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[Jintor]

I don't know if this will prompt too much discussion, but I very much enjoyed reading this article on the coherency of the architecture and world design of Demons and Dark Souls. I think it's very well written and really captures what makes them such amazing places to explore.

In 2009, a game called Demon’s Souls came out with minor fanfare and just happened to have some of the best level design ever. Its first intentionally visited place, the Boletarian palace — a massive, medieval type of imperial labyrinth, or Forbidden City — devoted itself to establishing a contiguous form and compounding its mass through the sheer, varied density of routes. A later site exhibited a diseased splaying out of makeshift platforms, walkways, and huts in a black, moldering valley. The precariousness of this architectural performance was grotesque, ambiguous, and consuming.

Navigation in Demon’s Souls flows from a hub housing the entry points to individuated locales, or “worlds”, each with their own checkpoints. Differently, Dark Souls presents a totally interconnected landmass whose zones’ layouts often have the spirit of those in Demon’s. It’s in this distinction that a stronger connection can made from Super Metroid to Dark Souls. We are, however, still within generalizations.

It’s worthwhile to tend to Demon’s Souls for a while, though, because it stands as the main model of influence for Dark Souls. From just a once-an-observer’s perspective, I took several principle impressions away from Demon’s Souls’ level design, and they’re impressions I still hold as someone who has now gone through the game’s entirety. One principle was that points of spatial epiphany were built into the worlds. These directed the player towards a conscious view of the architecture. In a later part of the aforementioned valley, where the environment has transitioned to a ground of swamp, thorough players might follow a series of cliffside paths and vaulted boardwalks all the way to a raised plank that could be lowered. This allowed quicker, easier access to the valley’s penultimate enemy. Shortcuts like these often appeared in much the same way one might suddenly find themselves on a familiar street after having, for the sake of a new experience, followed a series of roads different from the usual. As a consequence, Demon’s Souls’ shortcuts — often pure surprises, thanks to the lack of a map and areas’ labyrinthine traits — afforded a twofold-pleasure: they were a reward of convenience for having struggled through the preceding gauntlet, and they further actualized how the places were built.

Additionally, Demon’s Souls ran counter to an extant strain of design in action-adventure games that draws a distinguishing line between “combative spaces” and “non-combative spaces.” The least gratifying cases of this strain induce a monotonous awareness of compartmentalization, of there being a manner of space for fights — most often resembling an arena accommodating the spectacle of performance (God of War and its progeny come to mind) — and a manner of space for sites between fights. What made Demon’s Souls a categorical outlier was that conflict could happen anywhere; and that, when conflict did happen, the architecture supplemented it.

A player’s awareness here was of a sort of realism to the environments that were, nevertheless, designed to an almost obsessive degree of exactitude. Near the start of one world, players could reach a parapeted walkway guarded by skeletal archers. Doing so showed that the archers were flanked by another skeleton that rushed in with spiny rolls and sword swipes. A memorable dynamic suddenly emerged: dealing with the swordsman, positioning oneself so that the archers’ arrows were blocked by parapets, and minding the arrows of a distant sniper from an opposite direction. Later on, this swordsman-type appeared in narrow, underground corridors, frustrating the assumption that one would always find them in more open spaces, and necessitating a change of combative strategy.

Miraculously, this happened all over. On more action-bound terms, the game realized a quality of Super Metroid’s (and other excellent games&#8217 level design — that of “…developers understanding what they had on their hands, mechanically, taking a few base elements off the shelf, and then cleverly splitting up those atoms again and again in […] permutations. Rather than having a bunch of plain rooms with a few exhibiting centralized, showy set-pieces that drown out the rest in favor of being The Point, or having every spot be suffocatingly feature-crammed, everything just flows into the next without reserved preciousness.” Regardless of the actual creative process, Demon’s Souls’ environments didn’t feel as though they’d been designed as hell-houses first and given a fantastical laminate second. Their interrelating roots ran deep.

This effect is pulled off with the most reverberating results by the aforementioned Arch Tree. Compounding descent — the process of going deeper into the earth and finding out that there is yet another level below — is one of Dark Souls’ environmental themes, notably derived from the dungeon crawler mold (a genre whose very name is evocative of the theme). In an interview, Dark’s creative director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, stated:

“. . . we wanted players to feel like there was no end to the hole or how far down you could go. The idea was to have a stage that was called something like The Bottom Of The World, but then you find out that there’s an even lower level, and then another even lower level, and after you beat that boss then there’s still another level below. We wanted players to experience the surprise of not knowing where the world ends.”

When players have obtained a certain key, they may access the burg’s lower portion and, with another key, the Depths. On the sewer’s bottom floor is the proper entrance to Blighttown: a vast, demented corset of scaffolding based upon Demon’s Souls’ analog location. Blighttown leads down to a swamp punctuated by massive columns that support structures players may have seen during their earliest travels above. At one end of the swamp stands the Arch Tree. One of its large roots can be run up, trailing to a concave bit of the trunk that houses a desiccated corpse. Swiping at the wall next to the corpse reveals a hidden room. One more swipe at a wall in this room reveals an entrance to the Great Hollow, a winding descent along spiraling branches and roots beneath what you thought was the base of the tree, now shown to be a hollowed continuation of the organism.

Although the second false wall is the same as the first, it’s wildly secretive: the typical player will be less likely to strike at it because one secret has preceded it (and nowhere else in the game is one false wall followed up by another), and because it is more awkwardly positioned — right behind a treasure chest. At the Great Hollow’s end, one does not emerge from the shaft into darkness. Instead, there is a geographical reset that is the Ash Lake. Whitish mounds of ash rise and fall among a boundless body of black water, and trees like godly chimneys stand atop the waterscape’s horizon. The hazy, green sky above is obscured by a rippling sheet of clouds. You have discovered a world beneath a world. The mind reels.

Props to Wildgoose for linking me.

 

[TrutaS]

Thanks for the link. It's very nice to see my own thoughts on why the Souls series are special so well written and described by someone else.

I hope they never shy away from developing worlds with this level of attention - Souls games for me are all about getting to know the world, and the difficulty is just there to make you notice it.

 

[Dominic_Shade]

Thank you so much for linking this piece. I've always had trouble articulating the excellence of the Souls series' level design beyond "it makes you think lots durr", and this author lays it out perfectly. I'm certainly going to re-read this in the future and pass it around to my friends.