Dark Souls

[TomGuycott]

I read some more of the stuff regarding new co-directors, accessibility, etc etc. I can understand why some people are a little worried, and frankly I can foresee a couple of worst-case-scenarios in my head where the charm of the series could go down the crapper, but I don't think that will necessarily be the case with the original director supervising.

I have a feeling (no evidence to back it up whatsoever, obviously) that what they mean by accessibility could refer to two things: the open-ended nature of both the world, and the story. In Dark Souls you have a lot of freedom to explore the world, limited from finding only a few locations. You can even fight one of the possessors of Lords' Souls without even reaching the halfway point of the game where the rest are unlocked for you. Personally, I got screwed with this aspect (but I loved every second of it for some reason) when I was trapped in a lightless cavern trying to reach the end out of sheer curiosity, only to find that I couldn't go on and had to climb all the way back out. The whole ordeal was about 6 hours of gameplay.

As for the story, a vast majority of it was left for the player to FIND rather than it being presented to them. In fact, many interesting aspects of the story were only told through descriptions of various items. A prime example: it is implied that the Ceaseless Discharge was in fact the young son of the Witch of Izalith who constantly teemed with molten lava from his body. He was given a ring to suppress this, but he lost it, and when the ring dropped into the magma it formed into a Centipede Demon (the demon you find the ring from). Thus the Ceaseless Discharge became the monster that it was, constantly brimming with lava. This and countless other aspects of the game's story is presented in this way.

In terms of a more accessible world, I can see them making it more linear, something I would certainly not enjoy nearly as much as I did the original Dark Souls. Demon's Souls was alright because even though it was more linear you had five worlds to choose from that had some diversity in feeling. What I'd hate to see is the world being straight forward, go to one boss, then the next, then the next. However, I WOULDN'T mind if it was similar to the way Dark Souls was, but a little less cryptic. Granted, its not quite as grueling, but it wouldn't be the end of the world for me.

For accessible story... It's kind of a grey area for me at the moment. I love the story in Dark Souls, how you can't possibly get every little detail of it on a single playthrough, if only for the fact you simply cannot unlock EVERY single item in one go, and you can't unlock every single character dialogue string in one go (even though you get most pertinent dialogue strings). They could possibly make the game's story more straight forward, but I kind of liked going through alternate play paths in the game, discovering I may or may not be working on the side that is truly in the right. After all, after meeting people like Gwyndolyn and Kaathe the true nature of your character's quest becomes incredibly questionable in almost every regard.

All in all though I'm still excited for this. I want to see more.