Twitch Plays Dark Souls goes turn-based, defeats first boss

If you've been following our coverage of Twitch Plays Dark Souls, the latest Twitch crowd-gaming phenomenon, then you know that the community's effort to best this notoriously difficult game has been ... less than successful. Three days in, a Twitch audience in the thousands was still stuck in the tutorial area leading up to the first boss.

Now six days into the experiment, the forces behind Twitch Plays Dark Souls have seen fit to actually modify the game in order to hopefully allow for further progress. Rather than running in real-time and contending with a frustrating delay between what's happening in the game and what viewers see on their screens, Twitch Plays Dark Souls now operates the game in a turn-based fashion.

What this means is that after every action performed by the player character (as chosen by the chat), the game pauses for around 20 to 30 seconds. During this pause time, every action in the chat is tallied up; the one with the most votes is performed immediately when the game unpauses. This gives viewers a chance to react properly to what's on screen and should, in theory, make progress possible, if still difficult.

It should be noted that Dark Souls, as a game that's meant to be played online at all times, actually has no proper pause functionality. However this is working, it's been hacked into the game by the creators of Twitch Plays Dark Souls.

The reaction to the turn-based change amongst viewers has been mixed, with some happy that the game may go on while others are upset that it changes the core gameplay. After all, can they still call it Twitch Plays Dark Souls if they're not really playing Dark Souls as it was intended anymore? Then again, Dark Souls was never intended to be played by a few thousand people at once either.

Whatever the case, the turn-based change-up has led to improved progress. As of the time of this writing, Twitch players have finally defeated the game's first boss, the Asylum Demon. However, they have yet to exit the tutorial area.

You can join in the fun and watch Twitch Plays Dark Souls for yourself below: