The patient crowd of Twitch viewers attempting to simultaneously control a single game of Dark Souls has reached its first major milestone. Yesterday they claimed victory over the Asylum Demon, the game’s first boss, but they had to adapt the game slightly in order to do so. Now, instead of a maddening deluge of near-random commands being thrown at the game constantly, the action will freeze for a moment while players vote on which button to hit next.
Is it cheating? Perhaps, but seeing as until now they’d been repeatedly getting stuck in corners and in menu screens, this might be the only way they’ll ever succeed. There’s a video of the moment they defeated the boss below.
Original story below.
Besides letting you watch people from around the world play games and shout from little boxes in the corner of the screen, Twitch has lately become a sort of ongoing experiment in crowdsourcing game inputs, allowing thousands of players to attempt to simultaneously control a single game by shouting commands into the Twitch stream’s comments box.
It worked (slowly, and somewhat beautifully, over 16 days)with Pokémon Red. Itdoesn’t with Dark Souls. That doesn’t mean they’re nottrying.
Whereas Pokémon was tile-based and failure-averse, Dark Souls is renowned for being the most punishingly difficult of action RPGs, demanding reaction times, planning, strategy and not rolling around on the floor randomly equipping things and falling off ledges to your death.
They’ve managed to get out of the first room. And that’s probably as far as they’ll get, because not only will they eventually have to face an enemy of some sort, but even the ladders in Dark Souls present an unedifying challenge to expert players.
Let’s check back on these guys in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, here are the seven highlights of the time Twitch successfully beat Pokémon Red.