I’ve been replaying Wuchang: Fallen Feathers lately, and it still oozes that unmistakable Souls vibe. Yet even after beating it multiple times, I’ve never grown so familiar with its layout the way I know every corner of DARK SOULS. Why? Because it’s missing one key thing — the player messages, those notes scattered across the world left by other travellers.
Take Zhenwu Temple in Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. It’s a brutal stretch. The paths twist and loop, dim and shadowy, easy to get lost in. Traps lie hidden along the way; every step feels precarious, and ambushes wait around every turn. But these punishing gauntlets are nothing out of the ordinary in Dark Souls. The difference lies in those messages. They mark the way forward, point out shortcuts, warn “Liar ahead”; a faint glow in a corner alerts you to an ambush, and a bloodstain on the ground tells you someone perished right there. Though you tread these shadowy ruins alone, you rarely feel truly isolated.
One could even argue that those grueling, long-haul exploration stretches with sparse bonfire checkpoints, alongside hidden side quests, are built entirely upon those player messages. This is no overinterpretation. In a 2009 interview, Hidetaka Miyazaki laid out the core design philosophy behind Souls games: the gameplay he wanted to craft revolves around death and mutual aid. It is these two pillars that make Demon’s Souls’ design cohesive and internally consistent.
Put crudely, the “death” half translates to ruined worlds, ferocious foes, and brutal combat. This formula was later studied and refined into an ARPG blueprint — and it spawned that familiar spectacle across comment sections: every new action game gets flooded with “another soulslike” replies.
I am no purist, nor do I aim to criticize this widely accepted shorthand. Still, there theoretically exists an alternate timeline for soulslikes: what if successors learned from the spirit of mutual aid, rather than only the part about death? Sadly, far too few soulslikes carry that design vision forward.
The other path for soulslikes lies in encouraging player cooperation.
Many know that Demon’s Souls draws its concept from FromSoftware’s own King’s Field, yet few are aware that King’s Field itself descends from Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord — the dungeon-crawling RPG that took Apple computers by storm in the 1980s. The Wizardry series exerted huge influence in Japan. It inspired Koichi Nakamura to work on Dragon Quest, and its sixth entry, Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge, with its focus on monster ecosystems, even became inspiration for Ryoko Kui’s Delicious in Dungeon.
At its heart, Wizardry is about dungeon exploration. Its defining traits are no in-game map, forcing players to chart paths with pen and paper, and steep death penalties — yet players may retrieve their corpse deep inside the labyrinth to resurrect it and reclaim their gear. It is easy to spot these two features refined and popularized later by the Dark Souls series. Add dungeon save points, common in old games, and fundamentally, Hidetaka Miyazaki invented almost nothing new atop Wizardry. Where his real innovations lie are modernized combat, and that core idea of fostering player mutual aid.
Judged purely by the standards of action games, Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls would score poorly. Early Souls protagonists had input lag on actions, could only roll in four directions; enemy move sets were limited, and even final bosses were rather underwhelming, serving narrative purposes far more than combat spectacle. Why? In interviews, Miyazaki framed these titles as classic RPGs. The combat was modernized, but the exploration-and-strategy design descended from Wizardry. The fun comes from gathering information and learning through trial and error.
What do I mean? Take the Fool’s Idol from Demon’s Souls. Before fighting her, you have to take out the two puppet masters upstairs; otherwise, she will keep spawning clones. Then there’s Gravelord Nito in Dark Souls. Only sacred weapons can destroy his skeletons, or else the undead minions will revive endlessly. Father Gascoigne from Bloodborne is another example: if you finish his side quest and get his daughter’s music box, you can play it during the fight to interrupt his feral, berserk assaults.
You gain an edge by reading weapon descriptions, talking to NPCs, and unpacking the worldbuilding. If you try to treat it like a pure action game and rely solely on reflexes, the Ashen One’s frail kit and heavy input delay will put you in your place. The value of shared information and mutual aid shines brightest in map exploration, though. Dark Souls boasts fortresses riddled with traps like Sen’s Fortress, the pitch-black Tomb of the Giants, and the Crystal Caves with near-invisible paths hanging high in the air — each tapping into humanity’s primal fears of torture devices, total darkness, and heights.
That is where player messages matter. Warnings such as “Trap ahead” before boulders, hints marking invisible walkways, or faint glimmers guiding you through lightless catacombs turn the most oppressive zones into surmountable challenges. The map bears the “footprints” of those who came before. Its punishing design embodies the old saying: a path forms when enough people tread upon it.
Some messages also urge you to strike illusory walls and hidden passages. Every such discovery feels like receiving a handout of help. The world is cruel, yet you can feel the quiet kindness left by other players.
Naturally, some might push back: if I want co-op, I can just play MMOs. They might argue I overstate the Souls series’ mutual-aid design, like praising a microwave for its cooling function. Anyone who has spent time with online games knows the difference, though. MMO group content is almost a separate beast: the system forces strangers to fight side by side. Even with shared goals, teammates often heap pressure on one another, and matches devolve into endless toxicity and shouting.
Even FromSoftware’s own Elden Ring Nightreign suffers from this. While it carries forward the loop built around exploration, information-gathering and cooperation, its hardcore random matchmaking fostered one of the worst player communities of 2025. Scroll through any related thread, and you will find nothing but harsh complaints about teammates, griefing, and players breaking down after getting sabotaged. Its bizarre ranked system — +200 points for a win, −800 for a loss — amplifies bad faith between players. Under these rules, its “cooperative” framework rarely nurtures genuine goodwill.
At the end of the day, MMOs deliver strong social bonds. They throw strangers together to take the same test, assigning players duties and obligations without promising reliable rewards. Trust is therefore fragile, and conflict and disagreement follow easily. Within this framework, an “ally” becomes redefined as a risky variable you simply have to tolerate. You instinctively watch and judge them, and lash out when they slip up. It is not necessarily that anyone has a bad temper; the incentive structure pushes people to behave this way. It would be strange if fights never broke out.
To avoid this, Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and other titles take the opposite design path. First, they impose zero mandatory obligations: you can beat the game without leaving a single message. Second, your own deaths along the way can themselves be helpful. They leave bloodstains in other players’ worlds to warn of lurking traps. Third, the message system restricts players to combining a fixed pool of preset phrases, which all but rules out harassment and hostile abuse. The industry term for this setup — where you never meet others face-to-face yet encounter their traces — is asynchronous multiplayer. It builds weak ties.
Of course, since the system forces nothing on players, some will leave deceptive messages. Falling for them can leave you equal parts annoyed and amused. Still, messages carry an upvote system, and their like count serves as a useful cue. With experience, you quickly learn to tell genuine hints apart from malicious pranks. Better yet, whenever someone likes your message, you instantly regain health via an Estus Flask charge. More than once, this burst of aid arrived right as I was on the brink of defeat against a boss. This singular experience — sowing kindness casually, then hearing its echo much later — can stir a feeling that you do not want to let that stranger down, lending you courage amid despair.
Likewise, the online features remain unrestricted. You may invade another player’s world either to aid them or hunt them down. Even so, helpers stick far more firmly in collective memory: the Sunbros cosplaying Solaire across the Dark Souls series, or the Jar-Headed Champion standing before Malenia in Elden Ring. They have become iconic images tied to Souls games.
That is the magic of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games. They wear a harsh exterior, yet hold immense gentleness at their core.
And the very skeleton and soul of this design are those weak ties, encouraging spontaneous mutual aid between players.