Goodbye Demon’s Souls…
Many years ago, it seems like it now, a little known game was released. Demon’s Souls. After the gaming press pooped their pants with excitement, and hearing about it for many months I decided it was time to actually invest in an annoying RPG.
I say annoying because of something I decided to do around the start of 2009. I wanted to actually give some genres a chance instead of just ignoring them and playing counter-strike or rainbow six. Following that I bought Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Borderlands, and eventually Demon’s Souls. I was intrigued by ME, but it was a bit underwhelming when the ending rolled around. I was a bit interesting in how a gigantic barren field could hold my interest in fallout. I was pissed off that I spent 40+ hours playing borderlands, because it was a useless waste of time that I want back. Then came Demon’s Souls.
I spent the first night messing about the first level. Impressed at how I had unlocked two gates as a means to keep track of my progress for future playthroughs of the level, and I sat and stared at a gigantic door for 3 minutes deciding if I was going to open it. It was late, I was tired, and I had to get up for work in the morning. I decided I would give it a go and if I came into trouble turn it off and that would be the end of it for the night. I destroyed Phalanx by figuring out what I had to do, running around and avoiding damage, and needless to say I had impressed myself with actually being able to beat a boss first go around.
I thought about the game the entire day at work, couldn’t get past how much the ambiance of the world had sucked me in, had interested me, and I wanted another taste of it as soon as possible. I spent that night running around some hub world, trying to find some “monumental” who was supposed to explain how it all works. After finding an image of them online I had actually walked right past them at least 10 times. Listened to the story bit, leveled up, and awaited my next play.
That continued for a month, I would think about the game constantly, having it nag at me in the back of my mind, working through ways to get around the world and replaying the game in my head over and over. It wasn’t an obsession, it was lust. That game had something about it, something I wanted, something that brought out the best of me, the worst of me, and made me realize a lot about myself as a gamer.
I had gotten to the second boss, probably stared at the third, and I had decided to move on to a second character. I flew through the first level, got to the same spot, and tried another character. It was getting to the point where the game had little room for my tomfoolery and I had to return to my starting character.
I sat down one day, Beep… Beep… Beep…, Black. “Ugh, what now” I thought. I looked at the ps3 as I turned it on, green, yellow…. Fuck. I spent the next month waiting for the RMA to get to my door, boxing it up, calling Sony and explaining shit for the 4th time. Apparently it was going to be $150 dollars to fix my 60 gb ps3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4CASA0vlXk). My UK friend had the same thing happen a month ago to him.
Well, no worries, everything was backed up to a spare drive, I had everything in waiting, I would soon play again. I get the box, start to import the data, but apparently some of it is “protected” to stop me from stealing trophies or something. Oh great, every single game with trophies is not allowed to be imported, it is there, but I can’t import it. Thanks, Sony. Fine, I’ll just redownload every single game from psn again, patch the games, restart everything, and enjoy my Demon’s Souls.
Good, back at Phalanx and done with the first world. I even tried to remake my characters, but it wasn’t the same. I decided to just stick with my main, get as far as possible. A few months later…. Bleep Bleep Bleep, flashing red. SERIOUSLY! Alright Sony, I’m not paying you money to fix this, you obviously can’t, let me just go buy a slim and be done with heat issues. I beg my dad to take me to the store, the one that actually has it in stock, and have access to my stuff again. I spent a week redownloading all of my psn stuff, repatching every disc I had, what a wonderful “feature”. Made me miss steam, just doing shit for me.
Things got busy with school, I had gotten to the bridge again, with that stupid dragon, but I wanted to level up a bit and try to take it down. I tried for weeks, barely doing anything, magic, bows, nothing…. Oh well. I pushed on, got to the second half of the first world, practically cleared it, messed around with just about every world, and finally gotten to explore the entirety of the game it seemed. I looked into special weapons, world tendency, and I even managed to get some cool stuff during events that unlocked them. I would intentionally die on the first world in order to cause tendency, just to unlock a gate on the left side. Man that lady was hard, oh well.
I went to work that day, seemed like any other day. I got a call, little brother, “The house was broken into, they took your ps3.” WHAT! FFS, it wasn’t…. Are you serious? Hold on… I walked outside, got the details. My mom was having knee surgery, what a great time for this to happen. “It’s weird,” my brother said, “they left flowers and candy in mom’s room.” Heh, no man, those were from me. Alright, I’ll see it when I get home.
Just like that, a year long journey to enjoy a simple game was destroyed. Some asshole had taken everything, my ps3, some cables, thankfully he didn’t touch my rig. It seemed like a year and a half before insurance paid me for it…. A whopping 150 dollars, it was the 250 gb version.
I spent the next few years on steam, waiting for the time to buy a ps3 again, waiting for that moment when I would get a chance to try my hand at playing the game again. It’s been 2 years. Now I get news that there will be a sequel. Cool, but it won’t be the same. I wonder if there will be a pc port? Anyways, I wish I had my ps3 back. Back to Counter-Strike…
I spent many months, years it seems just wanting to buy the system, buy the piece of crap that died twice, that has all the shit I wanted as long as I pay them for “fixing their broken shit”. Piracy my ass, thanks Sony. I even bought Gran Turismo Collector’s edition, a strategy guide for dark souls, just to get a taste. I had to borrow a friend’s ps3 just to redeem the dlc code for GT5, so that it didn’t expire.
Annoying…
It’s strange how you can spend so much time, more time thinking about a game then actually playing it. The only reason I wrote this is because those thoughts, those experiences, that game, is changed forever. The servers are going down, it will be playable, but it won’t be the same. It has survived all this time on sheer fans dragging it to the front of people’s faces, forcing them to give it attention. Hardly any other game has done that. Heck, even got myself a PC port on the way of Dark Souls, that will be nice, but it isn’t the same, it is the original, it isn’t where it all started, not even the same company.
I guess the only way to end this is to say thanks, thanks Demon’s Souls. I’m sorry some people saw you as just a “difficult game” or something where you are “hardcore” because they play you. I’m sorry I never got the chance to find out what happens on 1-4, or at 5-2, but thanks for the memories. Thanks for taking the time to show me what some of the world has to offer, that even though the game may be an RPG, it isn’t. Even though the game has online integration, it’s something so much more. There isn’t too much I can say, except you are probably the best game this generation, probably the most important one since half-life, but no one will ever admit it. One day I’ll have a ps3, probably right after Sony decides to pull its head out of its ass, but for now… Keep enjoying the shelf. Thanks for everything…
-nabokovfan87
Improvement: Take Pride in Design!
Patching games to fix issues is nothing new. It started in the arcades with ROMs, which were updated to fix exploits, revise difficulty, and improve the overall experience for the players. This legacy continued on the PC platform, where the internet connectivity made it the perfect place to easily update games. Now we live in a console centric world where platforms like Steam are seen as useless because “PC gaming is dead” and the normal routine is to pay Microsoft and Sony for the pleasure of removing annoyingness from their broken systems. Be it cheating, exploits, game breaking bugs, or even the all encompassing “security update,” most modern patches revolve around 2 things, piracy or laziness.
Any gamer on the PS3 has experienced the following, and gotten shit from Xbox gamers because their particular platform is “far superior” to PSN. After unboxing a game, put it in the system, turn on system, install firmware update, wait 30 minutes for that to finish, launch game, new patch notice, begin patch process, 20 minutes later the patch utility restarts and installs the patch for 10 minutes. By the time this process is completed, what little time some people have for gaming is gone and “fun” must wait for the next opportunity. It is an asinine system that is built to ensure people will more than likely purchase the proprietary “subscription” service for either console in order to not put up with bullshit.
Xbox gamers can say Xbox live is better, but let us all stop pretending. When I play my games on PC I turn the PC on, check my email, check the news, and I more often than not immediately get a popup indicating that a few of my games were patched. Imagine that, a system where developers use the internet to send things to their consumers easily, quickly, and without someone else prohibiting what used to be a seamless exchange. There is no need for a long and drawn out “approval process.” Those hardly ever improve anything and are only intended to make console gamers wait for shit and pad Microsoft and Sony’s bottom line demonstrating how “useful” they are to developers. Microsoft’s uselessness has even found its way onto PC, in the form of GFWL. It is amazing how the same games can come out on entirely different platforms, no matter the audience size, and how much bullshit one group will put up with. That is the passion the designers should have.
Console games used to be designed for cartridges, where the fabrication of the games themselves was expensive and final. Games had to be perfect, if they were not, there was no going back, no revision, and no way to “fix” lazy mistakes. As a child, those were just bad games, now we see popular games like Street Fighter IV and others with revisions on release day awaiting the player.
I used to be on the PS3 side of things, but after having my 6th one stolen and being told by Sony I had to wait a year to play my games because “I had previously deauthorized my accounts in the past year.” #4 and #5 were YLODs and #2 and #3 were shipped incorrectly during the RMA process, which damaged them. That is on top of losing my saves more than three times for extremely difficult games like Demon’s Souls, all thanks to hardware encryption rules which are used to “prevent piracy” or as I like to call it, “more bullshit.” Needless to say I have enjoyed being forced to only play my games on the PC side of things, it has made me appreciate the ease of use with the interface and not having to put up with categories or blades, but being able to sort things easily as I see fit.
I enjoy picking what server I want to join, what map, game type, and rules I want to play with in Counter-Strike. If CS had the same setup as Halo and Gears, all that would be played is Dust2, nothing else. No gun game would exist, no zombie mode, no surf, no anti-Awp/Auto servers, no beginner servers, no servers with different player limits, no arena servers, no standard map only servers, and more importantly everyone would have to put up with stupid amounts of lag because they never get to choose which region their server exists in, that being if they were even given the option of having a server at all. It is a luxurious experience to simply have things work the way they should, and while Steam has many issues, it is a vast improvement over PSN patching and paying for half the game over in Xbox land.
This is not just an issue for the provider, it is an issue for the development of games as well. Skyrim has had quests that have been broken and would lead to the loss of saves, loss of quest completion, loot, ability to progress further in the game, as well as many others. TF2 has been practically remade in a different light, patched over 250 times into a game that is now about hats rather than strategy. It is standard practice to release a game, and day of release require an initial patch before actually playing the game. I am sure anyone could Google some form of “most broken game, worst patch, or release day woes” and find hundreds of thousands of pages filled with users complaining about that very subject. These all occur because patches are no longer about improving the user experience, or adding to the game, it is about fixing what is broken, and was released in half-playable condition. The best way to improve a game, franchise, series, and platform is to hold the people making the game responsible. If you take pride in your work, if you do it to the best of your ability, it will result in amazing user experiences like Demon’s Souls, Half Life, and F.E.A.R.
Now we move to the all important topic of the month it seems, piracy. Sopa and Pipa, Oh… Pipa, popularized the whole anti-antipiracy sentiment because consumers were against a system whereby some overseer was able to dictate whether or not they had access to something. Sound familiar Mr. Microsoft and Sony? It is funny how consumers cannot hack devices to put free games on them, fix broken firmware, or just flat out improve the functionality of a device, but it is OK for the same group demanding the previous activity be stopped to lock users out of basic fixes and flat out hold them out of multiplayer for an entire platform unless they pay a fee. I am going to guess you can see where this is going, you think I am going to rant about how piracy is not evil and how the world should simply allow it to exist?
Well, no, I have been living in a world of piracy for many decades now. One currently where it is easiest to simply Google a game name and have an ISO download link immediately, that works for every console, not just PC games folks. While you can blame PCs for all of the piracy, it is quite clear that torrent websites have been attacked by trojans, congressmen, angry developer letters, and police raids all of which have more than curbed piracy of large files like games. The addition of digital download platforms has put the nail in the coffin for the common gamer as well. The rest of those whom pirate PC games are simply the hardcore hackers, pirates, and vermin that will never pay for anything if they can get it for free, it is a psychological barrier, not one that software and hardware based DRM will help to break. Again, I am not vouching for it, I am simply stating facts.
These both culminate with what amounts to two separate platforms where the driving force for updating is to stop piracy or fix bugs that should have been caught by anyone who actually played the game prior to release. Instead, games are designed to a deadline, an insane deadline that encourages the “we will fix it later” mindset. The single best way to improve the gaming experience, simply stop being lazy and stop being all about prohibiting users. As Jim pointed out, the best way to fix piracy is to simply provide a better experience. Steam has done this. Indie titles like Beat Hazard, blockbusters like Demon’s Souls, user supported games like Frozen Synapse, and even Kickstarter projects like Abandoned all put the game above any sort of anti-piracy or laziness. Fans have directly supported all of these things with community feedback, monetary support, word of mouth, and in some cases direct design discussions with users. These games may take a bit of extra time, but there is nothing better than word of mouth and customers doing the marketing to sell a game.
It is all about making the single best possible experience available to the player. I think many game developers, platform holders, and even gamers forgot about that a long time ago. It is not about making something for money, fame, or to be better than the person next to you, the reason certain games will always be considered good, and the reason games are around today, is because those games have the heart and soul of every person that worked on it and every time you launch the game you can see the passion on the screen.
