Dark Souls changed everything. FromSoftware’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Demon’s Souls was a cult classic that only a few hardened players managed to conquer back in 2009, but the sequel took its stro⛎ngest ideas and moulded them in🤪to something truly special, a timeless piece of art that threatens to take hold of you and never let go.
Its dark, ambiguous world and characters combined with flawlessly precise combat created an experience that would be crowned the ‘hardest game of all time,’ but this identity feels like a misconception, a failure to recognise the excellence at the core of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls and how it has grown so impeccably influential. As this masterstroke celebrates its tenth birthday, it’s time to look back at its history, impact, and majesty in a gaming landscape t🎐hat wouldn’t be the same without it.
The opening moments of Dark Souls are indicative of the entire experience. You are the Chosen Undead, a walking corpse who awakens in a dank, rusted cell with little more than the crumbling armour on your chest to call your own. Suddenly, a key drops from the rooftops, a mysterious figure peering inward as you pick up the arbiter to your escape and step outside into the wider prison. You feel overwhelmed in an instant, as tutorial messages on the floor guide you where to go and what to equip as you stumble upon a sword, shield, and other items that will prove invaluable in the battles to come. As a new player, the crimson💮-eyed zombies who shuffle towards you are horrifying, slashing away endlessly until you fall to the floor in a defeated heap.
But you rise again, ready to regain your belongings and step forward headlong into danger. Dark Souls is a game that helped define the modern idea of failure in games. Game over screens are a thing of the past, now your death is often woven into the whole affair, an incentive to try again and overcome your demons, even if the enemies you’ve tried so hard to defeat are now revived only to be struck down countless more times. Die, find your souls, pick them up, and carry on. Die a second time and you might lose them forever, providing a reason to be careful, considerate, and ever watchful of the world you explore. It didn’t feel rigid and mechanical, it felt real, like you were stepping into the horrors of Lordran to leℱarn exactly why this once beautiful world had succumbed to ruin.
Upon stepping into the prison courtyard, the Asylum Demon crashes down from above. I can defeat them in a matter of seconds now, but back in 2011 this moment stopped me in my tracks. I ran towards him in a panic, slashing away with my sword hoping that I could somehow emerge victorious. I died, died again, and then died some more. Eventually, I read a sign on the floor that points out a gate I’m meant to dart through, so I can make my way up to the rooftop and reign hell on this chubby bugger from above. The game doesn’t tell you any of this, other players do, so you’re often lef♈t to figure things out and usurp your own sense of punishment to best Dark Souls. This game launched in an era where blockbusters were painfully forgiving, with FromSoftware single-handedly proving that players wanted to be challenged, surprised with new and unexpected things that game design at the time wasn’t yet delivering. It changed everything, and that influence was immediate.
Dark Souls 2 followed in 2013, a sequel that lacked the direction of Hidetaka Miyazaki and thus feels bland and lacking in ambition, although it still remains a magical game that maintains most of what made its predecessor so special. Dark Souls 3 was a victory lap for the trilogy, making deliberate callbacks to characters and lore across its narrative, showing fans that FromSoftware was read🍃y to bid farewell to the Souls name and try something new. In a way, it’s a shame that Dark Souls ever received a sequel.
Becoming a franchise diluted the brilliance of its influence, with gameplay, bosses, and world design becoming relatively predi🐎ctable in a landscape of copycats. The Surge, Lords of the Fallen, Mortal Shell, Code Vein, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Salt and Sanctuary, and Nioh are just a few of the copycats that emerged in the wake of Dark Souls. All of these games copied the basic formula while putting their own spin on things. Souls received a different name, while the act of dying and coming back to life was given specific meaning that often reflected on whatever world said games happened to exist in.
Of all the games that cღapitalised on the success of Dark Souls, it’s FromSoftware’s own that are the most memorable. Bloodborne is incredible. It&rsqܫuo;s a gorgeously gothic adventure that takes the combat and movement of Dark Souls and hurls them in the bin, making everything you’d learn up to that point irrelevant. You can no longer hide behind a shield (except for a shoddy wooden one), and attempting to block will only grant you a swift death. You need to move, parry, and outsmart your enemies in a world that - much like Lordran before it - has been swallowed by oblivion in a way that feels inescapable.
You are merely a spectre wandering through the remnants, finding your place in Yarnham while perhaps, just maybe, stumbling across a way to salvage it. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was equally as innovative, combining the defensive sensibilities of Dark Souls with the fast, frenetic movement of Bloodborne to create something that was almost rhythmic, each encounter a ꧒ballet of reflexes as you deflected blows and bested opponents in battles that felt unlike anything we’d played before.
Ironically, the studio most influenced by the impact of Dark Soulsಞ was FromSoftware itself. Once the dust had settled on the trilogy, Hidetaka Miyazaki and company were forced 🌄to recontextualise what they’d achieved and figure out how to move forward, how to best a selection of games that had all been celebrated as masterpieces. By looking at its own accolades, the studio reinvented itself time and time again each to unrivalled acclaim.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring will undoubtedly continue that trend, all while drawing comparisons to the classic that made its existence possible in the first place. The only games of relative cultural influence in the years since have been titles like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, Forꦿtnite, and The Last of Us - classics that had developers all over the world take a step back and analyse what they could be doing differently. Their influence on game design, visual trends, and the zeitgeist of this medium have been unparalleled, although I’m unsure any of them can be rightfully compared to the impact of FromSoftware’s magnum opus. Dark Souls changed everything, and ten years from now, we’ll be ♍singing its praises and highlighting its influence all over again.
