tl;dr: Dark Souls type difficulty doesn't really translate to MMOs, lets hope more single player games do it.
There are a few elements of dark souls that came together beautifully and made it work:
There was crushing initial difficulty and loneliness. That difficulty is almost all knowledge-based. If you can do things mostly right most of the time, you'll probably clear the game no problem, with only the odd death here and there as minor setbacks. Players then banded together on the web in communities to overcome the difficulty, which worked well because they spread knowledge. Players tended to be most likely to help each other out in the multiplayer than to harm, furthering the sense of friendliness. This created a sense of together-alone-against-the-odds, which tends to give DkS players a big sense of accomplishment and pride in themoselves and their brethren.
The loneliness may not be core at all, though I think going through the game without any assitance from phantoms makes for a much more genuinely soul-crushing experience, which I appreciate. As an idea, Tera loses something knowing that you can always find somebody to help you against whatever BAM you're fighting.
The problem with dark souls type gameplay as an MMO is that it wouldn't stay hard. Generally people play MMOs for long periods of time. I can guarantee that everyone who thought DkS was too hard and quit hadn't played for 100+ hours before they did. Essentially you need to master yourself and your enemy. Mastering yourself only takes so long, and then it's just a matter of learning the attack patterns and animations of your enemies and they're a sinch. The game would stay hard for just long enough that reviewers and people who tried to jump into the game would hate it, but players who loved it would master it and get bored, cancelling their subs after 3 months.
There are many kinds of difficulty, not just 2, and here are some (i'm leaving some out, like mechanical difficulty, and poor design difficulty):
1) Numeric difficulty. This is how most MMOs differentiate your experience between Level 1 and Level 1 (Maximum - 1). This is Diablo 3's Monster Power. This is shallow and becomes less meaningful the more often you go through it... which is why older players are getting tired of standard MMOs, which is why newer games level you faster.
2) Trial & Error difficulty, a type of "Fake Difficulty". See IWBTG. This is niche, lots of people hate it. I don't, but people have good reason to.
3) Information-Resolvable difficulty. This is most of the difficulty in DkS. Know where this item is, where that powerup is, what this spell does, this enemy's weakness, that enemy's attack patterns, etc.
Mega Man is a lot like DkS in this way. There's a bit of mechanical - getting the controls down and doing what you're trying to reliably. There's some numeric escalation, especially going to NG+. Still, with good knowledge and reasonable mechanical skill, 95% of the game is a piece of cake. This doesn't usually happen until playthrough 3+, but with an MMO, every subscriber that the publisher really cares about will play substantially more than that.
I don't know how to make an MMO with a feel similar to Dark Souls. I think it would be really hard, and I hope more publishers make games with that sense of accomplishment, MMO or not.
tl;dr: Dark Souls type difficulty doesn't really translate to MMOs, lets hope more single player games do it.
There are a few elements of dark souls that came together beautifully and made it work:
There was crushing initial difficulty and loneliness. That difficulty is almost all knowledge-based. If you can do things mostly right most of the time, you'll probably clear the game no problem, with only the odd death here and there as minor setbacks. Players then banded together on the web in communities to overcome the difficulty, which worked well because they spread knowledge. Players tended to be most likely to help each other out in the multiplayer than to harm, furthering the sense of friendliness. This created a sense of together-alone-against-the-odds, which tends to give DkS players a big sense of accomplishment and pride in themoselves and their brethren.
The loneliness may not be core at all, though I think going through the game without any assitance from phantoms makes for a much more genuinely soul-crushing experience, which I appreciate. As an idea, Tera loses something knowing that you can always find somebody to help you against whatever BAM you're fighting.
The problem with dark souls type gameplay as an MMO is that it wouldn't stay hard. Generally people play MMOs for long periods of time. I can guarantee that everyone who thought DkS was too hard and quit hadn't played for 100+ hours before they did. Essentially you need to master yourself and your enemy. Mastering yourself only takes so long, and then it's just a matter of learning the attack patterns and animations of your enemies and they're a sinch. The game would stay hard for just long enough that reviewers and people who tried to jump into the game would hate it, but players who loved it would master it and get bored, cancelling their subs after 3 months.
There are many kinds of difficulty, not just 2, and here are some (i'm leaving some out, like mechanical difficulty, and poor design difficulty):
1) Numeric difficulty. This is how most MMOs differentiate your experience between Level 1 and Level 1 (Maximum - 1). This is Diablo 3's Monster Power. This is shallow and becomes less meaningful the more often you go through it... which is why older players are getting tired of standard MMOs, which is why newer games level you faster.
2) Trial & Error difficulty, a type of "Fake Difficulty". See IWBTG. This is niche, lots of people hate it. I don't, but people have good reason to.
3) Information-Resolvable difficulty. This is most of the difficulty in DkS. Know where this item is, where that powerup is, what this spell does, this enemy's weakness, that enemy's attack patterns, etc.
Mega Man is a lot like DkS in this way. There's a bit of mechanical - getting the controls down and doing what you're trying to reliably. There's some numeric escalation, especially going to NG+. Still, with good knowledge and reasonable mechanical skill, 95% of the game is a piece of cake. This doesn't usually happen until playthrough 3+, but with an MMO, every subscriber that the publisher really cares about will play substantially more than that.
I don't know how to make an MMO with a feel similar to Dark Souls. I think it would be really hard, and I hope more publishers make games with that sense of accomplishment, MMO or not.
I don't think Dark Souls needs to be done in an MMORPG format.
Just like I've come to firmly believe that The Elder Scrolls no longer needs to receive an MMORPG format... thank goodness Bethesda is not the developer for this thing.
Just like how apparent it is now that the Knights of the Old Republic franchise did not need to go in the MMORPG format.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
no matter how much i would dream of some sort of Dark SOuls mmo i hope it never happens. What Dark SOuls need is the option to have online coop (jump in and out) from the beginning to the end, besides the standard DS online format.
On a side note, i do wish mmo developers take DS as an example on how to do awesome combat mechanics based on actual player skill. You can beat the entire game completely naked if you know how to do it. And PvP can be challenging and frustrating and a lot of fun too. All player skill.
Comments
tl;dr: Dark Souls type difficulty doesn't really translate to MMOs, lets hope more single player games do it.
There are a few elements of dark souls that came together beautifully and made it work:
There was crushing initial difficulty and loneliness. That difficulty is almost all knowledge-based. If you can do things mostly right most of the time, you'll probably clear the game no problem, with only the odd death here and there as minor setbacks. Players then banded together on the web in communities to overcome the difficulty, which worked well because they spread knowledge. Players tended to be most likely to help each other out in the multiplayer than to harm, furthering the sense of friendliness. This created a sense of together-alone-against-the-odds, which tends to give DkS players a big sense of accomplishment and pride in themoselves and their brethren.
The loneliness may not be core at all, though I think going through the game without any assitance from phantoms makes for a much more genuinely soul-crushing experience, which I appreciate. As an idea, Tera loses something knowing that you can always find somebody to help you against whatever BAM you're fighting.
The problem with dark souls type gameplay as an MMO is that it wouldn't stay hard. Generally people play MMOs for long periods of time. I can guarantee that everyone who thought DkS was too hard and quit hadn't played for 100+ hours before they did. Essentially you need to master yourself and your enemy. Mastering yourself only takes so long, and then it's just a matter of learning the attack patterns and animations of your enemies and they're a sinch. The game would stay hard for just long enough that reviewers and people who tried to jump into the game would hate it, but players who loved it would master it and get bored, cancelling their subs after 3 months.
There are many kinds of difficulty, not just 2, and here are some (i'm leaving some out, like mechanical difficulty, and poor design difficulty):
1) Numeric difficulty. This is how most MMOs differentiate your experience between Level 1 and Level 1 (Maximum - 1). This is Diablo 3's Monster Power. This is shallow and becomes less meaningful the more often you go through it... which is why older players are getting tired of standard MMOs, which is why newer games level you faster.
2) Trial & Error difficulty, a type of "Fake Difficulty". See IWBTG. This is niche, lots of people hate it. I don't, but people have good reason to.
3) Information-Resolvable difficulty. This is most of the difficulty in DkS. Know where this item is, where that powerup is, what this spell does, this enemy's weakness, that enemy's attack patterns, etc.
Mega Man is a lot like DkS in this way. There's a bit of mechanical - getting the controls down and doing what you're trying to reliably. There's some numeric escalation, especially going to NG+. Still, with good knowledge and reasonable mechanical skill, 95% of the game is a piece of cake. This doesn't usually happen until playthrough 3+, but with an MMO, every subscriber that the publisher really cares about will play substantially more than that.
I don't know how to make an MMO with a feel similar to Dark Souls. I think it would be really hard, and I hope more publishers make games with that sense of accomplishment, MMO or not.
Very well written post, thank you.
I don't think Dark Souls needs to be done in an MMORPG format.
Just like I've come to firmly believe that The Elder Scrolls no longer needs to receive an MMORPG format... thank goodness Bethesda is not the developer for this thing.
Just like how apparent it is now that the Knights of the Old Republic franchise did not need to go in the MMORPG format.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
no matter how much i would dream of some sort of Dark SOuls mmo i hope it never happens. What Dark SOuls need is the option to have online coop (jump in and out) from the beginning to the end, besides the standard DS online format.
On a side note, i do wish mmo developers take DS as an example on how to do awesome combat mechanics based on actual player skill. You can beat the entire game completely naked if you know how to do it. And PvP can be challenging and frustrating and a lot of fun too. All player skill.