Increased Soul Level Cost

This is a simple param edit to roughly double the soul costs of leveling up. It's not exactly 2x due to how the formula works, but is close enough, with early levels being a bit less than 2x and later levels being a bit more than 2x.

As for why this even exists...

Back in 2011 when the game first released on the PS3 and Xbox 360, it was a very different beast, and was overall much harder (but also a lot more broken), with enemies dropping a LOT less souls, and items like the Purging Stone being almost non-existent in the game, as well as humanity being extremely scarce, among other things. Then came patches 1. 04 and 1. 05, which rebalanced the entire game, making weapon scaling worth using over elemental, fixing broken stuff like Iron Flesh and the Crystal Ring Shield, among other nice changes. But it also massively increased the amount of souls enemies dropped, sometimes by over 3x, but usually around 2-2. 5 times the amount. This massively sped up progression and the player power curve, making the game considerably easier to those who did not previously exploit the aforementioned broken things from 1. 0, and who did not stop to farm for levels.

With that history lesson out of the way, the intent of this mod was to bring back at least some of that slower progression from 1. 0. Manually editing each enemy soul gain back to what it was on 1. 0 would not only be very labor-intensive, but also hard to get right as 1. 0 documentation is sparse, other than rough estimates on wikis and old youtube playthroughs. So my solution was to simply edit the level-up curve, making leveling slower, but keeping the increased accessibility of souls for other purposes, such as buying/upgrading equipment.

From a quick test run, I was around the same levels in the Gargoyles, Queelag and Sen Fortress as an old 1. 0 playthrough I compared to, usually 2-3 levels above at different points. Expect to be around level 15-18 after beating the Gargoyles, for example, not the usual 25-35 from the modern game. This will make the game moderately more challenging, and make your choice of starting class a bit more important early on. Dying twice and losing your souls will also hurt more.

I may look into making a proper restoration mod in the future that goes deeper into undoing some of the changes (such as every merchant and their mother selling Purging Stones, the reduced enemy aggro ranges, and the absurd abundance of humanity), but for now this simple mod will do.

Installation:

1. Go to "Steam\steamapps\common\DARK SOULS REMASTERED\param\GameParam" and backup your "GameParam.parambnd.dcx" file.

2. Paste the "GameParam.parambnd.dcx" file from the mod you just downloaded into the same folder, overwriting the old one.

Uninstallation:

1. Restore your "GameParam.parambnd.dcx" backup, overwriting the modified