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The journey through the FromSoftware games and analyzing how they educate players brings us to the final installment in the Dark Souls series. I hadn’t been sure how to organize all of this, debating between release order (which would put Bloodborne next) or not, but I opted for keeping the various “souls” games together. This would be helpful for comparison, and allow us to move to a series of games that revolve around similar concepts, but take those concepts in new directions.
One element that makes Dark Souls III feel interesting is how much it relies on the player’s prior knowledge. The previous games that we played focused on easing the player in as best they could. The games were still difficult, but concepts were introduced in a way that you could immediately try them out, and the tutorials were organized in a way to convey various lessons. Now the game is basically anticipating that you know what you’re doing. It’s something that makes for a much quicker and smoother opening for veterans, but leaves newer players hanging.
But I have little else to say, so let’s dive right into examining how this game teaches its players to succeed.
Recap: Game Needs and Tutorialization
NB: This section is repeated from last week’s essay. Feel free to skip to the next section if you don’t think you need the reminder.
One argument I made in the previous essay was that different games have different “needs” that are constructed out of their systems. Games that have a lot of open space for players to explore need to teach and incentivize that exploration. Games that are built around spectacle need to teach players how to fight in a “pretty” way and master techniques. And so on and so on. We may not be able to fully articulate every possible need, and there is no way to know what these needs are without having a pretty strong familiarity with the game itself. Which is why understanding the success of tutorialization is something that can only occur with sufficient hindsight.
In that same essay I made the claim that the various FromSoft games all shared some basic needs:
First, they needed to prepare players for a challenge. Perseverance is a necessary skill that the player must adopt through the playthrough, as there is a process of encountering new areas and enemies and bosses, fighting and dying, and then reviving at the last checkpoint to try again. If players are caught off-guard by difficulty, they are more likely to abandon the game when it gets difficult. If they are introduced to the idea early, they can A) more easily decide if the game is right for them, and B) become mentally prepared for what will happen in the rest of the game.
Second, these games should encourage players to explore and look around. This part is important both for finding useful goodies, as well as avoiding traps. A lot of items might be just out of reach, and players need to find pathways to get to them. Or an enemy could be lurking around a corner, and players need to be aware of those possibilities and anticipate those positions. If the game does not encourage the player to look around, they will miss both of these things.
Thirdly, the games need to encourage clever thinking. While the game provides you with ample opportunity to repeatedly attempt the same section of a game over and over until you get it just right, there are often other options available. Sometimes those options include rethinking the strategy you’re using. Sometimes it may involve using items. Sometimes it may involve summoning someone to help. Sometimes it may involve just going somewhere else. Whatever the case may be, the idea that you just bang your head against the wall until the wall breaks – the “git gud” mentality – is contrary to the actual systems of the game. And they need to prepare you for that purpose.
So with that recap out of the way, let’s dip in to Dark Souls III itself.
Dark Souls III
The game starts us off in a graveyard with a series of messages in front of us. These tell us things like how to move the camera and attack. We’re faced with an enemy who goes down fairly easily, who likely blocks our ability to read the message about rolling. This is what I meant about the game expecting you to know what to do: in previous iterations, many of these elements would have been separated by an enemy or two to give you a chance to try out the new information you just learned. Now you’re expected to process and remember all of this at once.
There’s a fair chance that we can see a couple of different paths: one leading toward another enemy and another leading into a little canyon. If we take the valley route, we find a dead end with an item. It’s nothing super valuable, but it’s our first bit of “exploration” that immediately tells us that there are goodies lying around and that looking for secondary pathways is a good idea. We should keep an eye out.
So we turn around and approach the enemy, and upon killing them we pick up another new item called the Ashen Estus Flask. We had already started with a regular Estus Flask, and if we used it (assuming we took damage), then we’d see that it refills our health. The Ashen flask is a bit of a mystery, but perhaps we could say it’s a reasonable assumption it could have something to do with that blue bar under our health. Incidentally, we’ve not received any information on that bar: health would be obvious if we’ve taken a hit (and also since it’s red), and the green bar is used up as we perform various actions. But the blue bar? If we happened to pick a spellcaster as our starting class we’d get some indication about what it is (effectively serving as our “mana”), but per the rules I laid down in previous weeks we’ve chosen the first class on offer, which is a melee build. The likelihood that we’re going to learn what the blue bar does at all is…slim.
Ahead of us are some ruins that offer three pathways. We can take some stairs up to the left or right, or go straight. Which direction we choose is irrelevant, since they all lead to the same place. But nevertheless the value of this setup is that it forces us to explore all of them so that we don’t miss anything. Especially since a couple of them contain more tutorial messages. This bit actually helps us get used to the idea of running around and checking areas thoroughly. We don’t want to just charge straight ahead, but instead we need to be in exploration mode.
However, an interesting downside is that it allows us to progress through this section backwards. As an example, let’s take the right stairs up. This gives us an indication on how to block and perform backstabs, and gives us a few enemies to deal with, the first of whom has their back turned to us. Plus yet another enemy shooting a crossbow at us. Once the enemies go down, we find ourselves on the “middle” path, but can move forward toward the “left” pathway, where we encounter another enemy. Once they’re dead, we find more messages, including one which teaches us about parries. Unfortunately, the enemy we were supposed to practice that parry on is dead, because we found them going the wrong way.
And you could imagine this happening in the reverse: fighting those two enemies without necessarily knowing how to block and backstab yet. The arrangement of the zone gives some valuable information about exploration, but at the cost of teaching players the controls in effective ways.
We might again notice two paths to progress down: one leading to a cliff, the other leading into another canyon. We might do as we did before and take the latter path, and partway down we find another message that tells us to turn back. The curious player may ignore that warning, wondering what the big deal could be. Which leads us to a nice shiny item, and a big shiny enemy. The enemy is killable, but will probably pose a threat to a brand new player, and is perhaps too tough for right now. This may, though, be our first introduction to death and the corpse run mechanic, though by no means is the only opportunity to learn that. While it’s possible to prevail, the difficulty of the enemy coupled with the warning is a way of teaching us that sometimes it’s worth just making note of things to return to later. So let’s make a note of this one.
We head to the cliff, where we encounter our first bonfire and a message telling us what it does. So we rest and progress, finding more enemies. And again, the path splits off multiple times. One pathway teaches us how to jump and gives us a challenge of leaping onto a sarcophagus to get a Titanite Shard, followed by teaching us how to do plunging attacks (complete with enemy to drop down on). One pathway takes us around to that same spot, and another leads us down to more enemies with an item at the end: some firebombs.
Incidentally, that final pathway contains our first enemy that has a shield. This would be a good opportunity for the player to learn how to kick away shields and create openings. It’s a real shame that the “kick” tutorial message was way back after the parrying message. So we could have practiced the kick move (which admittedly is annoying to pull off), but we wouldn’t know why the kick move is helpful. This is why I’ve been talking in all of these essays about how enemy placement is as important as the messages themselves. Sure, knowing what button to press is important, but knowing how those button presses lead to actions that you want to perform is the real key.
Now that we’ve cleared out the area, we can head through the big archway to find some dude kneeling with a big sword poking out of his chest. We get a prompt to remove the sword, which causes him to stand up and we thus get our first boss: Iudex Gundyr. Gundyr hits pretty hard, and will likely pose a significant challenge to the new player. Especially so once we get him down to about half of his health, when he transforms into a gigantic goo monster. If the player didn’t die to the big crystal lizard, they’ll almost surely die here. And thus you definitely get to learn about the corpse run mechanic.
Gundyr also teaches us about boss transitions. Almost every boss in the game will change up their moves at certain points in the fight, usually the halfway mark. That means the player has to undergo a new learning process. The big transformation provides a cue for the player that at a certain stage of the fight things change, and you need to be prepared for that change.
Whenever Gundyr finally goes down, we might notice a change to our character. We now have a more pronounced burning effect on us, the empty socket in the top left corner of the screen has a similar effect, and most importantly, our health bar is bigger. This is the impact of being “embered,” and provides us with an incentive to maintain that status. How? Hopefully we’ll get some indication, but actually the game won’t explicitly tell us how to get it back. At best, what we’ve learned so far is that beating a boss gives us this status. And we’ll find out when we die that the status goes away.
Anyway, we get to move forward, opening a big door and finding ourselves climbing a hill towards a building. I’ll skip the bit where we might explore this hill – really all we’re getting is reiterations about the lessons of exploration (make sure to be thorough, and make note of things to come back to later). Instead we’ll head into Firelink Shrine and encounter a bunch of NPCs.
The first one is the Firekeeper, who allows us to level up. And this will serve as our introduction proper to stats and what they do. I’ve spoken about the stats in previous essays, and the basic tenets apply here as well. We’ll stick to the rule that our new player puts points into what seems reasonable – whatever increase health, stamina, and damage.
We also encounter the Handmaiden, who serves as a shop. There might not be much we want to buy, or can buy if we spent our souls leveling up. So instead we talk to Andre, who introduces us to upgrading and infusing weapons, as well as switching around our Estus Flasks. Since we haven’t had any cause to use that Ashen flask that we picked up earlier, we would have good reason to change our allotment to focus entirely on healing. So we’ve got a couple of characters to visit again if we have souls or upgrade materials.
We could run around and explore the shrine, which yields little else. There is another NPC, but I will talk about him a bit later. Instead, we’ll go to the firepit in the center of the building that prompts us to put in the sword we pulled out of Gundyr, which gives us access to another bonfire. This lets us warp around, including to a new area. Thus ends the tutorial proper.
Enemies, Weaknesses, and Experimentation
I’ve been taking time in these essays to talk about specific elements of design and tutorialization that are more about how the game as a whole is structured, and not necessarily related to a specific part.
In this case, I’d like to talk about item usage.
One problem that players can often run into in these games is not using limited items. Anything that refills, such as the Estus Flask, gets used regularly. But everything else can wind up being ignored. This can be for one of two reasons. The first is a sort of “out of sight, out of mind.” While you pick up items, you get used to using whatever basic equipment you have on hand – your sword, your bow, your spells, etc. So why use an item when your gear has worked just fine already? The second is the fear of “what if I need it later.” Even when items can eventually be purchased infinitely, the idea that you might run out is sufficient to keep people from using things in case they might prove useful for a later fight. Which of course results in defeating the final boss with the whole hoard intact.
Whatever the case, one thing the game should be getting you as a player to do is use these items. And there is a bit of a missed opportunity with the Gundyr fight.
One aspect of this missed opportunity is that you only get a handful of bombs if you explore around before his fight. If you struggle to use them and can’t prevail against him in time, you could very well run out and have to fight him “naturally.” Alternatively you could just start a new character and run through the tutorial again – it admittedly wouldn’t take too long. But most players would be disinclined to do that, no matter how easy it is. This unfortunately reinforces that idea of “what if I need it later.” If you’d saved those firebombs until you’d gotten more used to the fight, then you would have had an easier time.
The second aspect is the way that Gundyr reacts. He is weak to the fire damage that the bombs do, but he doesn’t react in any way. Especially in his big monster form. This despite the fact that later enemies of the same basic design get briefly stunned when hit with fire. That kind of brief stun state would be akin to the first Dark Souls using the plunging attack tutorial as a way of making the Asylum Demon fight more approachable while also teaching a lesson. And here the lesson would be much more valuable: try out different kinds of items and see what happens!
Damage types are a facet of the game that players often don’t engage with, and yet is super valuable knowledge to have. And the problem is that players have little incentive to experiment with it. To experiment, you would need a lot of tools to conduct said experiments. Namely, a variety of weapons. Is this enemy weak to pierce damage, or blunt damage, or lightning, or fire, or something else? If you had a few dozen weapons of various types that you could switch between, then that kind of experimentation would be possible, if perhaps a little tedious. But as you progress through the game, keeping those few dozen weapons upgraded is impossible without grinding, and getting them up to the highest level is literally impossible.
While there are enough materials to have a few different weapons, the key problem is that the game never clues you in to weaknesses in any intuitive way, nor does it provide any strong incentive to try different things out. A small tweak or two to the first boss fight could have communicated so much information and radically changed how many players approach problems in the rest of the game.
Post-Tutorial
So we warp to the first “real” section of the game. We are running across a series of castle walls, following a mostly linear path. There are small routes here and there that lead off to brief fights and some items, making exploration worthwhile.
The most relevant branch comes when we encounter a dragon breathing fire. We have two options: we can take the lower level which seems safer, or climb the stairs upward which is riskier. Both actually lead to the same place, and the only significant difference is that the riskier path contains some items that are designed specifically as traps. But let’s say we ignore those and instead head through the door at the top of the stairs. There we find our very first chest in the game…which springs forward and chomps on us. This is a Mimic. It’s the very first one we encounter in the game, and indeed the first one we have had the possibility of encountering in our journey.
Mimics are creatures that disguise themselves as chests. There are subtle telltale signs that you can learn to use to spot a Mimic compared to a regular chest, though most players just resort to hitting a chest before trying to open it. Regardless, the interesting thing is that this introduction is one where the player not only does not know about Mimics, but is given no real clue that there’s something iffy about this chest.
To explain, let me take us to the first Dark Souls. About a third of the way through the game the player progresses through an area called Sen’s Fortress. It is a zone filled with all sorts of traps that kill the player quickly. And in one room is the first Mimic in the whole game. A chest lies in the middle of a room, just begging to be opened. Although an attentive player can notice that this chest is…odd. Most chests you’ll have encountered tend to be lined up against walls at parallel angles. This one, however, is not only in the middle of the room, but is very clearly off-center. Like someone moved it. It’s enough to get you to think twice, but not so obvious that you necessarily realize what’s going on. It’s possible that you could wait long enough to notice the Mimic breathe, but even if you don’t, springing the trap will likely result in you feeling that while you’ve been had, you could have noticed the difference. When other Mimics are brought in later, they are introduced next to other chests, giving you the opportunity to engage in more direct comparisons to see if there are any clues for how to spot them.
The introduction of the Mimic here in DS3, meanwhile, has none of these hallmarks. This is not a trap to teach new players. This is a trap to catch veterans. The only valuable information you can get from this as a new player is that chests might be Mimics. In fact, you currently have reason to believe that every chest is a Mimic.
Let’s leave this aside, though. Whichever path we take, we encounter a knight in armor that hits fairly hard and frequently, forcing us to learn how to use a shield effectively and move around, as just staying still and blocking is going to leave us unable to retaliate. After killing him, we can go into a tower which contains an enemy that will try to surprise us. I say try because the enemy’s placement and AI is a bit…strange.
It seems as though the purpose of this enemy is to teach the idea of paying attention to your surroundings, but the trap only works if you move to a particular spot in the room. However, the enemy actually triggers well before you reach that spot, so if you stop about midway through to look around the enemy will jump forward and strike the air. It’s a rather curious behavior that highlights an interesting component of how a good trap works. The reason so many of these traps have worked before is that they rely on the player behaving in a specific way. Putting enemies around corners, showing enemies with their backs turned in wide open rooms, putting shiny items on the ground. All of these things elicit particular responses. But the wide open room here provides so many possibilities that trying to put a trap here doesn’t really make much sense.
To our right is a stairway that leads up to a bonfire. But there’s nothing else here, so we head back down. We fight through a handful of enemies, and then reach a ladder going down. We’re again faced with two options – one leading towards progress, the other leading to a dead end. If we immediately or eventually go down the dead end route, we get an Estus Shard which we can use to get another swig of healing. So again, very useful to explore thoroughly.
A little ahead we are given another bit of encouragement to explore with a shortcut leading us back to our first bonfire in the area, back where we started. This will be helpful as we won’t need to run all the way through again just to get back here. Which is good because we’re about to get to another boss.
But before that we should head toward the large building out in the distance. We kill some knights – and probably get killed ourselves a few times – until we find an old lady sitting in that building who gives us an item and tells us what we should do next. With not much else to do, we head down the big stairs to face our first “proper” boss: Vordt of the Boreal Valley.
Early Game Bosses & Boss Weapons
Vordt can be tough, but actually conveys a useful lesson about fighting that a lot of other bosses don’t: placement. Hitboxes in the various FromSoft games tend to be fairly precise, and if you can get a good sense of where a weapon is going you can avoid an attack entirely without even needing to dodge. Useful when our hypothetical player hasn’t learned about the dodge’s invincibility. Indeed, if you stick very close to Vordt, almost under him, you can dodge a good chunk of his attacks, allowing you to hit him without worry. This of course only works to an extent, as at half health he changes his attack pattern and adds a charge attack that overrides this strategy. But even then, staying close to the boss and especially trying to stay at his back is a pretty surefire way to prevail with minimal stress. The more you are able to pay attention to enemy attacks and where those attacks go, the easier it is to think about where you should stand to make things easier on yourself.
Upon defeating Vordt we receive his soul and the path before us opens up. At this point rather than taking us step-by-step, I want to fast-forward to the next boss, the Curse-Rotted Greatwood. When I replayed this on stream I ended up mostly beelining to this boss because I wanted to take it down and talk about what happens afterwards. A new player may not go directly after this boss, because the area after Vordt branches in a few different ways, though those branches all converge again shortly. What we mostly get out of this is a reminder about the value of being thorough and exploring. The player is encouraged to travel down one path, and then double back and explore another one until they’ve all been exhausted.
The Greatwood is a boss I wanted to discuss because it is our first “gimmick” boss, and it arguably gets the closest to getting players to rethink their approach to fights. The Greatwood is a gigantic tree with human-like limbs, which crawls around on its rear attempting to attack the player. Hitting the tree just about anywhere is useless, as the boss takes literally no damage. However, it is possible to notice several patches of bulbous growths coming off of the tree. Attacking these does do damage, and upon doing enough causes the growths to burst, dealing a large burst of damage to the boss and briefly stunning it. After doing this a couple times, the boss then stomps the arena, causing it to crumble and sending you both down into a pit, where the boss transforms into its second phase by growing a large arm out of its torso.
Here you have a couple options for doing damage. You can try to attack the arm, which is a bit awkward since the boss is so large. So you would need to time your attacks well. You can also find some more of those growth patches hanging around the boss that can be attacked and burst. Both strategies are viable, and in fact just destroying the growths isn’t enough. You have to attack the arm at least a bit to take the Greatwood down. And so this demands careful planning, and learning the boss’s attack patterns.
One key element to mastering the combat in these games is learning how to bait out attacks. Enemies are not real people, but programs developed by the game’s creators. They have a limited number of moves, and those moves are usually performed depending on a variety of circumstances. If you understand those basic facts, you can use that information to your advantage. Imagine that whenever you are far away from the boss, it lunges at you in a way that it becomes vulnerable for several seconds: if you can figure out how to effectively avoid that attack, you’ve just received a massive opportunity to deal damage. And if you fully internalize that lesson, then a useful thing to do is keep moving away from the boss. Create enough distance that it lunges, then take advantage of the vulnerability.
Baiting attacks is a useful skill, and while it’s not strictly necessary to win this fight, part of how the Greatwood is designed seems to push towards that lesson. Whichever tactic you choose, you need to be able to tell how a boss is about to act and how it recovers from its own attacks, thus knowing when you have an opening. Attacking the arm in particular demands care, since trying to stay right in front of the tree is a good recipe for getting grabbed and slammed by the boss. Instead, knowing how to force the boss to perform certain attacks that leave it open for just a couple seconds is a good way to ensure that you prevail.
Whatever happens, we wind up with the Greatwood’s soul and an item called the Transposing Kiln. If we happen to be reading item descriptions (a big if), then we know to turn it in to that fourth NPC in Firelink Shrine: Ludleth. Ludleth will use the Kiln to transform those boss souls into weapons and items. Which leads me to a facet of these games that I also never got a chance to mention.
Since Demon’s Souls, the player has had the ability to receive the souls of bosses upon defeating them. And those souls could be turned into items, weapons, or spells depending on the game. But for the most part that process has run into two problems. One is that the games often needed the player to invest something to get the weapons, such as another weapon upgraded to a specific point (this requirement was done away with in Dark Souls 2). Two was that it would often take a while to reach the point where the player could get these special weapons.
I bring this up for a couple reasons. First, as it relates to these games as a whole, the player having more weapons is a good thing. It gives them more options to play around with, and withholding these boss weapons means fewer choices for the player to make. Most new players will only have a small array of very basic equipment in the early stages. But boss weapons are cool, and players will generally gravitate to “cool” things. If you want to get a player to experiment with new stuff, giving them something cool is a good strategy to encourage that style of play. So making sure that players get access to boss weapons fairly early on is important for this task.
Second, as it relates specifically to DS3 boss weapons are a good way for players to learn about weapon arts. Weapon arts are a special ability that every weapon has, which uses “Focus Points” (the blue bar under your health). There are a variety of different arts available depending on the weapon, with some special weapons having unique abilities. The game never explicitly mentions these weapon arts, so it would be worthwhile to implement systems that encourage players to engage with them, and boss weapons are valuable for that purpose, as those abilities are themselves often “cool.”
So DS3’s system is set up in a way that makes it more likely that players will get access to boss weapons early, and through that potentially learn about some more parts of the combat system. Further constraints upon the system, such as delaying it or requiring further materials, would make it much less likely that players would bother with these items.
Concluding Remarks
So in covering the first handful of hours of DS3, I’ve had some complaints already. As I said at the start, it feels primarily designed for veterans of the series, and not for newer players. The process of easing players in is still present to a degree, but much less so than we could see in prior games.
But how does it measure up against our primary needs?
The game definitely hits the player hard in the early game with its difficulty. Arguably Gundyr is the toughest first boss in the various Souls games, with the exception of the Vanguard Demon in Demon’s Souls which we are technically supposed to lose against. And the fact that he is presented so quickly really helps the player learn what they’re in for. You are put into the mental state that you will die a lot, and you need to develop the patience to tackle things multiple times and learn from mistakes.
As for exploration, it honestly does a phenomenal job at teaching players to look for extra pathways. It has a much more linear design that is more similar to the various zones of Demon’s Souls, but that in turn helps players direct themselves in a way that is both intuitive and freeing. The tradeoff, of course, is that we don’t get the kind of genuine openness that we saw in the first two Dark Souls games. But whether that tradeoff is “worth it” is a question of taste. From a tutorialization perspective it definitely helps newer players get up to speed about where they should be going and what they should be doing.
Meanwhile, the final need about thinking outside the box is…iffy. It’s not entirely absent, but the lessons are a bit muddled, and could be presented better. I spent a lot of time on the topic of weaknesses and item usage that gets undercut by their implementation in the Gundyr fight. And the Curse-Rotted Greatwood fight feels designed to get players to think more strategically, but it’s not entirely clear how well that lesson would get across. There are definitely signs that the developers want players to think more critically about how they play: the firebombs are there before the Gundyr fight because you’re supposed to use them; the Greatwood is so awkward to fight because you’re supposed to step back and ask how you can manage this gigantic enemy. But what you’re supposed to do doesn’t always match up with how players play, and how much discrepancy there is tells us something about the design.
I think DS3’s tutorial ends up being the weakest of the four we’ve tackled so far. In no small part this is due to the fact that the tutorial isn’t really for those newer players. But in light of our likely expectation that as a developer has more opportunities to try things out the better they should get, we would expect that DS3 should actually be the strongest of the lot.
And perhaps this points to a divergence between catering to new players and catering to veterans. Slowing down the learning process would be better for new players, but would leave more experienced players bored. And conversely, speeding things up would let veterans get to the good stuff, but would leave newer players in the lurch.
Abstracting Games 