Somehow Dark Souls was the inspiration for player messages in the kindest MMO around

The prevailing reputation of Journey's multiplayer system is one of anonymous kindness and emotional connection, which is about as opposite as you can get from the experience of multiplayer in Dark Souls games (unless you're visited by the fashion police or Let Me Solo Her, that is). I wouldn't have thought there was anything in a Souls game for Thatgamecompany to draw inspiration from in its extremely kind MMO Sky: Children of the Light, and yet that's exactly what its message system is based on.

This was part of the talk that creative director Jenova Chen delivered at this year's Game Developers Conference: «Designing to Reduce Toxicity in Online Games,» prior to which he gave me plenty of details on designing a non-toxic MMO. Sky has been a free-to-play MMO on other platforms for nearly five years now—heavily inspired by the flying and collaborative exploration of the studio's prior hit Journey—and is launching into early access on PC next week.

«In each game we make, because we don't understand the nuance initially, our take is very black and white: all text chat is bad,» Chen said. Journey didn't have any text communication at all, leaving players to communicate only by melodic chirps at one another. But players kept telling TGC that they wanted a way to communicate by text. «So when we moved from Journey to Sky we were like, okay, let's inch in a little bit. Let's see if we can just make this text thing work.»

Sky does now have direct chat between friends, but the other system TGC wound up with was little folded paper message boats that Sky players can place down in the world for others to find and read, which Chen confirms was definitely inspired by Dark Souls' system of soapstone messages on the ground. But in Dark Souls, players are restricted to a word bank to construct messages, which is where common gags like «amazing chest ahead» written near statues instead of treasure chests come from. In Sky, players can actually freely type in messages.

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