Cutting the Tension Out of Dark Souls III with Mods.
Game modding is when players and other non-professional game developers alter a game. Anne-Marie Schleiner(2018) discusses how mods can range from cheats with the intention of progressing toward a game’s goal in a different “often easier” way, to mods created by artists that render games “unplayable” but make enjoyable experiences or subversive statements about game culture. She also talks about the culture around mods, and how modders and developers use one another to further their own ends. Modders use the games they have purchased or pirated as a foundation for their own vision and large companies will sometimes profit off the free labor of dedicated modders. Her focus on people who create mods and the kinds of mods they create is interesting and informative, I’d like to look at an example how players who use the mods of others might interact with mods, and how they might fit into her ecosystem/parasite metaphor surrounding the effort people put into creating and modifying games.
The Soulsborn series (Dark Souls and Blood Born) is well known for being a grueling-to-play action, role-play, horror series. Many players refer to games that have similar style and gameplay elements as Soulsborn-like, suggesting the Soulsborn series is recognized as the start of and epitome of its own genre of demanding and unforgiving games. The games punish players for playing poorly. When players die, they lose a lot of the resources they have worked hard to collect. In the case of Dark Souls games, they lose souls, which act as currency and allow players to level up, purchase helpful items, and more. These mechanics can put a lot of pressure on players to perform well and make the gameplay tense. While many fans of this series/genre enjoy that and feel that difficulty is what makes the games worth playing, there are people who are interested in these games, but are looking for a slightly different experience.
Monster factory is a series of comedy videos where Justin and Griffin McElroy create abominable but lovable characters using character creators from a variety of games. Dark Souls III has a fairly robust character creator, so that works well for their format. What does not work quite as well is the hard-core difficulty and subject matter in the Souls Born series. While I have not personally tried it, I imagine it’s harder to make funny jokes when you are trying to focus on not dying in a difficult game. While some humor can be derived from your failed attempts, that will eventually become repetitive. The brothers have done videos for many of the games in the Soulsborn series, so it makes sense they would want to spice it up. They turned to mods. You can judge for yourself how well these mods change the game’s atmosphere by watching this video:
Monster Factory | Pushing Dark Souls 3 EXTREME EDITION to the limit — YouTube
Justin and Griffin’s goal in using mods, as suggested above, is to create a comedy show. They are using the efforts of FromSoftware (the game’s developers) and mod makers as a well of content from which to draw humor. In Anne-Marie Schleiner’s parasite metaphor, I would argue they paid for the game and are presenting it to their platform in an enjoyable way that might double as advertising, in which case their use of the content is symbiotic. Whether or not the relationship with the mod content is symbiotic depends on the goals and desires of the mod makers. Perhaps seeing people enjoy their translation mod, the purpose of which is obviously humor, was their goal, and this use of their mod is very close to their exact intentions, although I am sure a link to the mod download page in the video description would probably be even better (as the website Dark Souls 3 Poorly Translated Edition at Dark Souls 3 Nexus — Mods and Community credits the people who worked on it, allows others to experience it first hand, and maybe the ad revenue goes to the mod makers????). I would also include a link to the cheat engine, but I am not sure how safe looking for it would be. Either way this video does help to make others aware of these mods.
I suppose, in conclusion, there is no single way of enjoying or interacting with content, and mods (and some funny lads) can make Dark Souls III less tense.
Schleiner, A. (2018). The player’s power to change the game: Ludic mutation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.