The Evolution of Dark Souls Level Design (and Bloodborne!)

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I don't think I did this after spending the entire week playing Souls games and sleeping. I rolled credits on Dark Souls 1 2 3 and Bloodborne in a 7 day period. The idea came to me when I was going through Dark Souls 3 and I said something. In the vein of wow, this one has some really excellent

level

design

at the time, which seemed like the most substantial improvement this game makes over its predecessors, which is surprising because Dark Souls 1 is known for having some of the best 3D

level

design

s in games and by Dark. For Souls 3i to do even better, it surely needs to be something special, but good level design is a somewhat abstract concept, it's difficult to easily identify, quantify, and specify which specific pieces constitute good level design, and Souls games always They have been known to have a good level. design I decided to put them under a microscope and see what I discovered by clearing all the stages plus the DLC of each of these games except Demon Souls because I don't have a PS3 of my own and I didn't want to lose even more sleep.

I was only able to record about 4 hours and god I can't wait to get back to that game later. Disclaimer, as a big part of the Souls game experience is dealing with all the surprising traps its level designs have. save this video It can ruin the entire experience of playing these games starting with Dark Souls 1 Dark Souls is almost 5 years old and quickly became a classic for many reasons, the only one relevant to the level design was its interconnected and vertically stacked world, which on a smaller scale also presents challenges and narrative elements in a way that is radically different from most other action games out there.

This may seem pompous, but in reviewing it again I decided to narrow down three central aspects of these levels that really demonstrate their ingenuity: their location. Their Spirals and Exposition Souls games have enemies that are big threats, even the least powerful mob enemies can take away a lot of HP in one hit, but before and after their attacks are usually left wide open for efficient play. almost instantaneous death. It's all about spotting enemies early, planning how to exploit their weaknesses, and then acting accordingly, so placing traps and traps for enemies in areas that are fair and creative is really important, so important that there are entire levels where almost every encounter combat is memorable. situations where enemies are actually less of a threat than the ground they are on.

I have memorized almost all the enemy locations in Orlando. The Guardians and dragon archers of that particular level place them to suffocate the player in narrow walkways, the Tomb of the Giants is also etched in my memory, this giant skeleton on the side of a cliff is meant to steal the player's sight from another skeleton hidden on its flank and before that we have these creeping skeletons with very horizontal flanking attacks intended to monopolize the narrow walkways in which they are located. as well as a nasty front charge to exploit the Darkness of this area, these are all examples of where enemies and traps are placed in unique ways, creating situations that players can fairly spot if they go slow and pay attention, which makes the combat of these areas memorable and dastardly Strategies employed by the developer groups of beatable enemies can be separated into smaller sizes bad guys' traps can be used against them enemies can be attacked out of their territory and returned to the yours and for much of the first half of the game almost Every entity in these levels is very well placed and they are also very vertically oriented, although there are exceptions.

Most

souls

levels use some sort of spiral tower design, even when they don't look like it, the player is always spinning and always moving up or down, imagine this, the world map of a normal Metroid Vania game is a Spaghetti game, you have a lot of narrow tubes with occasional bulges of more open space, so the Dark Souls world map would look more like a cup of spaghetti, yes all the same elements are there but they are stacked vertically one on top of the other, which for a Souls game has many advantages. The punishing rules of the game that risk a Soul's experience mean that you can return more quickly to your recovery if you don't have to cover a lot of horizontal space, the need to constantly turn left and right for all the blind corners that the player has to traverse also gives the developers more cover to hide those enemy traps with spiraling level designs that can also be creative. alternate routes and shortcuts that give the player new corners to explore in the same areas they have already explored, making the levels easy to mentally map out while also being a complex process to play through shortcuts, ladders and elevators that link that mental map and the entire world of Dark Souls 1 ends up elegantly forming into a coherent and imaginable place.

Verticality also gives developers more ways to create strategic vantage points for the player to look at what they want them to look at, as after a grueling descent down the large gap practically the first thing the player sees of Ash Lake is a Hydra Beast with a giant ass, but if you take a closer look on the other side of the road you will see a bonfire, both in sight and those two sightings alone are a storytelling process, they create a sensation. of dread and then relief after all the previous stress of the big hole before and that's the exposure.

I'm using that word as defined in a GDC talk by Greg Cassavan, founder of Super Giant Games. Exposition is the deliberate arrangement of a game's content in support of the game's experiential goals, which is completely different from what is generally recognized as a game story, Resident Evil's story is garbage, the developers actively fought against its inclusion, but Resident Evil's exposition, location and pacing of puzzles in Windows dog. is brilliant and actually pretty smart, so Dark Souls has a story about flames fading by linking fires, but its experience is about feeling super cool to overcome tough challenges.

In that sense, we can consider level designs as a means to tell those types of experiential stories. We can look at the undead Berg as an example of a three-act arc. We have a dragon that crashes into our path at the beginning of the level. An incident that prompts us to continue something later. Sensing the routes to the Taurus demon, it is an ascending action on our way to the boss. From the sky, a climax to that First Act, a long battle that has its own twists and turns and then there's no bonfire right after, there's a good 3 or four minutes of unrequited silence after this boss, which is really stressful the first time.

When you have the massive amount of

souls

the boss dropped, you eventually see no hope ahead, just enemies and then the dragon fries you, which is an avoidable death, but probably not for the vast majority of players who have to go back over all your progress. that big recovery is a disaster, it's a crisis, it's a climax and then after you go back and look at this bridge more closely, you see an opening, you return to base of operations via a shortcut and the dragon is not defeated. through combat, but by sneaking under it you can finally relax, level up and take a break, that's brilliant.

The pacing of the first half of the Dark Souls levels is simply brilliant, but things get ugly in the second half when you're interviewed about your least favorite Souls level. Hitaka Miyazaki said that you would have to miss this one of the rare horizontal open fields, as the repetitive landmarks and too much open space make it difficult to know where to go to get to this proper location in the first place, as well as where they are. the optional things. A better example of a vast horizontal space working in a Souls game is in Dark Root Garden, where trees hide enemies, slightly undulating topography hides traps as well as the player's entry point, and fake items that glow in the distance they detour you the first time you cross it.

You can really feel like you're lost in the forest, but the lost eolith is a perfectly flat plane with half-finished enemies in sight, plus the constant lava damage forces you to rush and they don't teach you to rush in a game of Souls. Additionally, it is a much more horizontal expanse of land A2B than the usual areas of the game. Combine that with some wacky-looking enemies and it's easy to get the impression that the team was stressed for time when they created this area, which is the same impression that many of Dark Souls 2's levels give Dark Souls 2 a design. radically different world that is much closer to a traditional action game with one themed area that takes you to the next as you feel the variety of places you go and how quickly you get there on foot.

More like a half-life than Dark Souls, it's easy to forget how you got to where you are because the connecting tunnels were probably impossible and you'll never need to go back anyway, you can fast travel between bonfires early on which was a welcome unlock. half of the game. Dark Souls 1, oddly enough, you can do this in Demon Souls too, but with two long loading screens to wait for each fast travel and incentivize the developers to build spiral levels around each checkpoint instead of between them . The DS2 levels are meant to be chewed and tossed every half hour before moving on to the next.

New bonfires appear quickly and that's really strange for a Souls game. I was struck by how the first stretch from the bonfire, one of the last lows to bonfire 2, is just an L that you take. a left turn, fight through combat tunnels and you'll be at bonfire 2, turn a little to unlock the boss shortcut and this has to be the dumbest boss shortcut ever. The bonfire placement is so dense in this game that it creates a lot of tension. The chance to come back for a big recovery is lost even though the combat design and enemy placement make previous fights much more difficult, but despite its linearity and lack of verticality, I think the biggest defense for this game's level design is how often it pits you against Dark Souls groups.

Combat is designed for one-on-one and while the last game had a lot of groups of enemies, you could easily take out individuals with one or two arrows, but here in Dark Souls 2 many of those groups attack each other in pairs and are made up of hard targets of humanoid soldiers who take an entire stamina bar just to kill one, combined with movement and combat that has the dubious honor of feeling slower and less precise than the first and is a much more demanding game. The imperfections. of its systems give Dark Souls a big black mark among fans, but on some level I feel like it gets a bad rap, there's definitely some artistry in the visual design of some levels like Mula, the Airy dragon, and especially the shrine of aana I love the look The feel and sound of this area and the game tricks they have set up also when the lady stops singing the monster's aggression range increases you need to use your torch to measure the depth of the water but then it stops return ruined by this almost impassive wall of sorcerers who focus on you at the same time and cast spells at you without cover to protect you.

Dark Souls 2 levels have many moments like those combat gauntlets in which several enemies attack you at the same time and it is an example that shows that the strength of a Souls game is not only its combat, the true emotion of these games lies less in how well the combat is played than in the immersion that the high hit values ​​of that combat establish when every bit of a level could be a huge threat, giving the player a reason to absorb the atmosphere and story of these worlds generally well-animated and beautifully rendered, but the faster, undirected, and more level designdemanding in Dark Souls 2 is most visible during the giant.

The memory levels play almost like scripted action sequences without much direction to guide the player on how to represent them, other than deaths and mistakes, but overall I still think the game is okay. I still think Dark Souls 2 has a bad reputation. I understand why many fans don't like it, but in both games I found it a rewarding challenge to take on. For the record, I'm using post-processing mods on the original 2014 PC version, so the torchplay sections work. as planned for me, in addition to all the uninteresting levels there, it also has the gutter and oh I love the gutter, they turned the total

dark

ness of the tomb of the giants up to 11 since now your light source runs out of fuel, the player.

Little by little it feels safe Paths to illuminate the permanent beacons of a vertically challenging stilt village. Having players retrace microscopic fragments of old progress in new lighting helps them better map out their mental image of what this place looks like, and the walks from beacon to beacon aren't long enough to become tedious. Once this is done, you go down into a combat tunnel towards the boss. It's analogous to running from the Tomb of Giants leading to Neato's Domain in Dark Souls 1, but they somehow made the atmosphere of these places even more dominant. More horribly evil than the first game, this is probably the only bit of Dark Souls 2 that I think was pulled off better than the corresponding part of Dark Souls 1, so while a lot of its levels are pretty bland, there are also some which I generally like.

I remember how Dark Fruit Garden has those transparent Forest Hunters, they weren't too difficult, they had nothing to gain from transparency, they were easy. On the other hand, forgetting the Shadowed Forests has them very close to Invisible, there are a few feet of fog around the player and trees that scream when they are hit, but the AI ​​of these Forest Guardians is not so aggressive as to seem impossible. In this area I just wish the other parts of the forest had some lighting, although that kind of lack of polish from its texture and lighting work to its layouts and locations shows in most levels except the crown ones. of DLC.

The Sunken King and the Iron King DLC ​​have us spiraling up and down and up and down Towers whose play time will last you between 3 and 5 hours if this were the base Dark Souls 2 game, which would be closer to 30 minutes if If this were the base game of Dark Souls 2, these archers would have nothing stopping them from shooting at you from very far away, but instead, this is the DLC where you can flip a switch and suddenly create cover. If this were the base game, there would be a bonfire right after. the first difficult section of Tower 1, but instead, this is the DLC where, from Tower Two, you see shortcuts that close that gap.

Shortcuts that always existed right in front of your face, you just couldn't see them from your previous vantage point, but the third DLC really shifts gears, the Ivory King's crown has levels that maximize its width instead of its height, We're navigating a snowy snowy palace here that drowns in very wide city roads, it's easily the least claustrophobic Dark Souls has these huge ones. The avenues open to a City View that seems to have required a much larger budget than the usual DLC and ends with a great spectacle. Player's battle fighting alongside friendly AIS against an enemy horde, but despite that increase in bomb and circumstance, the DLC is not a fluffy scripted action sequence, it still has a quiet respect for the player's intelligence. , winking at him and pushing him back after a blizzard thaws that changes the look and layout of this place.

It's a change of scenery that also creates new kinds of fun little creative shortcuts. I don't think it's a coincidence that this DLC caused the studio to experiment with how open the city streets would work in this type of game. It is a similar use of space, although with a much lower level of technology. Bloodborne In Bloodborne we're now wandering around a huge city block rather than a shrine or tower despite its more aggressive combat, most of the mob enemies are actually slow and lukewarm, but they're cleverly placed. in types of trap formations like in Dark Souls 1.

We start the game. take on group after group of enemies, but the player's wide movements and low enemy HP make crowd control a much less desperate situation, and unlike Dark Souls, you have no shield here, combat is extremely elusive. , which forces players to do a lot of movement. left and right, which ends up fitting very well with the urban setting of the game. The spacious avenues ensure that the player has the space he needs to keep circling around the enemies of the three elements I mentioned earlier. The spiral location and Bloodborne exhibit have great exposure. However, the design and location are still top notch.

I love how this series now just has these time-saving shortcuts. Shortcuts that you don't have to unlock and that are in front of your face all the time, but hidden well enough that you won't notice them. Your first time, there is a ladder in Old Yarum that saves you minutes, but while you are panicking under heavy machine gun fire, you probably didn't realize even though you can easily use it while still under heavy machine gun fire. , first-time players are still likely to make that exciting run for cover while returning players and speedrunners can use this shortcut to save time, it's another great example of how vertical levels give players opportunities to rediscover areas. old and return to the demonic soul style of fast travel with immediately accessible checkpoints. each other, but not without two long loading screens, meaning the levels are built around your checkpoints, rather than each other.

The Forbidden Forest is the prominent example here. It is a long descent down a winding path that takes you through four shortcut gates in total. It's something that takes me an hour to even rush and all of that connects to a single checkpoint with quick access to each of those shortcuts and a quick route to the boss. This forest takes you down a huge distance below the city and it's surprising they didn't make it. to make the section look like just a big hole in the ground, but some clever tree cover and an unrealistically huge mill building make this deep boore look like a smooth, gentle slope and I think that's amazing, but actually that's the number two reason why it is currently transmitted by blood. my favorite game of these four The narrative element of a soul setting, exposition is taken to the next level here with a host of painted world-style tricks that lock off optional areas that you can't access until after reading the text of some Great stories, stories like what is behind this closed door at the beginning of the game, literally as we appeared we are already preparing for a great mystery to solve countless hours, four levels and an inquisitive pickaxe inside an easy to touch cave and suddenly we meet. doing detective work that connects to about three simultaneous story lines and one of the largest and most beautiful optional areas in all of these games.

In fact, after playing this game four to six times, I'm always surprised by how many of these levels are completely optional. Dark Souls 1 is open-ended, but meeting the victory conditions requires you to visit almost everywhere at least once. Dark Souls 2 is largely linear, requiring you to visit almost everywhere in a much stricter order, but only 10 of Bloodborne's 18 areas are required to visit, and the option to go off the beaten path gives more weight to your decisions. of the player. It's a method of locking content that I'm a big fan of, to ensure players of all experience levels have options while also preventing new players from accidentally jumping in. high level areas, but while they are almost always excellent levels, there are two that I feel miss the mark.

But the first few present it so well it's almost forgivable, the first floor of the conference building being a series of

dark

, drab areas. Square rooms without many interesting things to see there, the fight with these student loan debtors is not very difficult or interesting, the most dastardly trap they have prepared for you is that the enemies hang from the ceiling, very clever, but that's It's okay, because it's an optional area that is obtained through a strange item that a strange guy gives you a strange clue about, which means I was on the edge of my seat to see what kind of exciting things would happen inside and although it takes a Well, although exciting things eventually happen on a locked second floor until the end of the game provides some resolution to the mystery of this area, while projectile enemies and a fire giant are placed in tighter spaces to get things done. more challenging on your way to finishing the game. and thanks to that kind of presentation, that sense of mystery, it almost doesn't matter that this place is made of dark and monotonous squares, similarly, you can be sure that the first time I was kidnapped by a kidnapper and woke up in the Village Unseen my jaw dropped, I was breathless, and I was completely terrified to have one of the best gaming experiences of my life, but towards the end of the game, no matter how many times I've played it, I feel a passionate cocktail. many other emotions I hate Mergo's Loft and the menu nightmare in general.

I like the idea of ​​using a giant shoggoth as a beacon that deals frenzy damage based on the appropriate theme, but the frenzy damage hits too hard and is too expensive to heal to deal with. For it to ever feel Fair, it needed some serious Nerf weeks before release, the developers put in fast, hard to hit enemies that explode into faster, harder to hit enemies in the open air of this thing and dealing with all of this is a test. as clumsy as you could imagine. well just run past them, you might as well run past these giants, definitely run past these frenzy ladies on the shaggoth bridge, seriously, anything in this game that deals frenzy damage will unleash Eldrich's madness on the most wills firm, the door that connects. to the shaggoth bridge you first have to drop it from a moving elevator and we learned how unreliable it is to fall into a door from a floor that doesn't move in Dark Souls 2.

Keep in mind that these are just two plagues in what It may be my favorite game of the current generation, they are real picky nerds and the story behind the conference building is so fun to unravel that the boring level design is almost unnoticeable, but when you look at even more optional content, you find many The designs of levels in this game really aren't great. The Chalice dungeons are an incredibly easy to miss optional part of this game that you should probably miss and usually do. I don't want to dwell on these areas because they are very disconnected. from the rest of the game, but I really wonder what the process was behind it.

These level designs seemed to have modular tunnel puzzle pieces that come together Bethesda style to form these dungeons. They completely lack verticality and visual cohesion. Sharp 90° turns. have the player land in simple combat gauntlets and without the progressive experience of unraveling an exciting narrative as you progress, even one of your own, almost all the charm of a Souls game is missing here, these feel like an afterthought and only They serve as time synchronization. you don't level efficiently with them and most of their loot is just material to unlock more chalice dungeons, none of which I found very fun to play and here's something funny: Dark Souls 3's demonic ruins are They look a lot like those chalice dungeons.

I said at the beginning of the video that I think Dark Souls I has some really excellent level design, so forgive me for continuing this topic at its lowest points, the demonic ruins take you through a series of angled arched stone tunnels. equally sharp that it almost looks like a repurposed set of

bloodborne

resources, it's easy to get lost in this visually repetitive loop and there's no defined beginning, as you can enter from two different points that start at the steaming lake, a swampy horizontal field where a giant ballista Tower shoots at you constantly, one issue I'm noticing here is that having giant Towers in the distance shooting something at you doesn't really fit with these games, threats in Souls games are almost always in your face,en You can slap the bad guys out of commission in a fair fight, unlike giant artillery shells that fire at you with no hope of a response.

You can eventually climb through the demonic ruins and turn it off and not be rewarded with much. just the ability to freely explore the lake without that crossbow shooting at you and you could reasonably clear the lake below without taking out that Tower. It's problematic, but it's doable, I know because that's how I did it on my first race, which made me turn off this machine. just a huge waste of time and that also makes the smoking lake and the demon ruin the two low points of Dark Souls. I compare that steaming lake swamp to the swamp forests swamp, which is probably my next least favorite area, but it still marks a big leap in terms of simple gameplay, you have to permanently roll through a poisonous swamp because there is no way to make your character go faster, plus you are taking poison damage without any antidote, which easily drops near Blight Town in Dark Souls 1, made you wait. poisoned water, but it had antidotes coming to you all the time, literally falling from the sky through these mosquito monsters.

It's like a help package from the developers because they know, on the other hand, that the poison swamp in Dark Souls 3 only has two static Antidote Moss pickups that you could easily overlook, but it's also multifaceted and lively. It's a dynamic area with the PvP Arena seamlessly integrated into a single-player level. I spent hours here on my first run because like every other area in Dark Souls besides the steaming lake. and the demon ruins, there's so much going on that there are some really interesting, optional combat encounters located outside the line of your objectives. You can consider the Watchdog Covenant and the demon boss attached to it as a side quest.

There is a dark specter hidden somewhere. Something interesting with the Giant Archer shooting giant crabs and a lot of little stage moments that stand out from the main reason for being here, which is to do a perimeter sweep around the three levels of beacons in Dark Souls 3, it works like this, you do perimeter sweeps. around areas filled with small additional challenges and represents a masterpiece of the design principles established in Dark Souls 1, spiraling around cleverly placed combat. Cleverly placed enemy encounters, each creating an interesting little story to navigate through the undead settlement. an area full of quirky events and places and taking it easy on the M turn for an ALT route still has you crossing a bridge that overlooks most of them.

SE Meyer's Quest takes you to explore a completely optional new area that is surprisingly large and complex for what it is. A small isolated bubble is off the main path and even then I found a hidden tower on my second playthrough that I had completely overlooked the first time around. These little optional areas and the density of them all feel like you're doing a side quest. , but within the narrative experience of the Simplicity of the Souls game, they are neatly wrapped in the bigger picture, sort of like this PvP dueling arena is neatly wrapped in the combat tunnel at the top, no wonder many players want to fight each other here.

It looks designed expressly for that purpose, but without adding out-of-place signage, it's something brilliant. Dark Souls 3 is full of levels that are subtle, dense, dynamic and very well paced in both my first and second playthrough. I found myself returning to the bonfires. just when my healing items were running low and bosses are conveniently located seconds from the nearest bonfires, but that abundance of bonfires also resurfaces a trend that began in Dark Souls 2 of Bloodborne avoiding fast travel entirely early on from a quick menu, meaning there's actually nothing. preventing Dark Souls levels from becoming a horizontal combat tunnel with dead ends, as well as the designer's own prudence, and for the most part, they were thankfully quite prudent about maximizing this playspace.

I love how a hidden shortcut takes you to the right of the Catacombs to reach Bonfire 2 in a matter of seconds I love how this final approach to the sacrificial path has an indomitable wall of harpies that you can strategically flank from the sides or by shooting at them. the far for a much fairer fight the alternative routes These are really useful on a strategic level for newbies, not all of them are just extras to save time, so Dark Souls 3 uses its space well, but not in the hyper-compressed way as it did. I think I have to make a distinction between level design and world design here - while Dark Souls might have the best minute-by-minute level design in the series, there's a lack of interesting branches that branch off from the main path that don't really They follow the richness of the different areas.

To explore that you can hit them all at once like in Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, it seems less likely that strange sequence-breaking events will occur here, I thought during my first run until a cowardly act for the second time suddenly threw my newcomer level one directly to a boss within the game, so maybe you have options, but strangely you also have Bloodborne-style open spaces again despite returning to front-focused shield combat. If you ever feel like Dark Souls 3i is an easier game than the others, consider that there are simply fewer places to fall. a bonus is a sign that they've applied what they've learned from the previous games into what looks like a blockbuster compilation of the four and five, if you want to count Demon Souls, there's fanservice for that one here too, but that exemplifies the biggest itch I feel with Dark Souls.

While the level design may be the best of the bunch on a technical level, it feels like some kind of creative bankruptcy might be happening artistically. I first noticed this in the new DLC versions of Bloodborne. of the duk files in Blight Town still appear even then Blight Town is a throwback to the Valley of Pollution of Demon Souls and DS3's AIL dungeons are straight up Tower of Latria, which was an incredibly good level, but I'm giving myself account. that maybe one of the reasons Bloodborne is my favorite right now is because it's also the most original.

The medieval European setting of Dark Souls is eventually going to wear thin. There simply may not be much more they can do with castles. Cathedrals. Towns on stilts. and swamps and that's why I'm eager to see what a new spin-off sequel in the Bloodborne vein of Soft's originally built Dark Souls II would look like as the final episode of the series, but it turns out they're not done. with the series but rather with Miyazaki's great personal involvement in it, which actually makes me eager to see what they are going to do with this style of game.

Bloodborne showed us that taking tried and true game systems and applying them to a new universe with a unique setting can create a more exciting game overall, and honestly, I'd rather see more spin-off sequels like that than direct sequels with numbers at the end and with the experience of getting Dark Souls 2 out of the way for the supposed B. team, I can only optimistically assume that they have learned from that experience to improve the next game after all the DLC was pretty good, so whatever The next game that ends up being like this, I bet it will probably be at a really good level. design