Some good design choices in Dark Souls 2

1100 words (5 min)

Dark Souls 2 is the most disliked game in the Dark Souls series, and not without reason. It’s a let-down from the excellence of the first half of Dark Souls, lacking the slick level design and overall sense of fun. However, some of Dark Souls 2’s design choices feel over-hated, disparaged by fans simply because they’re different. The game has its flaws, but some of its mechanics are genuinely good, even if they could use more polish.

(Also, I’ve only played Scholar of the First Sin, so this essay is based off of that version.)

In Dark Souls 2, enemies despawn after killing them twelve times. This is one of the more controversial new mechanics, with many players going out of their way to make the game harder with the Covenant of Champions just to avoid despawning enemies. This is fair if a player is looking for a challenge, but worrying about enemies despawning feels unnecessary—the game is easy enough that you’re rarely going to die in an area more than twelve times, and most of the bosses don’t require that many attempts either. I killed a majority of the base game bosses in one or two attempts, and on the bosses that provided more of a challenge, clearing out the route to the boss door made the run back far less irritating. The enemies despawning made killing them on the way back to a boss feel like a satisfying progression rather than an obligation. This mechanic also demotivates farming enemies for souls. This is a trap of new players, who think that the only way to overcome a challenge is to become over-leveled, but the philosophy of the Dark Souls series promotes patience and learning attack patterns far more than mindlessly grinding for souls.

One counter-argument to the despawning mechanic is that it removes the tension of the game, knowing that you can just clear out an area if you’re having trouble. While this might be the case for some players, I simply don’t have the patience to kill enemies over and over unless I’m going to be traveling through the area regardless, like on the run back to a boss. A greater threat to the game’s tension is the ability to fast-travel, a widely liked mechanic. You’re never going to get into a classic Dark Souls situation like going to the Tomb of the Giants early and being trapped in hell for the next hour. Entering a location in Dark Souls 2 is no longer a commitment, and players are motivated to travel back to Majula frequently to level up, which destroys any sense of isolation the areas might have created. They lack the claustrophobia that the first half of Dark Souls achieves as you descend farther and farther into the bowels of the world.

Another common complaint about Dark Souls 2 is the healing system. Drinking from the estus flask is very slow, and you only get a few charges as the beginning of the game, pushing you to use the alternative, lifegems. This creates an interesting trade-off between the slow to use, limited, but much faster healing of the estus flask, and the slow-healing but faster to use lifegems. The different types of healing require a bit more strategy and give you more options for what to do. For example, while exploring, you might want to top off your last bit of health with your basically infinite supply of lifegems, to prepare for combat where you won’t be able to heal as easily. Boss fights, thanks to the slow, deliberate movement of both the player and the boss, play out like a series of turns. On each turn, you have to decide whether to attack or heal, and, like in the first Dark Souls, think several steps ahead to make sure you’ll be safe in whatever choice you make. The later bosses take this philosophy of careful choices further, with DLC bosses like the Fume Knight being very quick to punish heals if they aren’t already locked in an attack animation. The slow healing of both lifegems and the estus flask force you to relax and continue to dodge when you’re at low health, since panic-healing will only get you killed. However, the different types of healing provide different strategies in a fight—lifegems for more casual and less risky healing, versus the estus flask for more desperate heals—which can make the gameplay more dynamic.

The level design of Dark Souls 2 is pretty disappointing, structured as a series of linear paths out from the central hub of Majula. However, one moment stands out as something truly unique: the transition from Earthen Peak to Iron Keep. An elevator at the top of a windmill rises higher than physically possible, emerging in a fortress filled with lava. A similar moment comes later in the game, to a lesser extend, when passing through a tunnel in the sunlit Shaded Woods brings you to the dark, rainy Drangleic Castle. These surreal transitions perfectly capture the themes of loss of memory and identity that the game is focused on, seen in characters like Lucatiel, but they’re few and far between. If this surrealism was more intertwined with the overall design of the game, it would feel more like an intentional storytelling decision rather than a few weird moments. Much of what makes Dark Souls 2 unique is its direct contrast to Dark Souls. The player character is not the Chosen Undead on a great quest to claim the throne; they’re just like everyone else, coming to Drangleic to seek an impossible cure to their curse, feeling more like an NPC from Dark Souls rather than the protagonist. Like the other characters in Dark Souls 2, the player character’s memories are slowly slipping away as they become hollow, and the world and its surreal design reflect that. Dark Souls 2 could have used this contrast to Dark Souls’ intensely logical level design to make a thematic statement and hammer home its otherwise lackluster storytelling, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Dark Souls 2 is a game of missed opportunities. Some of its design choices, like despawning enemies or the healing system, work well in isolation, but are disliked in comparison to its predecessor. Other choices suffer from a half-baked implementation, with the level design not going far enough in its potential weirdness to make a thematic point. With later games like Elden Ring moving away from the slower pace and obscure mechanics of the first two Dark Souls games, it’s unlikely that Dark Souls 2’s more controversial gameplay elements are ever going to be revisited. It’s a shame that, even with an “enhanced” version in Scholar of the First Sin, the game never got a chance to shine.