Power, Skill, and Silksong

While this blog post does contain specific mechanical spoilers about Hollow Knight: Silksong, they're only at the very end, clearly marked, and hidden by default. Most of the post is spoiler-free.

Many games, video and otherwise, are structured in a way that presents the player with both challenges tools they can use to address those challenges. In video games specifically, much hay is made online of the challenges themselves: everyone talks about Ornstein and Smough, Absolute Radiance, or Balteus. But to the player in the moment, the shape of the tools they use determines as much or more about their actual experience.

Tools aren't just in-game items. They're anything that aids the player or allows them to engage with the game, from their character's stats to movement mechanics to the very concept of "make your character not be where the attack is". In sports, the players themselves are the most important tools. In chess, the pieces are tools but so are rules castling and stalemates. It's an intentionally broad term to discuss a broad set of game structures.

These tools are not only the ultimate determiner of how difficult the challenge is^[1], a well-designed arsenal gives players the opportunity to sculpt their experience, creating a mode of play that fits both the needs of the challenge at hand and their own personal preference. Often players end up self-sorting into two rough camps: those who choose one set of tools (a "build") and stick with it for every challenge and so experience challenges that may be easy for others as very difficult when the tools they've chosen don't line up well, and those who see each challenge as an opportunity to puzzle out the exact optimal set of tools and so take down the challenge as easily as possible. I myself fall into either camp depending on the specific context^[2].

One of the first thing a player will ask when choosing which tools to use is, "what's the most powerful?" And in some cases the answer to this is straightforward. In Dark Souls, the Straight Sword Hilt is certainly among the weakest weapons you can use by any objective measure. But in many cases the answer is unclear. There is no consensus "best" weapon in Dark Souls nor its successors, because what "power" even means depends on the player's play style, their goals, and to a substantial degree, their skill.

Defining Skill

I want to take a moment here to clarify what I mean by "skill", at least for the purposes of this post. I don't really want to get into the weeds discussing video game difficulty here and now, but I do think that discourse has made it difficult to mention skill as a concept without raising everyone's hackles and bringing in a bunch of extra baggage. So I'll try to be explicit about how I'm using the term here.

I'm not talking about skill as in some sort of innate talent at video games or even specifically hand-eye coordination or twitch reflexes. What I mean is something that comes with practice and, especially, shedding the fear of the unknown.

Every player, no matter how good or bad their reaction speed, is worse at the game in the initial phase when they're still getting used to it. Everyone loses some percent of their possible effectiveness from needing to manually think through which actions to take, from not fully understanding the challenge they're currently facing, and from not knowing how to match those actions up with that challenge. I'd go so far as to say that for almost everyone, this lost effectiveness is so large that it makes up the vast majority of the reason they fail the challenges with which a given game presents them.

The other side of this coin, then, is that players can increase their effectiveness simply by paying attention to their experiences and internalizing them through practice. This scale of practice-driven effectiveness is what I mean here by "skill". I certainly don't mean it as any measure of the player's "quality" in a moral sense or whether they've "really" engaged with the game. There's nothing better about spending the time practicing a game so you can beat it blindfolded except inasmuch as that experience is intrinsically rewarding to the player.

Power and Skill in Dialog

What's the more powerful ring in Dark Souls, Tiny Being's Ring which increases the player's max HP by 5% or Red Tearstone Ring which adds 50% attack power when the player is below 20% HP?

It's tempting to say that the answer is Red Tearstone Ring hands down. It's a staple of all the most challenging ways people play the game: Soul Level 1 runs, hitless boss fights, and speed runs. Tiny Being's Ring on the other hand is available as a starting item and is handily outclassed by numerous other rings which the player could use in that slot.

I don't think this answer is wrong at all, but I do think it's incomplete. For an unskilled player, Red Terastone Ring might as well have no ability at all. When the whole game is full of unknown monstrosities with unfamiliar moves, the safest course of action is to never be below 20% HP if you can help it. Any time you find yourself that low, your first priority should be finding a safe spot to heal. Tiny Being's Ring may not have a dramatic effect, but if that little HP bump saves you from one hit that would have killed you otherwise it's at least doing something.

We can think of power as a way of talking about what's most effective at helping a given player overcome challenges with the least amount of effort. From this perspective, how powerful something is depends on the player who's using it. This sort of "power" doesn't make sense as a metric in its own right—for a low-skilled player, Tiny Being's Ring is stronger than Red Tearstone Ring. For my friend who never uses spells in Hollow Knight, the underwhelming Grubsong^[3] charm is stronger than the excellent Shaman Stone^[4].

But this is a little unsatisfying, because games are fundamentally social even when they're single-player and tightly individualizing the concept of "power" cuts off any ability to discuss it with others. What I think most people mean in practice when they talk about it is something more like power pegged to some sort of implicit "average player", although where this player falls specifically in terms of skill and preferences is left unspecified, sometimes to the result of confounding the whole conversation. If this average player is pretty good at Dark Souls, maybe Red Tearstone Ring is better for them because they might be able to survive long enough to get in some hits at 20% HP, but it's still much weaker than one of the better options like Ring of Favor and Protection^[5]. I think if you posited this to a player, they wouldn't argue.

The power of tools affects skill as well. I talked about a tool's power as its effectiveness in helping a given player overcome challenges with the least amount of effort. In turn, exerting effort to overcome challenges is how the player builds skill. So we can see tools as lowering the skill bar for facing a given challenge, and we can see their power as how much they lower it^[6].

Another Perspective on Power

I want to look at this from a slightly different angle, though, inspired by my recent experience playing through Silksong and discussing the merits of various builds with my friends. I want to look at which tools are best the first time through a game. In other words, I want to view a tool's power as the lowest overall skill required to overcome a challenge with that tool across all starting skill levels. Red Tearstone Ring rates poorly on this metric because it only becomes strong in the hands of players whose skill levels are already high, but Tiny Being's Ring rates poorly as well because it doesn't lower the skill requirement much for anyone.

This is particularly interesting in the context of Silksong because it's full of tools that are at their best when the player is already skilled. Hollow Knight's spell mechanic is the same way: you accumulate "soul" by hitting enemies, and you can spend it either to heal or cast spells. While spells can do a lot of damage, using them concretely eats into your ability to survive fights.

So, are spells powerful in Hollow Knight? By this metric, which I'll call "initial power", I think they're good but not amazing. Their damage output is big enough that learning to use them effectively can shorten some fights enough to make up for lost heals, but not so strong that you can rely on only using them and never healing without investing a lot more time into building skill.

By contrast, we can also talk about "final power": the power of a tool once the player has built up their skill and understands the game's challenges. (We can frame this as the tool with the biggest overall reduction in skill required to overcome a challenge with that tool across all skill levels.) Hollow Knight's spells rate very high here, because once you're getting hit infrequently enough they can massively accelerate fights and reduce the overall risk.

The Part Where I Talk About Silksong

I'm not going to spoil anything you can't find in Act 1, but I will talk frankly about certain mechanics.

Reveal spoilers

There are so many Silksong mechanics whose power scales up with the player's skill: skills work just like Hollow Knight's spells, of course, but tools are also easier to stomach incorporating into your routine if you're confident you'll win a fight before having to go farm more of the crafting materials needed to create them. Some crests place restrictions on healing which are mitigated by better positioning skill (as well as of course taking less damage). The upgraded Hunter crest directly scales its damage with how infrequently you get hit. At the far end, Barbed Bracelet can double your damage at the cost of doubling all damage you receive in what amounts to this game's own Red Tearstone Ring.

But this line of thinking was most proximately inspired by thinking about the Reaper crest. If you're not familiar, this crest gives Hornet a moveset with very long-range swings including a pretty straightforward downward aerial attack (which is incredibly important in these games for both platforming and dealing with enemies) in exchange for being quite slow.

I heard someone (tentatively) call Reaper a "noob trap", but I don't think that's right. I think rather that it has a high ratio of initial power to final power. Reaper's long range isn't just comfortable (although it is also that), it's forgiving. It allows players to be messy in their positioning and inaccurate in their guesses about what enemies will do next with much more generosity than other crests. And when you're fighting new enemies or traversing a new platforming challenge, that's extremely valuable. On the other side of the same coin, the cost of pushing less damage is relatively lower early on because it's not always obvious when it's safe to land multiple attacks anyway.

Reaper (along with tools like Warding Bell that similarly forgive sloppiness) are perfectly suited to playing in an exploratory style, learning the rhythms of enemies and fights that you're seeing for the first time. They provide initial power which lets players build the familiarity they need to take full advantage of other tools that are better at higher skill levels. It's not so much a "noob trap" as a "noob aid". More importantly, the concept of "initial power" and "final power" help us understand why that is.

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1. The phenomenon of the Dark Souls Soul Level 1 run is a sort of inverse example of this. The player chooses to specifically limit their toolkit by never leveling up (character level itself being of course a tool) in order to dial in a harder difficulty on a game they've already played, and so experience it from a different perspective. ↩︎

2. When I played Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, I would look up each fight and meticulously plan out builds hours in advance, carefully breeding the exact right demons to meet every challenge I faced. On my first run through a Soulslike game, I instead tend to stick pretty assiduously to a single build. Interestingly, I'm playing Silksong more like SMT than like Dark Souls: I have a main loadout I mostly use for traversal, but I'll switch that up to some degree for most boss fights. ↩︎

3. You gain soul (a meter used for healing) every time you get hit. The rate on it is appalling. ↩︎

4. Increases both the size and damage of all spells. I got a lot of mileage out of this bad boy in my playthrough. ↩︎

5. Increases max HP, stamina, and equip load by 20%. Incredibly strong, but notionally "balanced" by the fact that it breaks forever if you take it off. Here's by Dark Souls hot tip of the day: don't take off Ring of Favor and Protection. ↩︎

6. Again, I want to be clear: I don't think this means that players who use all the tools available to them are "worse" in any sense at all. Finding ways to lower the skill bar is the game just as much as building skill to meet that bar. A player choosing where in the interaction of power and skill is most satisfying for them is player customization just as much as choosing a Greatsword because it makes them look like Guts. ↩︎