Souls as a service
The promise of reaching everything in your sights has long been a cynical joke at the player’s expense in the Dark Souls franchise, one I sit with as Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022) earnestly fulfills it without punchline.
Each Dark Souls entry is a precarious balancing act. On the surface, the games present a hopeless challenge in a world designed to reinforce despair. Especially in their marketing, the series waves its unfair difficulty and the lonely horror of a world dripping in grime and shit as a force to be endured. Every action is a commitment played out in slow animations, where the punishment for a single mistake is being quickly shaved down under increasingly absurd circumstances. Packs of ghouls waiting just outside your field of view condition you into paranoia as death kicks you to a distant checkpoint and puts your main resource at risk of deletion if you fail again. Try to keep up with a character of the story and you’ll often watch if not directly cause their death.
My character Wag Daze with the Two Fingers, an avatar of some worldly that are for some reason sicko giant rotting fingers.
The Souls games force you to reflect on your actions within a world decaying with or without you. The distant horizon becomes an arena upon your disturbance; your most recent foe rendered a victim when you meet their lover or sibling bearing no hostility. The world is ever shifting, constantly demanding you kill and die but never alter the system. While your only choice for ending the game is between a personal final death or worsening the state of the world, kindness still emerges somewhere along your journey. A puzzle or riddle maker is not kind by offering a simple problem, but by leaving a trail to a solution within your capability. Traces of near and distant history align with the location specific and extremely limited multiplayer to show that you're in someone else's footsteps, waiting to make your own for another to follow.
With patience and discipline, a challenger discovers a brief and expressive solution. The world expands through cramped stages, connecting in strange, coincidental, and unforgettable ways, most severed if you try to look back. With finite options for advancing, what resources and tactics the player has been exposed to is a broadly knowable possibility space for the developers. The player endures, accumulating information, doing some trial-and-error, and spending a lot of time thinking with the game off (my first clear took over a year) to cause a shift in understanding. Your character's strengths and enemy weaknesses become second-nature, and, while failure still haunts possibility, the game now crumbles beneath you, having learned just how rough you can be with your toy before it breaks Through player conditioning at a focused scale, you accumulate knowledge and develop a system to put it together along a curated path.
The post-tutorial views for Dark Souls (2008) and Elden Ring respectively.
As an open-world game, Elden Ring scales up to a degree where, even if kindness may appear, it is drowning. Following the popular open-world model, you are dropped into the wide-skied “Lands Between” with not much more than the names of some fantasy weirdos and a prompt to collect your four fantasy tickets to advance the game. You’re compelled forward by the possibility of going anywhere, constrained only by your line of sight and the distant edges of the pictographic map.
While the Souls series’ claustrophobic set pieces carry into Elden Ring, they are interruptions to your dominant task of poking through every forest and cliff face for the many new varieties and tiers of materials used to bolster your character. Difficulty in the major dungeons represent a quota for how well you've extracted from the land and upgraded your arms. The amount of damage enemies can shell out compared to how many health points a player can obtain compels you to simply leave situations when you cannot quickly output a “safe” amount of damage. You are still antagonized in and out of combat in this model, but instead of being bullied off of the game to contemplate a solution or consult a community guide, you are funneled back into Elden Ring’s environment to do a new action-adventure managerial task.
The map based wiki tool from Fextralife. Each node describes a vital resource or point of interacting with the world.
While more demanding than the average open-world game, Elden Ring still conforms to an extremely stable design method. Comparable to the games as a service model, Elden Ring wants to keep you in its world and on your gaming machine over a competitor’s world. An impressive and measured scattering of little tasks ensures that there is always a new direction to push. Even if your discovery strongly resembles another cave, catacomb, or boss, something slight in its numbers or behaviors shift to evoke surprise. The average gamer, someone coming home from work, can opt for a hair-pulling duel or a quiet night of managing trips to different locations holding smithing materials. Between post-work chores and the appointed hour of passing out on the couch, the player can be in control of an exciting, dynamic virtual world for semi-social entertainment within the comfort of their home. Even better, the game boasts anywhere between 60-110 hours to complete, making it a practical purchase to last you many months across dozens of evening shifts.
Elden Ring is a fun game and an overwhelmingly successful investment for the company FromSoftware. On Steam alone it saw the sixth most concurrent players in one game ever by its second weekend. The look and feel of Dark Souls, hard and loose combat choreography in a cruel grumbling world, remains intact if not spread out further. While grinding for resources and an easier time has always been an option, scattering the task makes it feel substantial and encouraging, welcoming players suffocated by the grimy opening areas of other games in the series. A new player has pastoral fantasy landscapes to gaze at before they’re conditioned to be masochistically excited about the fuming poisonous lake they have to cross. You too can now enjoy the hardcore gaming phenomena where you pay money to get killed by the same giant dude for hours at a time.
A bright pink poisonous expanse that I’m unsure of how to get at the moment.
In growing to demand more time and shifting to try to serve a general audience, FromSoftware must become cold and distant with the player. With such a broad path, you cannot begin to see let alone understand another player’s footsteps. Even when the way forward narrows, arrival logistics prevent us from ever sharing an experience. The places you go offer unspecific resources to extract instead of lessons for the future like the broken castles, poisonous bogs, and archer-filled catwalks of Souls past. Where you were once given hints to learn a new twisted logic – some small comfort in a rotting world – Elden Ring now defers to the general logic of work under capitalism. Put in brutal amounts of time and eventually you’ll change your standing in the world.
At the open-world scale (the abstracted hundreds of square kilometers) generous puzzles with site-specific solutions, even when offered, can never be the main system of progression. Getting anywhere with the same joy of compromised success requires traversal and inventory management at such an extreme magnitude that it resembles chores rather than the broad lock-and-key puzzles of entries past. I’d love for Elden Ring to be a more approachable and modular Souls remix, but there is still no kind of stat or damage modifier, easy mode, fine tuning of spatial sound, contrast and color blindness settings, or, outside of the game, wider access to adaptive controllers. Instead, there is only excess. More in-game resources for the player to employ are half-measures at best when the game cannot offer the guidance it was once best at.
For a franchise so intent on celebrating and complicating the act of trying your hardest, Elden Ring’s scale introduces a major compromise. After you’ve either sacrificed your life to temporarily reignite the flame at the heart of the world, extinguished it and doomed all life to fade, or simply put the game down out of frustration, the first Dark Souls compels you to earnestly reflect on your time: what part of your experience made your time worthwhile? What pushed you away? And what kept you invested in the task? Elden Ring simply asks for more.
With complete certainty, Elden Ring will be an awards season darling. Amidst mega-mergers, acquisitions, and smaller releases getting bought up for game streaming platforms, it is proof of artistry when stagnation and monopoly are the current trend. Already we’re seeing existing and reemerging attempts to present Dark Souls director and FromSoftware president, Hidetaka Miyazaki, as the singular influencer of a thing that involves countless hands. Many hundreds of individuals touch these games and the distant, elusive, but humble visionary persona found in many English interviews (an approach borrowed from film but often reserved for Japanese figures in games culture) runs in the face of that reality and even his own responses in these interviews.
Through no coincidence other than the common surname, I was stuck thinking about Hayao Miyazaki while writing this. While Studio Ghibli operates at a scale far ahead of FromSoftware, the two Miyazakis share grand and orientalist cultural narratives as singular makers of pure art in their mediums, without any regard for the troubling (and in the case of Hayao, nationalist) parts of their work. Without space for more writing or research to support that claim, I've included a transcription of a scene from 2013’s The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a documentary profiling the production of The Wind Rises (Hayo Miyazaki, 2013). The film is an incidental knife which cuts through to the fact that Ghibli films persist mostly because they are extremely profitable. The scene in question is an exchange between the son of Hayao, Goro Miyazaki, studio producer Toshio Suzuki, and an unnamed external producer.
Goro Miyazaki: I didn’t start off wanting to work in animation and aspiring to be a director to make my own films. That’s not how I got started. So, naturally from my standpoint, sometimes I do have doubts about my abilities and whether I have enough experience. So for me to keep doing this, I need a just cause, a good reason to do it. And if I didn’t come to Ghibli, I wouldn’t be doing this. On one hand, I want to do it because I enjoy it, but when I make films I do it for this company, Studio Ghibli. It’s for the people here. And I don’t mean the business. It’s for the people I work with. That gives me a reason to do it. But why do this project? Is this just for me?
Unnamed producer:: It’s up to you to find a reason to do it, so if you can’t find one, then that’s it.
Toshio Suzuki: If I may chime in. . .
Goro: I’m saying don’t pin it all on the director.
Suzuki: Okay, wait. . .
Goro: Isn’t the producer responsible?
Suzuki: Here’s what I was trying to say. The Wind Rises and Princess Kaguya are both interesting cases. With both projects, neither director actually wanted to do it. Then why did they get made? If we really get down to the truth of the matter, I hate to say this, but I pushed it through. That’s my point. Miya-san took four months to decide to do The Wind Rises. Takahata-san kept complaining, “Why should I have to do this?” That’s the truth. So I want to look at this logically.
Axe Binondo (they/them) does writing, visual art, music, and games in no particular order. Check out all of their work here and follow them on Twitter @wing_blade_.
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