Dark Souls - Why the storytelling is a step forward

Dark Souls,  a game which in my opinion is possibly one of the best games In recent years and one that me and no doubt many other people have spent far too many hours playing. One thing that stood out in particular to me though was the storytelling techniques that From Software decided to employ.

Instead of being fed the story in the form of cutscenes or excessively long explanatory dialogue like most modern titles Dark Souls instead keeps this to a minimum. In total a single playthrough of dark souls has two cutscenes that contribute to the story, one at the beginning and one at the end, this of course doesn’t include the cutscenes that don’t contribute in any way to the storytelling, like for example at the beginning of a boss battle, or transitioning between areas. Instead the story is told mainly through minimalistic dialogue, the environment, and item descriptions. This results in the player having to go out of their way to investigate and fully experience the story, resulting in immersion and making the storytelling elements far more interactive than any other game around right now.

The environment could even be compared to some classic movies (albeit a longer and significantly harder movie) where a lot of important information is contained within the subtext, never stated nor denied, forcing the player to observe the surroundings and speculate themselves about the implications of what they are seeing, this is why there is still discussion about the subtext of classic movies, and also why there is a lot of debate and discussion online about the dark souls story

This non-intrusive method also does wonders for the replay value of the game, one of my main gripes with Max Payne 3 and many other games is that the practically unskippable cutscenes make replaying the game a complete pain in the ass and only serves to distract from the gameplay.

However this approach to storytelling does cause some problems, modern gamers are so used to stories being spoonfed to them that a radical approach like this can leave some people with the impression that there isn’t a story and that the game sucks because of it, which is simply not the case.

Overall I think that this way of doing things has a lot of potential and just needs a little tweaking and experimentation to be fully accepted by gaming as a whole.