Dark Souls - Retrospective @ Gamasutra

Gamasutra has a a new article about understanding the appeal of Dark Souls.

Dark Souls is a very interesting game.

One thing that interests me about it is that two years later, as its sequel is about to launch, people are still playing it.

I see them talking about it on Twitter; my husband booted it up this week to play it some more -- he's already played it extensively -- and before long another player joined his session. That seems remarkable, for what's mainly a single player console game, and one that hasn't been promoted much at all of late.

In an era when we constantly hear that the window is smaller and smaller for premium packaged titles to find audiences and that DLC, multiplayer modes, and grind are necessary to keep it jammed open even an inch, that's an achievement. The game has little grind, very idiosyncratic multiplayer, and only one DLC pack, which you need to progress far into the game to even access.

I recently had a chance to speak to Brian Hong, director of strategic and digital marketing at Namco Bandai Games, about how the publisher's initial discussions of the game went. "A lot of people said, 'Well, this game's really hard, but you don't want to talk about how hard it is, because it's going to scare people away!' But as we kept going through and stripping everything down, I realized that this is actually the most defining characteristic that puts its first step forward."