Demon's Souls: The ultimate multiplayer experience. edited by : saudi
9 hours ago - 2:30 PM on 10.19.2009, Saudi Ali
Demon's Souls: The ultimate multiplayer experience photo
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For quite some time I didn't know what, exactly, I wanted to say about From Software's RPG Demon's Souls, but I knew I wanted to say something. That's one of the most amazing things about this game. It makes you talk about it. It makes you think about it. You'll be at work, trying to concentrate on business, but in your mind you're just plotting out new strategies and approaches to the game's many and varied obstacles.
Demon's Souls is a bleak game, set in a dead world. It's a game about loneliness and desolation, madness and loss. Yet never in a videogame have I ever felt such comradery, let alone in a game as alienating as this one. It's incredibly curious to note that nearly all RPGs are lonely games for lonely people, yet along comes perhaps the most isolating and forsaking RPG of them all and I don't feel lonely at all when playing it.
I now know what I want to say about Demon's Souls, a videogame that may not act like a multiplayer game, yet has more multiplayer spirit than any round of Halo could even imagine possessing. Read on to find out how Demon's Souls delivers its ultimate message, and how it manages to be the ultimate multiplayer experience.
You should all know by now that Demon's Souls is a hard game. Much of the difficulty is more grinding repetition and trial-and-error than actual challenge, but there's no denying that some of the game's bosses require real strategy and dexterity to defeat. This game is one of the most hardcore experiences released in years, cut from the same cloth as Mega Man and Contra. A real old school game that reminds us just how easy we've had it for the past two generations.
Usually these are games I have no interest in. I don't like to feel punished for trying to enjoy a videogame, and I don't like games that force me to replay vast tracts of old ground each time I day. Demon's Souls, however, has a certain magic to it, some brilliant magnetism that keeps drawing one back into its dark and devastated world. Part of it is the fact that the methodical combat is intensely satisfying and brutal. Part of it is the fact that Demon's Souls' universe is incredible and fascinating. Most of all, however, I believe it's the fact that Demon's Souls constantly reminds you that you're not just one guy going up against this cruel, spiteful game. You're one guy of many, and you're all in this together.
Demon's Souls has plenty of monstrous baddies to conquer, but the true villain of the piece is the game itself. Demon's Souls is your enemy. It wants to be played on its own terms, and its terms are favorable to itself and nobody else. However, you do have things that the game does not -- moral support, community spirit and the knowledge that there are hundreds of people out there, just like you, struggling against the same great opponent. This isn't just a game, it's a full out assault, and you are one of many proud soldiers.
From Software added several wonderful in-game features to remind the player that they are not the only one suffering. When playing online, you will see ghostly spirits running around, attacking invisible foes, and doing things that you have either done, or are yet to do. These are other players, warring against their own version of Demon's Souls in real-time. As you struggle against a particularly nasty boss, you will see these spirits, reflections of other players, who are fighting that very same boss at the very same time as you. Your sympathies are with them and the sympathies of other players are with you.
The ghostly apparitions of other players could be taken as a metaphor if you want to get pretentious. It's a message from the game that others are with you "in spirit," that every hardship you face is being faced by countless peers right at that moment. Many is the time I have passed a ghost, and watched it go about its business for as long as it remains in my world, pondering what adventures it's faced and where it's headed next. The specters of other gamers serve as an inspiration, encouraging you by letting you know that there's a world full of Demon's Souls players out there, all striving to the same ends as you.
Driving home the idea of sympathy and comradery are the bloodstains. When a player dies, they leave a pool of blood behind that contains a recording of their final actions. Visible in the worlds of other players, the stains can be activated and they'll replay these last acts, giving off a clue as to how they died. While there is an obvious tactical advantage to this, giving players an idea of where traps and sneak attacks may spring from, the stains also reinforce the concept of shared suffering and instill the feeling of empathy that keeps players invested in the Demon's Souls experience.
The game lets you know that, no matter how many times you die, you're not to feel like something is wrong with you. It's not a lack of skill that killed you as much as a lack of preparation. You weren't ready for what the game threw at you and, judging by the fact that you're surrounded by representations of your fellow players' deaths, you're not the only one who keeps getting slaughtered. It's positive reinforcement through negative feedback. Not a single portion of the game is without a puddle of somewhere, from the first world to the last, and even in the Nexus, where some poor sod fell off a high ledge or got punched to death by Blacksmith Boldwin because he felt like killing some NPCs.
Then, of course, we have the messages. Demon's Souls has a very wide selection of pre-written messages that players can select and then leave on the ground throughout the course of their adventure. These messages will then show up in other peoples' games, and they are predominantly used as warnings, letting others know of upcoming traps, ambushes, or useful items. Malevolent players might also attempt to lure gamers into danger or guide them off cliffs.
Interestingly, I have very rarely come across notes designed to trick me. I am sure more exist, and I'm certain players have been fooled by other people, but the majority of messages have been put there in good spirit. Most Demon's Souls players truly want to help each other out, and I've even had my life saved a few times with a handy "Behind You" message, helping me avoid an arrow ballista or a sneaky assassin.
Players can rate messages that they find useful, and whenever a message is rated, the person who left it is rewarded with full HP regeneration. There are even messages that say, "I'm in trouble -- please rate this message," allowing players to essentially heal others who are in dire straits. I have very rarely come across one of these messages that lack at least a few ratings, and this tells me that the community spirit of Demon's Souls is a very healthy one indeed. For the most part, this is a game that unites people -- and they can't even talk to each other properly!
This sense of community continues outside of the game as well. Demon's Souls is a game that often requires the counsel of others. There are certain things in this RPG that you'd never know without being told. For example, if you face the Penetrator demon without having fulfilled other objectives, you will most likely get eviscerated. However, how will you know that without being told? In most games, this would be considered a complete failure of game design. In Demon's Souls, however, it's all part of the experience. Learning the game's many secrets and then sharing that knowledge with others seems to be at the very heart of the game.
In Demon's Souls, there's no shame in asking for advice and getting told where to go next. It's a game in which you must survive any way you can, whether that's flicking through a guide or asking someone where to find some weapon upgrade material. Anecdotes and the passing of wisdom are what keeps people in the game, plugging away at the many cruel enemies and vicious traps. If you get two Demon's Souls players together in the same room, their conversation could last for hours as they compare notes, discuss battle strategies and recount many, many horror stories.
Demon's Souls does include some more traditional multiplayer elements, namely PvP and limited co-op. However, these "real" multiplayer options seem almost totally unwarranted in comparison to all the amazing things the game does elsewhere with its online servers. While certainly welcome (many players rely on co-op to deal with tough bosses), it's ironic that these "real" multiplayer elements manage to lack the same sense of community that the single-player mode does.
Demon's Souls is, predominantly, a single-player game. It's true, certainly, that games such as Halo or Killzone have far superior multiplayer modes, because that's what they're designed for. However, this is less about gameplay and more about capturing what it means to play with hundreds of people from around the world, connected by little more than a concept. To me, the Halos and Killzones of the world certainly have the gameplay part down perfectly, but the community? Not so much. The sense of "us vs. them" that Demon's Souls encourages is inspiring and truly brilliant, and provides a multiplayer experience that feels so much more alive and engaging than your average frag-fest or action game with a forced co-op mode.
That's why Demon's Souls is the ultimate multiplayer experience, and something I don't think will be topped for quite some time.
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05:53 PM
I wish I could've played through F.E.A.R. back when it came out. I tend to get that odd motion sickness from playing old FPS games. From what I saw before I had to quit was great though. Creepy.
05:46 PM
Mass Effect, when I found a body of someone that was supposedly been dead for a long, long time, but when I looked closer, they... they were still blinking! Okay, that's more likely a glitch, but was still just a little unsettling.
08:40 PM
05:26 PM
Another thing that works for me is being able to attack me while I'm not expecting it. If I'm playing a horror game I expect the dead bodies to come to life, so that's not scary. It's in moments like Resident Evil when I first walked by a boarded up window, and then arms came out of nowhere, and grabbed me. Also when the Titan would just bust through a wall, when I was try to be very cautious.
05:15 PM
One day I'll finish it, but I refuse to commit to when.
Some people just don't dig the FF games, and don't find them scary - I have to think these are the folks who in no way, shape or form believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in zombies, so L4D and Resident Evil don't do much for me - but I seem to unconsciously believe in spirits, so playing Fatal Frame is like having an icy hand gripping my heart the whole way through.
04:31 PM
In real life, my greatest source of fear isn’t about physical danger, it's about disruptions of mind and thought. Loss of self-control, delusion, reality around me dissolving into incomprehensible chaos because I’ve lost my ability to reason- THAT’S terror. That’s helplessness.
So, I’ve been advancing through the game for a while- but now my straightforward, comprehensible, and above all rational (by Kojima standards) military adventure has been yanked away. People I’ve trusted and grown accustomed to suddenly have different personalities and are saying things that make no sense. Normal, comfortable, predictable conventions of reality (like the Game Over screen) are suddenly confusing and not behaving as they should. I’m being told I’m not really who I think I am and that my identity may be a delusion. The lines between reality and fantasy are blurring or collapsing entirely, both within the universe of the game (suggestions that Raiden is actually in VR) and beyond it (the Colonel telling Raiden to turn the game off).
I found it incredibly creepy and unsettling. I’m being attacked by terrorists or soldiers or a portly mad bomber on roller-skates- fine. I can evade physical attacks. I can kill them before they kill me. There’s nothing to dodge or run from or kill when rational, comprehensible reality itself is falling apart around me.
04:12 PM
I had opted to play with the radio always on. The static sound in my mind equated with nearby fiends. And yet, with the radio static going haywire, I could not see any monsters as I made my way down this linear path. Not in front of me, nor behind me. Yet the damn radio would not shut up.
All of a sudden (as most everything is) what I could only describe as a shadow dropped from the top of the screen, roared and slashed at me, and then pulled itself back up, within the span of a second.
And that, my friends, scared the ever loving shit out of me. It had not once crossed my mind that there would be any enemies on the ceiling. I ran to the end of that damn sewer as fast as the character's running speed could. And I never looked back.
I agree with most everything everyone has said here. A game's unique ability to immerse the player in it's world through interactivity overall trumps anything a traditional motion picture could ultimately provide in terms of horror, even if the title isn't specifically a "horror" game. Anytime a game yanks away freedoms you had previously been given, anytime you expect to encounter something, and then you never do.
Heh. ^o^ I love this entertainment medium.
03:12 PM
Fatal Frame scares me. They make you play the roll of a Japanese girl... so talk about your sense of vulnerability. To top it off, the only way to fight the ghosts in the game is to look at them through the claustrophobic lens of a camera and take their photo. Very weird and intimate and scary. Your impulse is to run, but you have to stand there and focus on these things as they are coming after you.
There was a point where I was standing outside the door to a room. I had to go into the room to continue the game but I was too afraid because I didn't know what would be in there... but I knew it would be bad. I finally sucked it up, jerked open the door and ran in at full speed. Not that I could outrun the triggered event... but that's where my state of mind was. I have yet to finish the game. I'm too much of a wuss.
I've gotten some good fear out of the Resident Evil series, but that's more a sense of jeopardy and "BOO!" scary than lingering dread. I'd say my number two scariest game was Eternal Darkness. What with the insanity meter and all, that game will screw you up.
02:42 PM
Then there's scary. Where something jumps out and scares you, like the early Resident Evil games.
A game that scares me is Gears of War. When I play multiplayer execution. It's just me and another guy left. Who I know is a good sniper and I can't find him. I get nervous because at any moment my head could get sniped off. When it's happened. It's scares the shit out of me!
02:36 PM
Random scares just don't work for me. I don't crap my pants when a monster suddely jumps down from the ceiling or something like that.
But bioshock had a terrific atmosphere, fantastically unsetteling and uncomfortable. Every step in rapture was a step with caution cause you could allways hear the danger, and the moment you didn't hear annything there was suddenly a creapy doctor standing behind you scaring the living hell out of you.
Just thinking about it makes me want to go back (L)
02:46 PM
There was that one part in Bioshock. That I'm sure scared a lot of people here. The now infamous part, where the room fills up with smoke or something. When you turn around, one of those medical doctors with the surgical mask is just staring at you. Scared the crap out of me the first time.
01:10 PM
Rosemary's Baby is always an example I give of a really effective horror film that doesn't rely on any of the slasher/monster movie tropes. In that film you really don't see anything shocking, there are no moments intended to make you jump, and on the surface everything looks perfectly normal. But as you watch it, little things seem a bit..off, and you slowly begin to question what you're seeing. For me at least, there was one point in that film when I has a moment of horrific realisation and I understood what was really going on. The chill down my spine stayed with me for days after I saw the film. I think if I was a woman I might have struggled to watch all the way to the end. Anyone who's seen it will probably understand what I mean.
Plenty of games have made me jump and throw my controller or mouse in shock. Those dogs through the windows in Resident Evil, the bear in the barn in Tomb Raider, everything looming out of the darkness in Doom 3 - these all provide shocks that, for what they're worth, are pretty extreme. But I think they are all lacking something.
For me, Silent Hill 2 is the game that comes closest to creating that genuinely troubling sense of unease that a film like Rosemary's Baby manages, or that you get when you hear the details of some particularly disturbing real-life event. Silent Hill 2 is fantastically atmospheric, uses lighting and sound to creep you out and to make you jump out of your seat, but it has something more than that. Once you begin to understand the subtext of the environment you are in, and the symbolism of the obstacles you face, you realise that the real horror isn't what you're playing through on a second-by-second basis, but the underlying truth that gives that experience its nature.
Zombie dogs are one thing, but the psychology and history of James Sunderland is far, far worse as far as I'm concerned.
01:03 PM
Cause you have no idea what going to happen do you? There might suddenly come a screaming monster scaring you out of your pants, OR the worst thing... The static, scaring you out of your pants and into a new pair just so you get scared out of those too!
I love and hate that feeling. I've finally overcome my habit of pressing pause when a game scares me, so I can recollect after the shock. Now, I keep playing, scared out of my mind, not thinking clearly and fighting a zombie or whatnot, wasting valuable ammunition on blind shots, like it would be in real life!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, partners in crime and fanboys/ fangirls; Is what I mean makes a videogame scary!
01:02 PM
12:59 PM
I also freaked out falling out of the boat in RE4 fighting the giant fish thing. The camera from the fish's viewpoint gave it a great cinematic feel.
Several of my friends also started Bioshock but were too scared to finish it. Though I didn't ask why its fairly obvious what made it the case:atmosphere.
12:56 PM
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12:35 PM
I liked Dead Space well enough, but once I'd died a few times, replayed sections of a level, and seen all the enemies (or enough of them to know what the rest were going to be like), there was just no tension.
The one gaming moment that really stands out to me comes from the first Gears of War of all things. You may hate it, but the art style, lighting, and overall bleakness really set up the first encounter with the huge brute horde guy for me. The whole situation was out in left field since things in the game are tense, but you are fighting back...
The giant brute, however, couldn't be hurt, and he really jumps at you the first time with that charge that breaks down walls and has you scrambling.
It was one of the few gaming experiences that honestly raised my heartbeat.
12:25 PM
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12:21 PM
System Shock 2, on the other hand, is really scary. BioShock is decently tense too.
12:58 PM
12:17 PM
-Grainy disturbing flashbacks
-Rumble support
-Background music or lack of background music
I think Fatal Frame captured the scary factor for me!
12:34 PM
Also, the camera battle system is just plain fun.
12:13 PM
12:19 PM
Thats not something we talk about...
*quiver
12:31 PM
That, or when you overwrite your sole save in an inescapable room or inches from inevitable death. .<
12:13 PM
Half way through Dead Space, I actually started laughing. Instead of cautiously progressing, I would run down corridors while in my mind shouting "LEEEEROOOOOY JENKKIIIINS". It wasn't even slightly scary after that.
The same thing happened on Condemmed, as I would be actually actively trying to hunt down enemies, pitying them as I smashed their faces in with a pipe.
However, give me the curveball that was the first Flood encounter on Halo, and my hands were practically shaking in worry of what was killing all of these enemies.
12:15 PM
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