{"id":6848,"date":"2022-04-15T22:46:19","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T05:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=6848"},"modified":"2022-04-15T22:46:19","modified_gmt":"2022-04-16T05:46:19","slug":"further-thoughts-on-narrative-in-dark-souls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/6848","title":{"rendered":"Further Thoughts on Narrative in Dark Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I said earlier that <em>Dark Souls<\/em> doesn&#8217;t have story, it has lore. That&#8217;s not quite true, it turns out. In the early-to-mid part of the game, you get a lot of lore as flavor text on items, and it really seems like that&#8217;s all it is, just flavor, safely ignored. But once you unlock the game&#8217;s final layers, two things happen: you finally get an explanation of what your ultimate goal is, and you start directly encountering the legendary beings you&#8217;ve seen referenced over and over, usually to fight them. Story and lore merge, as what you&#8217;ve picked up incidentally about these characters establishes the weight and stakes of these encounters.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a peculiar way to convey story information ambiently without exposition dumps, reminiscent of environmental storytelling. I&#8217;m trying to think of other games that do something similar, and the best I can come up with is <em>Magic: the Gathering<\/em>, where you can see numerous flavor-text references to a Planeswalker character before encountering the card for the character itself. That&#8217;s not quite the same, though, because <em>M:tG<\/em> really does just have lore without narrative.<\/p>\n<p>The downside is that, as you may have gathered from my posts, it really does make it easy to overlook what story is there. I&#8217;ve been trained by so many other games that lore is inconsequential, a sort of optional extra of only tangential relevance to what I&#8217;m actually doing, and it takes a very long time before <em>Dark Souls<\/em> does anything to contradict that assumption. There&#8217;s got to be a better compromise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I said earlier that Dark Souls doesn&#8217;t have story, it has lore. That&#8217;s not quite true, it turns out. In the early-to-mid part of the game, you get a lot of lore as flavor text on items, and it really seems like that&#8217;s all it is, just flavor, safely ignored. But once you unlock the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[710,215],"class_list":["post-6848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dark-souls","tag-magic-the-gathering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6848"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6849,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6848\/revisions\/6849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}