Last night, I took a little bit of a break from playing the game. This may not have been a smart decision since the maintenance is happening tomorrow right in the middle of my pre-budgeted game time (thus giving me an unintentional break), but I needed to see some old friends, and that meant (strangely) some Garou and not Demon's Souls. Trust me when I tell you that this is something I will probably never say again.
I felt a little guilty about stepping away. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I had a plan, and I wanted to stick with it. 28 days of playing one video game and writing about it is a bit much, but not ridiculous, I think. I even really hit the Reddit and Discourse pavement pretty hard yesterday looking for some good co-op partners. I mean, it's going to happen again tonight, but there was a lot of wasted effort yesterday setting things up when I wasn't even around to follow through.
But this gave me a little bit of time to reflect, too. There's been one topic that I've been alluding to ever since I started writing this continued odyssey, and I suppose that now's the best time to get to it and reveal the truth: this has all been built on a lie.
Alright, maybe that's inaccurate given that I legitimately have a freelance piece to write at the end of the month about the twilight of Demon's Souls online community. But for me personally, I haven't played DS online since maybe its first year of release, and for several years after that, playing online was just never in the cards. I found playing offline to be both more rewarding, and much more fascinating. It all had to do with changing the world.
Of the hidden mechanics that were built into an already dense game, perhaps the most opaque was the concept of world and character tendencies. In broad terms, these are the measure of how "good" or "bad" you and the levels can be based on the actions a player takes. In more minute detail, it works kind of like this:
The game starts in a state that all world tendencies (they're separate for each archostone level of the game) are set to neutral. Kill a boss, and it shifts toward "white." Kill a friendly NPC or die in body form, and it will shift toward "black." The careful manipulation of tendencies toward pure white (PWWT) or pure black (PBWT) will adjust many facets of the game. In PWWT, for example, enemies take fewer hits to kill, will drop more healing items, and will unlock certain NPCs or sidequests. On the contrary, in PBWT, enemies are harder to kill, but rare items dropped from them are more common with their experience point rewards being greater. Certain "black phantom" NPCs can also be found in PBWT, which also drop rare and unique equipment. For an easier game, then, players will want to maintain a PWWT, but a smart and adventurous player will juggle the risk/ reward of PBWT for the better loot and quicker gains in strength. It's a neat system, if needlessly obscure for first-timers.
Character tendency is basically the same, but more so based on specific player actions. Killing bosses and invading black phantoms (read: other players) will shift toward PWCT, which grants a HP boost and access to a rare item when PW is reached. Invading other players and killing them, along with murdering the named NPCs in the game, will shit the CT to PB, which opens up a very dark sidequest for high-level rewards at the price of reduced total HP.
The twist here is that world tendency is linked to the online servers. Whenever you start or reload a game (meaning, you disconnect and reconnect DS's servers), you are subject to whatever median WT all online players are currently enjoying. When the game was relatively young, the fact that the vast majority of people were there for PvE and bosses were dropping left and right meant that there was a natural shift for all levels to be closer to white. People were unwittingly helping to make the game ultimately easier, and so it wasn't uncommon for you to play through the beginning of the game, kill the first boss, and then reload 1-1 to find the PWWT events opened up for you --which includes some of the strongest heavy armor of the game for free. Not a bad gig.
The problem was trying to see everything that the game had to offer, or with careful character building, which had a lot to do with mucking with world tendency. If every time you fired up your PS3 you would shift ever closer back to neutral or even PW, it would make for a lot of wasted time and effort, and in many cases permanently poo-poo any opportunities for PWWT (so, yes, it's ultimately harder to walk the straight and narrow) for a given game cycle. Most serious DS devotees, then, choose to play the game in offline mode, gallantly committing suicide in the Nexus while in body form as to not accidentally infect a given level with any negative WT. This is the way I have chosen to play the game since the end of my first run lo these nine long years past.
The reason for tethering this feature of the game, esoteric as it is, to its online connectivity was that the devs and publishers were able to interact with the players in a limited way. Atlus (and I assume Bandai and Sony in EU and Asia, respectively) would shift the WT to a permanent PB for the week of Halloween, for example, while bumping everything to PW for Valentine's Day which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the date of the finally server maintenance. I'm absolutely feeling a global shift to one side or another happening tomorrow, but will we be dressed in black for the funeral or drenched in white as a more fond goodbye? I guess we're going to see.
For tonight, the race is on for some legit online co-op. I have to use this Faith build for something, so it's back to the online communities for me and what kind of teammates I can find.
But we'll talk about that tomorrow.
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