Game Anatomy: Souls and Stats, Dark Souls Part 1

So, I finished Dark Souls III, beat all the bosses and found all the covenants.  Whether or not I decide to get all of the endings depends on how much I want to deal with the whole damn Lord of  Hollows bullshit.  I’m currently playing New Game + (or Journey 2 or whatever) and that’s pretty cool.  It’s been a bit since I did a game anatomy, so, I’m starting with this bit, which flows through all of the big From Software action RPGs, at least since Demon Souls.  I don’t know if King’s Field does anything like that.

Image copyright From Software and Namco Bandai

Souls act as the currency in the Souls games, as well as in Bloodborne (sure, “blood echoes,” whatever, same concept), and in a lot o ways, souls are just regular old experience points.  Kill a monster, get a set number of dropped points, move on and kill more monsters.  Once enough points are accumulated, then a level can be obtained.  It’s not quite the same as most RPGs, where the experience automatically levels up the player, instead levels are gained by purchasing stats to improve.  It’s not a new idea, but it’s rarely been used as intuitively as it has here, and this is one of the things that makes the Souls games work so well.

Most games that use the “experience points as currency” format generally have a large problem of being really complicated, and tend to get in the way of building characters.  It’s not a hard and fast rule, but generally, most skills or abilities have a cost, and that cost is rarely well balanced.  It’s mostly bad in table top games, where a lot of the time, skill in stabbing a bad guy is the same as skill in cooking.  It makes it where when building and leveling up a character, the player has to make sacrifices based on what should be two separate systems, instead of actually making choices based on what kind of character they want to build.  Even in games where combat skill and noncombat skill are actually separate systems, a lot of the time what can be bought by experience points means making unnecessary sacrifices in the name of what the player needs, rather than what the character wants to be.

Image copyright White Wolf. Pictured, one of the worst examples of that.  “Animal Ken” costs just as much as “Persuasion,” “Academics” and “Firearms.”  Also, it was really hard to actually find a blank one of these through Google Image search, even when searching for blank sheets.

The concept is generally less of a problem in video games than in table top, since video games tend to make sure combat and noncombat are separate systems, and that the player has access to the basics that make up their character from the beginning.  Looking at that character sheet above, making a cop would require the player to split their skills between Firearms, Athletics, Streetwise, Persuasion, Empathy, Investigation and Intimidation, and those are the basics.  A video game keep the systems separate enough that the player wouldn’t have to buy the ability to run right at the beginning.  However, progression systems that require the player to buy stuff with experience still often require a player to not have access to everything they should have, or need, of at least without grinding.  The issue isn’t specialization, it’s that rarely is the specialization well optimized for the player to have what is needed to fulfill the sort of character they need.  Look at the Elder Scrolls, where magic is split across 5+ schools of magic, weapons across 3, and skill in one of them doesn’t improve skill in another.  The issue isn’t actually specialization, but that the skills are disconnected and require the player to focus on all of them, or cut out things that would be useful for the point of a character.  For instance, depending on the character’s fighting style, the ultimate warrior might be the ultimate swordsman in Skyrim, but completely fail if they pick up a two handed sword.

Dark Souls doesn’t fall into this trap.  Yes, there are issues with specialization and making it difficult to branch out, but that’s another issue entirely.  The souls allow the player to buy what they need, as they need it, and they do so in a way that makes it so the player can shift into different, but related abilities with ease.  A combat based character who focuses entirely on combat stats isn’t going to have issues moving from a one handed weapon to a two handed one (yes, yes, Equip Load does mitigate this somewhat), or picking up a different style of weapon.  The stats that work with weapons help with any weapon, the stats that work with spells work with (almost) any spell and then the other stats keep the player alive.

The purchased stats allow for the players to branch out and experiment while still remaining within their archetype.  It does this by being clear what is happening to the player’s stats, by directly showing how the change in stats will alter their damage, HP and spellpower, but it’s also done by making sure that it’s the stats that are related have some crossover.  Sure, a dexterity based weapon is going to get better mileage out of a higher dexterity than strength (without infusions…), but that doesn’t mean that the strength is going to hurt.  The extra strength is going to add extra damage, no matter what weapon the player is swinging around and vice versa.  Yes, there are some exceptions, mostly with ranged weapons, but that’s not a general rule.

Sure, there are games that do this.  Oblivion, for example, strength adds damage to melee attacks, and Intelligence and Willpower do something for spells.  However, this is mitigated by the fact that there are three types of weapon skills: blades, blunts and bows.  Sure, a skilled bladeswoman with a high strength will do extra damage with an axe, but her base damage will be lower, since her blunt skill is lower.  In Dark Souls, if she picks up, say, twinblades, her high strength is still going to add extra damage, not as much as it would with a high dexterity, but it’s still there and it’s going to always have the same base damage, no matter what.  Not as good, yes, but not completely useless, and that distinction is what’s important.

So, I’ve written almost 1100 words on this already,and I’ll pass that before I finish, but I have more to say about souls, Dark Souls and stats, so I’ll be back to discuss more later in the week.