Dark Souls
Let’s pretend Dark Souls didn’t lead to a wave of games where difficulty was the main draw.
Let’s pretend that it didn’t establish a genre all its own where paying attention to its mechanics was crucial to success and that it served as a measuring stick most every challenging game has been compared against for years now.
Even without these elements taken into account, there are several parts of the game that made it influential and revolutionary.
Case in point: Dark Souls set a new bar for environmental storytelling, with details and important plot points hidden in item descriptions, the location and behavior of characters and even the layout and terrain of its different areas.
And that’s only if players dove into the game on their own. When the game’s multiplayer mechanics were taken into account, it allowed for cooperation and teamwork to overcome challenges as often as it allowed one to sadistically mess with strangers.
It was the kind of experience that people immediately knew was special, and it has continued to prove this notion true with the legacy it established and the legions of developers and fans who sing its praises and seek to emulate it respectively.
