Day 13: With a Warning

"Why is this game shutting down? Why isn't the maintenance already done? Fucking-"

The voice on the other end of the microphone was cut off. We had finally gotten three people summoned in for the Armored Spider boss at the end of 2-1 --an encounter that at least one of these people didn't think we'd win-- and things were getting a little hairy. Not knowing the giant arachnid's tell for the area-consuming fire breath it was about to spew, my insistence that it was time to run to the safe zone at the back end of the arena was enough to shut everyone up. The sentiment was clear, though, and not exactly wrong.

Last night, I finally found players on the Demon's Souls Discord servers to play online with. This was a welcome relief from the past few weeks' worth of blindfolded dart-throwing in the hopes of finding a more organic co-op experience. It turns out, doing it this way was both some of the better and worse adventures I've had online with the game.

It didn't take long to secure like-minded players looking for some jolly cooperation through the online chat system, though it looks like I may have just been lucky. One of them, we'll call him Nate, was ready and willing to start a new character and shamble through the game. He'd already finished it once, and it didn't sound like it happened in the most efficient way. Nate simply wanted the experience of playing with other people before the door swung shut on the servers at the end of the month. Nate wanted me to get on voice chat, something I've only done a handful of times playing online games, so I dug out the crude single earphone-d mic that came packed in with a PlayStation 4 and plugged it into laptop.

It was immediately lambasted. The second player, we'll call him Kurt, agreed with Nate that it was now the Year of Our Lord 2018 and that I should be using a proper headset. Poppycock, I silently said to myself while joining in on the gentle ribbing of the earpiece. Kurt was noticeably older than Nate, but I discerned over time that it wasn't by much. Both of them were intelligent and even quick witted, Nate something of a motormouth high school student and Kurt keeping personal info on the sly. They have been fighting with the game for online co-op for a few days, they said, doing battle with the janky server and its frustrating habit of disconnecting people from it and not telling them. We would continue this melee as the night went on.

Demon's Souls isn't meant to be played this way, something I cannot stress enough. The game has limited forms of communication by design to maintain a certain mystique. Co-op and PvP are entirely silent affairs with the exception of the series' famous systems of pantomiming gestures to show emotion, much to the consternation of players of more traditional online experiences. Personally, this was the way I wanted to keep things, too. But servers in desperate need of some TLC and a looming deadline for a story make for strange bedfellows, and heading to something like Discord and its "Skype for gamers!" modus operandi was a pill I had to swallow. Maybe it should have been with Scotch.

We each rolled up a new character while going through quaint pleasantries, but nothing with any actual depth like where we are in the country or even to what time zone we might be adhering. The small talk, then, was all business as we individually took a new character --something that was agreed upon in Discord's text chat ahead of time-- through level 1-1 so we could then be granted the game's personal permission for co-op play. We were assessing each other's knowledge of the game and, perhaps coyly, our individual skill. Kurt wanted to know how many times I had been through it before proudly proclaiming to have finished the Maneater boss from 3-2 solo. I replied with the fact that I have only once played this game online (outside of the last few weeks for this story) over the dozen(s?) of times I've completed it. He and I were therefore cordial with each other, but shared a mutually suspicious condescension going forward.

It became obvious through conversation that nobody was exactly new to the franchise, though maybe more green with this particular game. Upon return trips to the Nexus hub world, Nate began vocally berating the forlorn NPC Stockpile Thomas. "This fucking pussy," was his launching point. "Do you know this guy? Do you know the lore behind him?" A loaded statement. There's very little dialog in Demon's Souls. Getting to know a friendly NPC was a matter of hitting the "talk" option when in a dialog window two or three times. Yes, then, we knew Thomas' tragic journey to the Nexus and his guilt for leaving his wife and young daughter to die. Knowing The Lore, though, means that Nate had watched his share of Souls-related YouTube videos; something that's become a cottage industry unto itself even adjacent to the normal (or maybe "normal") explosion of internet video celebrity. The further games in the Souls series purposely obfuscated not only overall plot but also minor characters' back stories, meaning that Lore videos for Souls games were as common in hardcore gamer circles as crying Michael Jordan memes.

Kurt dug deeper, something I could tell was occasionally on the competitive side with me, the least verbose of our new misfit threesome. Nate obviously knew this game from a single run through and what he read on wikis. Kurt did his best to extrapolate on minor items of conversation with varying degrees of accuracy. I found it best to keep the inconsistencies to myself. Closer to 40 than I am 35, we had to get into the shit since it was starting to get a little late for me.

Nate had a yen for finishing 1-2, a reasonable request for low-level characters. I hemmed and hawed over the type of character build to use for the evening's activities, and upon finally settling on a mage (that poor, underutilized battle priest I had been slowly nurturing for weeks too strong to sync with new players) was then peppered with enthusiastic questions: "Wait, why are you in 4-1 right now? What's a 'crescent falchion?' Ok, how do I get magic? Do you have another falchion to give me? This game, man. THIS GAME. My other Souls friends are full of shit for bagging on this." I was quickly summoned into Nate's game after some coordination. Kurt had larger problems.

"Just go on ahead, I'm not connected," he began repeating. Nate and I stood around a small indoor castle battlement passing consumable items to each other while Kurt began the process of quit game/ reload for his character to finally appear on Demon's Souls' North American server. This is a waltz longtime DS players have had to endure for years as the game's already rickety online features seemed to decay over time with fewer maintenance periods between them. I was quietly confident enough that we could take on 1-2's boss, the aptly named Tower Knight given its height, with just two people having done it solo several times in the past. But that was stepping on the point of the whole affair, especially hearing the rapturous tone of Nate's voice when Kurt's summon sign finally appeared on the ground beneath his feat. The server finally deigned Kurt his entrance. The Tower Knight was killed.

I had relayed to Nate, and with Kurt's agreement, that we would run him through some more levels; we didn't need the extra help ourselves. The next target, shaky as the collective confidence seemed to be, would be 2-1 and the Armored Spider. The topics of conversation were becoming looser. The "Best Final Fantasy," -type starters and "I don't want to go to Math," -style prestige. Kurt broke into a protracted, if impassioned screed regarding his Linux, Windows, and Mac machines. Nate took five minutes for an ice cream break, giving the two of us who remained some time to kibitz. "Are you playing the new Dragon Ball game," he asked. No, I replied. It looks really good but I'm not sure I have the time to commit to learning it these days. "Time... to commit...? You don't have time for...?" Nate returned and promptly made a crack about living in mom's basement. One of us was conspicuously quiet.

Finally, the boss arena, and another 15 minutes of playing Ross and Rachel with the NA servers. All three of us, finally in-game, delivered the killing blow to the Armored Spider on our second attempt (somewhat vindicating Kurt and Nate's initial trepidation with the whole venture). On Nate's emphatic, though unnecessary insistence, someone else should be given a hand with 2-1. We return to the boss, and got into it with the server once more. Flustered and tired, we eventually call it a night without stepping into the battle proper, one of my two ephemeral comrades exiting Discored with a warning against the potential danger of homosexuality. It was, somehow, a joke.