Dark Souls: News & Insights

The Dark Souls trilogy's difficulty is debated, with one player highlighting inconvenient runbacks as a major factor. A new card game captures the series' spirit, while Elden Ring's Nightreign expansion drops a beloved feature.

Dark Souls' Inconvenient Difficulty: A Player's Perspective

A recent Reddit post sparked a discussion on the true difficulty of the Dark Souls games. While the challenging boss fights are lauded, the lengthy return journeys after death are criticized as more inconvenient than difficult. The author, having completed the entire trilogy plus Elden Ring and Sekiro, found the latter games more enjoyable due to their more forgiving checkpoint systems. To alleviate this frustration in Dark Souls, the player suggests using AutoHotKey to create save backups before boss fights, effectively bypassing the repetitive runbacks and allowing focus on the core challenge. This underscores a key takeaway: perceived difficulty can stem from frustrating design choices as much as actual game mechanics. This highlights a need for developers to consider player experience beyond just the core challenge.

Dark Souls: The Card Game – A Cooperative Challenge

For fans seeking a tabletop experience echoing the spirit of Dark Souls, the Dark Souls: The Card Game offers a cooperative deck-building adventure. Mirroring the core gameplay loop of the video games, players explore encounters, defeat enemies to gain souls and treasure, and upgrade their decks to conquer increasingly difficult challenges. The game's 4.6-star rating on Amazon, along with Amazon's Choice status, points to a successful adaptation of the franchise's core themes into a card game format. The cooperative element, strategic deck-building, and unforgiving consequences of mistakes all contribute to a highly engaging experience that will likely resonate with fans of both the Dark Souls series and the deck-building genre.

Elden Ring's Nightreign: A Roguelike Without Messages

Elden Ring's upcoming roguelike expansion, Nightreign, is set to shake things up by removing the series' iconic player message system. The decision, explained by director Junya Ishizaki, stems from the expansion's shorter, 40-minute gameplay sessions which are insufficient to allow for the writing and reading of messages. This change aligns with Nightreign's faster-paced, more cooperative gameplay, a departure from the slower exploration of the original Elden Ring. The expansion will feature procedurally generated dungeons, eight bosses per playthrough, and a focus on condensed RPG progression. While some fans may mourn the absence of the message system, this adaptation reflects a strategic choice to optimize the gameplay experience within the new roguelike structure. A demo and network test are scheduled for February 2025 to gather feedback before its official launch.