alightersoul

[alightersoul]

a note to future self: what appears to be going on in ds2, as seen from somewhere in the middle of the game by someone who didn’t play the first one:

1. you’re both Undead and cursed, or afflicted with “the Undead Curse”; the curse makes you slowly go hollow, losing your memories of yourself and your purpose

2. most friendly NPCs have forgotten their purpose; lots of enemies are mindlessly repeating things as well (the soldiers in the Fallen Giant forest hitting giant-trees eternally...)

3. various people tell you gathering souls will stave off the effects of hollowing; actually some claim/hope that gathering powerful souls will cure the curse *

4. the Emerald Herald tells you to go see King Vendrick, who ‘peered into the essence of the soul’, by first collecting 4 great souls; she asks if you’re the next monarch.

5. The witchy women at the start of the game *don’t* talk about the king or the ‘great souls’ or any kind of arc plot i don’t think, the talkative one of them just tells you that undead all come here for the same reason, to break the curse... and that they don’t think you’ll make it.

6. but their assistant Milibeth tells us they were once fire keepers, and that ‘the fire shows signs of fading’ & then about everyone going hollow in the same breath as if these are related.

7. Milibeth also mentions a 4th sister and one of the witches talks about ‘that kind old dear’ - seems likely that this 4th woman was the narrator at the beginning who convinces your character to jump into a swirling death vortex.

8. various folks say stuff that implies the King fucked everything up, and c’mon, inevitably, he’s gonna be all scary and hollow and a final boss.

9. the Majula map in the basement of that one house has 1 fire on it at the start, and more after battling each great soul/lighting each ‘primal bonfire’.

10. after getting 3/4 great souls, the Herald says: “Proceed, bearer of the curse. It is the only choice left to you”. why, I wonder (and hey what if I don’t want to, huh? maybe i wanna settle down in Majula and start a cross-stitch cottage industry, y’know??)

conclusions: 

- my bet is lighting the ‘primal bonfires’ is the actually important thing.

- the Herald is probably manipulating you this ‘next monarch’ stuff (I hope, it’s much more interesting if so)

- the Herald is maybe/probably doing whatever it is a fire keeper does? at least she and the Far Fire are both in the one safe haven village in the game where everyone’s maybe a bit depressed but getting on with life rather than aggro’ing on seeing you.

- so assuming because of that map it’s a ‘primal’ bonfire, the primal bonfires when... working properly... cast some kind of benevolent effect on their areas to keep undead chill and calm, in kind of the inverse to how using the ascetic items make areas *less* chill. (but they need a keeper - making the fire do that? debugging the bonfire magicks? lol) 

- the souls == cure to the curse theory is PROBABLY LIES, since game-mechanically the number of souls you’ve gathered/used isn’t at all related to hollowedness; hollowing is on a counter of how many times you’ve died since being human, whereas souls let you become stronger by levelling up yourself/your stuff.

- getting NPCs to help fight bosses advances their plotline, so, it keeps them unhollow by letting them move on with their purpose - which matches actual player summons because you get re-human-ified for being helping folks kill bosses! ~dark souls: friendship is humanity-restoring!~

[alightersoul]

the environment design in this game has so many VERY GOOD MOMENTS.

[alightersoul]

on complexity in videogames

elsewhere on the internet, I wrote this:

Currently I'm hunting for games in the middle of a Venn diagram that goes: little-to-no dialogue, beautiful weird bleak landscapes, interesting gameplay. (With an optional but encouraged extra category "cool boss fights"). 

so far the games in that category correlate pretty strongly with being ‘difficult’ - if your story is a background seasoning to the mechanics of the gameplay, it’s likely because you’ve got Some Interesting Stuff you want to do in the gameplay. in order to do that stuff, you’re likely to need the player to pick up a level of proficiency in the the game systems.

Hyper Light Drifter and Risk of Rain are indie games that need you to pick up a fairly narrow field of knowledge to start with - here’s how you move, here’s how you fight, here’s a 2d map to explore - then expand it out later. there’s a real artistry in making something so sparse into a satisfying game.

Dark Souls 2 neeaarrrrrly had me bounce off it and go ‘nope’ because it has a lot of systems: complex stats & levelling, encumbrance, different movesets for each different weapon, the gradual erosion of your health by hollowing...

but....  I just got to and fought and won against the apparently-famously-roadblocky boss The Pursuer, and have done the first really cool and tricky and precision-demanding fight in the game, I feel like I can see those pieces fitting together.

making players run from the last bonfire to the boss arena makes for this cool, tense, scary moment of “... I’m gotta go back in there in a minute. what did I fuck up last time? can I do better?”. the loss-of-health mechanic makes you go “do I heal up? will that extra 50% health be make-or-break?” (and ha! I won the fight in Full Zombiemode!!). 

the big complex systems are doing something. nice work, game.

[alightersoul]

a collection of vidjagames I’ve played over last ~6 months, :

The Last Guardian: extremely pretty landscapes!!! monster friend!!

> this is adorable but maybe something less abstract...

Persona 5: slice of life urban fantasy with inception-esque adventures in trippy dream sequences

> wow ok I enjoyed the first 4/5th of this game a lot. but then it had a literally 5 hour long finale that wasn’t all that good at pulling together plot threads. also it’s probably got more dialogue than war & peace and has used up my patience for games about talking to other people for the next year.

Horizon Zero Dawn: ROBOT DINOSAURS!! there is A Plot but mostly this is a game about how cool robot dinosaurs are

> these landscapes are beautiful but there is still too much talking and also i just want to be friends with these dinosaurs and not to fight them? I’ll come back to you later dino-game, sorry...

Risk of Rain: pixel art roguelike-ish thing that gets harder the longer you play for; you jump around platformy maps to find your way to your crashed spaceship, collecting powerups

> this soundtrack is great and I’m surprisingly completely sold on the fast-paced twitch-reflex-y combat!!!

Hyper Light Drifter: beautiful top-down pixelly game where you wander desolate landscapes finding keys and there’s very timing-based sword-fighting in which you dash around in a neon pink blur 

> THIS GAME IS AMAZING AND PERFECT I WANT TEN THOUSAND MORE GAMES JUST LIKE IT. It’s deeply beautiful and melancholy and compelling; and there are no words spoken in the entire game but I still felt deeply drawn into the story and in suspense about what’d happen to the main character when I reached the ending. love the combat system, it’s very clean & simple but stays engaging and interesting from start to finish. and the boss fights are all great and dramatic and stylish and difficult-but-in-a-problems-you-have-the-tools-to-solve kind of way and like? its so very good? ??

> i don’t think there are no more games like it, tragically. its a unique and beautiful master piece.

> ... apparently dark souls games also have cool boss fights and do the telling-stories-through-implications-in-the-world-design thing though? but it’s Very Different so you won’t be sad that it isn’t a pixel art masterpiece.

[alightersoul]

futher exploration:

at the start of the game, you do a little tutorial then adventure off towards a nice friendly village where it seems like nothing will want to kill you. this is MEJULA. Population: maybe 3 people, a talking cat, and 3 murderous, possibly demonic pig creature.  

there’s also a good view of a rolling ocean, a memorial that tells you how many times you’ve died, a blacksmith who’s locked himself out, and a big house that’s empty but locked. the talking cat is called "Sweet Shalquoir".

seems like you can gradually convince more NPCs to up sticks and move back there, probably because the rest of the world is even more desolate.

there's an NPC called Cale the Cartographer who wanders the lands making maps, hanging out in a dark cave amongst a bunch of hapless hollow knight dudes. which, I mean?that job must come with some pretty significant risks to life and limb, but, I guess if you're gonna be living an eternal undeath forever... what’ve you got to lose? you live your best life, NPC friend.

also in good video game environment design: omg, this benevolent statue looking down on you when you’ve juuuuust about survived to make it to a nice sheltered room with a lovely magical bonfire savepoint in it!

[alightersoul]

Adventures in Dark Souls II

A series of messages to a friend:

> I bought the second dark souls game and OMG I was expecting cool weird fantasy but the intro to that game involves a lot of old witchy ladies a la gormenghast and its delightful

> Also the character design prompt is "hey here's a weird featureless statue, it's you" then "try to recall your name"

(Actually that thing was the other way round, and even more just entertainingly creepy. The conversation goes like this:

YOU ‘try to recall your name’ as instructed by in a menu prompt.

The FIREKEEPER WITCH hands you a round shape made of something like twisted wire.

WITCH: Here’s your reward for sharing. It’s a human effigy. Take a closer look... Who do you think it’s supposed to be?

(a quiet moment of twinkly music, as the game lets you contemplate the featureless little object) 

WITCH: yessss, it’s an effigy of you. 

A character creation screen appears, then when you’re done asks you “is this your true self?”.)

SHORTLY AFTERWARDS:

> apparently characters in this game can't swim

> my amnesiac white haired knight lady is now a very fetching zombie