Dark Souls Game Design Analysis: Why Do We Come Back To Die?

The Souls series is one of the most punishing games to date, we all know that we died at least 100 times to before beating the game (if you ever did beat it). As difficult as the game is, the countless times we died and raged quit, most of us kept coming back for more. Let's be honest, had this been the 90's we would not have beaten the game without the internet, unless we had guides and some kid in school already beat it and helped you out. Also, Dark Souls breaks some few game design rules (well, more like guidelines) such as the ridiculous difficulty, of course, causing us to die over and over until we break something. Why? Why did we come back and died more times at the hands of so many enemies, cliffs, bosses and sadistic game design? In this article we will explore the science and psychology of the game design behind the Dark Souls overall and understand why it kept reeling us back in each time, so you as a game developer can apply this analysis into your own video games to create a solid formula.

Difficulty

Let's talk about the most obvious part first, we know Dark Souls 3 is crazy hard, and a golden guideline of game design is to not make the game too easy so it's not boring and not too hard to not frustrate the player. Dark Souls 3 developer From Software takes this guideline and completely stumps all over it, pushes it off a cliff and cranks the difficulty up to the sky. What feature of the game balances this insane difficulty? The answer is a reward system. At the beginning of the game outside the Firelink Shrine to the left, there is a samurai with a pretty sweet katana, this is an extremely smart AI that counter your moves and kill you in one hit, it can be immensely frustrating until one is finally victorious and receives that sweet glorious katana, giving the player the feeling that they've have earned it. The game rewards players for their hard efforts (at least most of the time) as it should, when we work hard at something we urge to be rewarded or commended for it. Had the player received nothing after 20 plus deaths, it would have completely made that battling experience useless and would only discourage the player from these encounters. To summarize, if you intend to make a certain battle difficult, then you must reward your player accordingly, the higher the difficulty, the better the reward. We're going to bring up the reward system a lot throughout this article and see where we should best apply it.

Reward System

Rewards come as items, weapons, armor, spells and lore hints, which are awarded to the player during exploration and after combat with bosses or certain enemies. We will talk about this further ahead, first let's talk about why this reward system is so effective, why does it have the players so hooked? For that answer we turn to science! Dopamine is a compound in the body as a neurotransmitter associated with the reward center of the brain and the sense of pleasure that derives from rewarding experiences. There are countless studies on the relation between dopamine and video games, in short, playing video games doubles the dopamine level in the human brain. In other words, when players get rewarded for exploring or defeating boss, the sense of accomplishment and reward raise the player's dopamine levels. Notice how closely this is tied to the player experience, so when designing and for the remainder of this analysis, always keep this kind of reward system in mind since it will come up often.

Combat System

If you take a Dark Souls and create an Onion Design (most important feature in the middle and then cover that with more features to support it), combat would probably be right in the middle. Close your eyes for a second and imagine Dark Souls but with a clunky badly designed combat system, now you have to beat one of the hardest games ever made with a bad combat system, terrifying thought isn't it? But if you design a smooth, responsive, and intuitive combat system and layer it with weapons, armor, diversity of enemies, bosses, then you have something amazing. That is what Dark Souls did so right, and keeps the players wanting to master the combat. Nothing like rolling out of the swing of an invader just in time and punishing the poor sucker for his mistake; Or how about when you were about to die and then through sheer skill you parried the Boss's attack and countered? This design makes you feel like a badass (when you pull it off), of course it takes time, but that is the point, for the player to master the combat system and overcome greater challenges overtime. Never overlook the combat in your designs, test thoroughly, ask people to test it and provide feedback. Another important thing to highlight, spicing things up with different weapons, they're unique in the Souls series and that's next.

Weapon and Armor System

Dark Souls offers a vast list of weapons types, each offering unique aesthetics and effects to most of them. A rapier is best for poking and countering, great sword for powerful but slow attacks, magic for ranged battles and players who don't want to git gud. Creating such a unique roaster of weapons makes the game interesting since the player can spice things up whenever they feel like it and just change their weapon types. Same goes for armor, there are different types such as cloth, chain mail, Havel's heavy armor, and such. But each armor has its pros and cons, if it's too heavy then it will limit mobility, and vice versa. The advantage of designing such systems is giving player choices to keep the game fresh and gives the player a lot of options to face each challenge they encounter. Keep in mind that maybe a player that started out as a mage has acknowledged their sinful and shameful ways and wish to become a swordsman now, giving them that option is key to encourage them to explore the different items the game has to offer. What does this have to do with bringing me back to play? Well, let's recap, having a vast weapon and armor system will keep the game interesting since the players can explore different builds that complement their play style, they will want more items to explore until they find what works best for them, this encourages them to further explore the game and the items in it.

Exploration and Story Telling

The typical RPGs will have a lot of dialogue for the players to pitch in to and see what's going on in the story. However, we all know that Dark Souls has incredibly little dialogue, and instead it lets the environment and items do the talking and leave the lore up to the player's interpretation. Now if you're like me, you completely missed out on the item descriptions. All items have a detailed description about it either telling you its function, the lore behind it, or both. This was one of the few way to get a grasp of the story or even progress through the game. A clever and brutal example is in Dark Souls 1 when you defeated the Wolf of Artorias, and got the Wolf Ring, it did, in fact, tell you that it was used to traverse The Abyss, much later in the game you stumbled upon a dead end which was an actual Abyss, now if you happened to actually read the ring description and had actually thought about that one ring at that precise moment, then you would have figured it out, I sure didn't like the 95% of the players. Why do such a punishing design? First of all, this lead to the fight of The Four Kings, which was actually an optional fight, so even though this is a brutal design, it didn't actually affect you progress of the main story, only the exploration. A lot of players don't discover 100% of the game's secrets, so as a designer you much decide on what can be missed and what cannot such as the main story, of course. That's not all, remember that reward system? Well, Dark Souls also uses it to encourage exploration, players go out of their my way to try and find some hidden loot somewhere, and when they find it, they feel clever and are rewarded for discovering a hidden area, or maybe they found a merchant with special goods, or an optional boss. Exploration was never boring this Dark Souls, because players always feel rewarded in some way, so even after getting killed over and over, I would still explore for fear of missing out on some goodies.

Bosses

Each boss is a masterpiece with one of the best soundtracks to date. It really felt like a unique experience, however we did die over and over with certain if not all bosses, yet we kept coming back for more, why is that? Do we not love ourselves? We kept doing it because it was a challenge to overcome, we all know that feeling when we see "VICTORY" in our screens, we had a sense of accomplishment. We have a psychological need of accomplishment, to overcome some trial and be victorious at the end, it makes us feel good about it and the harder the challenge the better we feel afterwards. That's exactly why we kept at it time after time, I must've died at least 30 times when fighting The Nameless King, but when I finally beat him, I felt like I could take over the world. The players also collect the soul of each boss to craft into an item (mostly weapons), that is a testimony of the challenge the player has overcome, the reward for their tears, sweat and blood. The design, as mentioned before, the higher the difficulty the better the reward, however, in this case, you were rewarded with a unique item but you weren't necessarily going to use it, so it wasn't about a better item but rather a unique item belonging to that fight experience. 

Autonomy and Decisions

This one is extremely important, so pay close attention, fellow undead! Form Software designed the game to give players complete freedom, this ranges from their build, to killing NPCs, I mean come on, you can even kill the Fire Keeper, the only person that levels you up! There are consequences to the player's actions, for example the outcome of a quest (which you probably don't even know unless you look it up) according to your actions and at which specific times they were performed. You can choose to kill and NPC whom you don't trust, or you just like his shiny sword. Players like to feel autonomous and having choices, it makes them take the whole game as their own, but at their own risk. Oops! you killed the NPC that takes you to another level with exclusive loot? Going to have to wait for "new game +" or start over, it is clever yet unforgiving. Why even have this? In life you have to own up to your choices, here is the same, if you were to attack an NPC and get absolutely no reaction, then it feels unrealistic, your RPG should be designed to give the player a sense of realism when it comes to choices, and Dark Souls exceed at this (maybe a little too much). Remember, let the player play the game how they want to play it, and throw obstacles at them to overcome with their decisions.   

Progression

Ah, the character creation screen, over 40 minutes on a character whose face you won't even see after 1 hour of gameplay, but most importantly, stats. In the character creation screen you're also allowed to choose the character class, which only refers to where the skill points will be spent upon creation, after that it's up to the player where they want to spend their skills points in. Let's say at first a player wants to use heavy weapons and invest in Strength, but then find a cool lance and now they aim to invest a bit in Dexterity to use it, but wait, now they want a chainmail armor so Vitality is up next. Their progression is altered by what they experience, which is definitely awesome game design to make a player change their minds after experience something in game. Of course, weapons and armor get better in both stats and aesthetics (as they should) and enemies become somewhat easier in previous areas to give the player a sense of progression. Now you've gone from a player with some okay clothes to some pretty cool equipment and moves so you can die in style! Now you've noticed a pattern, the game is rewarding you with better and better things as you progress, to keep you hooked on what's up next.

PvP

Best thing about the PvP in Dark Souls is that it doesn't take you out of your action, it adds it as a challenge. You can be walking normally and randomly get invaded by one (or more if you're unlucky) player, but it all happens seamlessly, you don't even see the invader(s) spawn, they just appear out of nowhere wanting your head. This is the time for player to test their skills at the game, when the player gets defeated by the invader then it's a "Oh that low life!" attitude, but if the player beats the invader then again they feel superior since they tested their gear and skills and the player was victorious. This feeds the psychological need of competition, to see if you're better than someone else at something. In this case the PvP design being invasion is an unexpected event, but flawlessly implemented since it adds to the player's action and doesn't stop it. Keep in mind, when designing a feature ask yourself if it adds to the player experience or if it affects it negatively, this will aid you in your game design.

Phew! So after this analysis we have covered the fundamentals behind the secret sauce in the Souls series. I hope you've learned from this and can apply what you have learned here and implement it in your own games!