I tried to make my second run through Dark Souls a contrast with my first. I always go for dextrous katana builds in my first run through these games, so coming back I wanted to do a strength-oriented build instead with heavy armor and heavier weaponry. I knew the game by this point, so I allowed myself to skip bosses and areas I wasn't interested in refighting (so long, Lost Izalith; another time, Kalameet).
But the most impactful change was streaming my run to friends over Discord, including particularly my friend @zandravandra. Zandra knows this game back to front, and she gave me some context on it that really opened my eyes to what's special about this Souls. The way the game hides its meta progression asks the player not just to engage with the game on its own terms, but to understand it so thoroughly that they're able to use the grammar of the game to subvert the destinies that seem at first unavoidable. To save Solaire, you must not only follow his route, but understand how to subvert it. To find the secret ending, you must see the ways the game prevents you from moving forward, then probe the holes in those defenses.
This demonstrates a tremendous amount of faith in the player's willingness to engage with the game over and over in order to truly divine its secrets. The willingness to allow each player to experience a different subset of the game clearly still persists in the later games (Elden Ring in particular is a master class in this), but even there as long as you touch everything once you'll see all there is to see. Dark Souls takes one bold step further by making so much at the heart of the game's text so readily missable, thereby demanding that players not only engage thoroughly but thoughtfully as well.
Even if you wanted to do that today, I'm not sure it would matter. We live in an age of endless wikis and discords which instantaneously disseminate information to players. That's not necessarily a bad thing—to catalog a thing so painstakingly is another way to love it—but it does mean that vanishingly few players will play a game five times through without ever looking up its secrets on the internet. But still, Dark Souls remains, a brilliant monument to that moment when it was possible to make a game just like this.
But the most impactful change was streaming my run to friends over Discord, including particularly my friend @zandravandra. Zandra knows this game back to front, and she gave me some context on it that really opened my eyes to what's special about this Souls. The way the game hides its meta progression asks the player not just to engage with the game on its own terms, but to understand it so thoroughly that they're able to use the grammar of the game to subvert the destinies that seem at first unavoidable. To save Solaire, you must not only follow his route, but understand how to subvert it. To find the secret ending, you must see the ways the game prevents you from moving forward, then probe the holes in those defenses.
This demonstrates a tremendous amount of faith in the player's willingness to engage with the game over and over in order to truly divine its secrets. The willingness to allow each player to experience a different subset of the game clearly still persists in the later games (Elden Ring in particular is a master class in this), but even there as long as you touch everything once you'll see all there is to see. Dark Souls takes one bold step further by making so much at the heart of the game's text so readily missable, thereby demanding that players not only engage thoroughly but thoughtfully as well.
Even if you wanted to do that today, I'm not sure it would matter. We live in an age of endless wikis and discords which instantaneously disseminate information to players. That's not necessarily a bad thing—to catalog a thing so painstakingly is another way to love it—but it does mean that vanishingly few players will play a game five times through without ever looking up its secrets on the internet. But still, Dark Souls remains, a brilliant monument to that moment when it was possible to make a game just like this.