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Crown of the Ivory King is the Dark Souls Series’ Low-point

Ever since the release of Dark Souls 2′s final installment, the Crown of the Ivory King, it’s been attended by a very vocally supportive playerbase. I’ve found it baffling and, despite lurking forums and attempting to coax out explications about why the heck people think it’s so great, I’ve hardly come any closer to understanding the reception. It’s fine, I think, to shrug and say you just have a thing for snowy levels. When that’s made into more than a hyper-subjective admittance, and becomes statements which denigrate Dark Souls 2′s main material (see: comments everywhere that the DLC is supposedly a significant step up from the “B-team”’s work (note that this supposed “B-team” is an imaginary group gamers have conveniently heaped their scorn upon when they’ve found Souls-stuff to be lacking)) . . . then I get kind of annoyed.

With the Boletarian Palace, Demon’s Souls set the standard for me where fortressed layouts in the series are concerned. At the risk of seeming to treat the Boletarian Palace as a case of insuperable level design, I’m going to quote a few bits here from prior essays concerning it, and hope that it instead demonstrates that its better qualities come from reproducible design decisions:

An uncommon attention was paid to the worlds’ furnishings. One noticed, making their way through [the Boletarian Palace], that rickety palisades were erected on the grand introductory staircase, here and there a discarded carriage with maybe a horse corpse; in small, pocket-like refectories were rows of beds, and tables bearing cups, candelabras, and bowled edibles; outside of these cells were carts harboring casks of wine and buckets; or that on a long wall-walk was a somber parade of trebuchets, and adjacent to this was an attic for carts loaded with to-be-launched boulders. There was a sense that everything was in its right place, and to weave through these environments was to experience a world that innately lent itself to textured terms of engagement. Running up a series of staircases peppered by barrels full of explosive powder, and haunted by torch-wielding madmen, meant grappling with an incendiary challenge, yet the challenge was holistically ingrained in the objecthood of that world. In that way, spatial dealings, navigational or combative, acquired a flavor of believability.

Additionally, Demon’s Souls ran counter to an extant strain of design in action-adventure games that draws a distinguishing line between “combative spaces” and “non-combative spaces.” The least gratifying cases of this strain induce a monotonous awareness of compartmentalization, of there being a manner of space for fights — most often resembling an arena accommodating the spectacle of performance (God of War and its progeny come to mind) — and a manner of space for sites between fights. What made Demon’s Souls a categorical outlier was that conflict could happen anywhere; and that, when conflict did happen, the architecture supplemented it.

. . . the Boletarian Palace’s magic was that its architecture discretely realized and blended the inherent themes of defense, housing, and storage. It both came across as a convincing place (again, “convincing” or “realistic” does not mean that the subject has a 1:1 ratio with reality) and engaged the player with design permutations that took hold of the surroundings, like groups of crossbow-firing soldiers blocking the way on a bridge, or darkly spear-throwing creatures in a dim room meant for storing carriages.

Rather than a stony maze with apposite ornaments thrown in, the Boletarian Palace felt like a castle first and foremost, with encounter design that naturally tapped into its abundance of nooks, sharp angles, and verticalities.

If we’re looking at Eleum Loyce -- which can be more or less separated into a fortified area, a residential zone, and a subterranean network -- I think the pervasive problem is that practically none of it has any suggestive power. Suggestive power is a consequence of the level design per se and the clothing it wears. So when nearly all there is to see is the most spartan of stonework (and not even skillfully texture-mapped stonework) and white mounds, engaging level design is vital. Most of the interiors have been reduced to bare, non-functional cubes, and exteriors largely are bluntly laid out paths where you pick off a line of enemies one by one, sometimes including peripheral retainers. It all has the flavor of a beta zone for developmental testing, and it feels terribly wrong that perhaps the sole memorable detail is a frozen fountain early on.

Since this doesn’t really lend itself to interesting encounter design -- there is no ambiguity or mystery to the space, no way to treat it as anything other than a sequence of immediately explicable containers -- and the majority of enemies are super-sturdy soldiers coming in a few flavors, many combative interactions play out as the melee-oriented player leading an alerted bunch of foes to a chokepoint and picking them off with strong attacks. For as much as I could criticize the aesthetic fumbles of the prior two DLC installments, their layouts had definite dynamics: Shulva’s staggered array of towers (some manipulatable), and Brume Tower’s tiered floors skirting circular shafts.

They also featured neat miniature gimmicks that could be engaged to lessen the danger of a given area: destroying sarcophagi in the Dragon Sanctum to make the ghostly sanctum knights assume a corporeal, and practically pregnable, form, and collapsing Ashen Idols speckling the Tower to halt the healing and reappearance of adjacent enemies. It’s hard to really say what Loyce’s comparable gimmicks are. There are, for a while, snowy winds blasting around the fort’s exteriors, but these winds only have a remarkable effect on your range of sight in the optional (and much-hated) Frozen Outskirts (this is, in fact, one of the Outskirts’ few virtues). There are also coats of ice making certain chests inaccessible, but once they’re shattered upon talking to a Lore-Dispensing Character it simply is a matter of backtracking and opening them up in a classically obsessive-compulsive manner (more interesting would’ve been the option to melt the ice by using pyromanic spells).

What little conspicuous level design exists in Eleum Loyce does stand out on its own terms. When you come upon the abandoned residential zone, you must navigate several columned arcades, being careful about the obscured, spine-backed ice rats and, a level above, a spell-casting witchtree spirit or two. Between this triangulation of elements you’ll find yourself using the arcades for cover while also trying to not let their dense arrangement hinder your movements or attacks. It’s basic stuff, and brief, and it’s good (it gets even better when you’re invaded by a black phantom NPC) -- it works on a level beyond shoveling baddies into crates and along straight paths. You’re conscious of an architecture. Disappointing, then, to find that the knotty little complex of residences is really a paltry couple of empty boxes with a useable staircase in one. So much for expanding on that aspect of the city.

Another similarly brief moment happens later on inside a dim, high-ceilinged hall separated by three floors built of wooden planks. The first of these floors is the most interesting. On it, you’ll juggle seeking shelter from two spell-casters by emerging onto nearby balconies, and taking care of a soldier on each balcony itself before you’re ganged up on by pursuers from the hall; and once you’re back in the hall to take of whoever remains, you’ll have to mind the several holes which break up the wooden flooring and lead to deadly drops. As with many cases of fine level design in the series, it demonstrates how an engaging sense of pressure can be exerted on players by aligning simple, but not overly simple, architecture with complementary enemy positions.

Eleum Loyce has been commended for having several loop-around shortcuts that lead you back to prior locations. These commendations haven’t taken into account why this series-trope has excelled when it has excelled, though. To be sure, Eleum Loyce’s shortcuts function as any shortcut should: they expedite the process of repeat attempts at navigation and impart a sense of incremental progress. But beyond this there’s not really any epiphanic or retrospective spark to the loop-arounds. Eleum Loyce’s overall layout is so diffuse and architecturally generalized -- if you compare the two screenshots below you’ll see how visually similar the city’s explorable portions are to its unexplorable portions -- that you’re never learning about its organizational character or seeing charismatic structures reappear. You’re just opening a door or taking an elevator. And, you know, that’s fine. But it doesn’t warrant special praise.

And then there’s the unpleasant friction of the Frozen Outskirt’s conceptual strength versus its actual strength. As each DLC installment has had mechanical gimmicks (some, uh, ostensible), each has also had an optional gauntlet catering to multiplayer efforts. These have been pretty uniformly terrible -- I called Shulva’s an “utterly reduced ‘path with enemies’” -- and are solely concerned with throwing as much densely packed shit at the player(s) in the tightest possible, and least imaginatively suggestive, spaces. As I wrote in the same essay, “There is no design goal here except, ‘Swamp the player who should have assistance to divide the streams of projectiles and the soldiers' advances.’” A slight exception, the Frozen Outskirts offer the novel idea of dislocating players by having the snowdrifts oscillate between visibility and near-invisibility by way of periodic snowstorms. If this were left on its own, if the challenge were one of pure navigation -- having to find one’s bearings and using several ruinous sites as guideposts, and fighting or running away from a few hostile adventurers -- I really think the Frozen Outskirts would be great. All of this potential is squandered by tossing what essentially amount to mini-bosses at players, with no options for even the tiniest bit of cover among the stretches separating the ruins (recalling Elana’s chief design failure), and so the overall experience is demoted to that of a frustrating slog.

I think what makes Eleum Loyce the series’ low-point for me is its formal vapidness + its very positive reception. I feel bored and alienated. It’s hard to not think that people have been poisoned to believe that what is most remarkable about these games is the element of challenge. Eleum Loyce is, to me, a snubbing of everything I’ve enjoyed about exploring these games’ places. All curious details have been scrubbed out and what remains is a base obstacle course of cartoonishly themed enemies -- ice-coated soldiers, some with crystals bursting from their backs -- with the ultimate signifier of Prepare to Die challenge at the end: a bunch of knights in a huge arena protecting an even bigger knight, who epically emerges from Barad-dûr’s peak to a tritone and can make his sword be the biggest sword.

Anyway. That’s what I think. What do you think?

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