In the Souls games, you had the option of carrying a shield or another weapon in your character's off-hand. Pressing the right button at the right time allowed you to swing this side-weapon and brush away an enemy's attack, leaving them open for a riposte strike. This was an extremely satisfying mechanic in the Souls games that I quickly latched onto. The games got better at making this mechanic a bit more useful as they went on, allowing for more enemy attacks to be countered if you were good enough with the timing. Not every enemy could be countered and not every attack could be parried, but there was an instinctive nature to the mechanic that made it at lot easier for me to understand than what is going on with the guns in Bloodborne.
The guns essentially do the same thing as the shields of Dark Souls. If properly timed, firing your sidearm can put the enemy in a stunned state, allowing for a massive counterattack. However, I have next to no idea when and where to use this attack on most bosses or enemies after having spent more than 10 hours with the game. The range I have to be from the enemy, the timing, and the types of attacks that require the mechanic to work are not clearly identifiable to me. I mostly just start shooting as much as I can at an enemy, wasting bullets trying to find the magic moment when it's supposed to "work."
The fact that there are a limited supply of these bullets adds to the frustration of the mechanic. Rather than making them like a renewable resource of the Estus Flask, a mechanic they figured out by the original Dark Souls, they decided to make health items and bullets for their parry mechanic consumable resources that you would have to farm off of enemies. I do not see the point in this decision that requires players to go back to earlier levels to just keep killing the same enemies over and over just so they can get these precious items that are almost mandatory to play the game. Even Demon's Souls, which had consumable health items, had so many different types that it gave with intense frequency that it was never an issue. However, it also didn't have a limited use to its parry mechanic.
So my choice with Bloodborne is mostly to ignore the guns unless I can find a real easy and obvious moment to use them in a boss battle, because I don't want to waste them on regular enemies. This then requires that I keep fighting with the regular weapons, but the weapon variety seems slim by comparison. Without a parry mechanic that is satisfying, much less consistent, to use, and without enough weapons to try out to really keep me interested in the combat, I am left wanting.
Even the atmosphere is only halfway there. The opening chapters have a good deal of creepy horror going on with some grotesque character designs and monstrous bosses. Then, in a really lazy, ham-fisted way, the game dumps labyrinths on you. From what I've seen of these labyrinths so far, they're little more than boring dungeons with repeating room designs and enemies. There are specific bosses contained within, but they do not do enough to remove the thoughts from my mind about how it all seems like a lazy way of padding out the game's length.
These mounting frustrations might have been reduced in my experience if I had started playing when Bloodborne was brand new and I was learning the ropes along with everyone else. The zeitgeist might have been enough to dampen the irritations to the point that I'd be willing to forgive the various design choices I don't agree with. Since this game has been out for several years now, however, I know that a ton of information sits online for me to read, rather than discover or speculate on my own. This "known quantity" of the information makes the obtuse nature of the gameplay and the growing frustrations I have with it more problematic to my experience. I don't have the patience for some of these issues and I am less willing to sit and bang my head against the wall of the game when I know I can just look it up online and solve my problem in 5 minutes. Nonetheless, I do it anyway, because the loss of the sense of discovery is just as negative a blow to the experience.
So Bloodborne has me in a new dilemma. Do I put up with the irritating nature of the obscure design choices for the sake of hoping to understand on my own and experience that dopamine rush of "figuring it out"? Or, do I cheapen my experience by just looking up the answer online for the sake of trying to make progress and to give myself the extra bit of understanding I may be lacking? Right now, I'm leaning towards the latter, just because I desperately want a reason to like this game more than I do and it may be my only option at this point.
With how little I am currently enjoying Bloodborne, any talks of a possible sequel in the future do nothing to excite me. There's a possibility that it may all just suddenly click later, as that is what happened when I played the original Dark Souls, but I'm not holding my breath. The new game that From Software just announced seems promising, but there was also Nioh, a game that came out last year and already did the samurai Souls treatment. Perhaps there's more acrobatic drama in Sekiro, and they do love injecting some creative horror into their games, but I'll have to wait and see if it's worth my enthusiasm.
Soul Fatigue: Remastered
Shifting gears to the game that spawned this lengthy article in the first place, I'm also not finding a good reason to pick up this new remaster that has recently come out. Remasters in general bug me because of the fact that they're often overpriced for the amount of work that went into the process of fixing up a game that was already made. The publishers have done the right thing by offering a discount to those on PC who already own the original Dark Souls, but even that wouldn't convince me that it's worth my time or money.
What does the remaster do? It improves the resolution. Some textures have been touched up to look less muddy. The frame rate is more consistently around 60 frames a second. Two out of those three issues were more or less fixed with the fan-made patch DSfix. While it was a slightly unstable fan-made patch, it still worked well enough to make the game run much better than it originally did and improved the resolution of the game to a meaningful degree. The original game, despite being 7 years old, still looks good running on this old patch. If you're like me and you don't care so much about how good a game looks, then the only reason to get this remaster is to be able to experience the online interactions with other players once again. However, that may not be what you want.
It's always a bummer when a game's online capabilities end, especially one as prominent and popular as the Souls series. Whether it be due to servers shutting down or just a community that has moved on, a game can lose something special about it without the community behind it. The fact that there is a new game out there with revitalized servers and a revitalized community gives people the chance to get the true Souls experience once again. Unfortunately, that includes hacking.
I've had my fair share of encounters with hackers in these games, so it's frustrating that the publishers and developers would push this game out yet again with minimal to no effort made to prevent hacking. Within the first 72 hours, there was a guy streaming his hacking feats and ability to ruin people's experiences to the point where he was guessing how many people he would cause to refund the game. You can avoid people like this by never going online with the game, but then why get the remaster? The only justification I can give is that it might be worth it on consoles because hacking is less prevalent there, but that's not enough to personally convince me.
Maybe it's my distaste with remasters. Maybe my patience has been worn down too much over the years. Maybe I'm just too old and grumpy for these Souls games. Even though these are some of my favorite games, I've grown tired of them and hope that From Software is capable of wowing me again with something truly new and original.
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