Scratching An Itch

So I have been playing a lot of Dark Souls lately and it has been scratching an itch that I didn't know needed scratching. While not a perfect game, Dark Souls does a lot of things right. It has excellent atmosphere, well designed monsters and environments, and a lore that requires its players to piece things together rather than spoon feeding all of the information. Dark Souls doesn't hold the hand of the player and guide them through the game, it encourages exploration and clever thinking.

Most games will take a lot of time to make sure the player knows all the ins and outs of the game and the difficulty will slowly ramp up. This is good, but so many games follow this path its nice to play a game that assumes you can figure it out. Dark Souls tutorial is a bunch of signs in its first area, and that is it. Nothing forces you to read them, but they are glowing so they are hard to miss so its kinda your fault if you don't bother with them and can't figure the game out. After it tells you how to play it just lets you run free.

That's not to say that tutorials aren't good, god knows I wouldn't get through a lot of games without them, but making them a mandatory and drawn out part of the game seems excessive. Pokemon games for instance, haven't changed much, but they all make you go through a tutorial on how to catch pokemon. You can't say "no thanks, I know how to do that" you have to sit back and watch a NPC do a pokemon battle. I get that if you don't know how to play it, this is useful information, but forcing players to go through it seems like a waste of time.

Skyrim, a game that I also love, does the same thing with its tutorial. Its like 10-20 minutes long and unskippable.  If I just want to wander around adventuring I need to go through a lot of shit just to do so. Luckily mods fix that issue, but it shouldn't have to be modded out.

I know this is a stupid thing to complain about, but the worst parts of many good games are the stuff like this. As I said before, Dark Souls is far from perfect, but I like that it doesn't guide you through the experience, it gives you a world and says "Explore!". Then it kills you over and over and over again.

By the by, if you want to know about another game that does the same thing: Dragon's Dogma. Its a fun game with some great monster design and has some of the best boss fights I have played in an action RPG (You can climb a dragon and stab it in the fucking heart, its balls out).