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Opinion/Poll: Is Demon's Souls part of the Dark Souls series?


PhyrxianLibrarin

Is Demon's Souls Stage 0 of the Dark Souls series?  

311 members have voted

  1. 1. Is Demon's Souls Stage 0 of the Dark Souls series?

    • Yes
      224
    • No
      86


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https://psnprofiles.com/series/47-dark-souls

 

The Update a Trophy List thread is cluttered with debates about whether game X belongs in series Y, and in which position (I'm looking at you, Yakuza). So before I post anything there, I wanted to get a sense of how people feel who've actually played it. Is Demon's Souls closer to Bloodborne, in the sense of it sharing gameplay and concepts with the main Souls games, but being entirely separate? Or is Demon's Souls more directly part of the lore/world?

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the series tabs are dumb anyways, with things not making sense, so i'm not surprised people are having a debate on this
but on the topic: its specifically the "dark souls" series, so no, des shouldnt count, were it soulsborne or souls-like instead like most people classify the series as though, then absolutely

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Too drunk for a proper argument for or against.
Yes, Demon's Souls is with Dark Souls.
Bloodborne is kind of the 'Entry' level into the series, but I still wouldn't class it as a 'Souls' game.

 

Edit: Story isn't related. Just the whole atmosphere etc, is together.

Edited by OpenScars
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Dark Souls is a spiritual successor to Demons Souls. They have no connection otherwise. The developers have said so themselves. So saying Demons Souls and Dark Souls are the same series is like saying Bloodborne and Dark Souls is the same. Or better yet, like saying Mighty No. 9 is part of the Mega Man series.

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It might be semantics, but Demon's Souls isn't part of the Dark Souls series-- that's not a matter of opinion. That said, since the site's series feature is all manual anyway, I definitely agree that it would make more sense to file them all under one "Souls" series, or even "Soulsborne" since at that point you might as well throw in Bloodborne as well.

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All 3 games are connected obviously. 

First that came was dark souls, then the dark soul bleed and created the bloodborne world which is actually a painting, then from bloodborne great ones came and one of them was the great one from demon souls. Simple. ?

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14 hours ago, Helyx said:

These two IPs aren't related. They're separate. No amount of polls or opinions will change this.

 

From a business, legal and semantic point of view, certainly the two IP are distinct, but to argue they are unrelated? That is wilful pedantry, and, frankly, inaccurate.

 

The two IP are variations on a theme - the same song and the same conductor, but a different orchestra, if you will.

 

Yes, the separation is important if I were a business executive involved in the game or in copyright law etc, but from the point of view of the players? The games are absolutely intertwined and more than just overlapping in a genre. I can envision no scenario where someone were to express a love for Dark Souls, where a recommendation of Demon's Souls would not be appropriate.

The games share far more than simply the developer. They share a common theme, a common tone, a common pace and tenor, a common design aesthetic and a common relationship with the player. They remind me a little of when a prolific author, (Like Philip K Dick, or Stephen King for example) will write a book where they are reusing elements fro a previous one, but refining and slightly shifting them, to create something new - It might be a separate novel, but any fan can see the shared DNA, and recognise where the refinements were made and the distinct points of intersectionality.

 

I wouldn't put them together in a 'series' list for the site, but there is absolutely a relationship.

 

@Spacey Dweeb said it perfectly:

 

13 hours ago, Spacey Dweeb said:

Cousins not siblings. 

 

Cousins, as the genetic abnormalities in the Royal family can attests, are related ;) 

 

 

14 hours ago, NathanielJohn said:

The point of the series feature is (presumably) to help people discover games and find related trophy lists. Given that, I can't imagine a single good argument for why Demon's Souls would not be included in the same series as the Dark Souls games. Just rename it the "Souls" series instead, like Wikipedia does.

 

14 hours ago, TehUberCheezCatz said:

the series tabs are dumb anyways, with things not making sense, so i'm not surprised people are having a debate on this
but on the topic: its specifically the "dark souls" series, so no, des shouldnt count, were it soulsborne or souls-like instead like most people classify the series as though, then absolutely

 

As far as this goes - I don't think the series tab is the issue here - Demon's Souls should not be in the Dark Souls series - the problem is in the Genre's tags.

 

There needs to be a wholesale re-working of the genre tags for games on the site, to closer match the specific genre's people might want to use to discover games with similar concepts.

 

Currently, AFAIK, there is no tag for 'Metroidvania', 'Souls-like', Rogue-like', 'Rogue-lite' etc. which are all genre's I personally would use the tags for. The ones that are there just now are overly broad, and in a lot of cases, just plain wrong - 'Adventure' is used as a tag on any game in which someone goes on an adventure - i.e. half the games in existence. In reality, Adventure games, in video game context, has always meant point-and-click adventure games, like Sierra or Lucas Arts games, and ironically, many of those games do not have the 'Adventure' tag attached to them.

Edited by DrBloodmoney
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This is exactly why I posted this topic; let's just say the Soulsborne games inspire strong opinions. :P I do find it interesting that the poll says Yes, but most of the arguments say No!

 

I'm not questioning whether the game is part of the "Soulsborne" genre; it definitely is, but series and genre aren't the same thing. And I don't want to get into an argument about what exactly it means for a game to be "Souls-like." Add genre tags to the list of features that will never be implemented here, I'm sure the mod team will love having to deal with those debates.

 

 

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10 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

the problem is in the Genre's tags.

 

There needs to be a wholesale re-working of the genre tags for games on the site, to closer match the specific genre's people might want to use to discover games with similar concepts.

 

We do not decide tags. That information is pulled from IGDB. If no IGDB page exists, then there is no data to pull. Anyone can edit and make an IGDB page for any game, but all changes must be approved by IGDB staff. We have nothing to do with what games get whatever tags, as it is from a third party.

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Just now, Dreggit said:

 

We do not decide tags. That information is pulled from IGDB. If no IGDB page exists, then there is no data to pull. Anyone can edit and make an IGDB page for any game, but all changes must be approved by IGDB staff. We have nothing to do with what games get whatever tags, as it is from a third party.


 Ah, okay -

Is IGDB the only option for pulling that kind of metadata? 
 

I only ask because I would love to be able to use the feature on the site, but find it not too much use in the current state. I tend to use a site called 50gameslike dot com when looking for similar games or genre specific, and while their tags are not perfect, they are much more granular, and a bit easier to use as a result. 
 

Not sure if they are pulling data from elsewhere or if it is crowdsourced on that site itself though

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7 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:


 Ah, okay -

Is IGDB the only option for pulling that kind of metadata?

 

At the moment, the primary issue with using IGDB is that the information is not always accurate, and if they make a major update in how information is distributed, it breaks the pulled data on PSNP. This is why you will occasionally see a game with a release date on some day in the year of 1970. Not only this, but usually, the data that someone might enter into a IGDB page is often incomplete, and is why you will see some games with a full card of data on PSNP, while others do not. This is because IGDB only requires a minimum amount of information to be approved, and so a lot of users of the site only put in that minimum. It is possible that we pull metadata for the game, and the information is incomplete in the moment the data was pulled, only for it to be completed at some later date. In these cases, PSNP does not re-pull that metadata automatically, it needs to manually pulled again.

As far as an alternative, PSNP has no alternative under consideration as of right now. This is how Sly has set it up, and so it is what we must use for meta-updates. The obvious suggestion would be to just allow manual entry for the GIT staff directly into the site, but it is not possible for us to do at this time. :dunno:I suppose if someone really dedicated were to, and were to find data entry to be fun, they could make a complete IGDB page for all 12,520 entries in the PSNP database, but uh... I find that exceptionally unlikely to happen.

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5 minutes ago, Dreggit said:

 

At the moment, the primary issue with using IGDB is that the information is not always accurate, and if they make a major update in how information is distributed, it breaks the pulled data on PSNP. This is why you will occasionally see a game with a release date on some day in the year of 1970. Not only this, but usually, the data that someone might enter into a IGDB page is often incomplete, and is why you will see some games with a full card of data on PSNP, while others do not. This is because IGDB only requires a minimum amount of information to be approved, and so a lot of users of the site only put in that minimum. It is possible that we pull metadata for the game, and the information is incomplete in the moment the data was pulled, only for it to be completed at some later date. In these cases, PSNP does not re-pull that metadata automatically, it needs to manually pulled again.

As far as an alternative, PSNP has no alternative under consideration as of right now. This is how Sly has set it up, and so it is what we must use for meta-updates. The obvious suggestion would be to just allow manual entry for the GIT staff directly into the site, but it is not possible for us to do at this time. :dunno:I suppose if someone really dedicated were to, and were to find data entry to be fun, they could make a complete IGDB page for all 12,520 entries in the PSNP database, but uh... I find that exceptionally unlikely to happen.

Also why you'll see some games have the full month typed out and some have the abbreviated month

It seems that somewhat recently they decided to switch to abbreviated month

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They're separate series.

 

They've always been separate and they were always intended to be separate. The creator has said this himself.

 

Also Demon's Souls and Bloodborne IPs are owned by Sony. Dark Souls Ip is owned by Bandai Namco as they contracted From Software for a trilogy of games specifically. From Software while the Developer doesn't own any of these series, so no argument can be made it's separate because they wanted to be separate from Sony.

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Definitely part of the series. Maybe 6 years ago it was confusing, but after Dark Souls 3 was released and it included several Demon's Souls items (Storm Ruler, Morion Blade, Tower Knight shield), it made Demon's Souls canon in the Dark Souls universe.

The Storm Ruler's (DS3) Weapon Art is literally called "Storm King", which is the Demon's Souls boss that guards the Storm Ruler itself. 

 

I mean, these are actual DeS items, not just references. A reference  would be Gundyr's armor description, which is clearly a nod to DeS' King Dorian, but to include the items themselves is not just "reference". 

 

Not to be confused with other items such as the Moonlight Greatsword, that's just a FromSoftware thing, otherwise we would be including the Armored Core series as well, lol. 

 

Also, I'm pretty sure you could make an entire category for Demon's Souls since you can get 4 Demon's Souls platinums, haha. 

Edited by BlitzkriegHottie
Typo
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