Now I think its straight up a bad game, and produced many tropes that reduced the quality of other games after it.
Dark Souls introduced exactly ZERO tropes in the westoid gaming industry and barely even had an effect on Japanese games. Even literal Dark Souls clones are a tiny niche and among those clones only an handful are any good.
I disagree. I think Dark Souls introduced and/or popularized the following:
- Difficulty as a selling point and marketing gimmick in mass games
- Very slow attacks that lock you in place and you can't cancel
- The dodge-dodge-dodge-hit cycle of boss combat
- The dance-around-and-backstab cycle of mook combat
- Diegetic/in-world explanations for death/save/reload mechanics
- Honestly, the entire idea of boss battles was brought back to PC gaming by Dark Souls, it was nearly extinct before
- Focus on environmental storytelling over narrative storytelling
- Focus on only telling half the story, and letting YouTubers make up the rest
- A community of people who think its okay for a game to require you read the wiki while playing
And you can go and say "ooooh Zelda did this, ooooooh ICO did that", but the mass adoption or revival of many of these came because of Dark Soul's commercial success. And I'd say about half of them are bad, and I wish they hadn't happened.
I can write a similar list for the Batman Arkham games (the cinematic combat, the "detective vision", etc), or Assassin's Creed, or Far Cry games, but for those games I played them once, and I immediately saw it. For Dark Souls, I thought it won't inspire much change in the overall game design space. Disappointingly, it did. My favorite roguelike genre got hit hard, too, though honestly some roguelikes do Dark Souls better than Dark Souls does itself.
