No this isn’t about how hard Dark Souls is, well not really…

And it’s not about how Dark Souls broke my spirits.

It’s about how Dark Souls messed with me as a gamer and totally broke my perceptions on what’s “normal” in gaming.

The First Break

I start playing Dark Souls a few days before I started on Rage. And although I wasn’t super into it yet (that came when I restarted it with a new character), I had already committed about 8 hours to it and had started visiting Dark Souls wiki’s.

Or in more simple terms, I was only in my double digit deaths at that point…

Even at this early stage however it had started to change me, and then I started playing Rage…

I decided that I play enough FPS titles to jump straight in on “Hard”, but throughout the entire experience it never got too challenging! I never died repeatedly, the AI never strained my abilities, I never felt flustered and overwhelmed and most of all I never felt a sense of achievement when I did something awesome!

Dark Souls had broken my sense of what’s truly “Hard” and what’s not, and unfortunately Rage suffered for it!

The Second Break

About 30 or so hours in I would now say that I was “into it”. My second Character had some badass equipment, I had a sense of purpose, and no creature (except for douche bag dragons) could stand before me!

And then Battlefield 3 arrived…

Now I love First Person Shooters, and from all the awesome ones out there Battlefield is my favourite, I’d even go as far as to say I’m pretty good at it.

But if you had seen me play it in my post Dark Souls days you wouldn’t have been able to tell!

I recklessly rushed to objectives, I carelessly threw my life away trying to cover ground, and I wasted hundreds of respawn tickets to achieve my goals.

In Short, I died a lot!!

And the sad thing was that I was okay with that! Dark Souls had led me to believe that dying was okay, that the only thing lost in death was some currency (which you could always just pick up later), and that respawning hundreds of times was just how the game worked!

the strange thing is Even though it was crazy hard, and messed with me on a fundamental level, Dark Souls is still super awesome and is going on my TOP 10 Games of 2011 list.

BTW… I apologize to all those Battlefield 3 gamers who had to put up with me during my Dark Souls come-down… It won’t happen again.