10 Ways Dark Souls Made All Video Games WORSE
1. The “Learn AFTER You Die” Style Of Game Design, Revived From The 1980s
In the 1980s, arcade games were hard as nails. They were often skewed towards unfairness, which worked well - the player would have to lose in order to learn, which meant spending more money.
As we moved to home consoles, games simply emulated this type of “punish to teach” approach, not because it was the best technique - games like Ninja Gaiden or Contra were hard... because they didn’t know any better.
Nowadays, we’re more savvy when it comes to teaching the player. No longer do we drop a piano on the player from a blind spot of the ceiling and say “oh, you’ll know there’s a piano there for next time” - we offer more contemporary challenges and solutions.
One of my senior designer friends once noted that “when a game starts punishing the player for trying to learn, you’ve stopped designing how to test skill, and you’ve started designing how to test patience”. A boss that can kill you in a single hit will almost certainly require you to die a few times to get used to its patterns, and what happens when it miraculously learns a plethora of new moves partway through the battle? You die, you learn, you repeat again.
Bosses can be tough, tricky to understand, brutal, satisfying to beat and relentless without resorting to serving the player up a Game Over screen after every brand new attack it decides to unleash.
Sometimes, it’s just more satisfying when you see the piano before it lands on your head.