I recently stumbled across this blog post by an author that goes by ‘Problem Machine’, called “Estus”. This post discusses a mechanic of the Dark Souls franchise. To briefly summarise, Dark Souls is a dark fantasy role playing game, and estus (flasks) are essentially a character’s main source of healing. Being a Dark Souls ‘enthusiast’ myself, I don’t believe the author explained this mechanic very well, and due to this they were unable to clearly express their thoughts.
The author mentions “For those of you who are not familiar with the systems of Dark Souls, the estus flasks are essentially reusable healing potions. You get a set number of them, usually five to start with, and can use one at any time to restore your health”, however nowhere throughout the post do they mention that in order to refill these ‘reusable healing potions’, a player must rest at a bonfire (or be killed, which they then spawn at the last bonfire). This, in my opinion, is a fundamentally important aspect of the estus system, as players must either fight their way forwards to the next bonfire whilst maintaining and conserving their health and estus, or retreat back to the last bonfire, which will replenish their estus but allow enemies to respawn. This is one of the many aspects that makes the Souls games what they are, pretty damn difficult.
However I do think that this author got some things right. I definitely agree that you could explain the aspect of combat “it becomes a tug-of-war, the player trying to keep their health above zero by creating opportunities to heal while evading the enemy attacks and still finding openings to attack their opponent and reduce their health to zero.” I thought this was very well put as players often have to make the split second decision of ‘chugging an estus’ or dodging enemy attacks to heal later.
alexkassabian 