Opinion - Stop Copying Dark Souls

GameRevolution asks for more variety in action games and says the Dark Souls formula is overdone.

It's not as if these games are all hitting it out of the park either. Recent release Code Vein saw praise from many reviewers (including our own) about how it strips the frustration out of the experience, but frustration is also noted as a definitive quality of the Souls-like game. Games should be accessible to all, but it seems like lowering the difficulty of purposefully difficult games is the backwards solution to the issue. If you want to make a game of this type for a wider audience, there are plenty of ways to do it and sanding off the edges this much shouldn't be it. Just doing that and not much else is not how to push a genre forward and doesn't allow for as much healthy variety that a genre needs to evolve. Genres and subgenres exist for a reason, and developers would do well to remember that rather than copying what's already there. There's probably room for a less difficult Souls game but it's a bit creatively disappointing if that's one of the few aspects it offers to the genre.
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Finally someone dared to say the obvious!! It's about time the action games industry to move forward, instead of playing it safe by copying/emulating Dark Souls over and over. It's time to try and do something new, much like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls once did.

Sounds like a guy that just doesn't like difficult games. Which is fine but if we all call for a stop to things we don't like they'll be no games left.

Also the term souls like is widely misused. Not every Hard game with action combat is souls like. I mean people are calling 2d sidescroller souls like or Darkmaus a souls like. It's just silly.

Other than from software they're aren't a lot of devs making true souls like games. Lords of the fallen and the 2 surge games were truly souls like. so was nioh, but games like ashen, salt and sanctuary and the like just aren't.

There's definitely more BG, Xcom and diablo clones out there but I don't here the calls for that to stop.

He's says games should be accessible to all, which I can agree with but that doesn't mean every game needs to be accessible to everyone. There's more than enough genres and games to go around.

There's plenty of games I don't like but I don't bemoan them. I simple play the plethora of game out that appeal to me.

There's a lot of variety in the action genre, you've got your souls types, diablos, dAI, witchers and assassin creeds or elex and greedfalls, pivot to things like watchdogs, gta or the dishonored series. I don't know, there's plenty more but that already quite a few different kinds of action games imo.

I remember 15-20 years ago when I just replayed the IE games and wizardry series over and over because I just couldn't find anything else that really interested me. Today I have literally hundreds of games in my library and the majority I still need to play. So complaining about to many games of 1 kind in this landscape seems disingenuous or at the very least narrow minded.

I have to disagree with the article author.

As long as there are obvious darksouls clones at the market, there is a low chance I'm gonna buy a game only to discover it's just a bit changed darksoulsoid thus I'd have to ask for refund for a title that wouldn't exist in my games library in the first place. Save me asking for money back hassle, it's annoying.

Selfish reasons aside, tons of people of which many aren't rpg fans don't care about games that aren't dark souls clones so there is that economical side to the story. Their $ can help developers who need funds for making some variety of content rpg and the strategy can be cashing in a cheap dark souls clone instead of doing phoneware with integrated predatory scams.

I don't understand what is he complain about. As @sakichop; says above, there are not many souls like games at all.

Soul like games are subset of "action games" and we have plenty of "action games". The last two Assassin Creed games are great example of accessible action games.

I also don't get the complain about difficulty of soul likes games as well. We all have huge back logs these days so we all have something to play all the time. Its not like soul games are the only games in town. We have huge variety of games now for all tastes and difficulties.

DS has strong characteristics gameplaywise, it does not prevent players from seeing DS everywhere.
Maybe the impression of difficulty they get is linked to their inability to take into account those characteristics, leading them to try to play the game as they would any other game.

sakichop said:

Other than from software they're aren't a lot of devs making true souls like games. Lords of the fallen and the 2 surge games were truly souls like. so was nioh, but games like ashen, salt and sanctuary and the like just aren't.

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I don't know much about Ashen, but I'd definitely call Salt and Sanctuary a souls like game. But I guess everyone has a different aspect that they associate with the souls games. For me it's the souls mechanic, combined with the checkpoint mechanics and a somewhat punishing difficulty.

I like the genre so I have no problem with more games copying it. But I'd like to see games takes more chances with the formula. Particularly when it comes to story. Dark Souls made a conscious decision not to have a coherent story. It worked great for them, but it doesn't mean every souls like game needs to be like that.

henriquejr said:

Finally someone dared to say the obvious!! It's about time the action games industry to move forward, instead of playing it safe by copying/emulating Dark Souls over and over. It's time to try and do something new, much like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls once did.

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Don't fret! The exact same thing happened with Diablo. Remember the ton of clones that came out after Diable was first released? And the subsequent 15 years? I promise by 2034 Dark Souls clones will be a not-quite-distant memory!

Its an opinion piece, so heres mine.

There aren't a lot of DS-clones out there.
Majority of reviewers compare a game to a headline title partly for relevance, and partly to set up a relatable standard. Thats where the majority of DSClone language comes from.

Its like Harvest Moon for the longest time. Any game that dared put in any sort of gardening mechanic was instantly a "Harvest Moon Clone!". Although it can be argued successfully that Stardew overtook Harvest in popularity.

If there is hard combat, if there is no significant penalty for dying, its now called Darksouls Clone. Regardless of the fact that both those mechanics have been around forever.

Wisdom said:

Any game that dared put in any sort of gardening mechanic was instantly a "Harvest Moon Clone!".

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First time I'm hearing this.
I did hear about Farmville and Farmville clones. But whatever moon... No, that doesn't exist in my memory.

While the first dark souls game was interesting to me, the second and third didn't strike a spark at all. Nowadays, hearing a new game is of a similar bent is more of a cautionary to me rather than being enticing.

fadedc said:

I don't know much about Ashen, but I'd definitely call Salt and Sanctuary a souls like game. But I guess everyone has a different aspect that they associate with the souls games. For me it's the souls mechanic, combined with the checkpoint mechanics and a somewhat punishing difficulty.

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Visually I’d agree there’s definite similarities but once you start playing you realize its much different. Gameplay wise it just felt very different to me.

Combat mechanics, weapon move sets, encumbrance, poise, etc. It’s the combat that makes a souls game for me and the combat didn’t compare imo. Probably why I only lasted a few hours before losing interest in S&S despite putting thousands of hours in the souls games and what I’d consider true souls clones. I’d agree though it depends on what aspects you focus on.

sakichop said:

Visually I’d agree there’s definite similarities but once you start playing you realize its much different. Gameplay wise it just felt very different to me.

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Well it was a side scroller so it was extremely different. You just couldn't create anything close to the same level of combat depth, although there were other things about it that I liked. But it still had the features I identify as being key to a souls like. To me you can have two souls like games that play very differently from each other, just like you can have vastly different RPG or roguelike games. But as we agree on, all of these labels mean vastly different things to different people.

Wisdom said:

Any game that dared put in any sort of gardening mechanic was instantly a "Harvest Moon Clone!". Although it can be argued successfully that Stardew overtook Harvest in popularity.

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SV was crowdfunded and made by a US American, as such, it is an original product, not a copy.