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[SOLDIER First]

you come into my house, you give a vaguely-accurate-but-not-at-all-if-you-bother-to-read-anything-about-the-game generalization of dark souls,

i mean generic as in HEY! ORCS! ELVES! HOLY SHIT kind of generic, because dark souls is pretty high fantasy otherwise (magic undead curse, whoopee)

[EnigmaticHat]

"Bother-to-read-anything" my ass, I played through most of the first game.  And I know the lore.  And I stand by what I said.

I feel like humans + monsters only is becoming the norm in fantasy, although I haven't read enough books lately to say 100% for sure.  That's just one small detail about what defines high or low fantasy.  Dark Souls doesn't have most of the markers for EITHER category so it can't really be counted as either.

Like don't get me wrong, Dark Souls has an odd setting.  But it accomplished it by taking a generic fantasy world, killing everything that wasn't a monster in some respect, and then putting it all in the same city.  Its almost exactly like Castlevania.  Castlevania has an odd setting, yeah, but that's because all we see is Dracula's Castle.  Doesn't mean its a more interesting setting than every other fantasy story out there that has the whole wide world AND the city/castle/dungeon full of monsters.

[Parsely]

Uh, technically the only human in Dark Souls is Sieglinde. Everyone else is undead. The PC is a "monster", he's not human.

[RAM]

I rather suspect that derived-from-a-human is pretty much the same as being human. There is no "we spend all our free time singing in trees" or "oh, my great to the tenth power grandparent? They live a few blocks down that way" nor "This is my tree, I live in it, if it gets hurt then I get hurt". There is just "this is what sort of human I was, now I am exactly the same except I have some contrived secret-society styled excuse to get into adventures and drown in angst because I have to eat people or something and oh noes I lost my oh-so-precious humanity waaah boo-hoo waaah..."... Now, granted, that all falls apart almost all the time because dwarves are just short Scots and elves are just French-with-ears and it all turns into a great big exercise in attempting to have legitimised racial profiling and arbitrary extremes of parenting to angst about escaping, but the principal remains...

Still, High-fantasy is more about possibilities. Death not being a big deal is pretty solidly high-fantasy, but combined with a tedious existence where there is no real significance to it other then a game-mechanic to ramp up the trial-and-error without forcing people to start over from scratch over and over leaves it kind of under-utilised. The Lord of the Rings was much the same, highly fantastic things were possible, but they didn't really occur with any volition. Most of it was just worrying about supplies, somewhat mundane espionage, and assorted forms of diplomacy with folk who either already wanted to help or had some specific reason to get involved. There was lots of high fantasy in the history and a lot of "boom, high fantasy flew you over the forest, now get back to crossing the mountain range on foot" But the setting was still basically just farmers farming, soldiers swinging swords and shooting arrows, and assorted nations getting into fights over land, history, and religion...

To my mind, high fantasy is about making your characters more capable. Mundane terrain shouldn't be a problem unless there is something fantastic and very specific that is causing it to be a problem. The assumption should be one of a post-scarcity society, and if you want to make it grim and oppressive then you need to add it back in. not that it is all that difficult to ad it in, throw in a few despotic super-mages and a horde of monsters and perhap an apocalyptic legion invading from an alien world and throw in a few all-powerful rocks that have various exciting effects like "in this nation, the floor is literally lava, bring a hammock" or "no magic here" or "don't ever make a goat angry" and you should start to see all sorts of grim oppressiveness where you could get rid of all your mundane issues and live in perpetual bliss if only all these massive disasters didn't keep bringing down the mood...

But really, if you want grimdark with permanent flight, constantly regenerating stamina, magical restoration of all your ailments, and all manner of races scattered around the place, why not play Morrowind?

[NRDL]

Confidence Artist Tycoon.  It would have Game dev tycoon sort of gameplay, where you start out with nothing but limited skills and a bit of money, you hustle and pull small-time cons ( small donations to fake charities, pretending to be in an emergency, etc. )  As you gain more money and skill, you get access to disguises, props, other actors/shysters as well as improved information gathering capabilities regarding your mark(s).  Eventually, you can form entire fake organisations, ponzi schemes, entire Mission: Impossible-esque deceptions. 

Obviously, you'd have to deal with the police, local and federal ( meaning state hopping in faux-Merica won't really work after you get notorious enough ), incredibly angry wronged victims out for blood, and other greedy con men.  May the slyest fox win. 

[SOLDIER First]

snip

Yeah, I see your point. Sorry if that seemed rude.

Uh, technically the only human in Dark Souls is Sieglinde. Everyone else is undead. The PC is a "monster", he's not human.

Undead... humans. The curse revives you as a beef jerky person, yeah, but Humanity fixes it until you die again.
But let's not get into a lore argument here.

[Egan_BW]

Ooh, are we talking about Dark Souls lore? I love Dark-

But let's not get into a lore argument here.

Aw.

[Sirus]

Seriously Dark Souls, stop temporarily taking over other threads :l

[SOLDIER First]

* Sentient Bowtie sheepishly takes my Dark Souls obsession elsewhere

[KingofstarrySkies]

* Sentient Bowtie sheepishly takes my Dark Souls obsession elsewhere

Before you do, for what it's worth, I'd really like a Souls game in a different setting. Dunno how but if they could work it to be Sci-fi (AS ALL THINGS ARE BEST IN THAT FORmAT) I'd love it.

[TheBiggerFish]

Souls-Fi?

[RAM]

Dark Fish? You are a remote projection of the immortal space-whale travelling the cosmos salvaging the wreckage of whatever ignorant biped vessels get in your way to build the giant mecha you always wanted to pilot.

[Fniff]

I always thought Dark Souls would work in a post-apocalyptic setting. Just replace the swords with madcap improvised weapons and the sorcery with ancient technology. Have guns be extremely powerful but with ridiculously rare ammunition. In a sci-fi setting, ranged weapons are such a big thing that you'd have to change what makes Dark Souls... well, Dark Souls.

[KingofstarrySkies]

...Hell, I'd in fact call Dark Souls post-apocalypse fantasy.

ANYWAY YOU CAN ALL GO ON WITH BEING NON-SOULERS NOW WE'LL STOP

[itisnotlogical]

I want to see a Dark Souls-style game set in a completely incongruous setting. Like, imagine if a Spongebob shovelware game came out for all the major consoles next year and it played like Dark Souls.