Dark Souls | Code Like It's 198x

Before Dark Souls came out, its director told Edge what he was aiming for. “I have no intention to make the game any easier,” Hidetaka Miyazaki said in 2011. “In fact, I want it to be more difficult. The way I put it to my team is that we are trying to make the most difficult game that it is possible to make, which at the same time can be conquered by those who persevere.” The result was a dark fantasy role-playing game in which dying is routine, the story is left for the player to piece together, and other players appear only as ghosts, scrawled messages and the occasional invader. Edge made it runner-up for its mainstream game of the year, and wrote that “the damnable dying is simply Lordran’s price of admission”.

Fast facts

Developer: FromSoftware, Tokyo.
Director, producer and game designer: Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Publisher: FromSoftware in Japan; Namco Bandai Games (now Bandai Namco) in America and Europe.
Released: September 2011 in Japan and October 2011 in America and Europe, for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
PC: Prepare to Die Edition, August 2012, with extra content.
Remaster: Dark Souls Remastered, 2018.
Predecessor: Demon’s Souls (2009, PlayStation 3).

From Demon’s Souls

Miyazaki had come to games late. He joined FromSoftware to work on the mech game Armored Core: Last Raven, then directed Armored Core 4, Armored Core: For Answer and his first action RPG, Demon’s Souls. That game, which Edge said was heavily inspired by FromSoftware’s own King’s Field and by the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, sold about 30,000 copies in its launch week in Japan, then spread by word of mouth to hundreds of thousands of players around the world.

Work on Dark Souls began as soon as Demon’s Souls was released, with about 80 per cent of the same team, all the lead roles included. It had a new publisher and a new name, but Miyazaki insisted it was not a sequel: “It’s not that we couldn’t use the Demon’s Souls name. It’s that we chose not to use it. Thematically, and in terms of ideology, the two games are very similar, but in terms of world and story they are completely different.”

The vagueness was deliberate. Miyazaki told Edge that when he read fantasy novels as a child he could understand “maybe half” of the English, and he filled in the rest with his imagination. He wanted players to do the same, so the games say little, and leave much of the story to sparse dialogue and short notes on items and weapons. The English script was written with the British localisation company Frognation, which he let improve on his drafts instead of translating them word for word.

Firm but fair

Miyazaki set out how he judged whether an obstacle was difficult enough. “We want any player to be able to clear any obstacle simply by learning from mistakes and paying close attention. Then, the reasons for failure must always be clear and understandable. Every problem must have multiple solutions, so that players can tackle it in whichever way they want. The game’s controls can never be a factor from which difficulty is derived. And finally, we want to make sure that there’s the possibility for miracles to happen.” He added that he was “actually not very good at action games”, which made him “a good benchmark for creating something that anyone can complete with dedication”.

Edge‘s review showed what that felt like. On the staircase near the start a Black Knight stands with his back turned, a glowing item behind him, and the player attacks anyway: “You died, says the game, just in case you’d mistaken your hero’s slumping to the ground for a sudden fit of narcolepsy.” There are no selectable difficulty levels, no map and no quest log. Killing enemies earns souls, which pay for everything from levelling up to upgrades and items. Bonfires are the checkpoints, where the player replenishes health, manages the inventory and spends souls, and kindling a bonfire raises how many healing flasks the player can carry. The review found that combat kept Demon’s Souls’ “slow, decisive rhythm”: “Even the ‘easiest’ foe in Dark Souls can prove lethal if you get impatient.”

One world

The big change from Demon’s Souls was the map. The earlier game sent players out from a hub, the Nexus, to separate levels. Dark Souls joined its world, Lordran, into one piece, and the team set out to remove every loading screen except the one after death. The programming lead, Jun Ito, called that “an immense challenge that Miyazaki set for us”. Edge’s reviewer found that it worked. A defeated boss drops a key to the sewers below the Undead Burg; beating another boss there opens a vast shaft down to a shantytown, and below that “yet another sprawling domain opens up”. Meanwhile a staircase beside the very first bonfire leads to New Londo, which Edge’s writer walked past for two dozen hours without noticing.

Each area took about six months to make, Edge reported, and the lead artist wanted “a far greater range of architecture types” than before. Among the enemies the review remembered were a giant butterfly and a once-proud wolf that “struggles to limp along on three paws moments before you deliver the finishing blow”.

Other players, at a distance

Dark Souls is a single-player game that is full of other people. Players online can leave short messages on the ground, built from a fixed list of words and phrases, which appear in other players’ games: warnings about a trap ahead, advice, or deliberate lies. Demon’s Souls had used them almost always for help; Miyazaki wanted more mischief this time. “It’s how you play with people’s minds, how you help or trick other people.”

Players can also be summoned into each other’s worlds to help with a boss, or invade to fight. The game matched players who were in the same part of the game world, and its connections ran peer to peer between consoles rather than through servers; Dark Souls II moved to servers in 2014. There is no voice chat. Miyazaki said that without it players would find it easier to stay in character. His favourite feature was the bonfire: “When playing in a dark, cold, gloomy world, the one place where the player can get some rest is the brightly lit, warm beacon fire. That players can set these fires up for other adventurers playing in their own game adds to the sense of co-operation, even if it’s in a remote way.”

Not everyone welcomed the help. Edge’s reviewer thought the messages “undermine the dopamine rush of hard-fought epiphany”, and joked that the game had two difficulty levels: “Insane (online with hint graffiti) and Teeth Gnashingly Impenetrable (offline)”. The magazine’s second piece on the game told how its writer, cursed three times by frogs in the sewers, found the way out only by asking on Twitter.

The PC version and after

FromSoftware had not planned a PC version. In 2014 the studio told Edge that it made one because of a petition signed by players around the world, and that it had simply ported the game “in the shortest amount of time possible”. Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition came out for Windows in August 2012 with extra content. The port rendered at a fixed internal resolution, and a player-made fix, DSFix by Peter Thoman, known as Durante, raised it. Dark Souls Remastered, made by QLOC, followed in 2018 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, and on the Nintendo Switch later that year.

Dark Souls II (2014) had two new directors, Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, with Miyazaki as supervisor. He told Edge that he regretted the scheduling of Dark Souls, which had needed patches after release, and had made sure the sequel’s schedule was right. He was made president of FromSoftware in 2014 and went on to direct Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019) and Elden Ring (2022). In May 2020 Bandai Namco announced that the Dark Souls series had sold more than 27 million copies.

Other studios borrowed the design so widely that magazines gave it a label. Wireframe used “Soulslike” in 2021 for Team Ninja’s Nioh, a “fast-paced spin on the ‘masocore’ sub-genre of hardcore action-RPGs in the vein of the Dark Souls series”.

Sources

Edge issue 226, April 2011, pp. 51–57: “Soul Survivor”, studio visit and interviews with Hidetaka Miyazaki, Makoto Sato and Jun Ito (Miyazaki’s career and roles; Demon’s Souls’ sales and influences; the shared team; “not a sequel”; the five difficulty criteria and “the most difficult game that it is possible to make”; seamless loading; the messages, beacon fires, summoning, invasions and lack of voice chat; matching by location in the game).
Edge issue 234, December 2011, pp. 106–108: review (the Black Knight; “You died”; no difficulty levels, map or quest log; souls and bonfires; the descending world; the wolf; combat). P. 109: “Post Script” (the messages “cobbled together from a pool of available sentence fragments”; the curse and New Londo).
Edge issue 236, January 2012, p. 94: awards, Dark Souls runner-up for mainstream game of the year.
Edge issue 242, July 2012, p. 16: Miyazaki and Frognation’s Ryan Morris on localisation; the Prepare to Die Edition for PC.
Edge issue 249, January 2013, pp. 62–64: Dark Souls II feature (Miyazaki as supervisor, the new directors, the patches, the move from peer-to-peer to servers, his childhood reading).
Edge issue 262, January 2014, p. 62: interview on Dark Souls II (the PC port and the petition; blood messages, bloodstains, summoning and invasions).
Wireframe issue 12, April 2019, pp. 50–51: “Developer Profile: FromSoftware” (King’s Field; Miyazaki made president in 2014).
Wireframe issue 48, February 2021, pp. 38–39: “Masocore: the making of the Nioh series”.
“Dark Souls (video game)” and “Hidetaka Miyazaki”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates; the unplanned Windows version; DSFix and the fixed rendering resolution; Dark Souls Remastered and QLOC; Miyazaki’s later directing credits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Souls_(video_game) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidetaka_Miyazaki
“DSFixing Dark Souls: A Conversation with Dr. Peter ‘Durante’ Thoman”, ROMchip vol. 5 no. 1, July 2023 (web, secondary). https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/187
FromSoftware, “DARK SOULS series exceeds 27 million sales”, press release, 19 May 2020, reported by TweakTown the same day (web, secondary). https://www.fromsoftware.jp/ww/pressrelease_detail.html?tgt=20200519_darksoulsseries_salesdata and https://www.tweaktown.com/news/72623/dark-souls-series-has-sold-over-27-million-copies-to-date/index.html