With coming to the end of Black Myth Wukong I'd had chance to reflect on the year full of Souls-Likes that we've had, the year topped up with them beforehand and probably a proceeding stacking too- I'm not sure, I haven't checked next year's line-up for fear of seeing a deluge. And the reason I find this a topic worth considering is simply because Souls-Like games have proven to be the successor to action adventure games that we didn't know we needed- perfectly blending the excitement of action games with the do-or-die stakes of consequence on the line- Souls-Likes introduced the arena-like challenge to a stagnating genre of platformer exhaustion. Even Final Fantasy ended up getting in on the fun with XVI- and the craziest thing about all this- this are the thoughts I have and I'm not even playing a Souls-Like.
Sure, WuKong is clearly heavily inspired by your everyday Souls-Like games with their focus on precision combat and light character building work- but there's absolute no risk of loss and the game itself isn't really that hard- it's more designed to make you feel intimidated before feeding the same sort of power fantasy as your average God of War game. But the lessons are there- we've learnt how to make this style of game permeate successfully without needing to ape it. So with that in mind- just why do we need to make every single game on the planet earth that is a third person no-shooting action game a Souls-Like? It's getting a little old!
Just this year I've played Lords of the Fallen, Lies of P, Flintlock: Seige of Dawn and Shadow of the Erdtree to completion- and those were all the bigger budget Souls-Likes of this and last year- there's been more since! Then you've got the smaller titles like Entropia which I would normally try out if I didn't have so much of a negative experience with the last lower-budget Souls-Like I tried. (Which I shan't name, but I will say it's one of the titles that got in on the trend relatively early- see if you can guess.) What I've discovered is that there's a bit of a divide between the perceived accessibility of this style of game and the level of talent required to make it right.
Because when you think about- you're dealing with games stringent on the successful and intelligent management of balance and difficulty- which are some of the highest level of design you can deal with. We're not talking about Ubisoft levels of game design, where they kind of throw a dart at a gameplay concept and wrap that up to ship with six months time- you need to know your game inside and out in order to properly balance for challenge. When I was making my RPG I literally crunched every single ounce of XP it was possible to have acquired at every milestone so I knew how to appropriately crank up the challenge to meet the player's level- and if you don't have data which starts at that level (I'm still very much an amateur to design, remember) then what are you doing making a game that revolves around difficulty and challenge?
But the way that trends work is that everybody experiences the moment of influence at around about the same time- but the effort it takes to learn and reciprocate those lessons digests at different rates, typically prolonged, so that even though FromSoft were making Dark Souls games for a good chunk of years before this trend hit off- these new titles are all popping up around about now. We're getting to a point of over-saturation but the teams working on these titles are too far gone to turn back now- they've been on these games for nearly half a decade now! And that's how you get games launching far out of season, like 'Suicide Squad disappoint with another crappy Season' or 'Concord'. Which is why we are told to develop games for an audience of the future rather than the fads of today.
Not so long ago I saw an industry showcase trailer for an anime-looking game that I believe had 'Barbarian' in the title but for the life of me I can't track it down again so I may have imagined that little title nugget. Now the visuals for this game looked true to style, the animation quality and the landscapes peaked my little ears to attention and then the gameplay started and I just >sighed<. Do you wanna know why? Because from the very first step the player took I saw the exact movement style, camera position and HUD layout of a Souls-game. Specifically a FromSoft one. And do you know how disappointing it is that those markers illicit a natural distaste from me nowdays? Everything about that trailer was to my tastes until that moment where I just turned off and now can't even remember what the thing was called.
I do think we're leaning towards a critical mass of this genre of games bubbling over in a manner that might put off the public to these titles for a good while- just like how I've always felt about survival games only to grow utterly aggrieved with them over the course of titles like 'Rust' and 'ARK' and the truly awful 'Survivalists'. (From a studio I genuinely loved too...) And in that climate we could see the erosion of some of the game design trends that have make surrounding games so darn good in the interim. I don't want to lose actually engaging boss fights after the deluge that was late 2000's early 2010's action games. I don't want to lose precision gameplay, meaningful progression, rich but directed worlds. But give us enough over saturation and it won't be long before 'back to basics' becomes the rallying cry.
Elden Ring really did slap the gaming world around the face and showed them a totally new style of game. Well... new to them- the rest of us had been here a while. Now it's not so much a 'clutch pearls' moment for a game to be naturally challenging, maybe even a little overbearing at times, and I like the feelings those titles give me. (Not including Lords- that games was just tedium incarnate.) Maybe if a developer like FromSoft remains at the top of the pack, even when this genre reaches peak saturation their own innovations will keep the heart alive in the new era- beyond into that age of Dark. At the very least I hope that's the case so IronPineapple can have content to review forever- love that channel.
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