9 Lessons All Video Game Developers Can Learn From Dark Souls

6. Restricting Progression Until The Player Proves Themselves

Structuring games can be very difficult. Achieving the right balance between difficulty and progression takes incredible precision and to do so in an open world can be hard. And so, developers tend to gate content behind certain barriers. Either through physical barriers or reasons within the game world that restrict your ability to move until you reach a certain point in the story.

This is not the case in Dark Souls for most the time. Gated content is gated until the player can prove themselves worthy to exploring it. The simplest example is the Asylum Demon. Until the player proves themselves worthy of exploring the rest of the game, they are trapped.

Now, there is a very fine line between gating content behind a challenge and gating it behind a physical barrier, as bosses and challenges in Dark Souls can often be considered barriers of their own. But tying into Player skill, the ability to overcome most challenges in inherent to the player. The way Dark Souls presents the entire game to be open at any point to any player who is willing to persevere is ingenious. Rarely does the game block areas of for no tangible reason and everything is open.

While the game does have its moments where It does explicitly lock portions of the game of through barriers and forces players to wait to experiencing them, it has more places where it offers up a challenge that is feasible to complete. It never downright says come back here later in the story and locks content which should be available away