9 Lessons All Video Game Developers Can Learn From Dark Souls

3. Great Character Design

There is a reason that characters In Dark Souls are so loved and worshipped almost religiously. And that is because they are incredibly well designed. Modern day game developers somehow always get it wrong and force the player into ‘liking’ a character simply by saying that the character they are playing likes them. Love interests fall heavily for this, giving the player no other reason to love a character beyond the fact that ‘the game told me I love them’

Good characters have depth and motivation. The characters in Dark Souls breathe personality with the smallest quirks to their design and speech that make them instantly memorable. The eccentric boldness of Solaire, stuck in players’ minds as he had clear purpose and depth to his character. The way he spoke and little flairs to character made him unique and players bonded with him.

Characters are hard to write and sometimes they fall short. But game developers seem to have it in their mind that good character design can be written plainly and that players will love characters simply if we are told we do. They need those unique personalities and encounters that make them fresh and fun. Part of the joy of Dark Souls is finding those characters again and spending so little time with them instead of having them thrown at us and being told to love them.

It says a lot when FromSoftware can make players fall in love with a faceless suit of armour and Activision can’t make us love Burly White Protagonist #1032 in Call of Duty…