FROMSOFT's Community Design Philosophy

Game Dev — FROM Design Works — Modern gaming has become more concerned with community than was needed in the past. This is due to an evolution in the way media is consumed, the rise of content creators, and budgets that require games to be played for years after release. While many bake in multiplayer, PvP, or other such modes (perhaps exclusively), left unchecked those things can easily create unwelcoming experiences. All one has to do is spend time playing any public match shooter, MOBA, Battle Royale and it quickly becomes apparent how awful many in those communities are (this isn’t new. XBL was a gumbo of some real questionable moral centers). Most developers have a sort of Laissez Faire attitude towards community with a self regulating reporting system. Enter FROM Software, the Edge Lord’s Nintendo (thanks for that M.E.)

It may be surprising, but FROM has actually developed one of the best community systems in modern day gaming. But how? How can a company known for making brutally difficult games and a community that has adopted the tagline, “git gud’’ have positivity attached to it. The answer, it’s by design. Souls games (meaning everything from Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring) are all punishing to play. The core combat design is based on moving through areas, losing to bosses, dying, and trying again (difficulty design can be covered another time). With the inherent intensity comes the need for some things:

Camaraderie

Respite

Comic Relief

All modern FROM games, save Sekiro and Armored Core, have an asynchronous multiplayer mode that allows players to summon help from other worlds. While there are multiple types of summons, other human players are the focus here. The host is able to summon up to 2 additional players to help them overcome a challenge in an area. There is no speech available, so communication is limited to emotes, limited speech items that say things like “Hello,” “Thank You,” and “I’m Sorry”, and frantically moving around like a glitching NPC. When players arrive in a host’s world, there are clear instructions to help them defeat the area boss. There are boundaries that keep everyone, including the host, from going anywhere that isn’t immediately related to a specific boss and the “level” that boss is in. This stops griefing and less focused players from wandering off and not helping (if you played Fable, Crackdown, etc, you already know)

The benefits to both hosts and summoned players are great. Hosts get the benefit of bringing in help on a hard area. They can enter a boss arena knowing the other players will eat up some aggro from the boss and buy them the time to heal, cast spells, or run away. This is essentially the “easier mode” of the game set in the design itself. For the summoned player, they get multiple benefits for helping. Firstly, they can explore a potentially new area of the game without risk to themselves (they have to have at least gotten to the area to be able to be summoned). That lets them know what to expect when they move forward in their own game (this is also true of bosses). If they die in that game, they return to their own world with any souls/runes/blood echoes (currency) they may have collected. Finally, if they successfully help the host defeat the area boss, they are rewarded with a Rune Arc and Furlcalling Finger Remedy (in Elden Ring specifically). Both of these items are consumables with the former giving the player a temporary boost to all stats until death and the latter allowing them to summon their own help. So it’s a win for everyone involved

Then there are invasions. This is a mechanic where a malevolent player can enter a host’s world, only if that host has summoned help, and tries to kill them. While this seems like the ultimate invitation for griefing and crappy behavior, it rarely, if ever, turns out to be. Generally, invaders make themselves known, bow, and then proceed to fight the others. Sometimes they wipe the floor with everyone, sometimes they are quickly overwhelmed. But it’s honestly rarely unwelcome, regardless of how they choose to interact. Invaders have access to the same emotes and sayings. Over time areas of each game become unofficial places for dueling where remaining players sit and watch a 1v1 match like their royalty at some medieval tournament. There are even invaders that enter games, unarmed/unarmored with a name like “tour guide” and they take the host and player around to hidden areas. It’s a truly fascinating phenomenon

The games also feature an asynchronous messaging system. This is one of the most unique aspects of FROM’s games since Demon’s Souls. It allows players to craft templatized messages from combinations of bespoke words and phrases. These then appear in other players’ games and evolved into something players could like or dislike. For every rating received, a notice appears on the author’s screen and they heal, regardless of where they are or what they are doing. This creates an incentive for players to provide help or comedy, and both are done in spades. “Hidden Path Ahead” marking a secret wall that can be hit and revealed; the same message in front of a wall where no secret exists; followed by a message that says “Liar ahead.” FROM, with its keen knowledge of the community, trolled players in Elden Ring by putting a wall that took 50 hits to open, calling into question every “Liar Ahead” message because who knows if that wall takes 100 hits, maybe 1000. The creativity it allows players and recognition has that added in-game benefit of healing and knowing someone is laughing at a dumb joke (“Try fingers, but hole”) or appreciating their help on a boss’s weakness (“try bleed”). Players are also restricted to 10 total messages so they can’t spam and create unlimited messages. This forces decisions to be made about which messages to keep and which to get rid of. There’s an art to crafting a good message

Finally, the game creates a meta gameplay loop where conversation exists outside of the game at all times. For starters FROM games have so many intricacies in the design. The NPC questlines, hidden areas, and the general difficulty of the game drive that. In spite of the “git gud’’ crowd reputation, (expect more dissections on FROM gameplay design in the future), the support between people making their way through the games is one of the best parts. Whether intentional or not, this is a huge part of what keeps the games alive long after other games fall by the wayside

The community systems are a combination of Japanese and Western design philosophies. They bring together the desire for individual achievement (western) with the communal aspect of being a good citizen (Japan). The games are a pure exploration of communal work + achievement through discipline (individual pride in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but it’s for the community). It’s as though much of western design tends to be zero sum, i.e. CoD, Battle Royales, MoBA are all stack ranked with points at the end which even leads team based-games to have #1s, rather than the team win (this also causes a lot of players to not play as a team member, in favor of themselves). Honestly, there is a portion of this that could apply to social media. Rather than the current design which encourages and celebrates dunking on everyone, a version that was more collaborative in nature with benefits for those who do good for others and clear areas for sparring. Perhaps tech companies should take note that a game developer has done a lot better than them by simply creating guardrails and incentives for prosocial behavior