Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 3

This post is the third part of a series on the Dark Souls combat system. This series will cover why I personally am such a fan of the Dark Souls combat system, why it is objectively a well-made system, and how it compares to other action game combat systems.

Picture from Google Images

Every time I play through Dark Souls (I'm on my 15th character, currently) I am always astounded by the things that kill me. Enemies and situations I never thought of as being that bad a threat, put me down like a dog. How does this happen, you ask? Well, the #1 thing to remember, is that Dark Souls is fair, and punishes you when you make a mistake, and very rarely otherwise.

As my playing style evolves, I don't make the rookie mistakes that come with minor punishment anymore, because in my over-confidence, I essentially play all-or-nothing, accepting the risk of bigger mistakes in order to speed things up. I can fly through the first areas of the game with extreme ease, but I get sloppy in my rush.
For example, I know that I can just barely hit this undead dragon with 3 attacks from this weapon  before I need to maneuver to safety, so I take the chance of doing as much damage as possible. I die, because my timing on the attacks was a little off, and I am punished by a lethal attack that is obvious and relatively easy to avoid for newer players, who tend to keep their distance and take less risk. This is frustrating to me, but once again, attributing my failure to my poor risk-management, I learn from it and move on.

Picture found on Google Images

This game is balanced to where you will die very quickly, and justly if you allow yourself to get into a bad situation; and that's exactly what hubris does in Dark Souls. This lends itself to the developer's goals for a dynamic experience, naturally increasing the difficulty for players via self-imposed restrictions (usually time, by rushing themselves), without ever changing the enemies. This naturally creates more goals for advanced players to conquer, that can prove to be almost as interesting as when the goal earlier was simply to survive. Even better, is that these goals naturally occur from the game's difficulty curve as the result of the player's mastery of basic skills, meaning that there doesn't have to be a cheesy, incongruous challenge system to encourage my continuous self-development.

In summary, most other facets of a game's design fall into place if you can perfect the basic game play mechanics (in this case close combat, obviously) by ensuring they fairly test the skill that they are intended to, leading to fun, brain-engaging challenge.

Thanks again for reading! I really hope that this is helpful and interesting to you, so let me know what you think in the comments.
My next post will highlight the weaknesses of the Dark Souls combat system (yes, they do exist).

-Kenny White,
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas