Exclusivity

The whole "console war" topic really makes me think sometimes.  I think people should buy the console that has the games they want to play and not buy the one that all their friends have.  Someone's gotta break the mold and be the trend setter.  In recent news, it was announced that a former game project, simply code named "Project Dark" will be released late this year as the spiritual successor to 2009's PS3 Game of the Year, Demon's Souls.

Demon's Soul was a fantastic, brutal, unforgiving dungeon crawler which took place in a medieval fantasy setting.  The game was about you, designing a character and then customizing it to play however you want, but what it really boiled down to was magic and swords.  You could use either or, or a combination and variety thereof.  The game was brutal and difficult, each death costly and proving to be a major setback.  Players who are more accustomed to todays standard "run in with complete disregard to personal safety" in game play found themselves at the receiving end of a premium rager.  The learning curve was painful, but just...so rewarding.  You needed to learn to block, to roll, to dodge, to counter attack.  You needed to play it safe at all times otherwise you will easily find yourself dying young.  When you die in this game, you leave a pool of blood behind with all the souls [read: money] you collected during the level, and start all the way back at the beginning.  If you die again, your previous blood stain is removed in favor of the new one, and with it, all the souls you collected.  That means that each death was very, very costly and players needed to tread lightly.

After fighting your way through throngs of horrible zombie man monsters, you would end up at a boss battle.  Anyone who's ever played Shadow of the Colossus can tell you that an excellent, epic boss battle leaves you with a certain feel once you defeat it.  Demon's Souls had just that.  Each boss was difficult and required a unique strategy, made even more challenging sometimes based upon whether you were a melee or a magic user. Melee uses generally got the shaft most of the time.  The rewarding feeling you got when you downed one of these monolithic creatures was...incredible.  It felt like you just went 10 rounds with Mighty Thor and came out victorious.  It felt like you just got mauled by Jesus and got miraculously resurrected.  It was like going white water rafting with Kevin Bacon.

And this is what made it such a fantastic game.  The extremely challenging difficulty combined with well designed and strangely addictive game play, topped by the fact that after all the hard work and toiling you put into getting through the level, the reward is a feeling of absolute joy.   Not to mention when you beat the game, you could start a New Game+ to continue your characters adventure and advancement, which was necessary if you ever wanted to invade someone else's game world and try to kill them!

The new title, the spiritual successor to this masterpiece of rage-inducing joy, is titled Dark Souls.  Not a whole lot is known about it quite yet, but, there are at least 4 things we know:

1. The game will have far more variety in it's game play and some easier modes [read: more spells and magic]
2. There will be co-op and online versus similar to Demon's Souls
3. It will be incredibly difficult with an angering learning curve
4. It will be multi platform on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3

While these all seem to be incredibly promising points, one seems to have irked the gaming community that loved the first title so much.  Why did it have to go multi platform?  Traditionally, games go multi platform in order to open up their audiences, which makes them more money and let's them continue to pump out AAA titles, which I think is a very good thing.  However, those who have been following video games for many years can generally tell you that a game that is designed, made and released specifically for one console tends to be far higher in quality than multi platform releases.  The specific systems required for the game to run smoothly and efficiently are different on each console, and when a developer can devote all it's time to just one of those, obviously the quality goes up.  This is accentuated by the fact that games are generally made for one system, and then "ported" over to another.  That means the code gets rewritten and tweaked as best it can so that it'll run smoothly on the other console. This is where the problems start to arise, because what ran smoothly and efficiently on one console may not do so on the other.   There will always be evidence that console exclusives are superior, but it's hard to compare names when it comes to this fact, simply due to the "what if" factor.

What if Uncharted we're made for both major consoles?  There's different codes to write, different systems to check, twice the amount of beta testing required across two different platforms, and a multitude of other issues that arise when trying to make multi platform games.  And the kicker is, they generally don't get more time to do it.  When a company wants to make a game, just like any product, it needs to be released within a certain amount of time.  When a developer can devote all of that time to perfecting one version instead of trying to perfect 2 or 3, then the quality is obviously going to be much higher.  If they got an extra year or two to make both versions perfect, the game would probably never come out or it would burn its budget before it could make back the money it spent to create it.

Demon's Souls is one such game who's polish truly shines.  What would this game have looked like as a multi platform title?  Would it lose some of it's tidy, glorious finish?  We'll never know, we can only wonder "what if."  I for one, don't believe that Dark Souls will turn out as polished or as finished as it's predecessor if it winds up on both consoles, but I guess we may never know.

See you this fall, Dark Souls!  I AWAIT YOUR CHALLENGE!