(Demo abandoned)

What the fuck are we doing? How the hell did Dark Souls 3 become the template for action games?

"Oh, it's the potential for good levels!" But what would good level design even look like in this context? Dark Souls 1 has a simple combat system that doesn't rely on large open spaces without obstacles. This way the player can be trusted to defend themselves in most terrain, which in turn enables designs like Blighttown, Sen's Fortress, New Londo Ruins, etc. where enemies can meaningfully interact with the level geometry. One can argue how consistently applied or successful this was in practice, but there is a solid design goal there that's still visible even up to Elden Ring (as scattershot as that game is).

As you make combat systems and enemy AI more complex though, generally you'll have to start making the simplifying assumptions of plenty of open space and no blocking terrain, which in turn restricts your level design capabilities. This is fine if you build the game accordingly, i.e. most of the classic linear action games. But Dark Souls 3 likes do not actually seem to be aware of this and so have dragged along huge amounts of bloat sections (Stellar Blade: swimming, keypads, climbing) so they can continue to pretend that the spaces between fights have any relation to the actual mechanics.

Similarly constructed arguments can also be made for the following Souls systems, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader: items, camera, pacing, leveling.

So I guess the whole point of these games is to grit your teeth so that you can experience the combat system? But is the combat really all that interesting? The camera limits how many aggressive enemies you can reasonably handle at once, and not being able to hitstun enemies with normal attacks pushes you into hit and run defensive play, which in turn pushes you to abuse the simplistic, timing-based parrying and iframe systems that all these games are cursed with. Why bother when you can just play Nioh 2, which commits all the soulslike sins above but at least has actually interesting resource management, accessible hitstun, deep weapon movesets, and so on. Why play any of these games at all when you can play Monster Hunter where the defensive, commitment driven style that soulslikes are known for is a hundred times better executed?

This whole subgenre is a complete dead-end design wise and doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. What a mess.

very impressive that a game can try to be ninja gaiden, nier, devil may cry and sekiro all at once, yet still somehow fail to capture the essence of what it aggrandises.

here’s the thing: this is not a real action game, it is a hollow facsimile of one. stellar blade tokenises action game design traits and shoehorns them into a dull modern template until it coalesces into god of war 2018: titty edition. mechanics lack any real depth while combat design is shallow and simplified. why is it combo-based if these are so heavily disincentivised? why are enemies so static, not playing to the strengths of the system? i’m glad they took the ninja gaiden route (e.g. letting you cancel an attack with a block) over sticking to animation priority, but my respect for the combat system mostly ends there. level and encounter design also lack anything beyond perfunctory consideration. enemy configurations often feel like a copy/paste job and never encourage a change in playstyle (e.g. switching between singular enemies/groups) or utilise risk-reward strategies. btw, there are only so many times you can pull the ‘enemy laying in wait behind the door/wall’ bit. if you must, then at least show me some intent, some playfulness. this shit just feels like getting 40 minutes into dead space and realising you’ll be repeating the same boring jump scare for the next twelve hours. bosses are, unsurprisingly, the best part, but sorely lack the dynamism required for what (i think) they were going for. all of these things are literally, categorically, the most important aspects to nail for a successful action game! it speaks volumes that they all feel half baked.

we can only assume that, at some point, an active decision was made to focus on adding AAA bloat instead of further developing and refining these most crucial design aspects. had shift up not been so enamoured with sonymaxxing every aspect of their game, we could have seen something legitimately interesting. instead we have a bird’s nest of disparate influences, filtered through the money-making machine until a big grey bowl of no-identity slop comes out the other end. who would’ve thought!