After a brief rant about Giantdad I'm in a Dark Souls 1 mood again. I've played it through enough, and this time am more thinking fondly of the nuts online community, the bizarre memes that followed, and the utter broken nonsense that was a delight to tear apart and exploit.
The year is, once again, 2012. Dark Souls 1 has just released on PC, and due to the hype being steadily built from its console release a year prior, the screeching about artificial difficulty has hit record highs[1]. Yours truly is blasting through a second playthrough on New Game Plus, picking up all of the little hints that passed me by the first time, and owning myself in the PvP scene with glee.
Building on Demon's Souls' charm of being innovative without a final touch of polish, there is so much to exploit. The Endurance stat is absurdly overpowered. The Resistance stat is useless. Darkroot Forest is an absolute clusterfuck of gank squads and tryhard bullshit.
The Ring of Fog completely prevented enemy players from locking onto you. Resonance signs were invisible and you had no idea when they were active - this mechanic took over two years of testing for the community to understand properly. Proper understanding of Vagrant appearances took even longer.
Yet the niche mechanics of the game were a hidden joy in itself. Kindling a bonfire would send a single charge of Estus Flask healing to a random other player's world. This was a beautiful little trick that saved many people's boss runs in the most poetic of circumstances.
However, outrageously broken stuff is far funnier. Until Patch 1.06, souls obtained from enemies/bosses was less than half of what it currently is. So beating the Taurus Demon would net you a cool 1,000 souls, which could buy you fuck all. Good job scrub.
Remember Basilisks, whose mist can inflict the Curse mechanic, halving your HP if you died to it? IT. COULD. STACK.
Roll-swapping weapons and movesets was totally viable, meaning you could meld the Tranquil Walk of Peace and Darkmoon Blade spells into some ungodly AoE murder machine with no consequences. And nobody ever realised how good Strong Magic Shield was.
Abusing this to grief others was easy[2]. Making use of these mechanics in increasingly silly ways was far more challenging and rewarding. Unkillable when two-handing a greatshield? Just hold up a certain infamous choke point and make people lose their minds. Even maximising usage out of silly character animations was its own trend.
None of this died overnight with future game releases. But the development cycle became tighter, the community were laser-focused on analysing game files on Day 1, and PvP arenas demanded narrower and narrower builds to stand any chance of victory. I do miss the blind scrambling to figure out the depths to which game mechanics worked, the yolo approach to surviving in Lordran, the total lack of orthodoxy to how the community behaved[3]. Elden Ring releasing to a barrage of NEW BROKEN META screeching nonsense does not fill me with anywhere near the same level of love.
Also - no other EldenShadowSoulsBorne game had the greatest gesture of all time. Case closed.
Final note: The blog post title is a reference to the time-honoured tradition of abusing the message system for silly nonsense:
