As players started looking at Dark Souls more objectively,
the tone in the Dark Souls forums became much less toxic than before.
At the same time, the game's ratings slowly started to go up.
Even though many players still bought it and then refunded it.
But Lucas thought this was completely normal.
Because even though Dark Souls has a very unique kind of charm,
not every player likes this kind of tough, hardcore challenge.
For some players, Dark Souls is clearly not their kind of game.
But for the ones who stick with it, after beating Gundyr and getting through the High Wall of Lothric,
the unique flavor of the Souls series truly comes out, and they get completely hooked.
And when it comes to spreading online, Dark Souls has blown up even more than Outlast did back in the day.
The main reason is that before this, there wasn't any game quite like Dark Souls.
Many players who experienced Dark Souls felt it was amazing and started recommending it to their friends, telling them to try it.
"Lucas released Dark Souls, you should give it a shot! What kind of game is it? Hack and slash! Super fun!"
"See this big sword? See this boss? Cool, right? Come play Dark Souls with me! Looks like we can even team up to fight bosses later."
"A shield and a longsword, let's carry the flame in this world of despair! If you're my brother, come to Lothric and light the fire with me!"
"Isn't the Fire Keeper pretty? Isn't this knight handsome? Want to join me and light the fire?"
A lot of players tried hard to lure their friends to join the mission of linking the fire.
Besides that, photos of Lucas from a few months ago at a game expo, as well as pictures from an earlier online event, were dug up by players.
Combined with his old quote from a year ago calling himself a "warrior of love," this pushed him back onto the trending topics list.
Especially with some photoshop masters creating memes, Lucas even became part of reaction images.
In the expo photo, Lucas originally held a microphone, but now it was replaced with the Dark Souls game icon.
Next to it was a caption greeting players warmly: "Ready to light the fire?"
And under Lucas's official post announcing Dark Souls's release, countless comments like "I'll light the fire" and "This fire must be passed on" suddenly changed.
Now they were all saying, "Whoever wants to light the fire can do it. We're done. We can't keep it up anymore."
Inside the game, so far, enemies like Iudex Gundyr, regular Hollows, Lothric Knights, Winged Knights, the katana guy, crystal lizards, and the dreaded mimics that have killed countless players—
They all got their own memes, like "Can you feel the producer's burning passion?" or "This is my love for the players!"
These jokes spread and gave Dark Souls a second wave of popularity.
It added even more fuel to the game's sales.
Of course, under all this hype was the players' frustration.
As the game kept trending, many players started tagging Lucas on the official account, asking him to become the Fire Leader and guide everyone to link the fire together.
They said that the amazing promo video from the online event was supposedly made by Lucas himself.
But that was just a rumor, and many players still wanted to see Lucas suffer, so they kept hyping things up.
Even though countless content creators and streamers were already suffering on video platforms and live streams—
It's different when the one suffering is the developer himself. The thrill and excitement just hit different!
...
Nebula Games office.
"Boss Lucas, what's the plan going forward?" asked Ethan from the marketing team, sounding a bit unsure.
Even though he was very confident in Dark Souls's quality.
But Lucas knew that the success of a game doesn't depend only on its quality. Marketing and promotion can give a huge boost.
Simply put, a game's quality sets the lower limit for its sales. But if you want it to sell well and have a big impact—
Besides quality, you need good promotion and hype.
There are plenty of examples of this in the past. The most famous one is Titanfall 2.
When it comes to quality, its reviews were amazing. Aside from its single-player campaign being too short, it had almost no flaws and was better than the first game in every way. Yet, it still failed miserably.
The main reason was that its competitors were too strong. Battlefield 1, COD: Infinite Warfare, and Overwatch—all huge FPS games focused on online multiplayer—came out at the same time.
On top of that, Titanfall 2 didn't get much marketing support. So the only path it had left was failure.
So, regarding the mixed reviews of Dark Souls after its release, even though the data showed no major problems,
Lucas still confirmed some follow-up plans with Ethan, including guiding discussions around the game's popularity.
But before they even acted on it, the game's direction was already improving thanks to players defending it on their own online.
"Keep our official game forum in good shape. Also, we can prepare to open the Dark Souls Workshop when the time comes. As for operations, stop everything except for ad placements." Sitting in his chair, Lucas thought for a moment and said this to Ethan.
After that, Lucas also talked with Ethan about Dark Souls merchandise.
Mainly some future figure products and such, but Nebula Games wouldn't make them themselves—they would license them out, only handling later quality checks.
When Ethan left the office, Lucas sat down in front of his computer and opened Dark Souls.
He had noticed the various player tags directed at him on the official account during his free time.
However, he had no plans for livestreaming.
For now, most players were still in the early stage of figuring out Dark Souls.
So he preferred not to interfere too much in that area.
But he still planned to make use of the game's popularity.
No livestreaming, but making some edited Dark Souls videos was fine.
It would be a good way to guide and reassure the players.
(End of The Chapter)
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