My main points, though, have to do with creativity, purity of vision, “accessibility” and community. The Souls games, like crypto, arrived and thrived over a period when the creative and ideological bankruptcy of the competition was becoming too obvious to ignore. Bitcoin had the 2008 financial crisis, and later rising anxiety about data harvesting by Web 2 operations, as useful examples of its enemies’ malicious intentions and failed ideas. The Souls games quietly stood athwart the trend towards hyper-slick and user-friendly but lifeless AAA games like Call of Duty and, particularly, mind-numbing and cookie-cutter “open world” games like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series.
