Dark Souls Inspired Sky Children of the Light's Message System

During the GDC 2024, Jenova Chen, the Creative Director behind Sky: Children of the Light, a peaceful, award-winning MMO from the creators of Journey, shared that its message system draws inspiration from the Dark Souls games. 

According to Chen, in Sky, players can send direct messages to friends, and there’s also a feature where players can leave folded paper message boats in the world for others to discover, a concept inspired by Dark Souls’ soapstone messages. Unlike in Dark Souls where messages are constrained to a word bank, Sky allows players to freely type their messages.

However, to encourage positive interactions and deter trolling or other toxic behavior, the developer, thatgamecompany, decided to display to friends which messages were authored by each player.