Chapter 555: Thunderbolt Interactive: The Dark God Factory!
Shortly after the release of "Dark Souls" and "Knight's Glory," major gaming media outlets both domestically and internationally began publishing game reviews. To everyone's surprise, even in Europe and America, "Dark Souls" achieved overwhelming success!
The European and American game review media praised "Dark Souls" even more fiercely than their domestic counterparts, leaving many players puzzled—just how much money did Chen Mo stuff into their pockets?
Some European and American gaming outlets even gave "Dark Souls" near-perfect scores, especially in areas like the combat system, level design, and world-building, offering extremely high praise. Some media outlets called "Dark Souls" "an unparalleled masterpiece of cold weapon combat design," even hailing Thunderbolt Interactive as the "Dark God Factory!"
As a flood of game reviews continued to emerge, players were astonished to discover that even in Europe and America, "Knight's Glory" was completely crushed by "Dark Souls." Whether in professional reviews, player ratings, or sales, "Dark Souls" had comprehensively surpassed "Knight's Glory," and the trend was still on the rise!
With more and more professional reviews coming out, many players began to understand where the unique charm of "Dark Souls" truly originated.
It must be said that ordinary players focus more on the experience and feelings they get from the game, while professional media outlets analyze the design of a game more precisely, often emphasizing artistic value and design techniques.
After analyzing "Dark Souls," gaming media summarized its strengths into three aspects.
The first is the extremely rich combat system. "Dark Souls" features a vast variety of cold weapons, including many that couldn't possibly exist in reality, each with its own usage. Players can choose daggers or straight swords for speed and agility, or greatswords and hammers for damage. However, different weapons have different characteristics, and no matter what weapon you use, there will be corresponding weaknesses that must be compensated for with good player skill.
This stands in stark contrast to "Knight's Glory," which, though based on real combat, has very monotonous combat mechanics, often testing the player's reaction time and character stats. In "Dark Souls," however, there are many combat techniques. Players can even interrupt an enemy's attack by preemptively striking, while utilizing special mechanics like parrying, rolling, backstabbing, and finishing moves, making the entire combat system incredibly rich.
The second is the pinnacle of level design. The mainstream level design in this world is still driven by numerical values—monsters become stronger mainly because their stats increase. Many game companies even try to cut corners with algorithms, randomly respawning monsters and assigning them stats based on the player's progress to create a sense of randomness.
But in this model, the player's experience becomes extremely tedious. As long as the player's stats can overpower the monsters in a level, it's just a matter of hacking and slashing through. If the player's stats aren't up to par, combat becomes painful, and even good technique struggles to get through.
"Dark Souls," however, chose a different path: meticulously planning every single monster in each level. Although monsters respawn randomly within a small range, the overall configuration remains fixed. Combined with the monsters' unique traits and carefully designed traps, challenging a level feels like solving a puzzle.
Do you lure them out one by one? Use the terrain to kill them in a specific way? Or equip certain gear and just charge straight in? Different players have different methods, but not every method works. Players must repeatedly experiment to find the optimal solution for that level.
At the same time, the design where all monsters respawn after resting at a bonfire greatly increases the difficulty but also maximizes the integrity of this level design. If monsters didn't respawn, players could just slowly grind through one by one and eventually clear the level, but that clearly wasn't the original intent of "Dark Souls."
"Dark Souls" wants players to perfectly solve the puzzle, moving from one bonfire to the next with limited health and healing flasks. This level design, while extremely difficult and even despairing for many, ensures that the level experience in "Dark Souls" remains at an exceptionally high standard, without any compromise.
Moreover, "Dark Souls" is popular not because it's hard, but because it's hard in a meaningful way. The game's significance isn't about suffering itself, but about the sense of achievement that comes after the suffering. In other games, the player's character grows; in "Dark Souls," the player themselves grows.
At the start, a player might need to chug an Estus Flask just to deal with a single skeleton, but later, they can sprint through an entire area to the boss room and achieve a speed kill. From a newbie to a veteran, the player's character might not have become much stronger, but the player themselves have genuinely improved.
The charm of "Dark Souls" level design lies in the fact that it doesn't deliberately torment players. Instead, it guides them through repeated failures, encouraging them to try different methods until they find the most suitable way to clear the level.
At the same time, "Dark Souls" takes the allure of exploration to the extreme. Although it's not an open-world game, "Dark Souls" allows players to explore multiple routes. Different areas have different difficulty levels, and "Dark Souls" doesn't force players to follow a specific path. For example, some veterans, after defeating the second boss, might kill the old woman to face the Dancer and enter the high-level area of Lothric Castle.
Additionally, the nooks and crannies of the map are filled with hidden items, which in turn conceal the unknown history of "Dark Souls." Through these fragmentary item descriptions, players can piece together the stories behind them and the entire world background of "Dark Souls."
The third is the game's unique identity. Although many people had some understanding of dark fantasy games as early as the "Diablo" era, it's clear that the release of "Dark Souls" pushed the concept of dark fantasy games forward by a huge step!
Genius remembers this site's address in one second: