Two disclosures:
- I have the opposite bias upfront; I’m quite fond of the games (though wary of their capacity to attract chuds–and notably, annoyed that the Gitgudders have arrived in Monster Hunter as of World). I’m also friends with tons of people who like the games and are cool.
- I quite simply do not “participate in video game communities.” I rarely talk to people on the basis of liking the same thing, almost never join community Discords, I’ve never been a regular of a major streamer. I do interact with stuff sometimes, but it’s generally quite loose. I’ll likely have a very sheltered perspective on this one as a result.
I have no thoughts about Demon’s Souls, other than that it was a well-reviewing game nobody liked at the time; Dark Souls 1 definitely got a boost from True Gamerdom Posing. It became the conduit that made Gitgudism into a central tenet for chuds. I think it’s essentially impossible to argue otherwise (in good faith, anyway).
However, now the apologia.
The games themselves are utterly uninterested in being that. Consequently, they’ve been less and less appealing to the chuds over the years. There’ll always be holdouts telling you that Spirit Ashes are for scrubs or whatever, but there’ll also always be people telling you that throwing them in a fighting game is cheating or w/e. I refuse to give mental screentime to bad opinion havers.
This is extra funny considering that the games are getting “harder” with every release. The timings get stricter, the moves get more elaborate, etc. Dark Souls 1 is actually not a particularly difficult game anymore for anybody who’s played more than a game or two in the genre (and especially if you accept that dying is not failing). It was just very new and genre-defining at the time.
I feel like already around the time of Dark Souls 2, the Gitgudders’ grip loosened considerably. It probably helps that Dark Souls 2 is a particularly weird entry in the series. I think at this point the conversation is kept alive out of inertia? Souls gets brought up constantly in various contexts, so you constantly get the remaining invested chuds nipping at any involved heels.
Notably, none (or few?) of the major Souls streamers/videors around (lobosjr, squilla, vaati, iron pineapple, etc) are chuddy gamer bros. Not exactly the best way to gauge a “community”, given those aren’t really a thing. But you know. At least circumstancial.
Ultimately, I think the Gamergate part of it all would have happened with or without Dark Souls. It just happened to be an incredibly influential game coming out at a time when those people were looking for something to latch onto. Difficulty-based elitism has always been a thing, and will forever be. And once those lines were drawn, any mention of Souls will activate them like sleeper cells to rehash 10+ year old arguments.
But, as is the case most of the time, the world has moved on without them. And the sum total of the legacy of the Souls games is a positive one in my opinion, because people have made it a positive one. Sure, it might occasionally be annoying to do corpse runs or have stamina bars in an indie game that did not need them, but there’s so much love, creativity, and art they inspired, and I’d much rather focus on that.