Iteration time!

This is gonna be good...

I don't like Dark Souls.

It's true.

Now, half of humanity will be thinking "Yeah, he's too much of a n00b, and not 1337 enough to beat it!", and the other half will be thinking "What kind of magic is making pictures appear on this rectangle on my desk?!"

Frankly, I don't mind being too bad at a game to beat it. The list of those games is quite long. But that wasn't it. I have beaten plenty of games that were hard and that required lots of practice.

So, it eluded me for the longest time why in the world I didn't like Dark Souls. But after much brooding, I got it! That's right; iteration time!

Now you're either thinking "What is iteration time?" or "The box next to the rectangle is making noises, what witchcraft is this?!".

Iteration time is the time between you cocking things up and you being back in action to cock things up again. For instance, in Super Meat Boy, the iteration time is extremely short. When you die, you reappear instantly at the start of the screen to try again.

This is something that all developers must take into account. How long iteration time do you want, and how will it be managed? Way back when, the most common way of all was having lives, which gave you a number of tries with short iteration time, but a long one if you failed more times than that. See Super Mario Bros. and the likes thereof.

In the g(l)ory days of PC gaming in the 90's, basically all games managed it by letting you save whenever you wanted, allowing you to have as long, or indeed as short, iteration time as you'd like.

Nowadays, everybody, their uncle, their uncle's dog, and their uncle's dog's favorite chew toy uses autosaves of one kind or another. Usually it's simply pre-determined checkpoints in the game, where the game saves automatically, and you have little or no control over when it saves.

Dark Souls uses campfires as checkpoints. When you die, you are returned to the last campfire you activated, and all your souls are dropped on the ground where you died. What this means in practice is that if you die fighting a boss, you can face a fun little romp of 15 minutes to get back to the boss every single time you die. And this is in a game whose tagline is basically "You'll die lots of time trying to kill bosses!".

D'you know what feeling that invokes in me? The same feeling that you get if you've played a game for two hours without saving, and your computer crashes. Despair, sadness, frustration, fury.

That's idiotic game design.

Having to trudge back for a quarter of an hour every single one of the eight times you die on a boss isn't fun, challenging, your engaging. It is a waste of time. There is nothing gained from it whatsoever.

Except for padding out the runtime of the game, of course.

Funny thing, Darksiders 3, a really poor knockoff of Dark Souls, that I will be ripping into furiously in the near future, does that one thing better. It always has checkpoints, in this case summoning points for a demon named Vulgrim, right before bosses, minimizing iteration time.

When what amounts to little more than the third rate porn parody of your game gets a crucial part of gameplay right more than you do, you've fucked up.

Fuck Dark Souls.

And fuck Darksiders 3!