Brick By Brick

There are so many false and unhelpful myths surrounding Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls series, and Bloodborne, and this is a case study of the one above, taken from a forum post: that is, that the games heavily depend upon statistically orienting your character the “right way”, and that there is a narrow of doing things “right.” This is a criticism that is also and frequently directed at Vagrant Story (and while there is some room to argue about it there, there is no denying that the game’s bevy of nested menus and hyper-specific stats, seemingly meant to replicate the experience of a tabletop role-playing session, will confuse pretty much any newcomer for a while). I want to attack this assertion head on because it is a misinterpretation at best, and contributes to the overall prohibitive and ignorant perceptions surrounding these games.

The thing to keep in mind is that Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne rely upon a basic trio of player mechanics: your health, your stamina, and your primary offensive power. Not that different from so many other games, except for the stamina. Put another way, what matters is being able to take hits (health), dodge and block (stamina), and deal good damage (primary offensive power). There is obviously a range of possibilities within the realm of offense, but the default emphasis is on weaponry (or, as gamers have, for some reason, taken to calling it, “melee”). This is partially reinforced by the means you are given by the game as you start out – the items you pick up, or can buy – and also the level up menus, which hierarchically situate the stats related to health, endurance, and attack at or near the top. Although you have increasing access to sorts of magic the further you play, your ability to cast them is tied to an exhaustible magic bar or visible diminishing counter; so that, although magic can be made powerful if you pursue it with intention, you are (correctly) led to understand that it is, offensively, secondary to weapons. This goes for Bloodborne’s firearms, as well, as they rely upon finite – around twenty – bullets, and some use multiple bullets per shot.

There are a number of other ways in which the games’ internal consistency and progressive streamlining assist, rather than work against, the player. For one, the overwhelming majority of Dark Souls’ weapons rely upon a threshold of Strength and Dexterity; these are not games where you will, mid-duration, suddenly realize that you leveled up your weapon-centric stats only to realize that weapons are, from then on, no good, or that they in fact depend on stats you’d falsely been led to believe were peripheral/specialized. Once you’ve played a single one of these games and perceived this pattern, you can play another and have that knowledge more or less carry over. When you see Bloodborne’s level-up menu (which has only six stats!), with the Bloodtinge and Arcane stats at the bottom, you can act in confidence knowing that that aforementioned trio – health, stamina, and primary offensive power – is the reliable core. In fact, it could be suggested that Dark Souls 3, in part, did not make as much of an impression as some people were hoping for because it was so mechanically predictable (albeit with a faster pace to most fights). Regarding streamlining, one might also observe that Dark Souls 3 simplified its equipment load tier (rather than there being three types of weight-dependent dodge-rolls, there are just two), and Bloodborne removed it entirely so that it is impossible to not always have the fastest player movement.

Magic-oriented classes are situated at the bottom of the character creation’s class list (with the hardly-equipped Deprived, essentially a “challenge” class, at the bottom). Each class is a suggestion; you can pursue what their stats initially support or branch out as you see fit as you uncover new items.

Two snags arise in this discussion. The first is Dark Souls 2′s baffling inclusion of its Adaptability stat: it has, as the page in the link lists, a variety of benefits, but chief among those is its link to the sub-stat of Agility. The higher your Agility, the more invincibility frames your dodge-roll has. On the one hand, this was a needless complexity; on the other hand, Dark Souls 2 is also the first of these games to let you reset your stats mid-game. Furthermore, no one has, as far as I know, detailed how having less i-frames is an active impediment, especially if you’re not aware of any of this. The other snag is that, in each game, equipment gets better only if you upgrade it, and upgrades require materials – Titanite and Bloodstones – that, for a while, are finite and either must be found or purchased. Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne did the right thing and had all clothing and armor need no upgrading, freeing players up to be less conservative with their resources. Noteworthy, too, is that these games are as notorious for their alleged difficulty as they are for the players who have completed them using weaker weapons on purpose.

I think it is important here to clarify that it is conceivable that people can get, and have gotten, stuck because they felt they’d hit a wall with their abilities and range of apparent options within one of these games. Perhaps they picked up Dark Souls’ Divine Ember and interpreted this as an eventual statistical primacy of Faith, dumped their souls into that stat, and then, once finding this to be incorrect, figured that starting over would be more efficient than continuing and leveling up other stats. My contention is with the post in question asserting that build-specificity is fundamental to the games’ design, as if those ignorant of some deep mechanical lore will be lost in a whirlwind of misdirecting numbers. It must be said that any combat-oriented videogame that intertwines its stats with weapon-usage may cause more confusion than a videogame where you can use whatever you want once you’ve got it. But this difference doesn’t correlate with the asserted narrowness of range. In a reductive but very real sense, these are games about dodging, blocking (excepting Bloodborne), and hitting, and the mechanisms for doing these things have a granularity that only matters if that is what you are specifically seeking and/or enjoy spreadsheets.

Note that this person conflates doing well with trivializing the games’ designs. This is what makes it easiest to dismiss their criticism as hyperbolic and reactionary. If the reason you’re abandoning an existing file for a fresh one is because you can’t steamroll everything, you should reexamine your priorities, or at least think twice before formulating that as a criticism. A caveat that might be just as significant to this topic as anything else is that my perspective is atypical. As of today, only 45% of players have defeated Bloodborne’s first mandatory boss. As of today, I’ve also completed an initial playthrough of Sekiro, which less than 10% of the playerbase has done (no doubt this number will rise, although it might never go higher than 20% or 30%). These are, along with other data-based comparisons, mere admittances that the progress I’ve made might bring with it blindspots or hindsight biases that downplay real impediments to newcomers. With this admitted as a way of easing the door open for rebuttals, my hope in writing isn’t to make an absolute statement about the games’ difficulty levels, as if my skill level were normative; it’s to clarify that I don’t believe that the difficulty arises from impractical “builds,” and to empower interested people who’ve been burdened by such claims before they’ve even played a single one of these games.