Telling Tales: Skyrim and Dark Souls

By Rich Stanton Published 7 December, 2011

When the mountain won't come to Muhammad.

How do you tell a story? Once upon a time there were two games, games of similar leanings that turned out entirely different - Dark Souls and Skyrim. Both have their tales to tell, a myth-hoard parcelled out through audio, text, environmental details and other characters. One stops being a game to do this. In the other, it just happens. Dark Souls is about looking and learning; Skyrim, looking and listening.

Both are fantasy RPGs, but the methods they use to engage players in their worlds are wildly different. Skyrim is a much larger canvas, an opulent and detail-packed space of boggling scope where everything's upfront - conversations, thousands of pages of in-game books to read, and exhaustive quest descriptions. It's a sprawl that's absolutely packed with things to find.

Dark Souls' narrative approach is ambient and minimalist - the tiniest details of its world fit together, rarely is anything made explicit, and understanding what's going on requires a considerable investment of time and brainpower. Though it's smaller in terms of acres, Dark Souls' world uses 3D space much more elaborately - all places are in an exact relation to one another, their deranged architecture unfolding and pulling back together like an accordion.

How each game's lore and narrative weave through these spaces is the difference. Skyrim's methods are familiar from Morrowind or Oblivion - NPCs with buckets of dialogue and plenty of voluminous volumes to read. You're constantly being fed new information, and the average resident is an exhausting bag of facts and opinions.

'Telling Tales: Skyrim and Dark Souls' Screenshot 1

Dark Souls' central mechanic is a big part of its lore: dying. It's a narrative beat linked to a repeated activity, a great example of showing rather than telling.

It's a stale template, a thought that solidified as I picked up and threw down book after book without reading any just to see if I'd bag a skill point. Such an undercooked attempt at incentivising suggests Bethesda's designers weren't quite sure what to do about all these tomes either. It's not that the books are terribly written - some are, some aren't - but that they're a symptom of Skyrim's biggest narrative flaw. The banal attention to detail in its world building is boring. This is a universe that's constantly being fleshed-out, and one where I skip nearly every conversation.

But perhaps you don't - and are doubtless salivating at the prospect of reading Waughin Jarth's A Dance in Fire (Chapter 4). The problem is that Skyrim is a videogame, and when it's in narrative mode it stops being one. This passive delivery is the rock on which Skyrim's lore founders - flicking through virtual pages or skipping through conversations counts as interaction, just, but it's of a rather dull variety.

Dark Souls' approach is the opposite of overbearing. Scraps of information are at a premium and there's almost no exposition beyond an intro video and what can be gleaned from the brief lines of a rare NPC. The pithy descriptions of items and the clues in its environment's details are where Dark Souls' story lies. Everything can be ignored, in other words, without your having to skip through it.

But it's there. Armour might have a clue about its origin, someone's weapon might be linked to their accomplishments or a ring might bear a legend. The city of Anor Londo's beauty dazzles you to its fundamental untruth, yet almost every detail is perfect - after dispatching Ornstein and Smough, a little and large boss pair, you find two differently proportioned elevators at the end of the hall. Every location and its layout implies detail upon detail, and when at their least obvious they're often most important. I personally adore the fact that you can trace branches you see in Firelink Shrine down to the trees that hold up the world - and what lies at their roots.

'Telling Tales: Skyrim and Dark Souls' Screenshot 2

The Knight Solaire isn't just a total badass, but also director Hideya Miyazaki's favourite character - he went so far as to design the character's emblem.

It would be impossible for a world of Skyrim's magnitude to possess such detail, but even so it exacerbates things by re-using interiors again and again, from the books residents read to the recurring cave interiors. Valve's book about the making of Half-Life 2, Raising The Bar, mentions that before creating any environment its artists would be given short stories set in those locations - because they were built with that context of past events, Half-Life 2's places feel real in the details. It doesn't matter that players never saw those words. Skyrim's rooms never feel like this. Even those that should be showpieces, like throne rooms, just feel like they've had the chairs rearranged.

And what of the people populating these places? It's clearly unfair to make a general comparison between Skyrim's hundreds on hundreds and Dark Souls' thirty-six, but we can look at how they operate in relation to the player. The stakes are upped by Dark Souls' save system, which gives things a persistence Skyrim couldn't and wouldn't dream of - pass up on the chance to speak with someone, and that chance may never come again. NPCs in Dark Souls appear and disappear because of different and oblique triggers, creating a convincing illusion that they're all on their own little quests in this world, and each has their own arc. Attack an NPC and they'll be your enemy forever. Be there at the right time or they're dead.

The seeming independence of these arcs from your quest when combined with the world's persistence leads to one of Dark Souls' greatest narrative tricks. It's dependent on its multi-playthrough structure, whereby completing the game resets things and ups the difficulty for your ongoing character, and the Knight Solaire's appearances are a good example. First encountered gazing into the sun, he muses aloud: "If only I could be so grossly incandescent." What a bizarre phrase. It's typical of how Dark Souls' NPCs speak - gnomic utterances with weird but precise vocabulary.

As you progress, Solaire pops up to help with bosses while engaged with his own adventures. Then, near the end of the game, you find him mad - his brain infested with a shining parasite, Solaire finds his grossly incandescent end. Then you kill him and loot his sweet armour. Joy mingled with sorrow, and the idle thought that maybe you could have done more - and sure enough, you can pre-empt this outcome. To do so requires knowing where this arc ends, and a roundabout journey that requires considerable resources and time to get there early - knowledge you have second time around, if you know how to use it.

'Telling Tales: Skyrim and Dark Souls' Screenshot 3

Just returning to Half-Life for a second, would it be quite the same world without the G-Man, about whom we know next to nothing?

Dark Souls initially seems linear, but has an unusually freeform and well-hidden structure - and working out where and when you can break into it is a matter of paying attention. Every time you work out how to take things down another path you find more of the whole picture, and there's so much more to say about Solaire - the hints he's the firstborn of Dark Souls' uber baddie Gwyn, a former deity cast down, his covenant. But you'll never quite find out everything. There is no revelation moment.

Many of Skyrim's NPCs can be alive for your whole adventure, but even when they have their own questlines it never feels like they actually have an independent existence within its world - worst of all are the ones that, when their quest is complete, stay in one spot or follow you like a dog until they die. In Skyrim you're always prompting everyone else to move - the centre of the universe that directs every step. In Dark Souls you feel like one actor in a world full of them.

Connecting the dots takes attention, apprehension, and time - all the while wondering if you've drawn the right lines. Perhaps what's most remarkable is that you'll never know everything for sure. Dark Souls heavily implies things, but it never gives you the whole picture or ties up every loose end. But the depths it reaches through these methods is remarkable - an amazing FAQ on the lore in Dark Souls' predecessor Demon's Souls shows just how much detail can exist in universes built on these principles. It's like reconstructing a jigsaw without a guide or, ultimately, all the pieces - but what a picture.

The great lie about Skyrim is that we love it because it's an epic. The truth is it's a game about cow-tipping bears, stealing stuff and looking at postcard views. The lore just kind of washes over you in a sea of forgettable names: Tiber Septim, the timeline of the third era, the Jarls, The Ruins of Kemel-Ze. None of it matters. What does it mean when a game's narrative methods never convince or invite curiosity?

Eurogamer plays Skyrim and talks about it.

It means you never believe, or even get close. Grappling with narrative is a messy and mixed-up business. It's not that the ingredients, or even how they're used, can't be identified - more that the stew at the end has a kind of alchemy to it, where it tastes of everything but not one thing. The coherence Dark Souls' environments, mechanics and lore possess is an incredibly rare combination. And Skyrim?

Too much fat and gristle. Skyrim has a lot going for it, but it's a world that operates with little narrative sophistication. There are plenty of welcome cosmetic improvements over its predecessors but everything's built on the same old shonky foundations. Skyrim's focus on freedom comes with a loss - you can choose your own adventure, but the world as a whole lacks any clarity of purpose. Things don't connect. And we should expect more than that. Games have always used crutches for the problems that seem too impossibly big to solve, whether that's cutscenes or text terminals or constantly yapping NPCs - none of these is, or will ever be, the best method for telling an interactive story.

Dark Souls delivers two lessons that games in general, nevermind other RPGs, should take to heart. Just because you're delivering a narrative doesn't mean you have to stop being a game. If your backstory's rich and detailed, that doesn't mean it all has to be written down. Putting faith in a player's dedication is as close as AAA games get to a revolutionary act these days, and exactly what Dark Souls does. Skyrim's approach positions the player as passive receptacle, and delivers a good dose of text at every opportunity. That's why you skip all the conversations and never read the books. Both are great games. But where the world of Skyrim feels like a glorious place from an imagined past, Dark Souls plays like the future.

Picture of Rich.

About Rich Stanton

Rich Stanton has been writing for Eurogamer since 2011, and also contributes to places like Edge, Nintendo Gamer, and PC Gamer. He lives in Bath, and is Terran for life.

Read more articles from Rich by visiting the Rich Stanton archive page.

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Comments (258) Latest comment 2 months ago

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  • Eraserhead #1 3 months ago

    That's why you skip all the conversations and never read the books.

    Speak for yerself, fella. I could equally argue that the world of DS is deliberately vague so that you yourself fill in the gaps and the designers were just being lazy. Or that the "gnomic utterances with weird but precise vocabulary" is down to dodgy translation.

    Not having a pop at DS as such, but this is a bit of a weird old article.

  • king_ghidra #2 3 months ago

    I completely disagree with this article.

    Sadly time prevents me from a blow by blow rebuttal, but the fact that you continually belittle and dismiss Skyrim and TES' massive, comprehensive lore, (much of it based and sourced from player activity in previous games), as though it is worthless, seems completely churlish and attempting to create controversy and debate where none exists.

    This paragraph "The truth is it's a game about cow-tipping bears, stealing stuff and looking at postcard views. The lore just kind of washes over you in a sea of forgettable names: Tiber Septim, the timeline of the third era, the Jarls, The Ruins of Kemel-Ze. None of it matters." is just ridiculous. You cannot possibly encompass the multitude and breadth of experiences people have in TES games with that kind of dismissive summary.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 12:07

  • Ptarmigandalf #3 3 months ago

    It's clearly unfair to make a general comparison between Skyrim's hundreds on hundreds and Dark Souls' thirty-six,
    ...but obviously that's not going to stop me.
    That's why you skip all the conversations and never read the books.
    No, you skip the conversations and never read the books so you can write this bollocks on EG afterwards. The rest of us enjoy the lore in Skyrim as delivered.

  • Crossifixxo #4 3 months ago

    o_O At your tag line, *whispers* It's not safe here.

  • linea #5 3 months ago

    Great article. I totally agree- Dark Souls' universe is incredibly well-thought through, and it's consideration of the logic of that universe that allows progress and uncovering of some of its secrets.

    For example the bit I've just completed, hearing the guy at Firelink talk about someone being carried off by the bird curled up into the ball invited me to try and do the same, leading to me being carried off to the Undead Asylum, and then in Anor Londo, considering why this gigantic building was made to house the painting leads to the Painted World of Ariamis. All through implicit detail and environment. Amazing stuff.

  • GamesProgrammer Verified Games Team Programmer, Eutechnyx Ltd. #6 3 months ago

    Couldn't agree more, Dark souls lets you get into the game imediatley and you find yourself looking for more story and lore in the detailed world and wanting to be part of it, so much better than having it shoved down your throat so much that you get bored with it and start skipping it. Definitely the game of the year for me.

  • marmaduke #7 3 months ago

    Rich Stanton's imagination vs. Skyrim: Skyrim loses. Who would have thought it?

  • CUR715 #8 3 months ago

    Nice feature. Well written.

    As wonderful as Skyrim is, it's for the reasons detailed above why it misses out on GOTY for me. It's structure is archaic.

    It's high time more developers stopped pandering to the masses and took a few more risks, like FromSoftware did with Demon's Souls (and now Dark).

  • Lexx87 #9 3 months ago

    Do not agree with this what so ever.

    The books in Skyrim, some of which are fantastic reads, shows a great amount of imagination on part of the developer to enrich their world.

    The point of Skyrim is that you make your own story.

  • Subquest #10 3 months ago

    The great lie about Skyrim is that we love it because it's an epic

    That's why you skip all the conversations and never read the books.

    Except it's not a great lie, and I don't.

    It's ok to not like a 10/10 game, you know. But there's no need to justify yourself like this.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 12:14

  • BellyFullOfHell #11 3 months ago

    Oh well at least I won't be wasting my cash on Skyrim. My biggest bugbear with Oblivion, something that pulled me out of the game every time, was that when I stopped, so did the game world. Sounds like its still the case. Shame.

  • Widge #12 3 months ago

    I always skip the books in Bethesda games, it is a full distraction away from churning through dialogue and quest driven tasks. The games have always been about absorbing the pretties as you travel large distances between locations.

    When it comes to creating a meaningful and solidly realised world, Dark Souls is light years ahead. Bethesda games dazzle you with scale.

  • Karzee #13 3 months ago

    I don't think I've read such pointless load of cobblers in an article in a long time.

  • Karzee #14 3 months ago

    Post deleted at 09:50:30 12-12-2011

  • Lalaland #15 3 months ago

    Bravo! I haven't played Dark Soul's so I can't speak to the strength of it's story telling but I have played a lot of Skyrim and it's flaws are all too obvious. I just don't care about the 'characters' in this world, they are all as interchangeable as the Draugrs that populate every cave in the world. I enjoy the game as a sort of first person Diablo clone with vastly less distinctive loot.

    Bethesda have never done narrative as well as they pulled off in Morrowind with it's intertwining factions and politics. I think they've made a conscious decision to blandify the world to allow you to join every faction and befriend everyone. By eliminating 'wrong' choices they allow users to do what they want but they also eliminate the reason for wanting to do anything.

    I mostly only notice dialog when they suddenly refuse to allow me to skip it, subtitles and frantic left clicks for the win!

  • Lalaland #16 3 months ago

    @king_ghidra I'd agree but that extensive lore has almost no impact on what they player can and cannot do. You can roll up an elvenmage and join the stormcloaks or a bruiser Nord who becomes Arch-Mage. The lore is there it's just inconsequential to the actual game you play.

  • Widge #17 3 months ago

    Yep I find Bethesda NPC dialogue remarkably skippable too, at least Mass Effect made you want to be involved and listen to everything being said. And considering I will happily sit through Kojima dialogue, making something feel skippable to me is rather an achievement.

  • Virtual_Entity #18 3 months ago

    This guy chats bare maca. I for one find the lore of Skyrim really interesting and perhaps a little overwhelming given the amount of effort put into it. Well done Bethesda, now get patching!

  • varsas #19 3 months ago

    An interesting article; it makes me want to get Dark Souls first when I get through my stack of games.

  • Wyrm #20 3 months ago

    Best two games I've played in years.

  • javvyman #21 3 months ago

    I just started playing Dark Souls last night (not played Demon Souls yet)
    first 10 minutes "This game is broken!"
    30 mins in after dying 5 times "why can't I kill anyone! bollocks game!"
    45 mins in "oh right, that's what you're supposed to do"
    1 hour 30mins in, standing on the balcony as the Asylum Demon looks up at me
    "haha how you gonna get me now?!....."
    Que fits of rage followed by the realisation of how fucking awesome this game is!

  • PlugMonkey #22 3 months ago

    @Lexx87

    Some of the books may be fantastic reads, but the game still stops being a game when you stop to read them.

    I agree with the article in this regard, and that this is a bit of an old fashioned method of telling a story in a videogame, but disagree that it's completely redundent. The point of Skyrim isn't cow-tipping bears and stealing stuff, it's throwing yourself into the world. You kind of get back what you put in.

    Dark Souls, on the other hand, takes a possibly more contemporary approach to interactive story telling, in that the story is told through the exploration of the world itself, and the story you're being told has actually already happened.

    Bioshock did the same thing. If you made a film about Skyrim, it would be about the rise of you, the Dragon Born, just like the game is. If you made a film about Dark Souls or Bioshock, it would be about the rise and fall of their respective civilisations. That's where the actual narrative lies. It tells the story by casting you as the archeologist digging it up, rather than as the main character in the event itself.

    It's something I would like to see more games doing, as it's a narrative technique that only games can really deliver, which does make it feel a bit fresher than games that are still delivering their story essentially as either books or films. But that doesn't mean I don't also enjoy the opportunity to be the star of the show from time to time too.

  • chubster2010 #23 3 months ago

    A fantastic article - nice work Mr Stanton.

  • chubster2010 #24 3 months ago

    Post deleted at 09:50:30 12-12-2011

  • Nanocrystal #25 3 months ago

    The article makes some insightful observations about the completely different methods of story-telling and world-building in these two remarkable games, but it's ruined by rather arbitrarily deciding that one method is objectively superior to the other. In truth, they each have their strengths and weaknesses. A more impartial comparison would've made for a much more interesting and informative essay.

  • Triggerhappytel #26 3 months ago

    This article needs some bloody spoiler warnings - I'm only 22 hours into Dark Souls and have just read a spoiler about Knight Solaire.

  • Madder-Max #27 3 months ago

    What a stupid article. Skyrim is all about how you play the game. if you dont want to read the books then dont. if you want to then do. they are different games and its pretty obvious that Ricky needs a more structured environemnt or he is simply tring to increase sales of DS for the publisher.

    Shit, pointless and totally useless article. its simply a marketing ploy
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 12:52

  • Rogueywon #28 3 months ago

    I've played both games - a lot - and like them both. But while Skyrim has impressed me, Dark Souls is, by a long way, the best game I've played this year. It's a pity that so many of the reviews fixated on the difficulty, because, integral though it is, there is a lot more to the game than that.

    This is a game with the best melee combat system I have ever seen, bar none. Forget Skyrim, forget Skyward Sword, forget countless beat-em-ups, hack-n-slashes, RPGs and shooters - nothing captures the interaction between weapon, shield and armour better than Dark Souls.

    It's also, as is the major point of this article, fantastic at building its world. I'm not generally a fan of "muted" storytelling - I was actually disappointed by Half-Life 2's atmosphere and likewise underwhelmed by Zelda. But Dark Souls really pulls it off - it gives a curious sense of being stuck in a nightmare, with only fragmentary memories, picking up what clues you can about your surroundings - but in a good way.

    I also love the visual design. It's mostly well-done but drab - reminding me of nothing so much as the original Quake, minus the sci-fi elements - but that makes the occasional brightly coloured sections, such as the Crystal Cave and the Anor Londo mentioned in the article, even more striking when you reach them.

    I've posted more detailed thoughts in a couple of posts in my slashdot journal.

  • username84 #29 3 months ago

    I thought you were supposed to create your own narrative in Skyrim?
    That's what I do and I love it for letting me do that to such a huge extent.

    I also thought Dark Souls was one of the best games I've ever played.

  • fabiosooner #30 3 months ago

    "It's a stale template, a thought that solidified as I picked up and threw down book after book without reading any just to see if I'd bag a skill point. Such an undercooked attempt at incentivising suggests Bethesda's designers weren't quite sure what to do about all these tomes either. It's not that the books are terribly written - some are, some aren't - but that they're a symptom of Skyrim's biggest narrative flaw. The banal attention to detail in its world building is boring. This is a universe that's constantly being fleshed-out, and one where I skip nearly every conversation."

    This all boils down to one thing: get over Tolkien already game designers, will ya?

    The world of Skyrim is inconsequential to the story, and ultimately boring when you're not in the heat of the action, for the exacts same reasons the world of Lord of the Rings is boring to anyone who actually reads books: the obsessive attention to detail trumps everything else. It's like the world and the plot run parallel, not together as a cohesive unit. But to be fair, this isn't a problem unique to Skyrim, it's endemic to nearly all high fantasy works heavily inspired by Tolkien in any medium - it's just that Demon's/Dark Souls finally brought those issues to light in gaming in particular. I wish more games would take a hint and get rid of the idea that you need a fully fleshed-out setting or elves and dwarves and whatnot to achieve 'genre authenticity'.

  • basstaverns #31 3 months ago

    Great Article, totally agree. Both are amazing games though, Dark Souls is something really special.

  • cussers #32 3 months ago

    I disagree completely. I think the fluff in TES games adds tremendous depth to the world. Just off the top of my head, there's a book called The Snow Prince which details the final battle between the Snow Elves and the invading, genocidal Nords who win and then force the elves underground. Over the millenia, the elves evolve into the savage sightless Falmer who are frequently encountered in Skyrim's depths. Point here is, if you want to know this stuff, it's there and it enhances a lot of folks' experience of the game, but no-one forces you to read anything.

    A lot of the dialogue concerning background is unessential as well, but it's there if you want it. If you're not interested in it, no-one forces you to choose it. And yes, you are passive, but only in the sense that anyone is passive when they listen to their question being answered. And even then, you can walk away at any time.

    Oh, and the interiors of Skyrim are samey? Maybe a few of the bog-standard dungeons, yet many interiors are wonderful and some are breath-taking.

    Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll have to get back to The Lusty Argonian Maid.

  • f00b_inc #33 3 months ago

    Enjoyed article but obviously biased. I haven't played much Skyrim yet because I've been utterly engrossed in Dark Souls so can't really comment on the former. Not been so sucked into a game as DS for a long time (as much the combat/satisfaction of finally winning as it is the game world).

    Worth a counter-argument being written up?

  • metamind16 #34 3 months ago

    I love both games for very different reasons. Both have great gameplay and narrative. They're just two very distinct games. Where Dark Souls to me is NOT an RPG but an action-adventure game with RPG progression element, Skyrim is a truly open ended RPG with sandbox trappings. In Skyrim there are tons and tons of tomes featuring lore from the frankly amateurish all the way to the epic and bizarre. All of which you can choose to ignore! Only things is: your experience will definitely suffer for it.
    There is a REASON why my brutish Nord is a magic-user that enjoys collecting butterflies' wings. I made that story up as I went along. I create my own identity using my imagination. Skyrim allows for that while giving a cracking experience. Sure I have to work harder as a Nord to become a masterful illusionist, but I can if I want to!
    Dark souls is quite a different beast that has enormous depth of gameplay, but a constrained narrative. Constrained because I have little influence or lore to sketch the boundaries of the experience. It is a treasure-trove of discovery. In that sense it reminds me of classic adventure games, where you have to crack a riddle or determine the right approach to a problem to get ahead in the story and discover new things. It makes a premise that is just as equally compelling as Skyrim's massive sandbox.

    What a time for gamers!

  • guernican #35 3 months ago

    Someone's been reading those troll-baiting football articles on the Guardian.

    In fact, plenty of reasonable points here: I just think it's odd that you tend to make the final step in all your arguments 'Skyrim bad, DS good'. The latter's entirely controlled, contained and scripted world allows it to offer a different gameplay experience that, some might argue, is wilfully obstructive and irritatingly obtuse. The fact that you clearly find that more ticklesome than Skyrim's lore don't, as Nice Guy Eddie said, make it necessarily fuckin' so.

    One might also reasonably argue that you're only ever dancing to Miyazaki's tune, while Skyrim allows you to write your own. Not saying that myself, necessarily. I just don't expect such single-minded negativity from Eurogamer. Or, rather, I didn't.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 13:06

  • Restart #36 3 months ago

    What's going on, EG? First we get an article encouraging piracy on your Android phone, & now we get this load of hot garbage, which has no point to make, & just reads like a load of fanboy drivel.

    Saying that TES games lack story/atmosphere because you can skip conversations & ignore books, is a completely moot point, because you could play through the entirety of Dark Souls doing exactly the same. Infact, you could probably complete Dark Souls having only spoken to the Primordial Serpent, ignoring, or killing the other NPCs.

    Point is, both of these things are OPTIONAL. If you want to storm through the game & ignore all these things, you can. But you would be totally missing the point of the game.

  • makariel #37 3 months ago

    I have yet to play Skyrim, but I haven't read a single book in any video game. If I want to read a book, I'll just do that. There are currently 5 books on my bedside table. I always wonder why games limit themselves to what books or movies do (see Uncharted) in terms of storytelling. Dark Souls is a great example of how games can use storytelling in ways that books and movies simply can't.

  • inutaihanyou #38 3 months ago

    I like both games for their great experiences. You don't have to denigrate one in order to hype up the other EG, that doesn't help either.

  • Quint2020 #39 3 months ago

    I love reading all the books and listening to all of the dialogue in Skyrim, it's one of my favourite thing about the game...

  • Madder-Max #40 3 months ago

    @makariel

    ...and what does that have to do with Skyrim. I thought all games were examples of alternative storytelling?

    This article and thread is about as real as the pig I saw flying past the window just now.

  • anomagnus #41 3 months ago

    I realise this is an opinion piece. And therefore, i understand that rich is entitled to his opinion. But i could not disagree more with him.

    In a sense, Skyim has no narrative. Nothing is handed to you. In another sense, its nothing BUT narrative, but you have to fill in the blanks. As i played through Skyim, i quickly realised the massive amount of work that needed to be done, and i divided my game into 'seasons' or 'book's, like the different series of a tv show, or a series of books.

    Season 1 was an introduction to the game, and some exploration, which ended with the mystery of where juergan windcallers horn was.

    Season 2 opened with a bang in kynegrove, focused on the champions, and ended in the thrallmor embassey

    Season 3 was a dark chapter, involving the thieves guild, the dark brotherhood, terrible deals with daedra princes, and ended with a midnight run with esbern across skyrim, and the discovery of alduins wall.

    Season 4 opened with a lighter tone, involving the stormcloaks and the civil war, and ended with the time travel!

    Season 5 was more adventure focused, with the college of magic, massive magic cubes, and ended with capturing a dragon!

    Season 6 ended the main story with a fucking bang!

    In between all this, i found 310 locations, completed tonnes of side quests, found all 9 dragon masks, became thane of all locations, bought myself a pile of tasty houses, and crafted a beautiful seat of dragon plate armour.

    I'm sure Dark Souls has its strengths, but to dismiss skyrim in this way is unfair
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 13:20

  • jdp311 #42 3 months ago

    Wow, I cannot believe I just read an article by someone who thought the story in Dark Souls was BETTER than what Skyrim does. That's a joke, a bad one.

    I love Dark Souls as a game and I liked it's ambiance but all the details and depth you are claiming is a smoke and mirrors job. They put the barest scraps out there and let you fill in the rest with whatever you want.

    This must be a guy who thinks all short stories are amazing because they don't fill in the gaps while LOTR was a hatchet job for giving so much stupid useless "lore".

    Yeah, I guess I disagree. That said, a game with Dark Souls gameplay and Skyrim's world would be amazing.

  • Hypercube #43 3 months ago

    Looks like some people haven't realised this article is a subjective opinion.

    My own opinion agrees with the author's - I much prefer Dark Soul's means of storytelling. But that doesn't mean that other people prefer Skyrim's.

  • lavalant #44 3 months ago

    Only the greatest stories can told in a linear fashion, where the designers are guiding the player through each part of the game and story, games like Mass Effect, KOTOR, Final Fantasy 6&7, even Arkham Asylum do this extremely well by slowly opening up the game world and story bit by bit, keeping the player on edge and totally engrossed in the main story.

    Non linear open world games like Skyrim will never have the same experience of engaging the player and keeping them on edge, they purposely disengage the player with distractions, and it's up to the player to make the effort, as someone said above, if you stop the game stops.

  • UncleLou #45 3 months ago

    This must be a guy who thinks all short stories are amazing because they don't fill in the gaps while LOTR was a hatchet job for giving so much stupid useless "lore".

    Not "every" short story, but it's no secret that writing a good short story is considered to be more difficult than writing a good novel. Not that LotR is exactly a masterpiece of literature. Nice bit of escapism, though - a bit like Skyrim, actually.

  • Whitster #46 3 months ago

    The greatest thing about Skyrim so far is the difference between everyones stories. I currently know about five people playing the game and each one of them has a different story order and progression for their character, which makes it great to swap stories, we even got into a convasation with some randoms in the pub beer garden the other night about it as we both overheard each others groups discussing our adventures.

    The only time I've experienced any of my friends Dark Souls storys was when I watched my mate attempt the same boss about 25 times while sitting round there one evening.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 13:32

  • Widge #47 3 months ago

    @Restart it's not the fact that they are optional, it's the fact that the optional stuff is so beige that it's not worth delving into to enrich the game playing experience.

  • FenderMaster #48 3 months ago

    Not entirely fair to be honest. A few npc's in dark souls will chatter away, revealing plot points, something the last paragraph pointed out as being a crutch, and really, is reading the item descriptions to glean the occasional bit of lore and different to reading a book or text in Skyrim? It's still reading, and it's still interupting the gameplay. what DS does do right, is give a sense of place through the locations. As you wander around, you think about what the locations may have been like before they were populated, and how they fell into ruin.

    DS greatest achievement is how much more subtle its storytelling is, but make no mistake, it's mean are the same; text from items, and talking with npc's.

  • cellardoor #49 3 months ago

    Dark Souls was a damn smart game but plays more like Heroquest compared to Skyrim's AD & D.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 14:05

  • Dubya #50 3 months ago

    What a stupidly biased article. Could have made it much shorter by just saying "I'm a DS fanboy and Skyrim sucks".
    Instead, I've wasted 10 minutes of my life reading it...
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 13:32

  • Widge #51 3 months ago

    @Whitster and yet read the DS thread and it is a multitude of discoveries, frustrations and elations.

  • DefendoCroc #52 3 months ago

    @GamesProgrammer I agree, Dark Souls has had me by the balls since the moment i put the disk in.
    And Knight Solaire was hands down my favourite NPC ally. God dam you Sunlight maggot!!!!!!!!!!!

    I just bought a copy of Skyrim though ... both games have a lot to offer.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 13:34

  • Stoatboy #53 3 months ago

    Couldn't agree more. The text and dialogue in Skyrim is pitifully bad. Not just bad - atmosphere-destroyingly bad. The world is really well crafted generally, presenting a fairly believable fantasy world for the most part - and then somebody opens their stupid mouth and ruins it. The fact that the voice over work is equally as atrocious as the writing just compounds this.

    I'm really enjoying the game generally, but I'm having to spend a lot of energy ignoring this utterly wretched torrent of inane drivel. The fact that NPCs talk at you if you happen to go anywhere near them makes it harder to ignore than it should be too - who the fuck starts recounting their tedious humdrum life story to a total stranger who happens to wander into their vague proximity?*

    And there's SO MUCH of it. Pages and pages of turgid sub-GCSE fantasy bollocks. It's like they gave the writing job to an over-enthusiastic under-qualified work experience guy and plied him with cocktails of Red Bull and speed for months, only letting him stop when he ran out of crayons. And he had a lot of crayons...


    Dreadful, pointless, time-wasting gash.




    *Everybody in Skyrim, apparently...

  • Rack #54 3 months ago

    Are you 8 Rich? I mean I sort of agree with the premise, I decidedly prefer Dark Souls' method of world building to Skyrim's, but since I am not 8 I can see these are just two different ways of achieving different but similar objectives.

  • Daddy-Doom-Bar #55 3 months ago

    What a load of bollox. I hope they didn't pay you for this shite, Rich.

  • Lancezh #56 3 months ago

    Wow some people are pisse about a game they didnt programm themselves... whatever... i never could nail why dark sousl has a way better atmosphere than skyrim. I think its hard to nail it really with words but thats the truth for me, i've played Dark Souls over and over and over and over. but i cant seem to finish skyrim, i don't care really. I dont care for the character development anymore (i'm lvl 40ish), the story, well i dont care, i couldnt care less about the NPC's and the great scheme i should play in this world. (I can't tell you why, i just dont)

    In Dark Souls however its like... the whole world is so interconnected in itself, so dark and lonely with few but interesting NPC's and my motivation is that i want to find salvation for myself, i want to escape this lonely place of undead so bad and on the way there explore the world and defeat all the bosses (a temptation i never felt in skyrim, last time i played i just wanted to finish) i just dont want this game to end!

    The downfall of Big Hat Logan into Madness along with Knight Solaire, damn son, i will definitely remember these. In Skyrim i probably remember that shitty ass Skyskilling interface that drives me nuts.

    To the argument skyrim has much more content: Well thats great lad, but i dont care for that content. I did at the start but it gets cumbersome.

    I played skyrim for 40-50 hours
    and Dark Souls for 300 hours

    Another unusual habit i have: I usually stop playing games when they bore me.

    GOTY Dark Souls
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 13:47

  • stoopidgreg #57 3 months ago

    Disagree with the author. The dialogue in Skyrim IS the game. If you actually had any sort of attention span you would, like me, become totally engrossed in the game and just sit back and bask in the story and all the characters you can talk to. You don't skip all the plot scenes in a movie just to get to the action... or maybe you do and that's the problem. Don't blame the game, just admit its not the one for you.

  • schnide #58 3 months ago

    I haven't really played Skyrim, although I know a lot of people who love it. I'm sure it's fantastic. But I LOVE Dark Souls, I've put in 60 hours already and am lamenting the day it ends.

    But to say that what Dark Souls does is called storytelling in any real way is ridiculous. There's no story. Even the intro video doesn't really make sense. The rest of the game is just me vs the world. That's it. The world that happens to be very convincing, absolutely massive, and at times incredibly oppressive, still just me vs the world.

    Okay, so there's backstory with the items, weapons, armour etc. but that's not the same thing. That's putting texture on the world, which isn't the same as a narrative by any means. The only story in Dark Souls is being written by me with every single action I take, every swipe of a sword, axe or catalyst, every enemy I defeat in one kill, every time I die at the hands, claws or blade of a demon I have no chance of defeating until it occurs to me to try something new which is in fact entirely logical, every time I turn off my PS3 waiting for the moment I'll turn it back on again.

    That, to me, is the pure genius of Dark Souls whether it was intended or not, and why I love it so much despite all the beliefs (and in my opinion, naive ones at the moment) that gaming is becoming an ever-increasing pre-written-story-driven medium.

    I am the player. My actions in a convincing world are the narrative.

  • Dangerous_Dan #59 3 months ago

    @The Tolkien with the short story comparison is very good. I personally think the Tolkien books are boring or let's just say i am bored with the high fantasy setting in combination with the characters he chose to fill it up.

    That must be why Skyrim and Oblivion were boring to me while i liked Fallout 3 - the characters and dialogues did not enchant me but i like the Fallout setting and the post-apocalyptic world.

    Haha, maybe it's challenge - Someone who's telling you the story of his life right after meeting him can become quite tedious while someone who does not spill his guts and is not a living signpost to the next quest is usually more interesting - does not apply solely to game characters...

  • popej #60 3 months ago

    Brilliant!

    Love that an employee of a well known website has the balls to say these things. Like it or not, this lends credit to the outspoken minority on the Bethesda forums. Skyrim really isn't all that, for the reasons mentioned above, and many others.

    DkS is GOTY for me too. Skyrim isn't even close although the modding community will doubtless rescue it to an extent.

  • arcam #61 3 months ago

    Non linear open world games like Skyrim will never have the same experience of engaging the player and keeping them on edge

    I just can't agree with this. Unless the scripted story is exceptional, and I don't think that's how Dark Souls could be described, I will always be more wrapped up in a story that I have created for myself. Skyrim does a really good job of allowing the player to create his/her own story, but still within the boundaries of the world and lore that is the Elder Scrolls. Skyrim isn't just about waiting to see what happens next, it's about deciding what you want to happen next and trying to make that happen.

    Different, for sure, but much more engaging for someone like me. But then I'm someone who can find a story in a round of BF3.

  • FanBoysSuck #62 3 months ago

    Nice opinion piece, I can see where the author's coming form.

    My own take is that Skyrim has maybe too much fluff (I love all the books but gave up trying to read them all) while Dark Souls seems to be missing parts to make the story a whole.

  • TelexStar #63 3 months ago

    I've played Dark Souls one and half times (so far) and am currently playing through Skyrim. I love them both but Dark Souls, for me, definitely has more charm and originality in every respect. Skyrim does many things wonderfully well but I just can't bring myself to read the pages and pages and pages of overindulgent books that seemingly litter every possible surface.

    Dark Souls does feel beautifully woven together and deliberately vague and I personally love that.

  • technotica #64 3 months ago

    A dance in the Fire is a pretty good book series! :p

  • WMain00 #65 3 months ago

    I can't help but feel the author of this article misses the point somewhat. Skyrim is all about developing your own story within the world; the lore exists simply as an addition that can be explored or ignored at the players leisure. Not once is the lore forced down the players throat. Skyrim is all about the freedom of exploration and performing your own thing within the world.

    Dark Souls is an entirely different experience and one that tells its story through the gruelling experience the player has as they traverse through the game. In a way I sometimes think Dark Souls is an allegory to The Divine Comedy; the player required to traverse though several layers of hell before finally finding redemption.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 14:19

  • Slipstream #66 3 months ago

    As I've been playing Skyrim I hear the call to play Dark souls more and more. Don't get me wrong Skyrim is amazing and there is still so much for me to do there and I intend to finish it before going back to DS.

    But the smaller more familiar environments of Dark Souls are charming in their own right, each one invokes a different emotion and mentality as brace yourself for the tricky environemtns and switch up your fight strategy for the different enemies...yeah I definitely miss it.

    Would also like to add in reference to narrative that as with Demon's Souls, Dark Souls drip feeds you elements of the tale and rewards those with keen comprehension skills more of the story through; item descriptions, listening carefully to what NPCs might have to say and following through, even if what was said seems highly unlikely and even talking to NPCs multiple times.

    Skyrim holds your hand so much that you're never really left out of the main story, but where Skyrim does excel are some compltely optional and missable side quests that you may just happen to find, some of these small stories are fantastic and the tought of what you may find at the end is always an exciting prospect and driving force.

    Also the small collectable books in Skyrim that adorn my homeshelves are win, extremely well written and imagination provking, conjuring images in your mind as you read them, very fun.
    Edited by 2 at 07/12/11 @ 14:29

  • Voz #67 3 months ago

    I've played through both games. And i have to agree out of the 2 Dark Souls is the future of RPG games. Skyrim is just like the previous one's in the series there all play identical there's only improvement has been the visuals.

  • tassletine #68 3 months ago

    Actually, both games use the same method of storytelling but in different ways.

    It's a classic method used by fairy tales: By being deliberately vague and allowing you to fill in the gaps it allows the 'reader' to come to his own conclusions, creating their own story that runs parallel to the main one.
    Once this intrigue happens the reader becomes completely engrossed as they are now part of the story (as they have contributed to it with their imagination) and start to see the story from their own unique perspective -- One which they will usually defend with their life -- at least on internet forums.

    Whilst being a brilliant game, I think Dark Souls lets the visual story overwhelm the gameplay sometimes. I found Anor Londo's visual narrative interesting but the level was quite boring with far too much running around. Additionally as the game progresses it has a lot more empty space (so it feels lonelier and more desperate) but the gameplay grows more stagnant and repetitive with repeated enemies, empty environments and endless running.

    Skyrim on the other hand allows you to fashion much deeper and more varied adventures in your own head -- but that's the problem for me. The game is better in your head than it is real life.
    In fact I'd argue that Skyrim just isn't that great of a game. I'm enjoying it very much at the moment but it's just so incredibly bugged and inconsistent that I find it quite laughable at points -- If only because it's so po-faced and so serious about it's self.

  • Sonic_D #69 3 months ago

    Apart from certain Street Fighter games (2 Turbo and 4) there is only one game I have played for over 100 hours. 128 hours in total infact. A game that I forced myself to stop playing so to play Batman AC. A game that I will probably return to after completing Batman AC and start a new character.

    That game is Dark Souls.

    The hints to the story are probably a bit too sparse to be honest, but it does the job really well and pieces the locales together enough to make the game work. But really it's all about the areas themselves. Each time I entered a new area the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like they did as I entered a new dungeon in Zelda OOT.

    Of course it helps that it has the best PvE combat system in an RPG ever. For me the PvP combat doesn't work as well, but this isn't that important.

  • geeza2020 #70 3 months ago

    Each to their own, but for me Dark Souls is one of the most overrated games of all time. I found its world boring and empty, its combat broken, and the difficulty (here come the noob calls) was frankly ridiculous. A game stops being fun when it is knowingly designed to ruin your experience at as many points as possible, and thats exactly what DS does. For a good while I was brought back to the game by the idea that the knowledge that I had gained from my previous failed attempts to progress through areas in the game would allow me to proceed, yet I would still be killed by some painfully unfair moment where I would be instantly killed that I couldnt possibly have known was coming without using a guide.

    Its points like this that the apparent "hardcore" gamers love in that it for them provides the holy grail of gaming by not spoon feeding you content, but they fail to address the fact that it what it also is, is unfair, and feels cheap. And it just made me realise that I just wasnt having fun with the game, which is the whole reason I still play these things. Darks Souls for me, just isn't fun.

    Skyrim on the other hand allows you to decide how you want to play the game in so many ways; from the methods of combat you use, to how many of the silly books mentioned here you want to read, and the towns you want to visit or dragons you want to kill - And despite ploughing over a hundred hours into it so far and being killed multiple times I've not once ragequit, or found myself shouting at the tv in anger - and thats why its the better game as far as I'm concerned; ITS MORE FUN.

    Thats just my opinion anyway.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 19:05

  • symmetry #71 3 months ago

    Telling Tales. The title of this article is what it's all about.

    When you tell a tale about Dark Souls, it's about the story in the game, written by the devs.

    When you tell a tale about Skyrim, it's about your story through the game, written by you.

  • Lemming81 #72 3 months ago

    "The great lie about Skyrim is that we love it because it's an epic. The truth is it's a game about cow-tipping bears, stealing stuff and looking at postcard views. The lore just kind of washes over you in a sea of forgettable names"

    I disagree. I'd compare Skyrim to Star Wars. No one is focusing on the lore when they watch A New Hope, it's the fact you are sold on a living, breathing universe. That's where Skyrim is a success. Without all that lore though, we'd see through the cheap tricks and it'd be as you described. The lore might appear forgettable to you, but its effect is more subliminal.

    The other games you describe are much more about the illusion of epic scope, to disguise the more linear aspects of the game itself. That's where a good story that grips you becomes essential - like Half-Life 2 - so you forget you are in a corridor shooter.

    I challenge anyone to do the Wolf Skull Cave Quest from Solitude in Skyrim, and not feel like they've just stumbled into Temple of Doom. Skyrim is made up of moments like that. The story is on to you, the player, to create it. It's not a lie, it's just another way to entertain and one I'd argue is a lot harder to pull off.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 14:49

  • SnuffleTruffle #73 3 months ago

    Interesting article, but I don't think it's correct to say that Skyrim is doing something wrong by giving people the choice to learn as much or as little about the world as they like.

  • hiddenranbir #74 3 months ago

    You're wrong Rich.

  • Khosrau #75 3 months ago

    I can only agree with this article.

    The latest 2 Elder Scrolls games truly lack Soul.

    Granted, I've not played Skyrim, but the more I read and see about it, the more it reminds me of Oblivion. And that's a massively overrated game in my opinion. It's really only half-decent. A hollow shell.

    Static gameworld, copy/paste locations, crap story, wonky storytelling, bad dialogue, no memorable characters at all...

    Once the initial dazzling scope wears of, there is little left. For me anyway. Maybe I've come to expect different things in games. I agree the Elder Scrolls (or Bethesda) formula is getting stale. While awesome in Morrowind, it hasn't evolved one bit. Although Morrowind was of course infinitely better then Oblivion, it had so much more charm, variety and depth. And soul, yes. That too.

    Good job Rich Stanton, for pointing this out.



    On another note, this article makes me want to play DS.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 14:56

  • schnide #76 3 months ago

    @symmetry

    "When you tell a tale about Dark Souls, it's about the story in the game, written by the devs.

    When you tell a tale about Skyrim, it's about your story through the game, written by you."

    Er, haven't you got that the wrong way around?

  • Gecks #77 3 months ago

    i haven't played skyrim; i gave up with bethesda when they turned fallout into a skill-less chore, held together by the glue of most gamers' (myself included) OCD -induced completion of page-after-page of quests.

    dark souls has no 'quests' - it is an environment you will know fully because it's all important. EVERYONE who's played dark souls will be able to map out all of its corridors, like the best maps in doom. the plot plays out similarly - i know every NPC and my actions affect the gameworld in a real, and permanent way. there's no abstract karma or respect meters; it's the difference between someone helping you and attacking you.

    so whilst i can't say whether skyrim is the more immersive story, i can say that dark souls is the most immersive, and best game i've played this year. all this bullshit about it being balls-hard - it is, but that's not all it has to offer.

  • Grayvern #78 3 months ago

    You can't ignore the fact that Skyrim is meant to be a fantasy world and an RPG and has to make concessions in both directions.

    Having in game books leads to the veracity of the world some players will engage some will not and ultimately either approach is okay.

    While Dark souls may not reveal everything to the player neither does Skyrim.

    Markarth and the Forsworn conspiracy being a prime example of the fact that Skyrim may not ask you to piece the story together it does however require you to infer the moral implications and motivations of those involved.

    The world of any game or story is always inconsequential if you choose of find yourself unable to engage with it.

  • Legion_nor #79 3 months ago

    Lore washes over you? Forgettable names? Complaining about the books? My dear Mister Stanton, if what you say is true then why does The Imperial-liberary exist?
    http://www.imperial -library.info The elder scrolls have an interesting story full of unique characters and places. Also, the debates raging on sites like The imperial liberary that concerns everything from in-game biology, theology, history ect would/should serve to make you point pretty moot.

    I belive you rather speak for a different type of gamer, a type of gamer who cannot maintain interest in somthing unless its recived in short actionfilled sequenses, and whom (god forbid) never could muster the fortitude to dive deep into an extencive lore background.

    just my two cents

  • stryker1121 #80 3 months ago

    Skyrim perhaps is handcuffed by the 'do whatever you want' template, which can make the storytelling floaty and unfocused when you're the star of the show and essentially creating whatever story you want. Every ES game is like that. But I for for one enjoy getting bits of the lore from NPCs and books. Sure I skip a good amount of the tomes, but the history stuff about Morrowind, the Oblivion Crisis, the Dwemer, etc, I usually make a point to read b/c it fleshes out the world nicely. To say Skyrim is about "bear tipping and postcard views" is gross oversimplification of what the ES universe has to offer. It can be whatever you want and that's the attraction.

    Have not played a Souls game yet but looking forward to tacking DkSouls down the line. It seems a far different experience than Skyrim, and that's fine.

  • Ironsword #81 3 months ago

    The flavour text of a single item in Dark Souls tells more about the world than a book in Skyrim. Also I found it ridiculous everyone seems to keep a journal of their last moments, surprised they don't end them in AAAaaaah....
    never read the books
    Personally solved this by printing the ingame books and reading them while not playing - I really like to keep those two things separate.

  • PlugMonkey #82 3 months ago

    @metamind16

    Just out of interest, why do you consider Dark Souls to NOT be an RPG?

    In terms of lineage, I would have thought that the dungeon crawler has just as much claim to the term as games driven more by character development and choice? Especially when it comes to RPGs on computer.

    Dark Souls can essentially trace its pedigree all the way back to Rogue, and even Pedit5. Were they not RPGs now? We've been dropping characters into near unsurvivable dungeons with little or no explanation as to why, and calling them RPGs, since about 5 minutes after the first computer was invented. It seems a bit late in the day to start denying a dungeon crawler like Dark Souls now. Isn't the dungeon crawler the original RPG?

    I completely agree with everything else you said though. It really got to the heart of what a game like Skyrim is all about. Yes, there's a whole load of stuff in it that is redundant to me, but it's that redundancy that lets me pick and choose, and out of that freedom my characters take on a depth of quirkyness that I never quite reach in other games. They evolve weird things that they do, and there are reasons why they do them.

    In Oblivion my character was obsessed with killing people by putting them to sleep. Fallout 3 refused to wear armour on fashion grounds, and would literally kill for a trouser suit. New Vegas collected teddy bears. There's something about the amount of depth they throw into it that encourages me to add even more of my own.

    Edit: Lol. Of all the posts to get phantom negged on! Especially compared to the over opinionated twaddle I usually trot out on here during my tea breaks. What part of that is remotely controversial? That dungeon crawler RPGs like DS have been around for 35 years? Or that the freedom in Skyrim leads to me developing quirkier characters?
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 15:39

  • BearFishPie #83 3 months ago

    With all the DS lovers out there, hopefully someone can help me out. I'm really keen to pick it up and get on the receiving end of some good ol' harsh treatment, but have only very limited gaming time these days - say 1/2 hour most nights. How easy/quick is it to save your game? I'm concerned it'll be like Lost Odyssey, where I daren't switch it on as I know the time available is too little to achieve anything given the spacing of save points...

  • Inmediasress #84 3 months ago

    Bethesda games are about quantity rather than quality.
    Skyrim is no exception about that.
    They just upped the quality a bit compared to Oblivion but it's still not enough.
    TES lore is not bad but Skyrim basically has all the lore from Morrowind same books and not enough new books about Skyrim. Anyone who played the previous titles finds it boring.
    Dialogoue is also painfully boring in most cases, at least they upped the voice actors by two or three but it still feels there isn't enough variety.
    Quite easy to prove that they went for quantity rather than quality.
    Mute companions no meaningfull interaction with them.
    Marrige same problem as above just thrown in because its the fad now to have gay/lesbo sex but no real elaboration on relationships.

    The biggest issue of course is that for such a sand box game where the world is supposed to turn around you there is very little impact you actually make on the world, almost nothing.
    There isn't really any sense of accomplishment nothing epic about it you just go around shooting random dragons which are more of a flying pests than anything dangerous.
    I'm at a point where I see one flying around and just go away don't have any interest in downing it.
    I'm more affraid of some wizards in random dungeons than dragons.

    I would be happier with half of this content, but make it more interesting where you can actually feel like you make a diffrence in the world.

    (By the way I palyed it on highest difficulty.)

    After the fiasco with the ps3 and seeing as how bland skyrim is, it stinks to high heaven why almost every game review glossed over these issues to give it a 10/10 score and there are still people that claim Bethesdanimax didn't buy reviews galore.

    I'm not saying it's a bad game but not worthy of all the high praise it gets.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 15:37

  • Widge #85 3 months ago

    @BearFishPie it saves continuously ... when you quit, you start off exactly where you were.

  • riz23 #86 3 months ago

    The article is biased but I do fall into the Dark Souls camp. You are drawn into that world and feel connected to it and the few desperate and strange people you find along the way unlike any other game. The level/world design is also so intricate and precise it almost defies belief. Everything in DS is done for a purpose, to achieve some emotional reaction or give depth to gameplay. Item descriptions, lighting, audio, nothing is just 'made' and put there. The attention to detail is astounding.

    Skyrim too has attention to detail and it is also impressive. All these items, all this lore, all this remembering of things. It's smart but it's not great design. It's a lot of content that creates a world, but Rich is right a lot of that content by itself does not mean much. Skyrim technically is also a mess and that breaks any immersion in a major way for me.

    Both great games, but Skyrim is a legacy of the past, it's like a super-charged old school rpg, which is awesome, but it's not new. Whether Dark Souls is the future, well no I doubt it, but it is almost unique in how it tells a story.

  • PlugMonkey #87 3 months ago

    @schnide

    "When you tell a tale about Dark Souls, it's about the story in the game, written by the devs.

    When you tell a tale about Skyrim, it's about your story through the game, written by you."

    Er, haven't you got that the wrong way around?

    Not sure why you're getting negged there. All my 'Souls' stories are mechanic based, not based on the in game story at all. I doubt any of them have happened to anyone else here.

    In fact, can anyone tell a Dark Souls story about the story in the game, written by the devs? That's just not how the game works at all.

    Skyrim is more of an even split. My highpoint so far has been Palagius the Mad. An utterly brilliant tale, but one definitely (if brilliantly) written by the devs.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 15:30

  • Gecks #88 3 months ago

    @BearFishPie
    there's not really a notion of 'save spots' in dark souls. essentially the game is saving all the time - you can't do anything without it saving on your one save file. so in that sense, you can play for 2 minutes and it won't lose any of your progress :) next time you start off in the same position, with the same items, and the same enemies alive/dead.

  • erekose200 #89 3 months ago

    Skyrim just looks so sterile with it's bland, cliched art style. Worse, the character animation is dreadful, making characters look like they float on air in a manner that is comical rather then convincing. In addition the combat in this game is woefully clumsy and superficial. I don't care if I can do a million and one things if the fundamentals are this poor.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 15:31

  • BearFishPie #90 3 months ago

    @Widge @Gecks

    Thanks folks. Once Arkham City's done I'll be getting myself killed an awful lot then. Can't wait!

  • Biker_Bob_1971 #91 3 months ago

    Post deleted at 16:59:10 06-02-2012

  • GreyBeard #92 3 months ago

    Great article, the fragmented-story model is the way of the future. The only trouble is that it requires intelligence and effort (oh dear) on the part of the player.

    The sad truth is that the most gamers (who are expected to be not so smart, with the attention span of gnats) would rather have narrative spoon-fed to them in easily digestible chunks.

    The most depressing thing to me is how unimaginative popular "fantasy" has become. Harry Potter, fucking Avatar... There's more to imagination than simply dressing up the same simplistic story tropes and power mechanics with different labels and presenting it in such a way as to turn-off/offend the least number of people.

    Skyrim, for everything (and that's reams of stuff) that's been written about it, offers absolutely nothing new creatively. Its just a tired AD&D high fantasy retread. "But, but, you now get Dragonshouts"

    Its just magic, redressed, idiots. Putting it in a different category with different acquisition/use costs is a completely superficial differentiator fictionally.

    I'm not saying this makes Skyrim a bad GAME. It doesn't. But its just an indicator of how shallow and superficial its fiction is.

    And as to the whole "you create your own story" thing. A chain of events created by fucking about aimlessly in a large space is the most primitive definition of the term. Real stories have structure, subtext, and a point that the author is striving to communicate.

    A person playing a game has none of these things, because most players aren't writers - hell they aren't even required to be creative; they are just clients / consumers. So the "story" being told adds up to fuck all. Unless you consider the height of storytelling to be the equivalent of humdrum shopping excursions, except that instead of muggers and rapists to watch for there are bandits and (woohoo) dragons to contend with.

    Trite unimaginative pabulum for the unimaginative. And no amount of naff, sub-Tolkien cobblers can disguise its fundamental banality.

  • QotSAfan #93 3 months ago

    Fully agree with the article. The world of Skyrim is built upon what you don't see. All that lore is there to prop up an otherwise bland world that you actually cannot really interact with.

    I have completed all the Thieves Guild, Companion and Mages missions and I am the respective head of all of the above. I have not come back to them since. I just feel like another soldier in the ranks. Sure, in the next TES game, something may be written about the dragon born being all of those things and wielding great power but the problem is, I am never let be that person. I am always the underdog, relying on NPC's to give me quest and with no real freedom.

    Think bigger next time Bethesda!

  • Shikasama #94 3 months ago

    What a load of utter tosh.

    I feel bad I actually clicke don this, sending a little statistic to EG that this worth putting on the site. I don't even know where to begin with how utterly subjective and assumptive this is.

    People like this pillock get to call themselves writers as well.

  • caesar_ #95 3 months ago

    I agree totally with this article. Not that I wouldn't give Skyrim 10/10.

  • HandOfBeadle #96 3 months ago

    I completely agree with the article. I also expect such a topic to be divisive, because different people are enticed by different forms of storytelling.

    I think the Skyrim format is born of a time when games couldn't muster the sophistication to tell a story without a lot of very literal (and hackneyed) exposition. When you still see such old concepts applied now, they stand out quite starkly in contrast to the more artful and nuanced narrative methods that inhabit other games (if not the same game itself - the dragon shouts themselves are far more evocative than every single book and 99% of verbal conversation in Skyrim combined).

    I can't disagree that Dark Souls is pretty far short of perfect in terms of the acting performances. But I do think it's far closer to attempting, let alone achieving, the sort of standard of narrative that could actually make the tired games-as-art debate much more relevant. That's because it doesn't take the Skyrim / MGS4 route of slapping on as many layers of text and story arcs as possible, knowing that certain people will lap any old tripe up. It takes an Ico / SotC route, allowing the environment and the general atmosphere of lore to speak for the game with each and every frame per second, ensuring that everything has a purpose and invites an internal response from the player.

    I actually think the giant ray boss in world 4 of Demon's Souls was closer to what Skyrim's environment and feel should have been than Skyrim itself. Ditch most of Skyrim's pleasant but extremely generic soundtrack and throw in a lot more bleak old Icelandic folk songs, take all American accents out of the game and replace them with far more characterful scandinavian voices than the ones we already have, and you'd have had something absolutely teeming with atmosphere and context. Not just occasionally smacking of it.

  • AlvySinger #97 3 months ago

    All valid opinions and, as a dialogue skipper (I'm in my 30s, no time), I understand the sentiment.

    However, it's quite similar to the latter stages of this review, which Graham Linehan linked to this week.

    http://www.grantland.com/st ory/_/id/7290527/one-night-skyrim-makes-strong-man-crumble

  • digitalkid #98 3 months ago

    Totally agree.

    What a lame trend to loose years on game lore and history. Absolutely. And making vast worlds where you have to walk (OMG!!!) to nearest village instead of finding it right next door. And all that books and details about the world..

    Aldmery Dominion war and White-Gold Concordat, forbidden worship to first Septim which led to Nord rebellion and segregation, Dunmer refugees from Vvardenfell who brought Daedra cults to Skyrim, ex-legion general seeking power despite many victims of his own blood, High Hrothgar monastery, shrine of Azura with last dunmer left to maintain it, hidden daedric worship temples.. Ah and all that towns, ports, little people with their little stories.. Boooooring. And books describing all that, and NPCs telling you all this stories.. Crap.

    Let's make more straight-lined-scripted-cutscened games with only what player needs and monsters, and bosses, and all the coolest stuff like that!!! And with world with a history and lore like they only a few days old. Woooooow!!! Ah, wait, there tons of games like that..

    8)

  • Black_RL #99 3 months ago

    You used to be a good article writer then you took an arrow to the knee.
    Perhaps what's most remarkable
    Is that the majority of people prefer SKYRIM, simple as that.

    SKYRM with more than 5.000.000 sales
    [link url=http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php?n ame=dark+souls&publisher=237&c

  • rickjoyce #100 3 months ago

    I absolutely agree and its why while I do enjoy Skyrim and appreciate the effort put into it, it just feels shallow compared to Dark Souls. It lacks the mystery and character of Dark souls and that's why I'll have forgotten most of it long before their sequels come about.

  • Dangerous_Dan #101 3 months ago

    @geeza2020 - Unfair? I doubt anyone can play through Dark Souls for the first time and not die (without a detailed guide) but other than that i would say it's not "unfair". And what i like about it, the PvE is skill based - you do improve with every hour you spend and it's not about ninja reflexes but about improving your combat skills.

    For the fun part - Come to think of it, i don't understand what fun is... Something that you do enjoy? Well i am enjoying DS. ^^

    But i'm not saying it's wrong how you think about this game, some people i know don't like it and ofc that's okay.

  • Inmediasress #102 3 months ago

    @Black_RL
    I attribute that to the people who got a hardon when they saw that dragons gonna be in it and the ungodly hype it recieved.
    Nowadays it seems everything sells good that is marekted heavily sometimes I wonder if some games have more marketing costs than dev cost.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 16:03

  • PoorMaryBellows #103 3 months ago

    I think this article rather misses the point that to many people who play it properly, Skyrim is more of a second life than a game. So when you sit down to read a good Skyrim book - or even the occasional not so good one - that's simply you doing in your Skyrim life something you'd also do in real life without even thinking twice about it.

    If Skyrim wasn't so mind-bogglingly vast, this argument might sound trite. But the game's designers have a created a massive, highly populated world where an enthusiastic player will spend literally hundreds of hours. And in a game of that scale, i swear it would feel weird if I COULDN'T chill out with a good book for a bit. Especially if what I'm reading enriches the environment I'm 'living' in.

    Just saying.

    And for the record, I absolutely love Dark Souls as well - especially the wonderfully intricate way the world is designed. But to be honest, the two games seem to me to be such different beasts that the whole idea of talking about them in a 'comparative' way seems fundamentally flawed.

  • PlugMonkey #104 3 months ago

    @Black_RL

    Based on the same logic: the majority of people prefer Avater, and therefore Avatar is the very pinnacle of story-telling in the medium of film?

  • drew327 #105 3 months ago

    Great read, thanks. I love both games but Dark Souls is far superior to me. Just can't compare the amount of incredible moments and realizations I had in that game. Skyrim is great but you start to see behind the curtain after a while, like with all their games. I hope Bethesda plays Dark Souls and gets the great experiences, and it motivates them to actually deviate from the norm a bit for ES6. Probably not though, see sales numbers.

  • agent55 #106 3 months ago

    "Putting faith in a player's dedication is as close as AAA games get to a revolutionary act these days... "

    Excellent observation.

  • Astro-Creature #107 3 months ago

    I remember the days when there wasn't a fucking Skyrim article every day.

  • JohnnyNoir #108 3 months ago

    @Eraserhead The best stories are in the users head/imagination. Good old books vs movies argument.

  • joest01 #109 3 months ago

    I agree with the general sentiment expressed here. Although Demons Souls certainly did a better job of transporting the story than Dark Souls does. Killing Astraea broke my heart every time. You actually wanted to find out more and started playing again and paying attnetion to put the pieces together.

    In addition, while I find the honor heaped on *.souls is well deserved, it is the Metroid series that should get the credit for this type of storytelling.

  • Inmediasress #110 3 months ago

    I almsot forgot it seems this article is what was missing from the original Skyrim review.
    Similar articles start to pop up at other gaming sites after the hype cleared up and Bethesda got its money.
    Now the gamesites are allowed to say negatives as well.

  • ThemisB #111 3 months ago

    I agree with some of this article, but you're still a bit harsh on Skyrim. Plenty of the dungeons, ruins, caves and mines you explore have their own story to tell, often independent of any quest.

  • KeatsSeven #112 3 months ago

    There is a great article on Dark Souls on Technorati [link url=http://technorati.com /entertainment/gaming/article/dark-souls-understated-online- system-is/[/link]
    Edited by 2 at 07/12/11 @ 16:30

  • Cose #113 3 months ago

    The future? What future? Bethesda invented a whole lore, full of imagination -not only for races, but also places, lands, seas, a whole continent and planet-. Some books like "The diamond and the Cake" are great, fun to read.

    I'd recommend the author of the article to program a game as big and similar to Skyrim, free of bugs.

  • JohnnyNoir #114 3 months ago

    Dark Souls = NG+++, searching every nook and cranny/dialogue/trigger variation/ item/weapon/order of killing things/or letting npc live or die.

    Skyrim = played 'normally' for a few quests found gameplay to be 50% looting/40% travelling from A to B, 10% spammy combat, now ignoring all side quest just doing main to finish the game, skip all conversations, open close books just to see if you get xp, stopped looting, stopped making any weapons/potion/food, now even stopped main quest. i just dont care for my avatar/the world lore and just moved onto mario 3ds.

    bring on the neg votes!!

  • Zob #115 3 months ago

    I really don't understand how these two types of game can be compared at all. They are chalk and cheese as far as game mechanics go. The link, as far I see, between them is the fantasy setting.

    The Elder Scrolls series have been around since 1994 and drew heavily from an old pc/atari st/amiga game called Legends of Valour. Its raison d'etre is having a full and extraordinarily detailed world where the player can roleplay if they want i.e. be like an honourable knight, a mushroom eating hermit that lives in the forests or a sadistic sorcerer that owns a tower overlooking their plundered land. The games often don't make sense to completionists who need to be able to do everything that the game world offers. ES games are just as much about what you don't get to see/read/fight/complete... it's that vastness that makes them feel like a world to carve your own adventure in. It's the fact you don't have time to do absolutely everything that makes each story different.

    Just like Tom Bombadil's poems in the Lord of the Rings books, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't sit concisely in the narrative, but they're there to flesh out the world and give a setting and place.

    Dark Souls has just a different way of telling the story. It's pretty awesome that both types of game are available to enjoy.

    You can bet your bottom dollar that if Bethesda took away all the books, lore and huge amounts of dialogue available they'd cause an uproar in their fanbase... there's absolutely nothing else on the market that could satisfy that kind of gaming appetite.

    Edited for spelling...
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 16:31

  • jimr9999us #116 3 months ago

    A very smart overview of the two best rpg's of the year. It's a shame Dark Souls unforgiving reputation will mean its exposure will be greatly limited, even if the reputation is deserved :)

  • puddleduck #117 3 months ago

    I love how many people seem to think this article is some kind of abomination that has ruined their day. It's an opinion piece that, clearly from the comments, has people that agree and disagree. So those claiming this article is complete rubbish are funnily enough looking quite foolish.

    Personally I loved DS more than any game I've ever played, but will still be getting Skyrim after Christmas as I still do enjoy a bit more of the passive gaming experience. I do agree with a lot of the points in the article though. I haven't played Skyrim yet, the combat in things like Oblivion and Fallout is incredibly weak when compared to DS, and in a vast world, that does indeed detach me from the story of the world.

    It says everything that Oblivion and Fallout were two of my favourite gaming experiences and that I would have had Skyrim as an insta purchase. That is until my curiosity was peaked by Demon Souls by this very forum and the interesting thread with tons of people sharing stories and information. After I played it, Dark Souls become the game I could no longer wait for, and one of very few Limited Edition Pre Orders I've ever placed!

  • IronCladChicken #118 3 months ago

    If Oblivion/SkyRim, etc.. are all heavily modeled after Ultimas 4/5.

    What is Dark Souls structure modeled after? Lure of the Temptress/Beneath a Steel Sky?

    (I've not played either SkyRim or Dark Souls)

  • scaramanga10 #119 3 months ago

    I've played Dark Souls and Skyrim and have come to the same conclusion. Skyrim was the RPG I was looking forward to the most, and its a great game I've put 100hrs+ in, but Dark Souls is the one that is superior in 'telling tales'.

    At first Skyrim was a shockingly good experience, but after a dozen quests and after yet another Dward ruin that looks the same, everything seemed inconsequential. Levels scale, enemies are easy. After the first part of the game, you have the entire world open up, you see everything, there is nothing new to discover after certain point.

    The parts that were laboriously designed, like the city of Markarth, is gorgeous and multi-leveled. Markarth is just one example, and when Skyrim decided to put love and care in their areas it does shine. But it made me realized that the entirety of Dark Souls is like a massive Markarth of Skyrim. Detailed, gorgeous, and living.

    From a telling tales perspective, Skyrim is lacking, the Dragon Born stuff is interesting, but all the other quests have little influence on the main story line. I could join the Dark Brotherhood and be a werewolf but its all inconsequential in the end. Another tale told, another quest, another easy dungeon, probably with a chest and a cheap short-cut out at the end.

    Nothing new to discover, which is the exact opposite of Dark Souls, there is satisfaction of discovering a new area, a new cove, a new shortcut, a new npc, a new weapon.

  • The-Jack-Burton #120 3 months ago

    Wow, that was a great read. And I completely agree. Skyrim is a fantastic experience, but it is lacking in sophistication and smarts, something Dark Souls exudes.

    Dark Souls really is the epitome of advanced, modern gaming, and big egomaniac developers like Bethesda really should take a hard look at what FromSoftware is doing. It is a simple, elegant interface. It is deep, complicated, tough as nails gameplay. It is true to the concept of gaming and the gamer.

    Skyrim's menus, the loading, the NPCs, the bugs, the insufferable mountain of items that you have to sift through, organize or sell, really shows that Bethesda is severely lacking in the ability to innovate. I'm at level 42 and I've only done 2 main quests and 3 side quests. As soon as I start wandering around a city, talking to NPCs, entering and exiting any multitude of doors, the game quickly becomes a bore and a headache. It's at its best when you just want to walk around and explore, and at it's worst when it tries to be a game.

    MW3, B3, U3, GOW3, Skyrim - it is hard to define what makes any of them a game.

    Portal 2, Dark souls - defined by and built around the concept of being a game.

  • JohnnyNoir #121 3 months ago

    my last post made me look like a skyrim hater. dont get me wrong, i did enjoy it. it just got boring quickly once i found out nothing has changed since their last game. 60+ hours of dark souls were enjoyable, even the deliberate grinding to level up when stuck. after an hour or so of enjoyable skyrim the rest of it felt like grinding.quest grinding/potion grinding/ingredients grinding/farming pelt to grind some leather to grind some armour. yea i'll follow the hype and give it 10/10 if i play it for an hour and only and hour. else its a 7/10 game for me at most.

  • orangpelupa #122 3 months ago

    umm i think i will get a lot of negttive for this.. but...

    Game like DS is to vague for new player (that already accustomed to be spoon fed with information).

    my 10minutes in the game, im 100% confused. because no information is being fed to me at all.


    then about Skyrim,
    that game is both spoon feeding the player with info and on the other hand also giving the vagueness of information just like DS.

    This making new gamer can easily "tune in" and "understand" what to do to "play the game".
    Then the gamer can keep doing the spoon fed info and can looking info by him/herself exploring the world/lore/story/etc.

    sorry the bad english and many "" marks.

    huff... bracing for the incoming negatives..
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 17:02

  • erp #123 3 months ago

    Thirty-six hours for Dark Souls? Yeah, sure! That's either some seriously impressive skills, or a lot of guidebook and wiki reading... (Forgive me, but I suspect the latter).

    I'm at around the 70 hour mark and I doubt I'm more than 2/3 of the way through, but then I play completely without any kind of guide whatsoever.

    Now I know I'm slow (for reference, Demon's Souls took me 107 hours), but I didn't think I was that slow! (Am I??)

  • orangpelupa #124 3 months ago

    btw what the meaning of EG tagline: "When the mountain won't come to Muhammad. " ?
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 17:10

  • quadfather #125 3 months ago

    Everyone has said what I was generally going to say, so I won't say the wall of text. But whilst I like both games, Dark souls has a clear edge for me.

    It has the perfect combat system.
    It's the desolation and the feeling of total isolation against odds that are fucking hard/challenging* in a fantastically realised world with NPC's that you actually listen to. That in itself should be saluted.

    Ok, so I obviously am going to write my wall of text. But why not? It's Dark souls - it's fucking brilliant.

    Going further into the NPC aspect, never mind the combat/worlds/bosses/skills/etc, (Spoiler warning) when I accidently messed up Solaire in Dark Souls at Lost Izalith, I was absolutely gutted. I *really* didn't want him to die and I was extremely reluctant to have to kill him. I even felt like restarting the game after 90 hours of play.

    Not many games can make you feel so much towards a game. At least, not for me.

    *Amend as your skill level deems appropriate.

  • King_Edward #126 3 months ago

    What an excellent article. I haven't played Skyrim, but it's great seeing Dark Souls get the attention it deserves in this area. People too often mistake a minimalist story for a bad one.

  • Soul_man #127 3 months ago

    I haven't played Dark Souls, but Skyrim is actually one of the best attempts I've seen at combining a large, open world with an engaging story (or stories). Fallout: New Vegas was better story-wise, but somewhat smaller in scope.

    Further along the spectrum are games like The Witcher 1 and 2. Each main chapter of those games is like an extremely detailed and well-written (but obviously smaller) open world game.

    Personally, I'm just glad to have this many quality CRPGs to choose from. :)

  • Stoatboy #128 3 months ago

    In Skyrim there's a female NPC in The Bannered Mare in Whiterun. Whenever you go near her she says something like "Let me share some Nord wisdom. You don't know a woman until you've had a drink and a fight with her".

    It's not a location you have to visit amazingly often, and I'm not a huge way through the game, but I must have heard that line a dozen times now. It was unnecessary, unwanted, unrealistic, awkward and jarring the first time. It'll be worse the thirteenth time. If something as horribly unnatural as that appeared in a film or TV show it would be rightfully lambasted.

    She doesn't even say hello first, she just comes right out with that nonsense.


    In contrast, there's a nice lady I often pass when I walk to work in the morning - a complete stranger. We've passed each other maybe 100 times. After about the 30th time she said "Good Morning". Since then we always greet each other when we pass. So I've spoken to her maybe 70 times now. We've never said anything other than "Good morning" (or words to that effect). Despite speaking to her more frequently than I speak to my own parents, I've never once been tempted to share trite snippets of received wisdom, my plans for the day, or an old wives tale or two, and I doubt she has either. We just say hello. Exactly like the NPCs in Skyrim don't.


    Not only is the dialogue poor then, it's also inappropriate.

    The simple fact is they could make Skyrim much more believable by removing the unprovoked chatting. It makes it feel like everyone in the world exists only to interact with the player when they come past. (And it usually is when you go past - so you spark these lines of dialogue from complete strangers as you leg it past them in the street, not stopping to listen as they chunter through their stock line one more time, still blathering on as the noise fades into the distance behind you.)

  • orpheus #129 3 months ago

    Er, surely if 'reading a book' suddenly prevents the game from being a game, does that mean that every time I hacked & read emails in DE:HR, I wasn't playing a game? I'm sure there are a hundred equivalent scenarios in other games.

    DS's 'story' was all bizarre guys muttering 'eeheehee' at the end of every conversation. Cliche doesn't even begin to cover it.

    EDIT: And perhaps the point of Skyrim is to have hundreds of stories in one world. In DS, there's only one story, and you probably won't get it the first time through, or the second, without spending ages OUTSIDE the game reading the fucking wiki.
    Edited by 1 at 07/12/11 @ 17:51

  • Zaiz #130 3 months ago

    After reading through goddamn everything, I have to say one thing:

    This is ultimately subjective.

    I personally enjoy Dark Soul's method of storytelling(Admittedly I've never played it) but I believe Metroid Prime is the best example of that method. I really can't say much about the story, as I played through Demon's Souls and found the plot to be between non-existent, utterly forgettable or GRIIIIMDAARRRRKK DON'T YOU SEE THE GRIMDARK?! The only thing that really saved that game are the mechanics - but the mechanics were ultimately skewed heavily in the mage's favor. So while I enjoyed it significantly, it also caused me pain to watch a douchebag beat the game with the thief's ring and poison cloud.

    As for Skyrim, it has massive amounts of lore that I personally enjoy. It is a world with history. It is also a world with intrinsic detail. Blackreach for example is a location that tells a very small story of the dwarves simply if you stand back and think about the area's stark and odd beauty, about its monolithic centerpiece that ultimately tells a short, but sad story about what the Dwarves missed.

  • Fox89 #131 3 months ago

    So what you're saying is: Skyrim tells a story, Dark Souls implies one.

    Both perfectly valid approaches. Personally, I prefer the former. Getting lost in the lore. OK, I tend not to read all the books in Skyrim, but I listen to all the conversations. I'm not too bothered about Tamriel's history, but I'm very interested in its current events.

    There will always be a place for that kind of storytelling.

  • Demiath #132 3 months ago

    Narrative shortcomings notwithstanding, the TES-related criticisms about reusing assets and being characterized by a "banal attention to detail" (provided this was referring to more than just the text-based lore) are perfectly reasonable as long as we're talking about Daggerfall, Morrowind or Oblivion. Within the context of the extraordinarily varied quest locations and insanely detailed world environments of Skyrim, such remarks feel misplaced and ungenerous to the extreme. Sure, there are undoubtedly reused assets even in the latest TES title, but Bethesda have stepped up their game tenfold this time in ways a long-time Elder Scrolls detractor like myself did not see coming.

    As for Dark Souls, if it's anything like Demon's Souls (which, unlike From's latest RPG, I have actually played) there's a tremendous amount of artfully designed environments there but not a whole lot of genuinely compelling storytelling regardless of whatever your definition of "storytelling" happens to be (things have happened in the world, yes, and they can be inferred from the environments, yes, but do the developers give any narrative-based reason for the player to actually care about any of it?). DS seems a very odd choice to compare with Skyrim, and both games also seem equally unsuited for the topic at hand.

  • evarofzentral #133 3 months ago

    Is Eurogamer being payed to write anti-Skyrim articles or something?

  • jelazee #134 3 months ago

    Good opinion article. Not sure I agree, having played both games. I get the point about implicit narrative being more powerful than explicit - "show me, don't tell me."

    Dark Souls is implicit to the point of being actively obtuse, un-enjoyably so for me. I'd probably name Portal as a game that really captures the power of indirect narrative - where as the reader / player, you are asked to put seemingly disparate events & experiences together in your head and come up with...exactly what the author wanted you to :)

    I agree that Skyrim is comparatively overt - but is still a mix of the implicit and explicit. For example, I massively enjoyed finding the Shadowmarks...and then enjoyed reading the book that explains them!

  • TazerFan #135 3 months ago

    Weird article.

  • Scimarad #136 3 months ago

    I agree totally.

    I love Skyrim and have at least enjoyed the other ES games but I have to say the lore and the NPCs generally bore the crap out of me. Obviously YMMV but that's how I feel about it.

  • Bockclock #137 3 months ago

    About Solaire and his maggot: he doesn't have to meet his doom to the sunlight maggot....gotta enter from the secret chaos covenant passage and take it out before it humps his head. Then you can summon him for Gwyn

  • intpleeus #138 3 months ago

    Good article.

    I don't skip conversations, and I do, sometimes, read books. There are little details in Skyrim's world that can only be interpreted by knowing some lore. For example, the throneroom of Whiterun has a dragon skull on the wall, a little detail that embodies a lot of narrative if one previously read "Olaf and the Dragon".

    While I agree there can be too much exposition in Skyrim, there is also a lot of ambient storytelling in its world. For example, wandering east of Whiterun one day, I stumbled upon a small shrine to Talos nestled under a ridge in the wilderness. Nobody was there; a wooden bench had fallen over and coinpurse lay at its side. I had previously overheard that Talos worship had been outlawed in Skyrim and figured that someone had to flee in a hurry, leaving their coinpurse behind. Perhaps its's just my overactive imagination, but I see little stories like this in Skyrim's world all of the time.

  • UncleLou #139 3 months ago

    Great article, and it explains perfectly why, while I like all Bethesda games for their exploration and scope, they never quite grab me as they should. I've played it for 50+ hours and couldn't tell you a single character's name (except Lydia).

    And yes, Half-Life is still ahead of its time with how it tells its story (which may not have a terrific plot, but that's besides the point). A lesson most developers who rely on cutscene after cutscene still haven't learned to this day.

  • ps-360 #140 3 months ago

    i'm bored of hearing about skyrim now, bugs,updates,glitches, comparison between both consoles,the game aint that pissin good!

  • geeza2020 #141 3 months ago

    @Dangerous_Dan - Remember the part in DS where you're crossing the bridge to the undead parish and that rather large dragon swoops down from behind you and scorches you to cinders, which you had no way of avoiding the first time through? How is that not unfair? I know it is only one example, but if one of the objectives of the game is to collect souls (which you have to grind for quite some time to collect) while you proceed through the levels, and the game will kill you in a way you cannot possibly avoid, making you lose all said souls in the process and returning you back to your last campfire then that surely makes the game unfair? Maybe 'unfair' is the wrong description, 'overly harsh' perhaps?

    I dont know how to explain it properly, and I'm definitely not saying its a bad game (its fans are numerous and vocal) but the aggresiveness against the player from the start and throughout, (I got to the fight with the Capra demon and just couldnt take it anymore!) just left a bitter taste. It looks and sounds fantastic though, cant fault the presentation :)

  • DaDon123456 #142 3 months ago

    I don't get the sub heading 'When the mountain won't come to Muhammad.' What does Muhammad have to do with either games?

  • DaDon123456 #143 3 months ago

    I don't get the sub heading 'When the mountain won't come to Muhammad.' What does Muhammad have to do with either games?

  • PlugMonkey #144 3 months ago

    @ stoatboy

    Completely agree re: the dialogue. How many times do I have to hear Lydia say "I am sworn to carry your burdens!"? It wasn't funny the first time. It gets even less funny when I'm trying to give her a new set of armour I've just blown my life savings on. And then, they didn't think to make her say "Thankyou". :(

    And what's with the people who say things like "Keep your hands to yourself, sneak-thief"? People responding to your achievements is cool. People psychically detecting your skill tree is jarring. Especially when it's something, y'know, a bit secret...

    @ orpheus

    I fear you may have missed the point. The presence of reading in Skyrim doesn't stop it being a game in its entirety. It doesn't even make it a bad game. But the point is that when you start reading, you stop playing, and the article questions whether this is a good thing in an interactive medium.

    It's essentially the video games equivalent of the "Show, don't tell" argument in film-making. Lots of old films used to rely on it, but it's now pretty much established that you should avoid long expositional dialogue, because you should really be using images rather than words in a visual medium.

    Video games is an interactive medium, so you could say "Don't show or tell - experience."

    I would say a great example of this is the Palagius the Mad subquest from Skyrim that I mentioned earlier. Now THAT is how you fill in some backstory in a game! No text, minimal dialogue, and most of it while I'm doing something. Films are best when I have something to look at; games are best when I have something to do.

    @ EG

    This is a great article, and has sparked one of the most balanced and interesting comments threads I have seen in a long, long time.

    P.S. Why does the reply button keep booting me back to the title page?

  • carlosdfn #145 3 months ago

    I've been saying from day 1 that Skyrim is overrated. Another game that completely destroys it is The Witcher 2, which is by far the best game released this year.

    People are so overwhelmed by the size of it's world that they overlook everything else, eurogamer's review included. Quantity over quality.

  • PlugMonkey #146 3 months ago

    @ geeza2020

    You were pretty unlucky with that dragon not to have a message on the floor warning you about it. Did you leave one? Personally, having an inkling of what the game was like from playing the first one, I have a natural aversion to bridges and any other exposed area, and am liable to run back for the door at the first odd noise. I just got a bit singed. ;) The Random Death Generator has actually been quite heavily toned down from the first game.

    Also, you don't lose your souls when you die, you drop them where you bought it. Having got that far before, it's generally not that hard to get back there again and pick them up. I think in 70 odd hours, I've failed to recover my dropped souls maybe five or six times? Mostly when I decided they weren't worth going back for.

    It's this mechanic that makes it rewarding to play for me, as I always have something to aim for. I'm either in virgin territory, or I'm trying to recover my souls. As long as I keep managing the latter, I'm progressing towards levelling up. It ups the stakes. But woe betide anyone who tries to rush back...

  • Immortal1912 #147 3 months ago

    Nice article. but I have a problem with the tag of this article "When the mountain won't come to Muhammad." widely attributed to prophet Muhammed but the truth is: the story is a lie and there is no written or oral tradition that traces this phrase back to him. I'm asking the author of this article: Can you please remove this tag?

  • Black_RL #148 3 months ago

    What matters is sales, that's why COD and Activision dominate, like it or not that's a fact.

    Also a fact is SKYRIM sales, that are more than 5.000.000 and DS that are only 1.000.000, that says a lot about what people prefer.

    When writing the article he should have been imparcial, but I guess we wanted a flame war, but who really cares? What matters are SALES.

    In my opinion SKYRIM is way better, and I don't skip the dialogs, only the books, because if i read everything I need 1.000 and not 200 or 300. Fact is that in SKYRIM one can do what he wants, and that's why the game is so popular.

    I like VIKING, SPLATTERHOUSE and DEADLY PREMONITION, the sales of this 3 titles were laughable, does that make them worst than DS? That's a hard question with 2 answers, first answer is that YES, it's worst regarding sales, second is that it isn't to some people lie myself. But does that change anything? No.

    Same as this flame article, it won't change a thing, next Elder Scrolls will crush next Souls game in sales, maybe even more.

  • BigHal #149 3 months ago

    You forgot to mention Dark Souls is not so bugged as to be unplayable. A lesson Beth should learn.

  • mcmothercruncher #150 3 months ago

    "But where the world of Skyrim feels like a glorious place from an imagined past, Dark Souls plays like the future. "

    Superb article. Dark Souls treats you like an intelligent adult, most other games out there, including Skyrim, assume you've the intelligence of the average ITV2+1 competition entrant.

  • SvennoJ #151 3 months ago

    Great article, after playing Skyrim for over 80 hours I completely agree with these observations. It is an addictive game, but also one with diminishing returns. Once you have seen most of the world and building and dungeon templates you are left with bad school play acting and a ton of essentially fetch or kill quests in repetitive environments.
    Quantity over quality indeed, not a game where I would want to do anything a second time. I know since I had to start over to do be able to complete the main quest (ps3 version). The 2nd time around, when you are not constantly looking for great views and wondering what's over the horizon, the dialogue and its delivery really start to grate.

    I want to play DS but a pause and save anywhere feature is kinda essential with kids. Does it at least pause when you hold the ps button pressed and get the quit game, turn off console, etc, menu?

  • trebellk #152 3 months ago

    Interesting stuff.

    I'd agree both are amazing and both have had me completely compelled but it's an interesting point about DS, there is something fresher about it.

  • Stoatboy #153 3 months ago

    @Black_RL: Because being popular is always a sign of quality, right?

    By that reckoning McDonalds is the best food you can get, Starbucks provide the finest coffee, and The Sun is journalism at it's finest.

    Utter nonsense.

    People are fucking stupid. Following the herd will generally lead you to the blandest, emptiest, most worthless tripe available.

    I'm not saying Skyrim is that bad - it's testament to the strength of many parts of it that it can survive such awful writing and still be a really good game.

    But ignoring the fact that the writing is largely awful helps no-one.


    Dark Souls has it beat on many levels. The fact that many more people buy Skyrim is something to be disappointed about, not celebrated,IMO.

  • peteob #154 3 months ago

    Part of the problem with Skyrim (and Oblivion) is that they have the equivalent of Sat Nav. You speak to someone, start a quest and follow a series of markers to complete it. That usually takes little effort (apart from the fighting) and is often boring. Suggesting things through books, conversations or other means and letting the player go and discover the world by themselves is more interesting and requires more thought. Obviously, the world has to be intelligently structured and thought out by the developer for this to happen.

    The problem is that because these games attract such a large audience now, developers make them accessible to people who do not want to invest much effort. Morrowind was better in that it didn't hold your hand as much. It encouraged you to take more of an interest in the world to find out things thus creating more of an air of mystery with many quests becoming more challenging and rewarding to complete.

    Dark Souls certainly doesn't hold your hand, but it doesn't have the depth of Skyrim in terms of content and the amount you can do. It is more of an action-oriented game (albeit with many options). It does have a very visually interesting world though, which is a lot of fun to traverse.

  • BlackANUS #155 3 months ago

    My personal preference is this:

    If I want to read a book or watch a movie, I'll read a book or watch a movie.
    If I want to play a game, I want to PLAY a game.

    Great article.

  • agent55 #156 3 months ago

    The Elder Scrolls series and Bethesda themselves are oddities in gaming; both immensely popular and genre leaders, yet at the same time they're often tone-deaf and technically incompetent. With seemingly all other gaming genre's there are masters and pretenders. Yet, in the single-player open-world rpg arena, it's pretty much Bethesda setting a clumsy, far-from-nuanced standard. Skyrim isn't a terrible game by any stretch, but it's nowhere near what I would consider excellent game design... far too many miss-steps and fundamental flaws to give it that kind of praise.

  • dr_faulk #157 3 months ago

    Could you imagine playing through the depth of Skyrim with the difficulty of Dark Souls?

    No thanks!

  • oz3d #158 3 months ago

    One could make similar comparisons dating back to Elder Scrolls: Arena vs Ultima Underworld and those were quite valid. Bethesda has however made great strides in this area and your argument is not only flawed, it does a disservice to the detail and nuance imbued within Skyrim. Things most certainly do connect, and its coherence becomes increasingly evident the more you play. Seize the freedom the game affords and you might be pleasantly surprised and begin to notice its narrative details and subtle touches. If you don't want to converse or read books, then why are you doing so, explore and you'll find the narrative coming to you. For example my interest in the Forsworn was instigated when I discovered a semi-nude woman slumped over a rock in a small pool where she had been bathing, forsworn arrows in her revealing her murderers.

    On some of your points:
    Such an undercooked attempt at incentivising suggests Bethesda's designers weren't quite sure what to do about all these tomes either
    Actually tomes provide a great degree of coherency and even reveal out of the way places and locales. Skill tomes are also evident by their value, and it's so easy to garner experience, if you don't want to read books why turn into a chore. Read a book when you're actually interested in discovering something related to a story or incident you've stumbled upon.
    pass up on the chance to speak with someone, and that chance may never come again. NPCs in Dark Souls appear and disappear because of different and oblique triggers, creating a convincing illusion that they're all on their own little quests in this world, and each has their own arc.
    At one point I saw an NPC approaching the aftermath of a battle on a road and pause to look at the bodies. Days after conversing with that NPC, I found him dead half way across the world in the icy north, apparently besieged by a pack of wolves.
    Unlike your static and often hidden merchants in Demon Souls or Dark Souls,the first merchants I came across was a traveling group, that moves from place to place erecting their store outside of cities.


    Granted, I agree with the point of your argument that more games should "show" rather than rely on exposition and Dark Souls does it very well as have games like System Shock. But you really shortchanged Skyrim in the process and frankly as good as Dark Souls is, its sadistic design diminishes the same qualities you describe. At some point traveling to an area one has previously visited only to have to wade through identical ambushes yet again, becomes tiresome, during which such details are also lost on the player.

  • Farzlepot #159 3 months ago

    Here is an apple. And here is an orange. I think the apple is better because I don't like oranges.

    Discuss.

  • Stoatboy #160 3 months ago

    I like both apples and oranges.

    This particular apple though is bland and insipid and a bit limp and lacking in crunch, whereas the orange is juicy and tangy and sweet - everything you want an orange to be.

    The orange is better.

  • a.monteiro #161 3 months ago

    I don't like to compare since i enjoyed both games immensely, but i do agree that Bethesda's narrative work needs a serious overhaul. The worst is by far the boring NPCs imo, it's annoying everytime i enter a town and those lifeless drones start to engage in dull conversations as they pass by, no one at Bethesda thinks this breaks your immersion? Bioware may have done many mistakes but at least they create some really interesting characters, i rather have fewer, better fleshed out characters than hundreds of forgettable ones.

    It's a problem more serious in my opinion than the lore scattered in books, which i actually read sometimes and find it's a cool detail.

  • Ternon #162 3 months ago

    When the mountain won't come to Muhammad.
    Wow, did you really have to use islamic death cult for metaphor?

  • ps-360 #163 3 months ago

    dark souls is 10x better than skyrim, 50+ hours into skyrim dont really feel like ive achieved anything. 2 hours into dark souls, then you really do feel a sense of achievement!!

  • oldergamer #164 3 months ago

    Excellent read.

    Regarding the "apples and oranges" argument: I think it's fine to compare these two games. I mean, we don't point out that The Godfather and Casablanca represent different genres when film critics put out their list of greatest films.

  • FortysixterUK #165 3 months ago

    I cannot agree with this article. Courting controversy for the sake of it?
    If you are that tired of the classic fantasy genre, simply walk away.
    I for one have thoroughly enjoyed Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim and if I can ever get my son to let me have my copy of Dark Souls back for a couple of weeks, I may get around to completing it !

    The criticisms in your article could be written, more or less, about any game that has a series of sequels to its history.

    It is good to read towards the end of the article that you state that Dark Souls AND Skyrim are both good games. But overall, the sentiment of the argumment is lost in comparing two games that whilst nested firmly in fantasy, are at such opposite ends of that genre that any comparison and criticism of one over the other is almost pointless.

  • cloudskipa #166 3 months ago

    Skyrim feels like he future, Dark Souls reminds me of an old school 8-bit game in it's cruel but immensely satisfying difficulty and more linear game design.

    Both are great games but Skyrim breaks new ground in terms of player immersion and the creation of a believable fantasy game world, it is the best RPG I've ever played. Dark Souls not too far behind it though.

  • spekkeh #167 3 months ago

    @peteob You do know that the satnav thing is optional right? If you don't turn it on in the quest overview, it doesn't help you. I'd say that if you still choose to turn it on, then you obviously like what it does, so it's rather strange you would deride it.

  • immateriaux #168 3 months ago

    The point of this article, though, I think is clear: it's not a considered estimation of narrative qualities of either game, it ignores so much. Instead it throws out a few well known ES memes that people, especially those who've never played a Bethesda game, can grunt along to and go "hell yeah"*; it never engages with the actual strengths and complexity of the game (as others have remarked above), nor consider realistically the practicality of delivering something with the intended scope and style of Skyrim.

    * Not, to be clear there, do I mean to be dismissing all Dark Souls players by that "hell yeah" remark (cause I'd be dismissing myself for a start). I think that's merely EG's cheap shot to get us divided and thrashing the other game when we really should be praising each.

  • kowst #169 3 months ago

    Utterly nailed it with this article. I didn't read any of the books in Skyrim save for the diaries kept by the NPCs whose story I was in the process of uncovering in that particular quest. NPC being the operative phrase.
    Skyrim is undoubtedly a good game, but one with massive flaws.

  • kowst #170 3 months ago

    @cloudskipa "Skyrim feels like the future"? REALLY? It's a good game, but I don't think it really advances anything in video game construction whatsoever. The narrative technique of, for instance, Red Dead Redemption, was far more impressive. And it too, was utterly rooted in the GTA series. Maybe it's just that I gave a shit about the characters.

  • Subdominator #171 3 months ago

    Skyrim does a lot of things great but character design is not one of them. There is not a single memorable character in the whole game. They should look at Bioware (despite Bioware games having their own flaws) for character design and storytelling. I'm lvl 80 in Skyrim, all but one skill are on 100, I have seen everything, talked to everyone, done everything. It's a great game but it has some flaws that are inexcusable. Why don't they take what they made right with Fallout and implement it (like factions and karma, like disguises, like peaceful solutions by talking to NPCs). Skyrim is nothing but a reskinned Oblivion with some minor changes. Granted the main quest is much better this time around. So there is progress. But the rest feels like time stood still. From the animations to combat, quest design and characters. And why did they take headshots out of the game?

    Scaling the enemies in Oblivion was bad. The way they don't scale them now is worse. I look back to the first couple of hours I spent in Skyrim when I ran away from giants and dragons because they would 1 hit kill me. Now I run away from them because I am bored with how easy they are. I even attack them with my bare hands just to get any challenge at all (on Expert). The world is awesome - the gameplay was much better in Fallout New Vegas.

  • fisherpot #172 3 months ago

    I'm playing Skyrim and I love it, best game I have played in a longtime hands down! but I have not played Dark Souls yet and I cant wait to play it as I hear so many good things about it! I will get in January for sure!

  • jimboton #173 3 months ago

    Could you imagine playing through the depth of Skyrim with the difficulty of Dark Souls?

    No thanks!
    Yes please!

  • adz #174 3 months ago

    My two cents - obviously just my opinion, but in the grand tradition of the internets I'll share it like its important.

    Skyrim is wish fulfillment on a grand scale - everyone is there for you and pretty much you alone (you can't walk past a complete stranger without hearing their opinions or problems), you can feel big and strong and powerful or cunning and devious or whatever with very little effort. For godsake, I killed a dragon (a FREAKIN' DRAGON) within a couple of hours of starting. It kind of reminds me of a "be a native for a day" kind of experience. Pay your money, put on the clothes, visit the sites, see some of the history all from a very safe place. If you die don't worry - we'll load you up in the nearest town.

    Dark Souls, on the other hand, takes a very different approach. It doesn't expect you to feel comfortable, it doesn't try and hold your hand. It tries to transport you whole and fully formed into a dark and hostile world - one where your common sense drives your progress. When you meet a dragon in Skyrim, you try and kill it - maybe you'll be exhilarated, maybe just disappointed. When you meet a dragon in Dark Souls even it's shadow makes you creep around trying not to be heard. You know that here is something awesome, something your should hide from. Something that you need to get strong enough and powerful enough to eventually challenge. But not now. Now you need to find a way around it.

    When people talk about how hard Dark Souls is, they're thinking about it wrong. You are supposed to take it personally - you are supposed to weigh up your situation from a "I'm just me, one man - how can I get through this?" You are supposed to look around, realise that you can use the environment to your advantage, take down impossible foes through skill and intelligence. And at the risk of sounding way too far up my own butt - fail because of your own failings... impatience, recklessness, arrogance, maybe even fatigue.

    Skryim is an amazing game and provides for a truly incredible experience in a world that most of us dream that we could be in. But ultimately, by giving us all the things we want, and so easily, it risks either showing us that beneath the facade, their isn't actually all that much to it, or even worse that maybe in the end we wanted something else. It's still just a game, and your presence in the world is one without real risk, and possibly as such, without lasting reward.

    Dark Souls is an experience that only really works when you embrace it. It's harder to get into. It's a game as well, but one that instead of trying to fulfill your every wish, tries to give you the experience that other role-playing games don't really have the courage to go for, that other RPGs really only flirt with. You don't play a role in Dark Souls, you play yourself. And that's hard, and frustrating, but if you succeed, I suspect that the rewards for doing so will be remembered long after the details of Skyrim have faded away.

  • HiredGoonage #175 3 months ago

    @Voz Exactly. There's been no significant evolution of Gameplay, just a bigger world with fancier graphics.

    The unfortunate thing is that not much evolution will occur in the next instalment either because this title has sold well.

    What publisher would encourage change when the pockets are full? It'll take some hefty competition to bring about a change, or perhaps for the masses to finally get bored and stop buying.

  • dr.d00m #176 3 months ago

    Storywise...

    ...skyrim is redoing what ultima vi did 20 years ago!

  • Dangerous_Dan #177 3 months ago

    @geeza2020 - harsh sounds good. It is harsh and that's why you remember every enemy and know the leveldesign by heart after some time. The biggest help in the game (or just the opposite) are your fellow gamers.
    The Carpa Demon? Killed me obviously the first time. So after some trials i summoned someone who wiped the floor with him in 10 seconds. (made me think about upgrading my shield to block stronger attacks) Now the Carpa Demon is no challenge anymore after learning the harsh way ;) .
    I guess unfair would be the Kobayashi Maru test (James T. Kirk). Also the game got easier after the last patch giving you more souls for every enemy.

    It's harsh, yes but some harsh things don't break you but make you stronger, better and that's one of them.

  • Spudmau5 #178 3 months ago

    at least he didnt call us cunts

  • freestyler_rmg #179 3 months ago

    I love playing game more than reading a lot of things in the game itself... it's very exhausting... I want to play the game, not to read some virtual book in a game... maybe thick narrative help (whether in heavy cut scenes or massive reading) to build a very detail the game's world... but is it really effective or the only way? I don't have a lot of time to play games like back then when I was in the college days... for me, Diablo is a perfect example of balance between gameplay and story reading... but Dark Souls sucks me in so hard... damn hard... their simplistic narrative is very very intriguing... it makes me want to explore more and more and never stop (and it's reward and punishment system is makes me cry a lot and very proud if I can conquer it even only a bit by bit)... Skyrim is great... but Dark Souls is simply the best... I'm 100% agree with this great article...

  • frazzl #180 3 months ago

    I just don't get the adulation Dark Souls has received (or for that matter its predecessor Demon's Souls). Sure the simplistic combat system requires some careful timing, but this is often negated by the significant frame rate issues the game has. The much vaunted online system of communication is nigh on worthless as well. The majority of comments I've read whilst playing the game have either been a) obvious, or b) "praise the sun". And I am not getting started on how difficult it seems to be to invite someone to join me as a phantom.

    As for the narrative...what fucking narrative? From my 15 or so hours with Dark Souls I have encountered fuck all narrative. Sure the artwork is great and the game drips atmosphere, but that's not the same as communicating to the player the "rich" back story the game may have. Oh well different strokes for different folks, but I personally really hope that Dark Souls is not the future of RPGs.

  • JamesMaverick #181 3 months ago

    The big difference between Skyrim and Dark Souls (well, the one I'm interested in talking about) is that while both games are flawed, Skyrim is built upon a host of fundamentally flawed systems while Dark Souls is built upon fundamentally sound principles, suffer as they may in execution. The combat in Skyrim, it simply is not very good. It is better than Oblivion, but only incrementally, because it is still based on the old system. Everything From Software tried to do with the game I can say they succeeded at. Good combat, fantastic, industry changing world (it is so very vertical -- why does no one mention that?), great atmosphere, and interesting characters. Some of the later levels are too big and empty, as has been said before, and it does have a few areas of needless repetitive action, but they are a small proportion compared to the whole. It is also not so hard as some believe, but it does take a certain mentality, one that I lacked while playing Demon's Souls but geared myself into before Dark Souls came out.

    Skyrim, with its very different goals, offers some experiences Dark Souls does not, and I certainly do not think that my likes need or should be the likes of all others, but suffers in not implementing its ambitions well. NPC's? Unmemorable, wooden, badly voiced. A vast fantasy world? Unrealistically proportioned, geographically senseless, fundamentally unbelievable in a way that has everything to do with design and almost nothing to do with technology or money. For me, almost every moment of Skyrim nags me with the question: why did they do that? Why are there third person finishers? Did they do it because some people would think it was "cool?" There is no reason for it. Why did the game script an occurrence to happen there when it would have been thematically superior, and less time wasting for the player, to script it for where the player already was? Why does the game let you become Archmage (just like Oblivion) but not allow you to do what an Archmage would? Why not just give the player the loot and make him not the Archmage? Why did that npc ask what she could do for the player while he was running past her through her cabbage patch? Why do random npc's interrupt rousing speeches to dither their dialogue? I will not bore further with a list of questions anyone else could ask while looking at Skyrim.

    Lastly, I am confused by defenses of Skyrim along the line of, "it lets you create your own story." Now, I believe that the real story in any game, insofar as it is a game, is the story of the player's actions, aside from any narrative imposed by the designers. But this line of defense seems to carry the implication that Skyrim facilitates imaginative creation, whereas I would think it would be more creatively limiting than the alternative: going outside once and a while and imagining your very own fantasy world. I must admit to having tried this and the experience was very rewarding -- highly recommended.

  • Zebula77 #182 3 months ago

    Soooo...this is all just to say "Dark Souls rules, Skyrim sucks, y'all"?

    I agree when it comes to all the books lying around, but for me, just knowing you COULD read them if you were thus inclined, adds a layer of immersion and believability.

    Meh.

  • Apaar #183 3 months ago

    I dislike vague storytelling. I dislike postmodernism. I enjoy exposition and old fashioned narratives, where the author's main purpose is to get the message accross as intact as is possible.

    I don't care for an authors artistic vanity or ladida trickery. I'm not there to do work for the author, to piece together their convoluted lines of thought. I am the customer, they should be working for me - doing their very best to make me understand and to captivate me. Clarity is a virtue.

  • Widge #184 3 months ago

    Which can get lost in mounds of uninspired dialogue and text.

  • SleepyMagpie #185 3 months ago

    The article could do with some spoiler alerts via Dark Souls.

    Elsewise I would say DS and Skyrim are apples and oranges. Bring on the books in Skyrim, I read many of them. And them being there brings believability as Zebula77 stated above.

    What I would like to see in Skyrim is more of the precise, controlled combat from DS. As it stands it's a mad flailing about, almost killing your companion too many times to dismiss it as nothing but a passing marital spat, and you can't help feel sorry for the lass, even though she is Mjoll the Lioness and tough as nails...

    Also, NPC's randomly blabbering on while key cinematics are shown and important lines are spoken is just off. Fix plx?

    Both Skyrim and DS are old school in their approach.

    Skyrim is a WORLD first and foremost, not a game, and it invites you to explore it. -But you don't have to.

    Dark Souls is a journey through hells and back, a Dante's Inferno reenvisioned, and asks you if you can take it, and dares you. -And you have to; if you aren't able - tough.

    Neither of them hold your hand. That's the old school part. And how refreshing it is.

  • Puppaz #186 3 months ago

    I'm just glad both these games got released. I love them both and have sunk so many hours into them. Don't really see them as similar games at all, they aren't even trying to do the same thing.
    I don't quite get why people want a game to fit certain parameters and then get raged when it doesn't, rather than just trying to enjoy what it is, and if they don't enjoy it, don't play it.

    Dark souls greatness lies in it's difficulty, it's atmosphere and polished simplicity. Skyrim is vast and allows you to sink yourself into another world. If you chose to. Its so easy to say omg this game does x and the other game can't even do y. As far as story goes, one is simply hinted at and therefore allows a greater freedom by the player, they can get into the 'story' as much as they like. This can feel great but is also much easier to accomplish, a couple of vague lore descriptions in weapon descriptions and simple one line npc dialogues don't make a good story, but when mixed with the desolate atmosphere and a feeling of loss, confusion and hopelessness it can work so well.
    The other game tries to be much more narrative, tries to fill the game world with stories and interactivity to make more than just one simple story, and to make the player feel there's a world going on around them, where people have stories to tell and lives are carrying on around the player. The problem is that this is much more difficult to achieve well, and it's easy to lose the immersion when you see behind the illusion, when an npc designed to act a certain way doesn't react to a situation as they should.
    This doesn't mean one way is better than the other, it's more personal preference.

    To sum it up, in skyrim an npc gets killed as part of some random encounter with a dragon, and the friends and relatives don't then act like they should. A bandit dies and his colleague doesnt worry about after a minute or so. This doesn't happen in dark souls, but it isn't because dark souls does all this better, it doesn't even attempt to do it. The NPCs are incredibly simple, the story a few hints and a huge beautiful dark world.

    People will argue over which is better for them, but to put one game down vs the other is kind of missing the point of what they're trying to achieve.
    (I actually enjoy DS more as a game, and would class it as GOTY, but have sunk many more hours into skyrim, so go figure)

    Oh gods.. Sorry for rambling.

  • Monkey_Puncher #187 3 months ago

    Different strokes for different folks I guess. While I agree some of the systems in Skyrim are clunky, it doesn't matter in the end as the game is just so much damn fun to play. Few games have the sense of exploration for me that Skyrim does.

    You don't read the books and skip dialogue? Wonderful, a lot don't though including myself. I find the lore and breath of content on offer in Skyrim and other Elder Scrolls games to be utterly engrossing. It's all there if you wish to find out more and really gives place and history to the world you're exploring. But if you don't care about that stuff, you're free to go about your business and punch bears in the face if you so choose.

    Just because you don't play the game for these elements, doesn't mean nobody does. I'vwe played Dark Souls and Demon Souls and neither game was for me. I just could not get into the systems unfortunately, it seemed like the game was going out of it's way to punish me, which for me isn't fun. It doesn't mean it's a bad game, it just wasn't for me, clearly a lot of people love it.

    This article really does scream Skyrim = Bad and Demon Souls = good...clearly the millions of people loving and enjoying Skyrim would probably think otherwise. Definitely brings up some interesting and valid points about story telling, though it's hard to ignore the fanboy like bashing of Skyrim.

  • JohnnyNoir #188 3 months ago

    DS is not hard. All games these days are too easy and geared towards mass market. best rpg, its like you play yourself. DS assumes you are literally you. weak human, no knowledge of the world as if it just dumped you into the game. your suppose to sneak around cautiously and run like hell anything happens on screen. DS dragon vs human, yes you will die in 1 hit. (or you could have just run, nothing is unfair/unavoidable). Skyrim dragon vs human = human tanks the dragon!!

  • Olemak #189 3 months ago

    He's right and he's wrong: millions of customers getting SkyRim prefer their game just so. Personally, I am bored with the template; while the scope of the SkyRim is impressive, the individual parts lacks the attention to detail that more focussed games often have.

    One could hope that developers pay attention to dark horse success stories like Demon Souls and Batman: Arkham Asylum, which were both followed by outstanding sequels this year. Those games are really should be copied more.

  • DrR0b3rts #190 3 months ago

    I think the freedom and richness of Skyrim does actually vastly outweigh its shortcomings. The NPCs do spout some ropey baloney, but, you know, you can live in an abandoned shack way out of town and just visit this weird civilisation when you have to.

    Can we start the backlash to the backlash now?
    Edited by 1 at 08/12/11 @ 14:41

  • mowgli #191 3 months ago

    Article is spot on, I love - love - Skyrim, but Dark Souls is so incredibly innovative where Skyrim is samey but big.

  • PlugMonkey #192 3 months ago

    @ oz3d

    "But you really shortchanged Skyrim in the process and frankly as good as Dark Souls is, its sadistic design diminishes the same qualities you describe."

    I don't really get these sorts of comments. Am I the only person who gets suddenly and arbitrarily killed while playing Skyrim? Yesterday I had to restart an entire dungeon because my companion triggered a trap that insta-killed me. For all it's reputation, this sort of thing has happened to me a hell of a lot less in 80 hours of DS than 40 hours of Skyrim. People just seem to ignore it in Skyrim because people aren't banging on about the difficulty all the time.

    @ zebula

    "Soooo...this is all just to say "Dark Souls rules, Skyrim sucks, y'all"?

    I understand comments like this even less. Because you like something, you can't criticise aspects of it?

    I get that people like Skyrim. I like Skyrim. That doesn't mean it's not starting to show its age in places. I really don't want to see it start lagging seriously behind, and it has well and truly been overtaken in many areas. It's time for an evolution.

    It's not the bad bits that make the game good. You don't need the bad bits. They can go. That will make the game better. Other games are pushing the envelope, while Skyrim is just getting fatter.

    I've said a dozen times before, I admire the scale, and that makes up for a lot of shortcomings, but for ES VI I'd like to start seeing better rather than bigger. It's big enough, and other games are really starting to expose areas of it.

  • Monkey_Puncher #193 3 months ago

    Skyrim is actually much smaller than Morrowind and the games that came before it. The world size seems to be about on par with Oblivion, though there's much more interesting and varied content packed in, and obviously the verticality of the terrain makes it seem much larger.

    The amount of political intrigue and back story to everything really gives you a sense of place in the world. Stuff like the backstory of the Snow Elves and the story behind the forsworn really makes me want to explore and see everything. There's nothing more enjoyable for me than flipping open a book to be greeted by a new quest, and then reading the book to find out the back story behind the place you're off to.

    When I go on message boards and read deep philisophical conversations about the situation with the Thalmer and the civil war in Skyrim, I find it really hard to criticise the fiction.

    I really like the book system, it's clearly not for everyone though.

  • frazzl #194 3 months ago

    @mowgli How exactly is Dark Souls innovative? What does it do that hasn't been done before? And for all the hoopla Skyrim is getting for technical issues, I don't recall Dark Souls getting the same. In fact I clearly remember someone in the comments section of the Digital Foundry Dark Souls comparison, claim that the vast amounts of slowdown gave them a pleasant case of nostalgia. I wonder if there are any PS3 owners who feel the same about Rimlag? ;)
    Edited by 1 at 08/12/11 @ 10:58

  • makariel #195 3 months ago

    @Madder-Max "I thought all games were examples of alternative storytelling?"

    Have you played any of the Uncharted or modern military shooters of late? Their singleplayer campaigns are a sad statement how video game directors try to copy what works for adventure movies respectively Michael Bay-type action blockbusters. The game is paused every odd minute, so that I can watch what the studio wants me to see. 'Look at that falling building! And that exploding helicopter!'. No, not all games are examples of alternative storytelling, since they are so busy copying other forms of entertainment.

  • SFG_Clan #196 3 months ago

    Actually I disagree, while I enjoy Dark Souls the begrudging narrative and slog of a gameplay style can work against it. It is Gothic and fascinating but it is also incredibly punishing at points.

    This makes the lore inconsequential as you are once again splattered by the evil lizard men in the castle with all the annoying traps and narrow walkways.

    Skyrim is a joy to play and I find the lore one of the most interesting parts of the game. I like Dark Souls but I love Skyrim.

  • PlugMonkey #197 3 months ago

    @ frazzl

    re: innovation in Dark Souls (so skip it if you're not interested ;))

    Well, the always connected online support system is quite innovative, as is the PvP, which is not only well balanced, but also does some fun stuff with players' roles, and whether they're good or evil and the rewards and punishments that go along with it. I can't think of any other games off the top of my head that blur the line between online and offline so effectively.

    The combat is also very nicely put together in a way that I can't really think anyone else has done. The fighting styles' different strengths and weaknesses dovetail beautifully, and I particularly like the way the NPCs effectively share move sets with the player. See a move you like? Find that weapon. See a PvP enemy with a similar weapon to one you've seen before? Well then, you probably know what to expect. Some people seem to think that the combat in the Souls games is pretty basic and has all been done before, but I think they're not really looking. I can't think of another game where the fighting is as much about learning as it is about practising. However quick you are on the buttons, a new enemy is always a threat, and an old enemy is always your biatch.

    It also effectively communicates information about the enemies entirely visually. I can kind of tell how tough, and what fighting style, a new enemy is just by looking at them and how they move. Skyrim, by comparison, is very lazy here. 40 hours into the game, and I'm still fighting Draugrs. They look and fight exactly the same as the Draugrs from 1 hour into the game, but they have an adjective in front of their names and more HP. In Souls, I know an enemy is tougher because I haven't seen one before, and it looks tougher. We didn't have the graphical fidelity to do this before; we do now, and it's an area where Souls is pushing ahead.

    The way this is structured and communicated in the Souls worlds is pretty innovative too. I know how tough an area is, and it's up to me to decide if I'm up to it or not. To keep using Skyrim as a comparison, its world is a big jumble of difficulty levels plastered over with auto-levelling, which feels a bit artless and crude. The world feels a lot less concrete for that.

    Finally, I'd say the way that Souls deals with death is innovative too. People are always complaining that when you die, you lose your progress. When you die, you don't lose anything. You can go back and get it all. Even when you fail, you keep all the objects you've picked up, and get the opportunity to recover the xp you've gathered. And people go on about how unfair this is? Is Skyrim this fair? No. When I die, I go back to my last save point. Everything I have done since then gets completely and utterly wiped! I have to do absolutely all of it again. Even the boring stuff like searching chests and picking up objects. I think here Dark Souls innovates well on the zero punishment system that didn't really work in Bioshock, and also improves on the age old Skyrim system of just completely wiping everything you've done.

    I've never actually thought about it like this before, but that probably explains why I get much more frustrated when I die in Skyrim than in Dark Souls; despite most people's assertions to the contrary, Skyrim punishes me absolutely while the supposedly more hardcore Dark Souls lets me skip the boring stuff and gives me a 2nd chance at the rest. If I can get my souls back, then the last 10 minutes won't have been a total loss. In Skyrim? Boom! Lost! Gone! That last 10 minutes of your life was a total waste! If you think about it, it's quite a neat system.

    So there you go. For all the press it gets about being incredibly old school, the Souls games are some of the most innovative titles of the last few years. I can't think of any way that the supposedly genre pushing Skyrim has really innovated, barring its scale. Brilliant though it is, it's far more a consolidation of ideas from five years ago than anything new.
    Edited by 4 at 08/12/11 @ 11:58

  • superflyninja #198 3 months ago

    Very well written and interesting article. Nice to see these kind if thought provoking articles appearing.
    To my shame ive not played DS. But I agree with some of the Skyrim points. I read EVERY book and quest in Oblivion but Ive no real interest in the characters of Skyrim and only read some books. Id rather be playing the game than reading I guess. Though books work very well when integrated with the world. For example the Red Sword( I think that's what its called) quest. The book really worked well in tying the lore to the ruins etc. For me skyrim is more about the emergent stories than the ones preauthored by the devs. The set up is showing its age a little though. Who cares if there are 500 NPCs if 90% of them are boring?

  • jonnyboyband #199 3 months ago

    Amen! So very very true an article. Now please put your scores where your hearts are.

  • Ptarmigandalf #200 3 months ago

    @Hypercube Looks like some people haven't realised this article is pretty objective "let's rile up the fans!" troll bait...

  • Wizard83 #201 3 months ago

    I like to feel part of a sweeping narrative and be the centre of the world (usually saving it) i'm just one among many in real life so why would i seek that in my game life!?

    Being hard isnt the main selling point i'm looking for to be honest.

  • TelexStar #202 3 months ago

    @Ptarmigandalf - "Looks like some people haven't realised this article is pretty objective "let's rile up the fans!" troll bait..."

    You mean subjective, right?

  • JHo #203 3 months ago

    I have personally found several of the stories written in tombs in Skyrim to be downright creepy and considering their brevity, very well written. The story about the young boy who wishes more magical abilities having his heart literally ripped from his chest by his summoned Daedra was downright ghastly. The tale of the young archer being trained by his families slave resulting in his abusive, racist, fathers demise was intriguing. The one I just read titled, "The Locked Room" was good enough to draw comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe for Christ's sakes.I could easily go on.

    I enjoy reading in real life quite a bit. It is one of my favourite pastimes. I also think that videogames are the greatest way to spend (kill?) time that has ever been created. To have a game like Skyrim combine the two mediums in an arguably brilliant fashion is a gift from the "Gaming Gods."

    I don't read every book I encounter. But there are several that I took a brief moment after reading them and said to myself...

    "Shit. That was actually pretty f'n good!!"

  • Mindstorm #204 3 months ago

    my two pennys: the narrative appeal of skyrim isn't the books, but it's emergent through the gameplay, I agree about this article as an attempt at shitstirring by the way-

    some examples of what I mean by emergent narrative follow (minor spoilers):

    - meeting Jzargo during the Winterhold quest led to a darkly humorous, and very personal, subplot in which he first tried (maybe unwittingly, maybe not)to kill me by asking me to try out his faulty scrolls on the undead. When I became archmage I asked him to follow me as a bodyguard, he had no choice. I must admit I didn't feel too sorry when the hapless (or trechearous?) khajiit stepped in front on me right when I was about to cast a fireball, which resulted in his incineration.

    - alighting from a dark dungeon after an intense series of fights, only to be startled by the the shadow cast by a dragon flying over me. The thing scared the hell out of me (I had only killed one dragon up to that point, and pretty much forgot about all that dragon-born nonsense and decided to turn into the most powerful mage Skyrim had ever seen by enrolling to WInterhold). I felt as something bigger than me was dragging me back in a sequence of events in which I was to play a pivotal role.

    - wandering in the tundra at night, catching the sight of a ghost headless rider speeding through the wilderness, trying and failing to catch up with him and wondering giddily what his story might be and if I will ever find out.

  • Kew1Melon #205 3 months ago

    Both great games. Simple.

  • superflyninja #206 3 months ago

    @anomagnus should all those skyrim seasons not be spoiler tags?

  • FladgeMangle #207 3 months ago

    There was an article not long ago on Kotaku comparing Skyrim unfavorably to Zelda Skyward Sword for pretty much the same reasons.

    What both these articles fail to grasp is the fact that while Dark Souls and Zelda are all about experiencing a one-off adventure, Skyrim is about living in a world full of many.

    It's senseless to try and compare them directly. You may as well complain that GTA4 is worse than Split/Second because fewer buildings collapsed as you drove through the city.

  • Kaiscir #208 3 months ago

    I think the author raises some interesting points, but may not be entirely correct in his conclusions. The biggest issue, which I think people may be ignoring, is that the difference between the two game's narratives is the difference between narrative styles. I would venture to say that it is actually culturally associated - i.e. eastern RPG storytelling vs western RPG storytelling.

    In my recollection of eastern RPGs and fantasy stories in general, the narrative style is always to withhold information until the dramatic effect is deemed necessary. You can see this in various forms of media from anime to wuxia shows to jRPGs. In a sense, it does give the audience a greater sense of "Gasp!" when they find out but at the same time can be incredibly frustrating.

    This is all opposed to western RPGs and stories and tabletop roleplaying, where the more detail is given about the world, the more incredible or lifelike the world is. This is most easily seen in the strong and venerated pillars of fantasy - the novel. Tolkein and every other fantasy writer after him created an entire world and history and language with crazy sounding names for the entire purpose of showing that it is indeed a different world. The detail deluge is part of the experience, but comes in such overwhelming amounts at times that it is possible to stop caring

    So in the end, each approach to storytelling from its roots is different, which ends up with very different end products. One is designed to give a tightly woven, albeit minimalistic storyline with specific points of dramatic intersection, either hidden or apparent. The second is designed as a world to delve into as much you desire (or not), dozens of storylines to explore (or not), and the ability to choose your own activities - be it hilarious hijinks or epic dragon-conquering.

  • panathatube #209 3 months ago

    I think Stanton compares oranges with pineapples. Yeah, both are fruits (RPG games), but that's that. Skyrim has an epic open world game, whilst Dark Souls is a game with superior narrative because at the end of the day it's infinetely more linear. They are both great games in their own right. I prefer Skyrim but the guy next door prefers DS. It' a matter of taste. Yeah, Skyrim could have been ever better narrativewise as the character lacks any... real character, but DS in my book lacks any substantial depth that used to characterise the RPG genre. Stanton could have compared DS with the Witcher 2. That would have been far more interesting. Pointless subjective article.
    Edited by 1 at 08/12/11 @ 14:16

  • ronuds #210 3 months ago

    pass up on the chance to speak with someone, and that chance may never come again. NPCs in Dark Souls appear and disappear because of different and oblique triggers, creating a convincing illusion that they're all on their own little quests in this world, and each has their own arc.
    Doesn't that sort of thing happen in Skyrim as well? I'm sure certain events would have been altered had I joined the Imperials over the Stormcloaks, for example.

  • Black_RL #211 3 months ago

    It is what it is, like I said, the fact that DEADLY PREMONITION is one of the best stories (best?) this generation didn't help it much, did it?

    And SKYRIM beat DS in sales and in metacritics:

    h ttp://www.metacritic.com/search/all/skyrim/results (96, 95, 93)
    http://www.metacritic.com/search/all/dark+souls/results (89, 89)

    Not to talk about that awesome game that ANGRY BIRDS is with 500.000.000 downloads....

    http://www.doubletimemedi a.com/technology/13624/angry-birds-hits-500-million-download s/

    Before some of you know what games were I was playing them, and I surely know what's happening to the industry. But you know what? People overreact, games are supposed to be fun, so what if one prefers DS over Mario? Who really cares? Each with their own.

    Regarding the future it's pretty obvious, what makes a profit will continue to exist, what doesn't will cease, simple as that.

  • PlugMonkey #212 3 months ago

    @Black_RL

    But we're not talking about sales figures. We are talking about stories. So exactly why the fuck you keep banging on about sales figures is deeply baffling to all concerned.

    It's as utterly irrelevant as how long you've been playing games for.

  • cloudskipa #213 3 months ago

    I wonder how many people who agrees with this article have only played the PS3 version of Skyrim. Probably quite a few...

  • PlugMonkey #214 3 months ago

    @cloudskipa

    Interesting. You feel the lag issues might be adversely affecting the narrative techniques used?

    How, exactly?

  • digitalash #215 3 months ago

    They've got different approaches to storytelling. You don't like Skyrim's but I think being so casually dismissive is a bit rabble rousing, no? Bethesda have actually listened to their fans, and instead of giving them vanilla fantasy like Oblivion, have delivered another quirky, fleshed out country to explore. The fact that you skip the books is the point really; you don't have to read them, but they're there. Every book you pick up CAN be read. That's not interrupting the game - you choose whether you want to interrupt the game by reading a book. It's phenomenal detail, and all completely optional.

  • suicida #216 3 months ago

    I loved Dark Souls, played for 120+ hours, but I honestly couldn't tell you what the story was about. Somethihng about fire, and you had to ring some bells and capture 4 lots of boss souls to put in some dish because a giant talking snake said so. Didn't make much sense to me.

    The combat was fucking amazing though. Give me Skyrim's world with Dark Souls combat and progression system and it would probably be the best game ever.

  • humanchu #217 3 months ago

    Wonderful read! This is what I hope to find each time I visit Eurogamer.

  • TazerFan #218 3 months ago

    Honest question: where were all of you guys when this game launched? You couldn't nitpick any aspect of Skyrim without getting negged to high heaven.

  • whishman #219 3 months ago

    Quality and quantity.

  • thomps92 #220 3 months ago

    Interesting article. Maybe not the best place to ask this question but having had no experience whatsoever of playing games such as these ( I never realised there was a world outside Mario and Zelda.... ) I'm drawn to both these games yet it is DS that intrigues me most. However, with nil experience of RPGs should I steer clear as it might put me off for life! On the other hand with no experience then I've no preconceptions on difficulty levels.
    Skyrim seems to be a more liklier starting point for a newcomer like me I suppose but is DS worth going for with no experience whatsoever? And I mean no experience!
    Appreciate any advice.

  • Mr_SRS #221 3 months ago

    Excellent Article. Couln't have said it better myself.

  • Trafford #222 3 months ago

    Interesting article, I haven't played Skyrim, but can well imagine what its like.

    I have played Dark Souls for about 6 days (real time) and I love the lore, the npcs and their arcs.
    From the future indeed.

  • a.monteiro #223 3 months ago

    recommend reading @adz and @PlugMonkey posts for anyone still on the fence about Dark Souls.

  • Black_RL #224 3 months ago

    BECAUSE like plenty of people that BOUGHT the game I prefer the stories (yes, plural) of SKYRIM when compared to the story of DS.

    Sales do matter, they serve the purpose to prove popularity/taste of persons. I know you don't like them because numbers aren't good to DS in this case.

    Article filled with flames assuming this and assuming that, how the hell does he know that I and tons of other people skip conversations? As a matter of fact I don't, and same argument can be used towards DS.

    So much hate in this article and in people comments, people refuse to see the truth and offend others. And I find it funny, sales and numbers don't matter, so why people keep voting positive or negative in the comments? If numbers don't count, why bother? Some flawed logic there....

    If the minority is right, then I, being the minority against the article must be right, this according to the flawed logics of some people here.

  • orborborb #225 3 months ago

    Exactly my feelings, RPGs have always been one of my favorite genres, but none of Bethesda's or Bioware's since the original Baldur's Gate have engaged me. Risen is the only other RPG of this gen that compares to Dark Souls. The key word to me is microcosm, the universe has to BE something and not just feel like they "added detail" on top of a structure intended to divide jobs easily among employees.

    I love open world games too, it's just that only the GTA games have ever been any good at it from a storytelling or gameplay perspective (and even there, the important thing to understand is that they are DRIVING games, I'm not sure an open world walking game can ever work for me since they have to rely on teleporting). Fallout New Vegas ALMOST worked, the script was worth following, and the random crap everywhere was part of the humor and style of the narrative, but I still think I would have enjoyed the story even more if the world had been more structured and interconnected.
    Edited by 8 at 09/12/11 @ 00:23

  • frazzl #226 3 months ago

    @PlugMonkey I did ask what was so innovative about Dark Souls, so I am not entirely sure why you would think I would skip your explanation.

    Firstly I would like to point out that I never said Skyrim was innovative. It isn't. There is nothing in Skyrim that hasn't been done before, especially in previous Elder Scrolls games. In my opinion however Skyrim does it a lot better than most.

    As for Dark Souls, I do have to disagree with you on most points. Let's take the online system for example. I agree with you that it's innovative, BUT, I personally think it's useless. Most comments left by fellow Dark Souls questers are not helpful at all. They're either blatantly obvious, or even worse, a complete waste of time ("Praise the sun!" for example seems to be a fan favourite). Haven't done any PVP in Dark Souls admittedly, but I have tried several times to invite players over to fight a boss with me and I have yet to be successful. Based on comments I have read elsewhere this seems to be a common problem!

    What really gets me about all the praise Dark Souls gets, is the praise it gets for its combat. Sorry PlugMonkey, but anyway you spin it, the combat in Dark Souls is simple. Very simple. You have 2 attacks, a block, and a parry. Sure the game expects you to time your attacks carefully, but this does not add depth. Throw in the obnoxious amounts of slowdown and a flaky lock on system, and you have, in my opinion of course, a mediocre fighting system that could do with a lot of improvement. Note that I am not saying Skyrim has a great combat system either; it doesn't. Like Dark Souls, combat in Skyrim could do with a lot of improvement.

    Lastly I want to point out that appearance alone is not a sufficient indicator of how dangerous an enemy is in Dark Souls. As with Skyrim, the further you progress in the game the harder the enemies become. It is as simple as that. Fearsome screen filling creatures that you encounter early on in the game are nowhere near as challenging as some evil little frog that stacks curses on you robbing you of your HP meter. It's a simple case of RPG enemy leveling to maintain challenge as a player levels up their own character. As for enemy variety, well you'll encounter plenty of the same type of enemy during the significant amounts of back tracking that you do in Dark Souls. In my opinion, one thing that is not wrong with either title is their lack of enemy types. Both games have plenty!

    I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. I did say in my first comment here, "different strokes for different folks". I will admit though that the author of this article annoyed me with his spiel equating Dark Souls as the future (especially of narrative) of RPGS. I certainly hope not!

    (I am sure there are plenty of typos here that I can't be fucked correcting, so I'll apologize in advance :p)

  • olionajudah #227 3 months ago

    @Eraserhead

    you could argue that. but you would be wrong.
    laziness is trying to pass endless, repetitive dialogue traversal as game design. the 'Lore' in both DS games is delivered precisely to my liking..

    I thought about playing skyrim
    but then i took an arrow to the knee..

    :)

  • olionajudah #228 3 months ago

    for the next article in this series, how about we compare the combat in these two games?

    ...
    DS - How melee combat is supposed to feel.. like the visceral pursuit of survival

    Skyrim - ..?


    oops.

  • UKwoods #229 3 months ago

    It's all about preference and choice. you can choose to read a book, or not. I treat Elder Scrolls books like real ones. I read a bit, and if it's interesting I'll read it all. I think the people who designed DS were so obsessed with making it difficult, they made what could have been an awesome experience a bit vague and barren.Thats just my opinion though.

  • Stoatboy #230 3 months ago

    @Black_Rl: re: "So much hate in this article and in people comments, people refuse to see the truth and offend others"

    Waaah, waah, waaah! What utter gobshite. People share an opinion you don't agree with and you call it hate, flaming, and a failure to see the truth. There's been very little of any of that. Just a difference of opinion, that you apparently can't deal with particularly well. There's not been much that's offensive either.

    Until now.

    I'd call you a thick fucking twat if I thought it would make a difference, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't. Man up, you pathetic fucking tool.


    The people arguing against the piss-poor dialogue and text in Skyrim are asking for it to be better. The people who oppose that apparently don't want it to be.

    They don't want better! How fucking dim is that? You'd have to be as stupid as arseholes to not want better. Even if it was really fucking good (which it bloody well isn't) better would still be better. Arguing against better is about as stupid as you can get.

    "Would you like things to be better?"

    "No thanks - I'm a fucking moron, and want more of the same." Contemptible fucking idiots.

  • myms1ps3 #231 3 months ago

    Like it or not the article did it's gob by raising alot of debates/opinions/discussions and arguements.
    Some great opinions though. Relly enjoying this comments page.

    I started off with this sentence "Quite enjoyed the article actually and can't really add much to what's said by everyone",
    BUT ENDED UP WITH THE FOLLOWING!!! HTF DID THAT HAPPEN!!



    They're both great games but i'm more inclined to DS. Media/reviewers hyped up Skyrim to rediculous levels. Very over-rated.
    I firmly believe that, although not exactly bad, it doesn't maximise it's potential, in terms of battle-system, leveling, sneaking, etc. Oblivion left a LOT of room for improvement, I felt Skyrim fell shy in mechanics dept.

    I thought Skyrim was more style than substance whereas DS was more substance than style.
    I'm not saying either lack style/substance, just each excel "better" than the other at one - but that's only relative to opinion i suppose.

    I'd prefer to say they're two great games that compliment eachother perfectly as opposed to comparing them competitively. Both should be played - with no prior expectations, i was shocked at how far Dark Souls supassed mine and the last thing Skyrim needs is more hype. Realising something was over-hyped always leaves a bitter taste.


    With regards to storytelling and fleshing out their respective world, DS ecourages you explore the ruins of a lost civilisation whereas Skyrim places you at the heart of a civilisation, teaming with life and evolving around you. So i think any comparison is pointless.

    And i don't understand the grief over books in Skyrim, they're clearly optional for people to pursue the lore. I've read the one's worth reading about the dragons and mission related ones but thats it.
    However, it's worth noting how creative Bethesda are, using books to start random missions inspired by a legend. It's a nice dimension to them.

    I've been very vocal over my problems with my PS3 copy of Skyrim in other articles on EG, I still think Bethesda exploited us and are an absolute disgrace for it - totally inexcusable, but you can't deny the level of creativity or scope in the world.
    The echoes of Edoras and Rivendell really do exude a fantasy world soaked in atmosphere, and it easily has one of the best theme songs EVER.


    Dark Souls doesn't need much said about it. Just that it's utter GENIUS and puts nearly everything to shame this generation with just it's level of dept alone. Stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best.

    People will be playinG this for years, in fact, I'm confident they'll be remaking HD versions on consoles far into the future.
    However, I can appreciate and understand why it's not for everyone though, like anything else i suppose.

    They're not without their faults but both are quality titles.

    Good work once again EG.
    Edited by 1 at 09/12/11 @ 07:41

  • myms1ps3 #232 3 months ago

    @frazzl #183

    "I just don't get the adulation Dark Souls has received"

    Fair enough fraz. I can only speak for myself.
    The fact that DS doesn't treat the player like a total moron demands respect IMO.
    For me it was refreshing to progress through the game without an NPC prompt or in-game hint.
    Very addictive gameplay is a rare quality in contemporary games.
    Just like trying to better you're high score on old arcade games, i think DS impliments that better than other games.
    Dying in any other game, including Skyrim, is a real pain in the balls for me. Dying in DS, for me, would actually change how the game was played, in the sense that dying could be used as an advantage by using bonfires as a method of transportation from one area to another by puposely dying - SPOILER - i mean without the Lordvessal of course.

    I felt that made the gameplay much more dynamic than anything else out there IMO. Not all about the battle-system in case people are reading who havn't played.


    @frazzl

    "negated by the significant frame rate issues the game has"

    It's unfortunate you've had bad experiences with framerate, wasn't as severe for me. Blighttown was particularly bad for me though.


    I'm sure you're not an idiot and you've obviously played the game, so forgive the tone through the post, but i thought i'd share SOME reasons why DS earns my adulation.
    Edited by 2 at 09/12/11 @ 09:24

  • myms1ps3 #233 3 months ago

    @frazzl

    "In fact I clearly remember someone in the comments section of the Digital Foundry Dark Souls comparison, claim that the vast amounts of slowdown gave them a pleasant case of nostalgia. I wonder if there are any PS3 owners who feel the same about Rimlag?"

    WELL I FUCKIN DONT!!!!

    More like an unpleasant case of nausea.

  • myms1ps3 #234 3 months ago

    @immateriaux


    "The point of this article, though, I think is clear: it's not a considered estimation of narrative qualities of either game, it ignores so much. Instead it throws out a few well known ES memes that people, especially those who've never played a Bethesda game, can grunt along to and go "hell yeah"*; it never engages with the actual strengths and complexity of the game (as others have remarked above), nor consider realistically the practicality of delivering something with the intended scope and style of Skyrim."


    If you arrived at your conclusion on the point of the article, why would you question why the article doesn't engage with the actual strenghts and complexity of the game??? Surely that would be a topic for another article.

    I know what you're saying though and I agree it would have been nice for Rich to balance out the article.

    I can kind of relate to his approach though.
    I think the article indirectly implies that Dark Souls does what it does very well, while suggesting Skyrim could have went further with what it does, basically saying it lacked polish. Which i agree with.

  • 5h1nj1 #235 3 months ago

    There are so many great truths in there. This should be a mandatory read for all game developers. Elder Scrolls fanboys are kinda overreacting in the comments, but that was to be expected.
    I like Skyrim, but it really is ancient and dull in some ways. Applies for the engine too actually, so there's at least some synergy. :)

  • slowbots #236 3 months ago

    Everyone has his right to have an opinion but this article (if you can call it that) seems to have to come from the hole that doesn´t see much sunlight.

    Skyrim gives you the choice to experience the world around you in whatever way you want, be it reading every snippet of information, talking to the multitude of NPC´s around the world or just wandering around to build your own experience.

    DS as good as it is, shoves you down narrow paths and you rarely have experiences that haven´t been put the by the developers to find at that exact time.

    I can almost guarantee that not a single player of the 8 million plus that have bought Skyrim has had a similar adventure while those who have playd´ DS will have had very similar routes again and again through the game.

    Both great games but one wins hands down in the narrative department for me and that´s easily Skyrim.

  • Architect_z #237 3 months ago

    Post deleted at 19:07:49 15-12-2011

  • PlugMonkey #238 3 months ago

    @ frazzl

    The "skip if you're not interested" comment was basically aimed at anyone that wasn't you, so they could skip the wall-of-text if they weren't interested in the subject, as it was a direct reply rather than a general comment. (that still applies, BTW ;))

    Just to re-address a couple of points:

    I'm quite surprised you haven't played any PvP at all. Pretty much as soon as I've revived myself to kindle a bonfire, I usually get invaded shortly afterwards, and I've had some damn tense fights. The messages are a mixed bag, but every so often there's one that saves my life. I think on balance, it's a 'plus' feature for the game, and definitely an innovative one.

    The combat, I still think you're being overly harsh on. All the enemies in Souls I have to learn how to fight, and I fight them in different ways, using different moves, and even different weapons. The timings may be simplistic, but that strategy and learning element is not something that you see very often. You seem to be ignoring that in your assessment and focussing purely on the second-to-second gameplay, which wasn't the part I highlighted the innovation in. It's mechanically simple, but there is strategic depth.

    It's basically like a puzzle game. A good puzzle game has a very limited number of things that you can do, but a lot of different combinations you can apply them in to solve different problems. Portal has how many moves? And how many different puzzle solutions? This is the way the fighting in Souls works. Some enemies I block, some I dodge, some I parry, some I attack only after specific moves that leave them exposed, some I hit one handed, some two handed, some with quick weapons, some with slow - they all have different optimal strategies and until I learn those strategies, I'm vulnerable. There's a lot more than just the timing of the moves, I think, and the way it holds up in PvP really shows that.

    Skyrim, on the other hand, is just mechanically simple, and that's it. I don't fight an ice troll any differently than a draugr, and the first time I meet a skeleton or a spriggan, I know I'm going to fight them in exactly the same way as well. That's true of most games. At most, I do exactly the same thing, but with a fire weapon because it's an ice demon, but Souls actually makes me change my strategies. This puzzle aspect of Souls is innovative in my eyes. It makes it immensely satisfying when I'm killing for sport a monster that was kicking my ass 10 minutes ago. Can you think of another game that does that?

    The look of the enemies we're definitely on agree to disagree territory. The first time I meet a lizardman in Souls, I know that a) this is a new enemy and b) that I may struggle to fend their blows, and I'm probably not going to be staggering them. Then it's watch and learn time again until I discover their weakness. The first time I meet a Draugr Wight, I only know once the name appears that it's new. And then I fight it in exactly the same way as a Draugr, but for longer.

    I never meant to imply that you thought Skyrim was innovative, by the way. I just needed an example to highlight the stuff that Dark Souls is doing, and Skyrim seems the obvious contemporary. Dark Souls is definitely NOT everyone's cup of tea. It has very strong and unique flavour, and you will largely either love or hate it, and you may disagree how effectively some of the innovations are implemented, but the innovations are definitely still there.

    And lastly, I also think the article over-emphasises the extent to which Dark Souls is The Future. Dark Souls uses a narrative technique that is unique to the medium, is currently relatively under-used, and one that I think will be used more and more in the future. I think games like Skyrim have something to learn, because there's a lot of clunkiness in there, but it would be a dark day if they completely stopped doing what they're doing.

    Just like in films - the rule may be "Show, don't tell" but y'know sometimes, the best way to tell your story is just to have a damn voice over narration. When that's the case just do a voice over narration. If the choice is to put some extra depth in your game in a book, in a boring quest about it, or cut it all together just put it in a damn book. I'll read it if I want, I won't if I don't! Assuming everyone skips the books is like assuming everyone should love Dark Souls just because I do. Horses and, indeed, courses.

    I also think they could get cleverer in the way they're using this background supporting plot stuff. For example: If you insist on having books overflowing with backstory, I have an e-reader on my smartphone. Everyone has an e-reader on their smartphones. Why aren't the books I find in Skyrim being sent there? Then I could read them during the parts of my life when I can't be hunting dragons, rather than it cutting into my valuable dragon hunting time.

    Aaaanyway, if you've read this far then I thank you greatly for your indulgence. You asked what exactly people see as innovative in Dark Souls, and you at least now know one version of it. I would imagine that if you just don't like the result, then all the innovation in the world is going to seem a bit pointless. :)

  • frazzl #239 3 months ago

    @PlugMonkey Read your comment in its entirety. It's a simple case of different strokes for different folks. The good thing is we can both be glad at the quality of games that have been released in the last few months. I haven't been this swamped with quality gaming in years :)

    Edit: I have honestly never been invaded in the 15 or so hours I have played Dark Souls. I have also never been able to successfully invite someone to a game of mine. Quite frustrating really :(.
    Edited by 1 at 09/12/11 @ 12:59

  • frazzl #240 3 months ago

    @myms1ps3 I didn't think you would having read your posts on RimLag. I was just highlighting how some people are so in love with Dark Souls that they forgive any flaws they may encounter with it (and I am not pointing my finger at you btw). Anyway as I have said to PlugMonkey, it's just a simple case of differing opinions. There is no right or wrong here. You prefer Dark Souls and I prefer Skyrim. As long as there are good games to play, it doesn't matter which game you get your fix with.

    Edit: I have Dark Souls on the 360 and the slowdown in the New Londo Ruins (I think that's what the place is called) below the Firelink Shrine is absolutely diabolical. We are talking about around 15 fps for the entirety of your exploration of the area. Made that segment unplayable (for me) so I skipped it entirely.
    Edited by 2 at 09/12/11 @ 13:02

  • myms1ps3 #241 3 months ago

    @frazzl

    "I was just highlighting how some people are so in love with Dark Souls that they forgive any flaws they may encounter with it (and I am not pointing my finger at you btw)."

    I hold my hands up. Love DS to death. But i haven't experienced the slowdown that you have so the game wasn't ruined for me. Blighttown was a bit shocking - felt unfinished.
    I can relate to how you feel though because "Rimlag" makes Skyrim unplayable for me after 2-3hours. Not including quest bugs and stuff.

    @frazzl

    "Anyway as I have said to PlugMonkey, it's just a simple case of differing opinions. There is no right or wrong here. You prefer Dark Souls and I prefer Skyrim. As long as there are good games to play, it doesn't matter which game you get your fix with."

    Totally agree with you. I wasn't having a go mate, your post just gave me an excuse to list a few things i loved about DS.
    You did say you didn't understand why it got the adulation, i was just sharing why it got mine.

  • frazzl #242 3 months ago

    @myms1ps3 No worries dude. It's good to have a sensible debate about videogames with someone that doesn't devolve into fanboyism or namecalling :).

  • Black_RL #243 2 months ago

    I have some great news to all of you, SKYRIM just won the Video Game Award for best game of the year, best RPG and best studio.

    It must be some kind of evil scheme! It sells more and also wins the prizes! What a bummer to the one that wrote the article and to the flamers.

    Better luck next time? LOL

  • Black_RL #244 2 months ago

    @Stoatboy WOW! Your comment showed some intelligence and maturity! I like the part where you curse a lot, makes you fell like a real man in front of the PC cursing to some nickname ah? I bet your parents asked you to speak lower because they want to sleep.

    The article says he skips dialog, story and text in general, so how the hell does he know if it's any good? Or any of the people that do that?

    DS has to travel a long road before he can have the amount of content SKYRIM has, it may not be the best main story but all the stories compensate that.

    I don't mind if SKYRIM gets even better, but comparing SKYRIM to DS is laughable, it just doesn't has enough content.

    Anyways, see my other post, SKYRIM just won everything at the VGA, it must be a conspiracy!!!!!

    Now you can curse a little bit more, if it makes you feel better do it!

  • myms1ps3 #245 2 months ago

    @Black_RL

    "I have some great news to all of you, SKYRIM just won the Video Game Award for best game of the year, best RPG and best studio."

    Laughable comment.

    Correction; 2Skyrim just won the Spike TV Video Game Award for best game of the year, best RPG and best studio."

    The Spikes are the games industry's Oscars. A total fucking joke.

    Spike TV??? It's interesting to note who makes up the panel - reviewers, editors of games magazines, etc - all obviously have an agenda to justify their outrageously unjustifiable high scores and misleading reviews.
    The voting panel comprised of staff from American publications so the awards are not a fair reflection of industry opinion, as the industry is NOT confined to America.


    Even the fact they awarded Bethesda studio of the year is a testament to how clueless they are.
    Are they unaware of the issues across platforms with Skyrim and the disaster that was Rage?? Their lazy response to the "Skyrim Crisis" with a dodgy patch???

    The uneven amount of nominees in each category was a joke - 5 for GOTY, 4 for studio of the year as an example.
    Shouldn't a studio be at least nominated for it's game's inclusion into the GOTY category???

    A more accurate awards title would have been "American Video Game Awards" or the "2011 Moron Awards".
    I mean BASEBALL(MLB)!! WTF!! And the sub category to vote for the cover face of the next installment of NFL.
    What a joke.
    And did you see that stupid fucking category, "Best Adapted Videogame"???

    And judging from first hand accounts, how the "ceremony" was conducted was described as farcical. What a travesty to the industry - typical American "yee-haa", "WOOOOOOOOOOO YOU ROCK" childish, over-excited bullshit.

    I can only imagine what kojima and Miyamoto really thought of that circus.


    @Black_RL

    "It must be some kind of evil scheme! It sells more and also wins the prizes! What a bummer to the one that wrote the article and to the flamers."


    Yeah, why does Skyrim sell so many copies??
    I wonder if it has anything to do with the MISLEADING reviews that don't mention how broke it is.

    And, Rich wrote the article from a personal perspective, while the people you reduce to "flamers" are gamers who bought a 60e/60pound game that didn't work for them and an expensive guide for a broken game too.


    Furthermore, i wouldn't assert these awards as point in your posts, they totally undermine your arguement.
    Edited by 1 at 11/12/11 @ 22:51

  • PlugMonkey #246 2 months ago

    @myms1ps3

    Yeah, why does Skyrim sell so many copies??

    Wouldn't be anything to do with it having a marketing budget many orders of magnitude larger, would it?

    Nooo! That couldn't be how these things work!

    ;)

  • Vinks #247 2 months ago

    Beautifully written. I haven't played any of both spoken games but this article was just amazing. Clearly the author tilted the balance towards Dark Souls but as a busy person I am without much time to spend on games, the article gave me an idea of what to expect from each of those two games and settled my mind into which one i should buy......first. I'm a hardcore gamer so playing both of those is a must for me :D

  • myms1ps3 #248 2 months ago

    @PlugMonkey

    In fairness, that question was proposed in a sarcastic manner.

  • Devox #249 2 months ago

    Innovation in Dark Souls???? There isn't any at all because, and this seems to have passed most ppl by, it was all in DEMONS SOULS. Thats the innovative game. Dark is pretty much just demons souls with a lick of paint. They are both brilliant games but Demons is the one that should be getting the praise. Also, will there be a backlash if the third Souls game is just more of the same???

  • Stoatboy #250 2 months ago

    @Black_RL: If there's one type of person I despise more than any other it's people who can't cope with swearing. Swearing's brilliant fun, and only tends to upset the weak of mind. It's just words. Complaining about it makes you look like a weak-willed prude who can't cope with simple language. You'd have to be a moron to let simple words bother you. Ignore it if you really don't like it, or fight fire with fire, but whining makes you look somewhat pathetic.

    Then again, if you think Skyrim's well-written that's an even bigger indicator that you're not particularly good with language generally. :)

    I like the fact that you imply I'm young enough to be living with my parents though, based on a bit of banter you seem a little too sensitive to deal with. Thanks for that. I'll take that as a testament to my youthful joi de vivre.

    I'm probably old enough to be your fucking dad, you timid feckless twat.

    Doh! And I was doing so well on the not-swearing-to-avoid-offending-the-simpletons up until then... :D

  • Architect_z #251 2 months ago

    Skyrim is more of an adventure quest, heres your map, talk to people, fantasty world thing. Which is Awesome.

    Dark Souls is more, you're in a nightmare, not much is explained, but everything hates you, and thats basically the story.

    Judging which is best is down to the player, I like Dark Souls story though, I like to discover things and work out things myself. I know Skyrim has a great story and everything, but it gives too much away, and the gameplay can't compete. Skyrims gameplay is fantastic, and not really comparable to Dark Souls, but DS has better combat and a better sense of accomplishment when things go right, and depression when things go terribly wrong.

  • Cheapshot #252 2 months ago

    Fantastic article and I thoroughly agree. I've always thought that narrative with minimalism and nuance works best to gaming's strengths. -- that's the reason why IMO, Shadow of the Colossus, ICO and Silent Hill 2 are some of the best stories videogames have to offer.

    Skyrim is just so overwrought and clumsy in comparison, but at least there's still a great game behind the archaic storytelling.

  • eminusx #253 2 months ago

    Somebody made a great comment earlier comparing the two games if they were made into films, Plugmonkey maybe? But basically it said that skyrims narrative would be based around the rise of the central character, you, whereas Dark Souls narrative would be based around the rise and fall of the surrounding world and civilisation and you are the archeologist there merely to unravel its intricacies, which is spot on I think, this also draws a very distinct line between the two in their approach to storytelling.

    In a similar vein, Skyrim is the Peter Jackson-esque film of the two, a picturesque fantasy which leaves nothing to the imagination but excels in its beautiful vistas and spectacular grandeur, DS is very much the David Lynch film, an ominous, brooding, intentionally difficult beast which perfectly utilises the power of suggestion and leaves the viewer to dig deeper and fill in the blanks. One film you would walk away from feeling fulfilled in its narrative wholeness, the other you would spend days questioning how everything fits together and what it all means as it worms its way deeper into your consciousness.

    Personally I love DS for this reason, its exactly the same reason I love Lynch’s films. But I also think Skyrim is a fantastic game having spent around 125 hours on it so-far, theyre just very different, so it really boils down to the gamer or viewers personal tastes as both games excel at what they set out to achieve, warts and all.

  • ashley_falls #254 2 months ago

    I enjoyed this article a great deal, especially the comparisons between Dark Souls and Half-Life 2. Both games feature a minimalist style of storytelling that serves the game well. Half-Life 2 always keeps you grounded in your character. There are no Halo-style cutscenes. Dark Souls has a few cutscenes but they're very brief and don't generally involve dialogue.

    Skyrim & Oblivion are good games. But they're set in fairly generic fantasy realms. There isn't very much about the Elder Scrolls mythology that makes it unique. I think Fallout 3 is Bethesda's only truly great game. F3 has an extremely unique mythology that is unlike anything else out there.

    Part of what I love about Dark Souls and it's predecessor, Demon's Souls is that multiplayer is incorporated into the story. Every player in a Souls game is the hero in their own realm. Every game is the telling of a battle that is happening in millions of universes that are overlapping due to a distortion in the space-time continuum. Every game, played be every player is a unique experience that's just a little different from the next.

    It's not a perfect game. Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are too uptight about letting people play with their friends. The whole "play with strangers" aspect feels more like it's being incorporated because Hidetaka Miyazaki is a control freak who wants people to play the game his way or not at all than because it legitimately benefits the game. The summon signs for phantoms become harder and harder to find as you evolve to higher levels.

    But these are still minor quibbles. I've invested almost 400 hours of time as a Dark Souls player and am currently on my fourth game. It's an amazing, intuitive experience that goes from very hard to moderately easy as you master its exciting combat and learn how spring its many traps. Given its success, it seems likely that we'll see "Dark Souls 2". I can't wait. I hope From Software reneges on its commitment to refusing DLC. I'd love to have new areas for my character to explore in this world. It's an adventure like no other.

  • CaptainJelly #255 2 months ago

    Excellent and brave article. I love both games, but as has been said many times here before, if I want to read a book I'll do it on my Kindle. The sooner games stop trying to ape books or movies the better off we'll all be. Developers are working in a golden age and have the chance to carve an identity for the medium - great to see games like DS getting critical and commercial recognition.

  • dutchspeededup #256 2 months ago

    This is by a distance the most interesting and insightful article I have ever read on this site.

    Quite superb.

  • lord_fartsalot #257 2 months ago

    I declare fatwa for the blasphemous subtitle.... Also I stopped playing skyrim because I'd rather be Batman. I don't like games like Dark Souls, because I like my controller and my TV.

  • magifyre #258 2 months ago

    I know this is old but I had to sign up just to say hahahahaha. It's hilarious reading all the Skyrim fanboys crying over their game being picked apart. Hahahaha