How Dark Souls Grew From a Niche Game to a Genre-Defining Franchise

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It has been just over a decade since the first Dark Souls hit consoles in 2011, and since then a whole genre has been born. While it wasn't FromSoftware's first game, it's undeniable that it had struck gold as the industry began to evolve in response to Dark Souls bucking traditional gameplay experiences.

However, it's worth looking at how Dark Souls revolutionize the scene, and what its legacy will look like the longer games follow in its wake. As of this writing, an exceptionally difficult title can earn itself the moniker of a "Souls-like" game as a badge of honor, guaranteeing a certain degree of success just by mere association. But whether this will last forever remains to be seen.

Dark Souls Was the First Strand-Type Game

The genre arguably first began in full with Demon's Souls, a precursor to the Dark Souls that served as a spiritual successor to FromSoftware's King's Fields. What differentiated the two Souls games was a matter of timing and platform, with Dark Souls no longer being a PlayStation exclusive and launching at a time when the industry was under fire for producing games that «held players' hands» by making things too easy and obvious.

Unlike contemporary games of the time that focused on formulas like tutorials with in-game prompts, Dark Souls was developed so that polished combat mechanics and balanced game design could complement one another, with deaths not merely being a possibility, but an inevitability. When players failed, it was never attributed to poor game design, but a lack of player skill. Moreover, the ability to progress and a limited availability of checkpoints — bonfires — were tied into this system. Deaths meant losing significant progress, something few other titles allowed for, and