I didn't have a lot of time on my hands last night. For reasons that aren't worth getting into, I didn't sleep much over the last week, and I could feel my body starting to shut down. I needed to pound out a new character build, and I needed to do it quickly so I could grab some much needed shuteye. Demon's Souls, sometimes a wily dickcheese made manifest in video game form, thought it best to mess with me. I did't sleep well last night, either.
For my part, it was a sound plan: I had decided to roll up a Faith build. I would start with a low-level miracle, boost up a few stats for as much protection as I could muster, and then maybe jump into 5-x to score some Faith-based super weapons like the Large Sword of Moonlight. The odds of going through all of it last night seemed a little long, but I could at least tear through 1-1, maybe even start using the bastard sword found there to get used to playing with a heavy weapon.
But, again, the point of this final month of online connectivity was to play, well, online, and this is where the problems manifested. A few days ago, I wrote about how playing in online mode can affect serious performance issues. Last night, while also trying to stream the game on Twitch, these issues went overboard.
The frame rate plummeted to maybe single digits at times, the auto-save indicator on the top right corner of the screen in a constant, furious shimmer. It happened midway through 1-1 (I skipped the tutorial this time and most of the cut scenes), which was almost sad because things were going perfectly smooth up to that point. As I finished the level, I could almost feel the struggle my PS3 was experiencing in my own heart, which only got worse as loading screens between locations crawled into the minutes. That's way outside of normalcy. Sometimes these things clear up, though, so after checking the world tendency screen and seeing that 1-1 was close to pure white (which, again, I'll get into soon because I know that looks like gibberish), I tried skipping back into the first level. Then the game locked up on the loading screen and I knew that something was terribly wrong.
Reboot the PS3. Reload the game. Find that nothing saved since maybe the first five minutes of playtime. In the realm of big deals, this is relatively small considering that it's just the beginning of the game, but this is indicative of a larger problem here. These servers were never built to last. Over time, the maintenance on them has become fewer and further between. The game, when online, has been slowly killing itself for years.
I ran back through the rest of 1-1 in short order, things loading and moving as they should. I bailed out the first friendly NPC from a sticky situation, opened up a few shortcuts, and made puddle out of the boss, Phalanx. But the nagging feeling that none of it mattered was in the air. Are things saving as they should? Am I just spinning my wheels, here? Is all of this a convenient metaphor for the deeper themes of the Souls games (actually, yes)?
The good news to all of this is that Atlus will give the world a rare server maintenance next Wednesday, perhaps doing a global adjustment to world tendency for an event. Without something like that happening, I was seriously considering playing the game in offline mode for this run to avoid these kinds of problems, even though that gets away from my motives. I can always play like that starting on March 1. Guess I need to grit my teeth and tough it out for the next week or so with this build. It's clear to me now that DS was a game that needs some updating to survive, the network functions especially for how well they're integrated into the larger meta game. Maybe letting poor network maintenance that caused real, sometimes lasting gameplay issues was a sign to the community that ending them may be a mercy killing. Good things end. Nothing lasts.
But we'll talk more about that tomorrow.
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