Dark Souls
Dark Souls was a real earthquake for the entire gaming industry. We are talking about a title that has allowed From Software to rightfully enter the Olympus of the most popular software houses in modern times, as well as having created a real line of games called Souls-like. Precisely for this reason Dark Souls is a title that is still a lot played and much loved by fans, who show appreciation in various ways.To celebrate one of the most important games of the latest videogame generations, youtuber EsinReborn has recreated the well-known undead hamlet area of Dark Souls in Unreal Engine 4. From the video published online, we see how the famous village shines with a new light in this new fan-made version. In addition to the classic architecture, the style has also been respected, giving us a map faithful to the original aspect of the From Software title.
This fan-made map is not only beautiful but the youtuber has also added a whole series of physical effects, which means that the player can destroy small objects, just like in the original Dark Souls. In addition, EsinReborn has implemented some basic user interface icons, an inventory system and a very basic 3D model that allows players to move and fight in the setting played in Unreal Engine 4.
The video starring this fan-made creation shows us amply how the whole undead village of the first Dark Souls was recreated by this enthusiast. A truly fascinating and successful work, which shows us how much the From Software title would appear beautiful to look at even using the Unreal Engine 4.
Waiting for Elden Ring, you can retrieve Sekiro Shadow Die Twice on Amazon at this address, or you can book your copy of the new From game on Amazon at this address.
Death's Door Creators on How Their Game Embraces and Rejects the Legacy of Dark Souls
When David Fenn and Mark Foster, the two halves of Acid Nerve, released Titan Souls in 2015, a lot of critics and players uttered the common refrain that's now become a bit of a joke in gaming circles: 'It's like Dark Souls.'
'I mean, we were kind of asking for that,' Fenn tells me, referring to the names of the two games being rather similar. 'We actually came up with it in the 30 minutes before the deadline for the game jam it was originally part of, and we just never got around to changing the name.'
Foster and Fenn are hearing similar comparisons with Death’s Door, which launched on Xbox and PC last month. Like Titan Souls before it, Dark Souls is once again coming up as a comparison point, usually nodding at the game's gothic atmosphere and challenging combat. But it's also getting a lot of Zelda comparisons, given that the two are both top-down adventure games with some tonal and structural similarities.
'I think every game gets compared to Dark Souls now,' Foster says. 'There's always a way to compare it to Dark Souls, or anything, really. You can always kind of compare any game to any other game because they're all games at the end of the day.'
Have you played Bloodborne?
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I had originally reached out to Fenn and Foster having loved my playthrough of Death's Door and seen the many comparisons, wondering if they had any particular thoughts on the repetitive joke of a refrain of 'It's like Dark Souls' when Death's Door was so clearly a distinct piece of work. What I learned from the pair was that while they aren't bothered by the comparisons, Death's Door is inseparable from the legacy of the classics that came before it, both in its similarities but also, more importantly, in the ways in which it challenges player expectations of the games it invokes.
We came up with [the name for Titan Souls] in the 30 minutes before the deadline for the game jam it was originally part of.“
Foster and Fenn originally met at a games event in Nottingham, where they lined up to see Fez creator Phil Fish. Upon discovering they were both game makers from Manchester, they started doing local game jams together until, as they describe it, one thing led to another and they had a publishing deal with Devolver Digital for Titan Souls.
The two quickly found comradery in their mutual love of polish and attention to detail. While game jam games tend to be rough on purpose — the goal is usually to conceive and develop a functional, usually unpolished game in a short amount of time — Foster says the pair would often spend half their limited time making a game, and the other half polishing. It's a tendency that comes through in Death's Door, which is replete with details like sign posts that appear cut in half if you try to read them after, well, cutting them in half.
After Titan Souls, Fenn and Foster spent a lot of time prototyping different ideas for their next game, and originally ended up with an early version of Death's Door that had no crows at all and was very boss-focused, with a Howl's Moving Castle-like door that changed where it took you each time you used it. After some time, they finally settled on a simple combat prototype that made them happy, to which they eventually added a rough model of a crow.
Though still an early version, they had been sitting on it long enough they felt they had to pitch to Devolver soon or the publisher would forget about them. But turns out, Devolver had been eagerly waiting for whatever it was they would make next.
'I think they said, 'Finally, God, we were waiting for you to pitch us something. Come on,'' Foster says.
Fenn adds: ' Before we sent them the pitch we were really nervous thinking like, 'Oh, what if Devolver have moved on?' Because it had been a few years. They might be full now. And then we sent them the pitch, we put loads of effort into it, and then Nigel [Lowrie] just sent us back a GIF of a guy rolling in money. Does that mean they like it? What does that mean?'
It's like growing a plant, you just feed it, and water it, and then trim away the leaves and stuff that are dying, and let it grow.“
With the funding and support they needed, Foster and Fenn were able to create their new, crow-filled action game. Foster tells me that the seed of his original idea was as a sequel to their challenging, top-down adventure Titan Souls, a game where the player only has one health and only a single arrow to attack with. That DNA is still in Death's Door if you follow the story to certain conclusions. But beyond that, the composition of the game's story was largely organic, he says.
'We just have an idea and then we'll just put stuff down, see what works and prune away the stuff that doesn't work. It's like growing a plant or something, you just feed it, and water it, and then trim away the leaves and stuff that are dying, and then just let it grow.'
With that kind of progression, it's natural that the two drew plenty of inspiration from other games they love. Foster, for instance, is a big Dark Souls fan, though Fenn doesn't care for the series as much. And both love Zelda.
'You could say Dark Souls is a sequel to the very first Zelda game, really,' Foster says. 'It's taking that formula, and then moving it along into the modern day. You could say that the games are all related in some way.'
But comparisons aside, one of the elements that makes Death Door stand out from both its inspirations are the ways in which it directly challenges their conventions. On the surface, Death's Door has all the look and trappings of an aggressive, punishing challenge: the combat is difficult, you have very little health, you collect 'souls' from enemies you kill that can be exchanged for upgrades in what seems to be a direct nod to Dark Souls, and when you die, an enormous 'DEATH' text overlays the screen, emphasizing your failure.
But Death's Door is, by design, far gentler than it appears. You don't lose your souls or anything else from dying, for one. You just reset to the last door you visited, which is very often quite close to where you died given how generous the game is with shortcuts. Your health may be low, but the game provides a generous number of places to heal yourself, and easy access to revisit them as needed.
Then there's the aesthetic, with characters and ideas that are at points reminiscent of a Ghibli film (an inspiration Foster confirms), and a soundtrack that leans often on gentle piano melodies. All of this makes Death's Door, in many ways, more of a cozy game than a punishing one.
There's an art to figuring out what a game's going to be like for someone who isn't as experienced as you.“
This is, Foster says, all on purpose. He tells me that a lot of developers instinctively follow the Dark Souls model of causing players to lose everything on death because it worked so well for that game. But Fenn hated that model, and Foster wasn't opposed to ditching it either. He says that while he's spent hours fighting hard bosses on the more challenging difficulties of Bloodborne and Dark Souls, as he's gotten older, he's become less patient with that kind of game. With Titan Souls, it was a 'really hip thing at the time' to make a really challenging game. But with Death's Door, he wanted to make a game he would personally enjoy playing more.
'I think it tends to be a lot easier to make something really hard,' Fenn says. 'And that's something that we've kind of fallen into the trap of as well. Because whenever you're making something for a game you always make it way too hard, and then there's an art to trying to figure out what it's going to be like for someone who isn't as experienced in the game as you, and then just tweaking and iterating with that in mind. That's something that we've probably become better over time as well.'
Foster adds that this ultimately makes games more accessible, too, because they can design something that's challenging and engages players' brains without being so difficult that players get frustrated and give up after losing 20 or more times. And that kind of game, he says, is more fun to make.
Death's Door, then, is both an embracing of legacy and a challenge to it — a mix of the history of the games its creators love, and an answer to the ways in which they've changed and grown over the years. And while Death's Door does this in very overt and specific ways, Fenn says that this is something all games inevitably have in common.
'I think a lot of it is subconscious,' he says. 'I came from a music background, but one thing I really became aware of was that loads of people wanted to break grounds and be completely unique. But then those people just ended up making music that meant nothing to anyone, because they weren't using the same language that people know.
'I like the idea that everything you make is an amalgamation from all the things you've experienced and learned. In the case of games, all the things that you played throughout your life, and that's a language that you've developed, and the language that most of your target audience have as well, because most of the time the audience have played similar games probably. So we're using that to create our own thing.'
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.