June 2, 2025

The Curse of Needlessly Copying Dark Souls | Design Delve

This week's episode of Design Delve is now available!

The Curse of Needlessly Copying Dark Souls | Design Delve (YouTube)

Comments (7)

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Harehiro · June 8, 2025

I loved Lies of P until it gave up its esthetic to copy Dark Souls. After the King of Puppets fight, which was spectacular, it just becomes Dark Souls and is so boring I never finished the game.

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Tim Wilson · June 4, 2025

Honestly I loathe Fromsoft games for many reasons but weirdly it sounds like Lies of P fixes a lot of the problems I have with them (and kinda sounds like Western Nier: Automata). I might actually give this a go.

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Ryan Evans · June 11, 2025

Western? It's made by a Korean studio

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Ecter · June 4, 2025

Nice video. But it's missing more good examples of games that did it right - just to drive the point that a game can be successful without copy&pasting the same old crap from a widely known title.

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Jadedrakerider · June 2, 2025

But we have to copy Dark Souls! Why? Because it's there. I think I disagree about the jump control rationale. "Do it because the popular thing did it" in this case seems like a developer saying, "I have no idea how to do this better. Let's do what the popular thing did because at least players will be accustomed to it."

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Idnex · June 2, 2025

Hearing you wax poetically while Ludo barks about video game design is one of my favorite parts of being part of Second Wind.

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Honor · June 2, 2025

I've not got the reflexes to play a Souls-like (I'm having enough trouble with Clair Obscure Expedition 33 on Story mode) but it was very interesting regardless , and many of the same points crop up in regards to the copying of Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley cosy games "We don't allow saving except on sleep because Stardew Valley doesn't" for instance.