Gamespot: Dark Souls is one of the most influential games of the 21st century

[Artdayne]

Where's Warcraft 3? World of Warcraft? PUBG?

 

[Dr. Mario]

This is...a stretch. Zelda 1 despite the overworld is hyper linear. You can wander about a bit but there's only one way through those dungeons- you can't sequence break to any real extent. The Souls Games? not so much.

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Huh? No that's not true at all, you can go to dungeons 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 right from the start. And others you can get an item and leave without defeating the boss.

For the rest, yes obviously it has RPG mechanics--but Dark Souls is not known for its RPG mechanics, it's known for very much the same mechanics as there are in Zelda 1. Yes of course the story is more developed too, it's not the 80s anymore.

And I want to say the difficulty in the Arcade era of game design was the point too. It needed to artificially elongate a small game to make it worthwhile to pay up to $80 for it.

 

[Soneji]

Dark Souls is so far down the list of influential 21st century games that it being as far as I can tell one of the first in this series is laughable.

GTA3
WOW
RE4
COD : MW
ICO
HL2
DOTA/LOL
PUBG
Minecraft


And more I'm probably blanking out on in my tiredness are definitely more influential, with a lot of games that are arguably more influential.

 

[Bastables]

Uh not quite what i meant. Anyone who is saying demons is more influential than dark souls is distorting history. Demons didnt have the influence nor recognition of the larger public consciousness. Dark souls very clearly did.

Better examples to illustrate this point is suggesting that final fantasy 1 or 2 is more influential than 7 because it came first, despite 7 being the most influential of the franchise. No one is seriously debating what game influenced the influence of a more influential game that's a ridiculous premise and honestly if that's the case then demons souls isn't influential because kings field came before it.

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Yeah I think you're mixing up influential with popularity especially in reference to Demon Souls vs Dark souls and with the Final fantasy series. Remember Demon souls was a critical darling, and created, primed the the hard core player base that switched to lauding it's take on "difficulty". Lauding the difficulty as opposed to having Yahtzee style melt downs about how you'd need to be crazy to put up with "dieing" in a game to learn it.

Look at innovation introduced in Dark souls that separate it out from the Demon souls template; connected world with a primacy given on backtracking through connecting levels due to lack of warp. This one thing that Dark souls actually does differently is never a core part of the "souls" genre, never mind not really being a thing in Dark souls 2, 3, and blood borne which all have Demon souls style hub with levelling NPC. The one thing Dark Souls did differently never became a souls staple, it did not even influence it's subsequent direct sequels.

Final Fantasy I was directly influenced by Wizardry and Ultima, they're the influential ones as they directly influenced Japanese RPG's.

 

[lowhighkang_LHK]

Yeah, DMC is kinda weird, as while it was probably the first really big action game of its kind, a lot of the games it influenced are either by Kamiya himself, or one of his companies, to the point it's like saying Demon's Souls influenced Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro.

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The genre itself isn't influential. Much to my sadness.