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[snowgoblinblog-blog]

Environmental story telling in Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the first sin edition.

I planned to do this post ad a video but due to circumstances beyond my control I haven't been able to make it. I do plan to expand on the topic in the future and when I do I will do it in video format.

I recently picked up Dark Souls Scholar of the first sin. I've been a big Souls series fan since Demon's souls. Like with many of my favourite series it took me a couple of failed starts to appreciate what was in front of me and I almost put it down less than 5 hours in. Since breaking in there hasn't been a Souls game I didn't buy day 1 (and in Dark Souls 2's case I even purchased a USA copy on PSN as I didn't want to wait the extra week for the UK PC release). Unlike many people I didn't find Dark Souls 2 to be a disappointment, it held my attention extremely well and I played it until I finished it. If I was awake I was playing it, if I wasn't playing it I was asleep. It probably wasn't the optimal way to experience it but that's how I did experience it. I waited happily for the DLC and even used cheat engine to access it early when it was found you could teleport beyond the first DLC door and use the bonfires beyond. I remember playing most of the way through the DLC and then putting the game down and never returning to it. The game had done nothing wrong, I had just had enough of Souls games.

This burn out would continue on to later Souls games where I found I grew increasingly to dislike them even though the content was reasonably good. Bloodborne was a slog of the worst kind, I really liked the Victorian setting and the idea of being a hunter tracking down werewolves and other beasties. My problem came that at this point it wouldn't be unreasonable to say I had put 1,000 hours into the Souls series. If it was worth doing then I had done it and a lot of what I hadn't thought fell into that as well. When I hit Dark Souls 3 I enjoyed it as a nostalgia hit mostly because the first real area reminded me so much of Demon's souls 1-1. I never ended up finishing it for the same reason my PS4 has a Bloodborne save file at the last boss and I've never seen the ending. When it comes to Souls games I've seen some shit and I'd rather experience new things. I knew what I liked, I knew what was on offer and I was mostly content to replay Demon's souls every few years and be happy with my lot.

That was until I stumbled across someone playing the remixed Dark Souls 2 and saw how many Black phantoms had been added to the game. In the original almost all of them were put in NG+ and I never did a NG+ play through due to burn out. Since fighting Black phantoms is by far my favourite part of the series I was part way convinced. matthewmatosis putting out some excellent souls content I watched while playing Zelda BOTW didn't do any harm either. Got to do something while running between areas and getting your autism fix on for shrine discovery.

Normally I despise these personal over detailed introductions to a topic I want to read. No one gives a fluff about me and I don't pretend they want to read about me playing games 3 years ago. The only reason I mention it is because I want it to be clear when I write the feedback here that I have a lot of souls experience but that alone isn't going to keep me playing one of them any more. No matter how good the content at this point I need a hook other than it just being a Souls game. Dark Souls 2 SOTFS's hook was that the enemies were remixed, this made me curious to see what had changed. It in turn lead me to want to write an article on world building, it isn't exclusively about Dark souls 2 but a game with such solid atmosphere is one of the best examples to work from. I will cover others games as we go on.

The final third of DaS2 takes place around a giant stormy castle. It becomes a second hub from which to branch out and return to. It's taken a good few hours to get here and it's where I find fatigue naturally sets in. Dark souls games all seem to be about 10 hours longer than would be comfortable. You finish your big quest and then they side line you with a sub quest which involves finishing up areas you couldn't access before or finding some key to unlocking the final area. It leads to poor pacing and mostly seems to be a cut off point for difficulty changes rather than any real in game reason. At the castle we're introduced to a mechanic where you have to kill enemies in order to trigger door mechanics. Their souls are absorbed by the giant statues rather than yourself and it works pretty well. Once you know the key you can progress quickly and there's lots of variety in what enemies you fight in order to unlock the doors. Some doors end up being traps you wish would have stayed closed and I feel the area is overall well done and would have made an ideal ending point.

In DaS2 the primary enemies here are different forms of knights or tin soldiers and a few much larger enemies. You have Allone knight captains as archers, gold knights as general tougher guys and the tin soldiers as week mooks you kick around. You even see the return of the Ruined sentinels from earlier as a general but rare enemy. For a onster collection this suits the area well but came with a little bonus. Defending the King here were several elephant monsters previously seen briefly in the cavern area. They're massive monsters with halberds and full body shields. The introduction to the area in both versions is fighting 2 of these at once. This is a pretty intimidating fight the first time you reach it and it's taken a tough enemy from earlier and doubled it up. In the caverns their armour was rusted and incomplete, here they're wearing solid gold plate and are enitely covered. I like this, I like the idea that a giant king would have giant elephants protecting him. It gives the impression that these elephants are some what intelligent and will work with the dwarven races as well as the larger races. It's a wall of meat with a halberd so it fits right in.

The problem comes with SOTFS when they replace these enemies with ones from other areas. The first 2 remain intact but the later ones are all replaced a long with some of the knight's acting as archers. This in it's self wouldn't be a problem, you can remove a few here and there and give the same impression. The issue is that by only having 2 elephants you lower the sense of defence here. I'm killing golden knights I've already killed in other areas so they're not special. The stone knights from the Tower of Heide return here in SOTFS and those are basically enemies you farm for your first few levels to get going. We go from huge walls of meat you've barely been able to fight before to the first enemies outside of a tutorial area. The sense of intimidation is completely cut down. Ivy covered stone knights just doesn't fit what else is going on here. It's knightly theme is actually weakened by including the stone knights. More knights should add more knightly themes but it doesn't work out because we already have to over saturation of them. The elephants gave a good contrast while imposing the same defensive power full plate did. You can understand why someone might recruit some elephants into their patrol garrison where as 2 random stone knights just stand out as odd. Why would they be falling apart when nothing else is? This area's full of petrified enemies who wake up when you get near them which stops them decaying the way these ones have.

The bigger problem with this area comes with the addition of 3 enemies from the Earthen peaks. It's an area full of poisonous pools and flame sorcerers. It's one of the worst designed areas in the game and isn't much fun to play but it works as an overall theme. Dodging fireballs on narrow ledges or being ambushed by headless assassins gives it a lot of character. It's a vile place where only the worst of the worst would wish to live. If you manage to survive the poison pools then a knife is waiting for you around the next corner. This is a complete contrast with a creepy castle filled with knights. One is about honour and the other is about deceit.

Upon entering a room full of petrified tin men in DaS2 some of them wake up for you to use as keys to the doors around them. In SOTFS 2 assassins drop from the ceiling by a set of chests and you have to lead them to the doors you want opening. What is this supposed to tell me about the castle? The puzzle doesn't matter here, it's probably better for the assassins but we're talking the area design not the gameplay here. This area supposed to give me the impression that it still has honour and valour and then suddenly 2 assassins drop down and shank me? It breaks the location's subtle hints of corruption. A cursed painting lets you know that something is a miss here, if you go near it then you immediately start building up curse. It's a clear suggestion of corruption. 2 random assassins makes me think that there are under handed things going on in the castle. Less corruption and more just outright thievery. These two messages are bizarrely in contrast.

The other additional normal enemy is a flame witch from the Earthen peaks as well. These half dressed women carry massive fans and use pyromancy. They're annoying as hell to fight and doubly so in their original home. They're ill fitted here as the assassins area. If the world you're trying to build is a noble looking castle that is rotten inside then why are you showing me evil enemy types? You break the feel of the place because the subtle hints are replaced with random mooks who don't fit the theme. Should I assume that Earthen peak has some how started to invade the castle or that these people have been hired by the Queen? The Queen already has great power, she's a Dark user. If you want to push the theme here then why aren't you using some kind of enemy mage with dark spells as we see a couple of areas deeper or the first DLC? Dark and Flame are the two contrasting elements in Dark Souls, by including flame here you overwrite the nature of it. On my first play through I saw this place as an intimidating fortress full of steel. On my SOTFS play through I spent all my time wondering what the hell 2 assassins were doing there.

That isn't to say that the castle lacks assassins in DaS2. It includes a black phantom called The Unknown Usurper. He spawns in and tries to shank you with a dagger through out several areas as you get closer to the king. It's always a tough fight and it usually involves him spawning in behind you. I'm not aware of his back story at the point of writing but I get the impression he is someone else looking to make themselves king. Either by replacing the current one or by killing myself and preventing me from becoming king so he can. This is great story telling because I have a reason for him to be there. They made him an invader, he's an alien to this place the same way I am. He doesn't have to be related to the rest of the enemies here, his contrast works well to make him stand out. Souls games do an excellent job of this, in Demon's souls 2-2 you have the barbarian twins and in Dark Souls you have Maneater Mildred. They feel like they fit in with the world in logical ways. They live in these places and they're invading my world to defend their territory or to eat me depending on your level of cannibalism.

Here even though it's a contrast, I still understand how this phantom fits into the world. Many of the SOTFS phantoms fail to do so in the same way. They feel like a collection of random parts to make a fight happen. I don't feel like I'm invading their territory or that they have a reason to invade mine. The fact that many of them are simply the same 2 enemies respawned over and over is just annoying. One which especially bugged me was the Phantom before the Rotten boss. He's in an area full of poison darts and yet he's running around shirtless with a club and some way over the top poise trousers. I didn't feel like he was there for any reason but to introduce a new challenge when the game had previously left you unmolested if you had run that gauntlet. He's an example of a poor phantom placement when we're talking world building. The fight being annoying would fit the area nicely if we had some context for the annoyance. The entire journey down here has been one kick in the balls after another, adding a final cunt punt to the end isn't an overall bad idea. It was just done poorly in both gameplay and world building terms.

Before you exit the castle there is a final room containing 5 enemies. In Dark Souls 2 it contains 4 golden knights and 1 elephant knight. In SOTFS it contains 2 stone knights and 1 horse.. wait what? The horse is the undead chariot boss's second form which appears after you slam the gate on it. It's incredibly easy to fight and in my case was the area I had previously just finished. I remember the doorway being intimidating the first time because it's a 3 on 1 fight with an elephant having massive reach and all 3 enemies having shields you need to get round. It felt like something behind it was being guarded. I'm not exactly sure who puts a demonic horse to guard something important but here you go. The problem with this enemy is that it should in theory fit what is going on in the place but in practice it ruins any sense of subtly.

The castle being taken over by Dark is supposed to be a late game reveal with small hints. Here you have a Dark horse that's defending the most important part of the castle. The area beyond has a new type of knight on the run to the boss fight, they have twin blades and horse head armour. It's easy to see why they decided to place the horse here. Had it been a Cerberus type enemy then it could easily be seen as some sort of guardian the same way the Sanctuary Guardian is in Dark Souls 1. But that isn't what we get here. We have a former boss who can barely fight and has massive recovery times on all of it's attacks. It wasn't designed to fight, it was designed to carry a chariot around a small area and then when you solve the puzzle be an all but free kill. What the hell are you doing guarding this hallway with something designed to run away and carry things behind it? Let alone something that gives away that you as the Queen are corrupt? Just because the enemies after have horse heads doesn't mean a horse enemy matches the theme. Any subtly is now gone and frankly why am I refighting an unique boss like this? In Dark Souls you refight Kapra demon and the Taurus demon. Both are early game bosses and difficult on your first go through. Reusing them later is story telling in how much stronger you have become. You can now consider them to be weak opponents you will drop in 1 combo rather than 5-10. You head down into where they are born so you meet more of them. The original encounters are demons wandering the land way above their station and give you a reason for the silver knights to be around. It all works together as a single eco system of prey, predator and super predator. I get the impression that the horse was placed here because players weren't seeking out the boss fight in the original. Why encourage players with a nice item when you can just jam it up their butthole in an unavoidable fashion instead?

While the castle is the biggest problem area for this sort of messing around it happens in other areas as well. In the Shaded forest the game originally had mostly beastmen wandering around. These presented a tough challenge and could be considered the first real difficulty spike. Even good armour will see you dead in a single combo. When you got to this area you know you were out of the beginning and needed to start focusing your build and upgrading items. The curse vases made running a bad option so now you had to face a hard enemy or have your health taken from you. A tough but fair choice. SOTFS will have none of this. It's taken enemies from the previous area and placed them here in place of almost all the beast men.

These enemies are fog figures you can't lock onto. They usually sit and wait for you to pass before standing up to attack you. In the fog forest you just passed through they act as paranoia inflicting back stabbers. You can't fight them well, you can't outrun them, you can't tell where you're going. They work perfectly here and as the sole area with them I wouldn't change a single thing about them. When you make me fight them repeatedly in the open all you do is force me to switch to a weapon with a sweeping attack. This is the point where I switched from a spear to another weapon because I just couldn't reasonably fight these guys any other way. The game wasn't trying to challenge me in new and exciting ways, it simply told me I had made a bad decision in trying to do a spear play through and I should do something else. I've always wanted to use spears in Souls games, they're cool as hell.. yet half way through they end up being replaced by another weapon almost every time. I always find something better but this is the first time I felt like the game actively telling me I was playing wrong. Their reasonably high poise and no way to focus my attacks on them in a reliable way made fighting them annoying rather than rewarding.

This areas original theme is lost due to the fog men and it's gameplay is drastically changed. The fog men aren't a harder fight in the way the beast men are. They don't require you to run away if they get on top of you. It just requires you have a sweeping weapon so you can neglect their no lock on effect. An effect that was so bad in Dark souls 1 they removed it for the very first patch I might add. Dick Stab forest's phantoms all used to have this effect. It fucking sucked. It still sucks. It's destroyed the areas identity as a “humanoid beasts” area and replaced it with another one that simply doesn't make much sense. Fog men in the fog forest make sense, fog men hanging around a giant scorpion monster not so much..

The other addition to this area is one of the hardest enemies in the game you previously found at the end of a primal bonfire path. One of the greatest swordsman ever to live greets you as a head with no body. He warns you his body has gone feral and is attacking stuff while he can no longer control it. Weird story but hey works for me. In Dark Souls 2 you find it locked away in a huge arena after several tough areas and down an entire mine. It makes sense that this feral beast is no where near the head. It's travelling, it's exploring, it's likely been captured and being tested on. Now it's just in this area where you don't have room to fight it and it will drop some very good armour if you beat it. We go from a wandering monster to something 2 feet from it's head that's supposed to have no idea where it is. If they had changed the lore that the body is searching for the head then it might work. But how feral is this body that lurks all of 1 area away from it's head? If I recall correctly it can't even escape where it spawns. It's trapped between a petrified beast man and a fog gate to a new area.  “Oh hey what's t.. OH FUCK” after a big boss fight when you're supposed to feel safe and “Oh hey another monster”. Completely different set up, completely different feel. Complete loss of character on both parts. Rather than having a miniature story line where you spend several hours between hearing of the body and then fighting it you have an hour tops and it could easily be as little as 20 minutes. This completely declaws the mystery and removes much of the coolness and the utility of the arena beyond the primal bonfire.

One of the worst offenders for this complete lack of identity is the Dragon's aeries. This area in the original is quite difficult due to the fact they take a boss you just beat and made it into a standard enemy here. The areas smaller, you have less options and he's still just as deadly. In the original game you had to walk past several of these enemies to get to the next area. In SOTFS they're all asleep and won't interact with you unless you provoke them. Since there are no stealth mechanics in souls games worth a damn this makes the area all but pointless. Why tell me this is a dragon's nesting ground if my only experience with dragons is them sleeping while I fight suicide bombers? I'm not saying you need to repeat the boss fight I just had but make me interact with the creatures you're telling me are here. It's like seeing a sign for ice cream and then when you enter it's a chip shop. It doesn't matter how good the chips are I went in for ice cream. This only gets worse when you take into account they placed one of the dragons in the Tower of Hiede as a mini boss blocking the door way to Ornstein. Why a dragon randomly flew down from it's nest and decided to sleep among a bunch of stone knights and next to a dragon slayer possessed by Dark is beyond me. It's almost as if they wanted to put an additional barrier here and rather than think the area through they simply jammed a late game enemy in. The Aeries was one of the most iconic places within the Dark souls 2 marketing campaign, you saw hundreds of dragons flying around in a series where dragons were previously a rare and mostly unknown species. It is the first time you come into contact with a non-deformed dragon and learn about their native habitat. Shame they're now all insomniacs and all of them flying round are made less threatening because you're not worried about having to fight some of them like you just did the last dragon who came near you.

The final castle area after this I'm some what torn on partly because I don't remember if I just forgot how it worked in Dark souls 2 or if I ignored it like the stubborn swine I can be. Several harder versions of the previous stone knights are here and you're forced to fight them or you get gang banged by the other enemies in the area. They set up a neat mechanic where if you try to run past one of the enemies they will turn hostile to you and start attacking. In theory this is a great mechanic to show that they're looking for a worthy champion and will punish those who cheat. In practice it's an incredibly annoying mini game where I'm forced to fight enemies that possess no challenge but are tanky as hell. I've already proved I can beat these guys in several areas to get here. The game has no reason to challenge me in this same way since it already knows I have passed that challenge (ignoring speedrunning and running past everything as is very abnormal for Souls and discouraged in SOTFS by aggro ranges). The game puts the feel of the area way above the gameplay of the area to the point where I just ended up using a poison bow to cheese the knights to death and advanced each step of the way to return to the mini boss fight I had been struggling with and didn't want to skip. The area became memorable for it's character but that character became annoying almost as soon as I had figured it out. These enemies were not giving me many souls, it was not giving me interesting battles, why exactly are you presenting this? Even though the enemies fit perfectly here, their inclusion is not enough to make up for a poor gameplay mechanic. A better mechanic would have been to have some sort of cage as previously seen and a monster inside it I had to fight. “Protecting the last step of this journey are many beasts, prove you can better then and that you are worthy.” Cool, I understand why you're doing it and you're offering me varied gameplay by picking exotic enemies that stand out as abnormal and placed there as a challenge. Here picking the abnormal works to enhance the area rather than detract from it. It's telling a story unique to this place and offers a some what unique mechanic that encourages me to interact with it rather than avoid it. If you cannot find a way to make a functional eco system that works for your gameplay needs then implement a foreign element that disrupts that eco system.

That isn't to say that these are the only changes in SOTFS. They replaced many minor enemies with other ones or changed how enemies approach you. Some for the better and some for the worse. The point of writing this article is to try to explain to people how minor changes in enemy placement can completely change an area's feel in ways that make superior gameplay a poor compensation. Some times it is better for the gameplay to be slightly worse so that the overall package is a much superior affair. The Curvous demon in the Earthen Peaks is a good example of this, as a boss fight it is a joke. It may kill you once if you seriously mess up but even that is unlikely. It's a giant slug who flops at you and rolls around. It doesn't even have much lore about it or any suggestion for why it is there. The fact that a giant slug monster lives in a poison swamp just reinforces the theme. It's big, dumb and lumbering but it shows a corruption and that a weak predator can survive in this place because it's so toxic to normal life. Who needs to be keen predator when your key to victory is just not dying to the poison around you? It expresses a different kind of evolutionary niche within the eco system of Dark Souls. That's why it's a nice piece of world building.

For any one interested in exploring this idea more I would recommend picking up a Pokemon game they have previously played. It doesn't matter which one just as long as you're roughly familiar with it. You basically need to get an impression of what should be spawning where. Apply a randomizer to it and then go through the same area. I find that the fun of finding random pokemon is completely eclipsed by the random nature of it. Yes it's cool finding a wild legendary or finding some late game pokemon early on but it doesn't feel right. I'm just leaving the newbie area and this time travelling dick monkey is hanging from a tree branch where a rat or a small bird should be. My sense of progression or that I'm shifting between areas is completely removed because those areas lack enemy identity. When these areas lack an identity and anything goes I find I have less interest in exploring them. I have no sense of this volcano being a volcano if I'm finding ducks and fish every where I turn. I have no sense of progression if you're showing me a literal God the moment I leave the newbie town.

I'm not saying randomizers can't be fun. I often watch Speedgaming's pokemon crystal randomiser bingo races as background noise as I work on other things. They definitely have their place as their own niche with which to dick around in. My point isn't that they shouldn't exist, it is that they shouldn't be how you build your world. Even if you're making a rogue like make sure that the enemies you include make sense in the eco system they're in. Ask yourself “who would live here and why?” If you want to include exceptions ask yourself the same question. Why is an Elf in the human kingdom? Maybe he's a wandering minstrel looking to make a name for himself across the kingdom, maybe he's an adventurer looking to reclaim lost Elven treasure now hidden in human kingdoms. Like the usurper in the castle exceptions can add depth to the world when they make sense. The abnormal can be a good contrast to the normal as long as you have a good foundation for what normal is and communicate that to the player. When you sit down to design the gamplay of the area jot down your impression of what creatures would live in it. What foreign entities would find their way into it. From there you can design enjoyable gameplay that builds the world and increases immersion. The reason why I picked Dark Souls as my example for this is because that entire series is built around this single concept. Dark Souls gameplay is very solid, but it is also rather bare bones compared to other games in the action adventure genre. What makes it stand out and be beloved so much is that world building, when it fails it failed doubly as hard and stands out where other games you would simply hand wave it as function over form.