Almost a year after Elden Ring changed everything, there’s never been a better time to return to Dark Souls

[ad_1]

Everything dies. That’s one of the unavoidable truths of the universe: everything that is given life must also give over to death. It’s true of us frail, transient humans, and it’s true of the very best video games ever made, too. Everything dies, no matter how important it once was.

And 11 years is a long time in this industry. It’s a yawning gulf, an epoch. It feels like so much longer ago that Dark Souls was released – when the meteoric success of FromSoft’s first mainstream success began casting a shadow over the rest of the gaming industry forever. On a quiet September afternoon in 2011, FromSoft changed the course of gaming history forever, and built on the foundations of its own, proprietary genre: the Souls-like.

Years after the game’s debut, there’s no shortage of veritable tomes published on the title – detailed descriptions of how it came to be, portfolios of art from its development, dispatches from the frontlines of its making, all revered in the same way that interviews with Scorsese are worshipped by cinephiles and students of the silver screen. But games are mysterious things. Unlike films, they can rarely be enjoyed completely out of context of their release – so much of the actual experience is knitted into playing the game ‘live’; enjoying it with other people and having your experience galvanised by the actions of friends (or foes) loading into the world at the same time as you.

[ad_2]

Source link