Demon's Souls and Internet's Guides

I have been dealing with the worst “writer’s block” this past week. I spent the whole week trying to settle on a topic and wound up starting and stopping more articles than will probably ever see the light of day on this blog. And then I started playing Demon's Souls and had a random thought about the role of online guides. So that's why this article is a couple days late.

In addition to the many other unanswered questions of Demon's Souls's narrative,
 I still want to know why the knight on the box art has beak armor.

Saying that online guides for games are ubiquitous these days is like saying the sky is blue. Whereas once upon a time, a person had to rely on hear-say and magazines like "Nintendo Power" for videogame hints and cheats, modern websites like GameFAQs have cultivated strategy guides for nearly every game ever made. A quick Google search can turn up everything from level maps, to bug fixes, to step-by-step guides for beating almost any game on any difficulty. Often these guides are ready within weeks of the Game's release. And as anyone who has bought a new game at GameStop can attest, there is a good chance they will try to sell you the published guide to go along with the game.

Why does Final Fantasy XIII need a strategy guide when the entire game
consists of running down a linear hallway?

But can there be a game where the sharing of secrets, tips, and tricks by concurrent but separate players—or even players who have long since come and gone—is not only expected but necessary for individual improvement? And more over, can it be thematically important? Enter Demon’s Souls, a game which I have only started playing recently and which spawned these questions.

For those of you who are not aware, Demon’s Souls is a fantasy RPG, released in 2009 which quickly became renowned for its unflinching difficulty. The game developed a cult following and has maintained a dedicated enough community for two pseudo-sequels to be developed and for its publisher to continue supporting its servers years after release. I have been meaning to play Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls for some time but never got around to it until recently when a friend loaned me his copy and I began bumbling through my first five hours of embarrassing incompetence.

The narrative is at once astoundingly simple and damn near incomprehensible: An evil fog swept over the kingdom of Boletaria, which cut the city off from the outside world and brought a bunch of soul hungry demons along for the ride. Warriors from all over entered the fog but none have returned. The player character is one such warrior. Yet the game’s intro throws so much jargon at you it is impossible to keep straight without a notebook, as can be seen in the game's intro cinematic. 

Any Demon's Souls players will be familiar with this screen.

Demon’s Souls takes a similar approach to its tutorial in that it throws basic movement and combat controls at you bet gives no hint as to how the underlying systems work. The game is also not above positioning its bad-guys in areas where the player will not see them until their health bar is already half-way devoured, which is where the crowd sourcing elements of Demon’s Souls comes in. The game features an online component where the player can see the spirits of other players who are playing simultaneously but cannot interact with them. There are also randomly placed blood patches which can be activated to see how another anonymous player died. Players can also leave little pre-scripted messages for others like “beware enemy ahead,” “use fire ahead,” “walk here,” and “new players should avoid this area.” The player can also use certain stones to summon up phantom players to help them out. The explanation for the messages and phantoms is that the players are all in the same world, working towards the same goal, but are separated into different dimensions. 

Good thing this game isn't on Xbox Live or those few characters might
contain every possible racial slur that XBXn00bPwnR could think of.

Concurrent users separated by insurmountable distance yet are able to anonymously assist or antagonize one another sounds a lot like the internet. In this context, the real-world internet becomes an extension of the game’s network of player interaction. Most of Demon’s Souls’ secrets—such as how certain souls can be used to create certain items, or how a number of the game’s core mechanics work—require either a ridiculous amount of trial and error or an online guide

I have trouble believing the relationship Demon’s Souls and online guides is unintentional. The game itself is already built around the idea of limited, anonymous, player interaction. It also features an encyclopedic amount of lore which is only revealed to the players in disconnected snippets of dialogue and item descriptions. From Software’s other titles, Armored Core and Chrome Hounds, also feature extremely complex systems yet withhold information from the player like Smaug hordes gold. Yet Demon’s Souls never breaks emersion and says “go check the guide.” Through its mechanics it still gives the player all the tools they need to get through the game and more. Speed runners have proven that Dark Souls can be beaten in about two hours, and that is not because the game is poorly designed but because it applies its rules fairly. Both Demon’s and Dark Souls are difficult but they are also fair. Demon’s Souls has a very strict set of rules which it applies universally to all foes. Once those rules are understood, then the player can exploit them and excel. Unlike other games where exploiting the system would be a sign of poor design, Demon’s Souls encourages exploitation because the monsters also exploit the rules too. There are more monsters than their are players and the monsters fight dirty so the player is encouraged to fight dirty to level the playing field. 

I have no idea what this fat demon is but it should probably check
the nutritional value of all those souls.

For me, Demon’s Souls opened up when I started researching; when I sought the help of those anonymous warriors who toiled away in their alternate dimensions. So my quandary is whether the out-of-game construction of a knowledge base is something that a developer can design for or whether I am just trying to cover up for the fact that I suck at Demon’s Souls? I lean towards the former because Demon’s Souls builds crowd sourcing into its mechanics and its narrative is primarily delivered through lore snippets, which encourage encyclopedic observation. Its rules and systems encourage replay, prior-knowledge, and exploitation, while also never letting the player forget that they are not alone in their individual struggles.