This review is for the Xbox 360 version of the game, played with no patches and online functionality disabled.
For better and worse, the seventh generation normalized patches. It is not all that uncommon for a game to release in a state that is totally removed from that which it may occupy years later. Content support, balance tweaking, level design, even whole story beats can be altered, resulting in varied experiences depending on when someone finally decides to pick a game up. No Man's Sky is perhaps one of the best examples of this, but my mind always goes to Mass Effect 3, whose Leviathan DLC attempted to better contextualize and alter its reviled ending. If you waited to play that game and started it with the Leviathan DLC installed, then you would have experienced the story differently than those who played through it at launch.
A point of conversation that has come up an innumerable amount of times between myself and my friend Larry is how much Dark Souls has changed over the years. It wears the same face, but the way it carries itself is all... wrong. Its reputation as a hard game is well known, but we've long insisted that Dark Souls as it exists today is perhaps the easiest game in the Souls series, so much so that we find little about it to be particularly compelling. However, at launch we both found the opposite to be true. It was hard. Too hard to be enjoyable, in fact.
It has long been my opinion that From learned the wrong lesson from Demon's Souls. They internalized that people liked Demon's Souls because it was hard, and so for the follow up, difficulty is what they decided to lean into. "Prepare to DIE." And then prepare to get incredibly frustrated, because unlike Demon's Souls, the constant loop of death feels less educational, and more irritating. There's a fine line between difficulty and challenge. A challenge is fair, it presents the player with a problem or an obstacle, and if you understand the rules well enough and apply skill built from that understanding, you can overcome that challenge. Conversely, a segment of a game that is merely difficult only exists through sloppy balancing or from a desire to kick the player down. This is how Dark Souls can be simultaneously too hard and too easy. Make enemies less tanky, give the player better stats, make upgrading more viable beyond a small selection of elements and weapon types, give the player more souls... Suddenly it's not hard anymore, because nothing about Dark Souls was ever designed in a way that was inherently challenging.
But, what if I was wrong about all of that. After all, that's an argument I've been making over a decade removed from the game's launch. Perhaps I find Dark Souls easy now because I am more familiar with Souls games than I was in 2011. That formed the basis of an absolutely terrible experiment: Buy a launch copy of Dark Souls for the Xbox 360 and slap that fucker in with the console's online functionality disabled. Yeah... Yeah I'm gonna play Dark Souls like my primitive ancestors did! I'm gonna put the theory into practice! I'm gonna be real fucking stupid and waste my entire weekend!
I was actually pretty excited to do this, because I've developed some strange brain condition where I've now formed nostalgia for specific patches (and lack thereof) for video games. Little bit concerning, that. Initially, I intended to spec my character into pyromancy, but decided it would be more appropriate to replicate my Dark Souls HD build in order to create a direct point of comparison. A cleric wielding the starting mace taken down the base upgrade path, although I did create a few others characters to mess around with in order to test the viability of other classes and weapons. Almost immediately, pre-patch Dark Souls feels noticeably different. Enemies are much more spongy and they drop less souls, and upgrading the mace made it feel like I was making substantially less significant gains with each subsequent level, to the point that it almost felt kind of pointless. This was, nevertheless, the point of this experiment, and so I pressed on... And as I did, I started to realize that perhaps I was right and also a bit wrong, because while the game is noticeably more difficult from a sheer numbers standpoint, I was able to make up for the fact that enemies were more resilient and my damage more feeble by having a far better understanding of enemy attack windows and animation timing. I know how long the wind up is on this mace, and I know when to parry a black knight. Those parts of the game haven't changed that much, or at least they're far less perceptible to me.
However, understanding the precise moment to roll towards Sif when she swings her sword means nothing when the game suddenly drops below ten frames per second right when you're getting ready to initiate the roll. Dark Souls may not be as obtusely difficult as I remember it being, but its performance more than compensates. The game can barely keep itself together anytime there's more than one enemy on screen, which results in a lot of deaths from botched dodge rolls, parries and attacks. The Belfry Gargoyles are so routine for me at this point that it never really takes more than a couple of tries to take them down with an un-upgraded weapon. This time around I died about ten times and decided to veer off to kill the Moonlight Butterfly, grind enough souls to get another five levels in strength, and upgrade my mace a few times. It wasn't because the pre-patch balancing made them that much harder, I just needed the extra damage output to kill the first one before the second could show up and bottom out the framerate.
I hit my breaking point in Anor Londo when Ornstein started teleporting around like a Dragon Ball character, which is something I observed happen several times before with random hollow soldiers blinking out of existence. On one especially buggy attempt against Sif, she started using her spin attack against an incline, which progressively pushed her model higher and higher up into the sky. It's not like I wasn't expecting some technical difficulties, after all I do remember Dark Souls running like crap back in the day, but I was genuinely surprised to rediscover how unplayable it was. Over ten years removed, it's hard to say how much that factored in my dislike of the game at launch, but then that does tie back into why I chose to do this to begin with. It's entirely possible later patches smoothed out some of the rougher areas on the Xbox 360 version of the game, but applying such a patch would also mean losing access to the game's original balancing, effectively rendering the whole exercise moot. But I'm also not having any fun with this, and that leaves me with two options: press on and get progressively more Mad about Video Games, or stop playing and do something better with my time.
Was this exercise worth it? Probably not! However, the way the conversation around this game was framed when it came out is only made more maddening for the experience. I remember people trying to gaslight me into thinking Dark Souls was a flawless masterpiece, a modern day classic, a perfect 5/5. These are the same people who would press that point while applying five different fan patches to the PC version so it could even go full screen; they were wrong then and they're still wrong today. I think some of my criticisms of the game's balancing issues stand, primarily in how certain weapon types and upgrade paths feel lackluster to the point of being actively harmful to spec into, and insipid enemy placement providing engagement only in terms of how hard they hit (and how hard you have to hit them.) It is merely the intensity with which I've internalized these problems that I think is wrong, and I'll admit that familiarity with the Souls series has partially resulted in me feeling post-patch Dark Souls is "too easy." However, the performance issues are so bad and so frequent that I can't believe anyone found them tolerable enough at the time to beat the game. Somehow I did! I think we just had different expectations for what was acceptable in the seventh gen, and though patches have become an ingrained part of gaming, thank God people are holding game performance to a higher standard today.
Dark Souls is cool because I've never had a particularly high opinion of it, but every time I played the game it seems I come up with a different reason why. 2011 pre-patch? Too hard. Post-patch on PC and the HD remaster? Too easy! 2011 pre-patch replay? This runs at 8fps and I want to puke all over my lap, also just not fun generally speaking.
Now that this sacred cow is well and truly dead, let me tell you why I think the original release Dark Souls 2 is fifty times better,
For better and worse, the seventh generation normalized patches. It is not all that uncommon for a game to release in a state that is totally removed from that which it may occupy years later. Content support, balance tweaking, level design, even whole story beats can be altered, resulting in varied experiences depending on when someone finally decides to pick a game up. No Man's Sky is perhaps one of the best examples of this, but my mind always goes to Mass Effect 3, whose Leviathan DLC attempted to better contextualize and alter its reviled ending. If you waited to play that game and started it with the Leviathan DLC installed, then you would have experienced the story differently than those who played through it at launch.
A point of conversation that has come up an innumerable amount of times between myself and my friend Larry is how much Dark Souls has changed over the years. It wears the same face, but the way it carries itself is all... wrong. Its reputation as a hard game is well known, but we've long insisted that Dark Souls as it exists today is perhaps the easiest game in the Souls series, so much so that we find little about it to be particularly compelling. However, at launch we both found the opposite to be true. It was hard. Too hard to be enjoyable, in fact.
It has long been my opinion that From learned the wrong lesson from Demon's Souls. They internalized that people liked Demon's Souls because it was hard, and so for the follow up, difficulty is what they decided to lean into. "Prepare to DIE." And then prepare to get incredibly frustrated, because unlike Demon's Souls, the constant loop of death feels less educational, and more irritating. There's a fine line between difficulty and challenge. A challenge is fair, it presents the player with a problem or an obstacle, and if you understand the rules well enough and apply skill built from that understanding, you can overcome that challenge. Conversely, a segment of a game that is merely difficult only exists through sloppy balancing or from a desire to kick the player down. This is how Dark Souls can be simultaneously too hard and too easy. Make enemies less tanky, give the player better stats, make upgrading more viable beyond a small selection of elements and weapon types, give the player more souls... Suddenly it's not hard anymore, because nothing about Dark Souls was ever designed in a way that was inherently challenging.
But, what if I was wrong about all of that. After all, that's an argument I've been making over a decade removed from the game's launch. Perhaps I find Dark Souls easy now because I am more familiar with Souls games than I was in 2011. That formed the basis of an absolutely terrible experiment: Buy a launch copy of Dark Souls for the Xbox 360 and slap that fucker in with the console's online functionality disabled. Yeah... Yeah I'm gonna play Dark Souls like my primitive ancestors did! I'm gonna put the theory into practice! I'm gonna be real fucking stupid and waste my entire weekend!
I was actually pretty excited to do this, because I've developed some strange brain condition where I've now formed nostalgia for specific patches (and lack thereof) for video games. Little bit concerning, that. Initially, I intended to spec my character into pyromancy, but decided it would be more appropriate to replicate my Dark Souls HD build in order to create a direct point of comparison. A cleric wielding the starting mace taken down the base upgrade path, although I did create a few others characters to mess around with in order to test the viability of other classes and weapons. Almost immediately, pre-patch Dark Souls feels noticeably different. Enemies are much more spongy and they drop less souls, and upgrading the mace made it feel like I was making substantially less significant gains with each subsequent level, to the point that it almost felt kind of pointless. This was, nevertheless, the point of this experiment, and so I pressed on... And as I did, I started to realize that perhaps I was right and also a bit wrong, because while the game is noticeably more difficult from a sheer numbers standpoint, I was able to make up for the fact that enemies were more resilient and my damage more feeble by having a far better understanding of enemy attack windows and animation timing. I know how long the wind up is on this mace, and I know when to parry a black knight. Those parts of the game haven't changed that much, or at least they're far less perceptible to me.
However, understanding the precise moment to roll towards Sif when she swings her sword means nothing when the game suddenly drops below ten frames per second right when you're getting ready to initiate the roll. Dark Souls may not be as obtusely difficult as I remember it being, but its performance more than compensates. The game can barely keep itself together anytime there's more than one enemy on screen, which results in a lot of deaths from botched dodge rolls, parries and attacks. The Belfry Gargoyles are so routine for me at this point that it never really takes more than a couple of tries to take them down with an un-upgraded weapon. This time around I died about ten times and decided to veer off to kill the Moonlight Butterfly, grind enough souls to get another five levels in strength, and upgrade my mace a few times. It wasn't because the pre-patch balancing made them that much harder, I just needed the extra damage output to kill the first one before the second could show up and bottom out the framerate.
I hit my breaking point in Anor Londo when Ornstein started teleporting around like a Dragon Ball character, which is something I observed happen several times before with random hollow soldiers blinking out of existence. On one especially buggy attempt against Sif, she started using her spin attack against an incline, which progressively pushed her model higher and higher up into the sky. It's not like I wasn't expecting some technical difficulties, after all I do remember Dark Souls running like crap back in the day, but I was genuinely surprised to rediscover how unplayable it was. Over ten years removed, it's hard to say how much that factored in my dislike of the game at launch, but then that does tie back into why I chose to do this to begin with. It's entirely possible later patches smoothed out some of the rougher areas on the Xbox 360 version of the game, but applying such a patch would also mean losing access to the game's original balancing, effectively rendering the whole exercise moot. But I'm also not having any fun with this, and that leaves me with two options: press on and get progressively more Mad about Video Games, or stop playing and do something better with my time.
Was this exercise worth it? Probably not! However, the way the conversation around this game was framed when it came out is only made more maddening for the experience. I remember people trying to gaslight me into thinking Dark Souls was a flawless masterpiece, a modern day classic, a perfect 5/5. These are the same people who would press that point while applying five different fan patches to the PC version so it could even go full screen; they were wrong then and they're still wrong today. I think some of my criticisms of the game's balancing issues stand, primarily in how certain weapon types and upgrade paths feel lackluster to the point of being actively harmful to spec into, and insipid enemy placement providing engagement only in terms of how hard they hit (and how hard you have to hit them.) It is merely the intensity with which I've internalized these problems that I think is wrong, and I'll admit that familiarity with the Souls series has partially resulted in me feeling post-patch Dark Souls is "too easy." However, the performance issues are so bad and so frequent that I can't believe anyone found them tolerable enough at the time to beat the game. Somehow I did! I think we just had different expectations for what was acceptable in the seventh gen, and though patches have become an ingrained part of gaming, thank God people are holding game performance to a higher standard today.
Dark Souls is cool because I've never had a particularly high opinion of it, but every time I played the game it seems I come up with a different reason why. 2011 pre-patch? Too hard. Post-patch on PC and the HD remaster? Too easy! 2011 pre-patch replay? This runs at 8fps and I want to puke all over my lap, also just not fun generally speaking.
Now that this sacred cow is well and truly dead, let me tell you why I think the original release Dark Souls 2 is fifty times better,
Weatherby
1 year ago