TROLLING IS A ART

You knew it was coming. You felt it in the very deepest, blackest, most poo-encrusted region of your bowels. You knew it with the strength of every fiber in your body. You knew the two most eagerly anticipated RPG’s this year coming out at about the same time would not escape my steely gaze. Because you need me. You are incapable of divining a truly individual thought or educated opinion on what to have for breakfast, let alone what you should spend your money on. So it is with your inadequacies in mind that I present you an objective *coughnotevenslightlyobjectivecough* comparison between Skyrim and Dark Souls.

I’m not working for IGN or GameSpot here. If you wanna know who published what or which artist colored the pixels on which Troll scrotum go look it up on Wikipedia. I play games, I do not make them, I just happen to be way better at them than you. So with no further dickery, it’s about time to make with the reviews.

Character Creation
With the amount of depth Bethesda put into their character creation tool they could have released it as a game of it’s own, called “Slider bars: The Slidening”. I could go on about it. And I will.

There is a bar for NOSE HEIGHT for gods sake. You can adjust the tone of your war paint. You can pick one of a million races. You can come up with your own lame little backstory. You can become Lord Assram, Chief of the Analbead warriors if you want too. You can spend hours making all your features orthogonal to your own throbbing erection. You can then also get less than five minutes into the game and realize you will be spending most of your time in first person, or less than an hour into the game and cover it all with armor, thereby rendering this entire process, and all your efforts, completely futile.

Dark Souls realizes that for the most part, character customization is pointless because you’ll just end up wanting to cover yourself in badass looking gear, and that most of us are simply here to slay some really fucking huge demons, so its character creation aims to be as little of an obstacle to this end as possible. Personally, I rolled a thief. I named him Phil. I picked his starting item, gave him an awesome bronytail and was good to start getting my shit handed to me by hordes of the undead. Just like that. It took me less than two fucking minutes.

Character Depth/Development
Part of the fun in RPG’s is developing your character. Watching it grow from a humble peasant with essentially a sharp stick into an unstoppable powerhouse that sweats testosterone due to a potentially fatal excess. A lot of people seem to think that Skyrim has this down pretty good because of the millions of years of dialogue and the colorful characters. They seem to think that the context of the game, with you of course being the only one that can stop the terrible terrible dragons, is a good source of developing your hero. Hang on a second… Let me google that.

char·ac·ter/ˈkariktər/ Noun: The mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual. The distinctive nature of something.

You cannot feasibly derive your character’s development from other characters in a game. Skyrim does not give you freedom of character development, it forces you into a mold. You ARE a Dragonborn. You WILL be forced to pick Stormcloak or Imperial. You are dragged into the civil war. You WILL have to do ‘quests’, whether compulsory or not, and there will be some sort of order to them and you will have to sit there rapidly skipping all the horse shit poorly acted fantasy cliche dialogue before doing anything interesting. You do not get a say in this. But hey at least you can become a level 50 Dildosmith by repeating the same mundane crafting tasks over and over, right? Good for you. You truly are a unique little snowflake. You and the other 400 million Dragonborns who bought the game.

Dark Souls? You (and other people on your server whose ghosts you see hovering about the place) are an undead guy that was locked in a cell to rot for the rest of time. Fate has set you free. Get out there and try to win your humanity back. Or failing that, invade another online players game, kill them and take theirs. Or don’t, whatever’s good. (Note: there is more to the story than this, but I am not spoiling it, and you don’t have to deal with any of it if you don’t want too anyway.) From the very start of the game it is all on you. You are not taken by the hand. There are no decisions made for you and once you leave the Asylum you are totally on your own, with nothing but ‘Bells are a good idea I hear’ to guide you. You are free to be precisely who you want, with your own motives. You can join any of Nine competing covenants, or you can join none and just go around being a badass. I like to think Phil was sentenced to an eternity rotting in a cell on an island because he porked too many of the kingdom’s wives. But hey, did it stop him from breaking out and fucking up some undead shit? You had most definitely better believe it did not.

Difficulty
If any part of you believes the phrase ‘a game does not have to be hard to be good’, get the fuck off of my blog and do not ever return. You want a pleasurable viewing experience? Go watch Harry Potter. Fag. Games have to be hard because they are designed to be a challenge to your coordination and your mind. Take the difficulty out of the equation and you may as well be fingerpainting. Anyone can finish Slow Ride on easy in guitar hero 3 and there is thus no thrill to be gained from doing so.

Skyrim has a difficulty slider, because Bethesda will be damned if they’ll miss an opportunity to make you drag a dot up and down a horizontal bar. I get it. You need to pander to the casual market to make any money from a game like Skyrim. You need to make it accessible to the spastics. I won’t judge them for that. But here’s the harsh reality of the situation. Skyrim is easy. At least when compared to Dark Souls. Making enemies hard to kill does not make a game hard. Skyrim has enemies that will rape you just as hard as the ones in Dark Souls, but Dark Souls is still infinitely harder. This is for two reasons.
One: In Skyrim, you can save anywhere. Whenever you feel like it. You can spam Quicksave til the cows come home and be safe in the knowledge that your glorious progress shall always remain thus and that pesky Giant that took you 4 hours to kill won’t be bothering you anymore. Those bandits who assraped you (kudos to you for playing on a decent difficulty) will forever be in their cold, cold graves thanks to the wonderful invention of quicksaving. In Dark Souls, there is one and only one way to save your progress. Bonfires. And they are few and far between. Oh, and resting at one, which is the only way to restock your heals and save your game, respawns every non-boss enemy in the game. Yeah, I know you just spent 15 minutes and all of your luck, timing, skill, items and energy taking down that massive clump of knights in that corridor. I know your Esflask is empty and you’re retarded enough to roll a Wanderer and not spec Faith, and therefore have no chance of making it through the next room, and resting up will mean taking on those all those knights again. But guess what? No one gives a rat’s ass. Get your poxy ass back to the bonfire and come back when you can kill a bunch of KNIGHTS for fucks sake. What chance would YOU have against this?

One of the less intimidating Dark Souls enemies.

Two: This is one that a lot of the ‘hardcore’ RPG fans like to bitch about. The fast-travel system. Once you go somewhere once, you have the option to click it on your map and be mystically teleported there from anywhere in the game. Talk about amateur hour. In Dark Souls, if you die, you drop a soul containing ALL OF YOUR XP AND MONEY (which are the same thing in the game). If you die again before you can get back to your corpse and reclaim it, it is gone forever. There is no bank for it, you cannot store it anywhere, you are either using it or carrying it around with you. It is totally independent of the amount of XP you had and there’s no workaround. If you had all the XP from the past 2 hours farming and die twice, you’d better saddle up for a long fucking farming marathon, because it is gone.

This might seem like a dick move, but what it effectively does is create an atmosphere of constant tension. Every death is one you cannot afford, but mostly it is one you also cannot avoid. In Skyrim, any tension that might have been brought on wandering the wilderness to get back to turn in those quests is immediately ruined because you can use the ancient art of fast travel to magically appear there. SNORE.

Mechanics/Gameworld
In terms of scope, Skyrim wins. No contest, hands down, Skyrim is bigger. Even if you will spend most of your ‘journey’ through it staring at a loading screen to save yourself the tedium of walking through generic forest number 41. But as your girlfriend regularly reassures you, size is not everything. Sure, the two games both borrow pretty heavily from the ‘fantasy game location pool’. Enchanted forests, ancient tombs, infested dungeons, giant castles, ruins etc. But what about your experience in it? As I mentioned, Dark Souls more or less drops you in a world where everything either wants nothing more than murder you, or in the case of the ‘friendly’ NPC’s, treats you with complete indifference. Mostly they either want you to give them souls for shit, or join their covenant and help them get souls and Humanity by murdering things. They would not be caught dead wasting 15 minutes of your time while there’s demons to be eviscerated.

On the other hand, here’s a video of a guy doing the first dragon slaying quest in Skyrim. Play the video, then go boil the kettle, put on some popcorn, maybe catch up on some reading. By the time you’re done he’s probably almost up to fighting the fucking dragon.


Seriously. 11 minutes into a video involving a quest to kill a dragon and still remarkably few dragons (or anything else’s) have been killed. Then when he gets to the place the dragons supposed to be, he has to wait. I understand the need to flesh out your world, but this shit is ridiculous. You cannot promise me an epic open-world RPG about slaying the fuck out of some dragons and then give me what is essentially a daytime TV series with some mediocre dragon fighting in the ad breaks. Dark Souls creates a more convincing, and certainly more entertaining world with just art direction and atmosphere.

I threw Combat in this section as well because there isn’t much to say on it. Dark Souls combat is easy to learn, it only involves a few buttons, yet impossible to master. It’s not perfect, and has glitches, but it is elegant and intense and violent and immersive and generally does the job well for a dark fantasy RPG.

In Skyrim, you hold your shield up, wait for an opening, and swing. Or kite and use ranged attacks. You get absolutely no physical feedback from most of the enemies you attack, they mostly look like they didn’t even notice you hit them, and it feels stiff and rigid. It’s not terrible, it’s not even really bad, it’s just not very good and could have been done so much better so easily if they had have just deviated from the Elder Scrolls robotic combat formula that has plagued the series since Morrowind.

In summary, if you want a full fantasy simulation, if you want to be put in a world with villages and monsters and knights and different races and professions and everything else that is essentially real life in a different world; in other words, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys arguing about the Lord of the Rings books, get Skyrim. If you want a good, fun action RPG, a REALLY fucking good one that will give you hours of furious childish glee and let you be whoever you want without forcing you into a role, if you want a game so difficult it makes you want to break it yet simultaneously unable to concede defeat at its hands, get Dark Souls.