Dark Souls - Multiplayer Mechanics

Gamasutra is hosting a new article from Alex Wawro about Dark Souls multiplayer mechanics. He also goes on to say other games are copying then now.

There's something terrifying, in a very primal sense, about the way total strangers invade your world in Dark Souls.

The first time it happened to me, I almost quit the game. The hair on the back of my neck prickled with fear that another human being was in the game -- and somewhere, somehow, they were doing their best to take me out.

Over time I came to relish the thrill of being hunted, and it seems I'm not alone. Popularized by From Software’s Souls games, the concept of players invading each other’s games has inspired developers around the industry to come up with interesting new ways of blurring the lines between single-player and multiplayer experiences. 

From big-budget 2014 debuts like Watch Dogs to more contemporary projects like Dying Light, developers seem excited to pick up what From Software is laying down and play around with ways to inject similar levels of tension and uncertainty into their own work.

But that entails answering a very critical question: what is it about the way Souls games implement player invasions that make them so compelling, and how do you make it work in other contexts?