Mechanical Evaluation 1: Dark Souls Combat Part 5

This post is the fifth 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. In the previous post, and the this post, I will go over the backstabbing system. 

Picture from Google Images

When you see that mask along with a rapier (lightweight, low-requirement weapon with thoroughly-insane back-stab damage bonus), you may as well assume that they plan on fighting you only with backstabbing. 
The problem with backstabbing in online combat against other players, is the all-too-common exploitation of latency (online lag) to get back-stabs that the recipient usually does not see coming, and has no chance of avoiding, except by anticipating their attempt. This practice is colloquially known as "lagstabbing" in the Dark Souls community, and is almost universally frowned-upon in public, despite its extreme prevalence in actual online play. 

As you can see from the video, backstabbing, originally intended as a punishment for sloppy play, is used as a powerful primary means of engagement via purposeful lagstabbing. 

This will frustrate the loser (trust me on this one), as they must attribute the failure to the the network for being slow enough to allow this (not to mention the oft-derided Dark Souls netcode, which seems to give "priority frames" to backstabs), and the other player for exploiting this technical issue, rather than their own failure to rise to the challenge. Plus, the perpetrator as well as victim is essentially robbed of what could have been a fun fight, by choosing to substitute the fast and frantic in-and-out, best-in-class combat for an instant, nigh-infallible kill.

Thus is the truly tragic part of this situation, from a game design perspective.  All of the masterfully balanced nuances of online combat are thrown out the window when someone decides to abuse lagstabbing. All of the mind games, anticipation, and finer points of a good duel are circumvented by a strategy that requires almost no skill, and was not intended to be possible. The winner is also cheated out of potential enjoyment from proper engagement of the challenge of online duels. For these players, the thrill of the win, fear of failure, desire to annoy other players, or a combination of the three, must over-power their desire to just have the fun, unpredictable, fights intended by the developers.

Now that I have  touched on the strengths and weaknesses of Dark Souls combat, I will continue further discussion with comparisons of it to more popular games.

Picture from Google Images

(Don't worry, I still play Elder Scrolls games every now and then, I'll be fair!)

Thanks for reading! Comments are as welcome as always!

-Kenny White

PSN: Fatalis_Veritas