9 Lessons All Video Game Developers Can Learn From Dark Souls

By Adam Hogg / December 19, 2016

The original Dark Souls can often be polarising, with a lot of people heralding it as the best thing since sliced bread and a lot of others slamming it as the devil incarnate. Regardless of peoples' opinions, it is undeniable that Dark Souls is different to the vast majority of titles on the market. It changed a lot of common gaming tropes, and pushed the boundaries of third-person action with a lot of its mechanics.

The way the story was intertwined with the entire game and the multiplayer being intrinsic to the games world, there was a lot that it did differently.

And due to its ability to push boundaries and not be afraid to make new choices, the game fundamentally was sound. It introduced a lot of new ideas and concepts that should be held to a higher pedestal with a lot of lessons to be learnt from them. With its many success and mistakes, Dark Souls can be a major learning tool and one that developers don’t look to very often.

With that mentality, there are a lot of lessons to be learnt in regards to Dark Souls and I’m running down nine of those lessons that game developers need to learn to make their games better.

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9. A Truly Interesting World

Building an interesting and deep world is difficult and getting the player to engage with it is even harder. And while making that world is difficult presenting the story and narrative behind the setting is something that is damn near impossible without a secondary medium. That's why games resort to books and dialogue trees to reveal story and back log exposition without having to explicitly throw it at them.

But when you look at the world of dark souls, a lot of its story is told through small snippets of dialogue with characters and through its world. The way the world is made, makes it feel real and purposeful and the details woven into the world tell their stories. Simply through a few visual keys and details in level design, you can extrapolate additional details about the world.

The stairs in Anor Londo having small steps and large steps to illustrate the fact that it is the city of the gods who aren't human, but giants. The switch between cramped small corridors and buildings in Undead Burg to the vast golden city with big rooms, further details the divide. The world is built with telling a story and simply by exploring it, you learn and figure things out.

Its a far more intrinsically effective way to communicate a narrative, and after all, video games are a visual medium for a reason.