How Dark Souls III Helped Me Identify a Problem In My Game & Guild Wars 1 Helped Me Solve It.
Last night, as I lay in my bed with the intention of falling asleep, my brain, as it so often does, had other plans: thinking about game design. Specifically, I was contemplating something I'd been noticing as I've been replaying Dark Souls III in preparation for a video retrospective series on the trilogy, which is that it seems like I've spent the entire game making my character and her build, which means there won't be any game left in which to actually use that build. Put bluntly, I don't like this. Granted, New Game+ exists, thankfully, but nevertheless, it got a thought-train rolling. I also thought about how that contrasted with my experiences with Guild Wars 1 , a game that generally wants you to get set up very early and that has a lot of game to experience after you've got your build put together (as much as "a" build is a thing in that game, anyway—it encourages experimentation and variety). I much prefer this, where I can feel like I'v...
