And fucking LOOOOL at all the people melting down at the game being too hard. It is absolutely too difficult but that is From’s MO. Grind levels and slam ur way thru still seems to work for those of us unskilled in their combat style.
Hmmmmm, I dunno, I think ’it’s supposed to be hard’ is a shoddy excuse used to wall paper over some serious cracks in the designs of these games. I don’t think the games are hard tbh. There’s no puzzles to the environments (like Zelda dungeons) and they tend to be hard because of cheating by just throwing more things at you. They are also obscure or unfair though when it suits them which is bad game design.
Here’s some examples from Dark Souls:
To get the soap stone, arguably the most important item in the game as it allows you to communicate with other players, you need to talk to the sun knight not once, not twice but three times before he hands it over. That’s game critical information hidden behind three levels of conversation. People are used to talking to an NPC once and getting everything they need. The game makes no effort to communicate up to that point that you may need to talk to people several times. That’s obtuse. It makes no difference to the rest of the game and given it’s importance, the game should have metaphorical big arrows pointing to it saying ‘PICK THIS UP. YOU NEED IT’
There’s a staircase in Dark Souls that leads down to a black portal that will kill you if you jump into it. Unless you wear a ring item you get from one of the other bosses. At no point does the game tell you about that and you cannot complete the game without doing it. You have to look it up the ‘how’ on the internet (a MASSIVE black mark against any game outside of an MMO is forcing the player to resort to the internet). That’s not hard, that’s just obtuse.
The hit box collision isn’t fair. You can stand behind a pillar and the baddies can still whack you but you can’t hit them and you’re supposed to be in cover. Again, unfair, not hard.
Unless you know about the secret dragon sword you can get near the start of the game by cutting off the dragon tail, I do not believe you can get past the first boss as a regular player. Again, more secret looking up on the internet.
I could go on but Dark souls committed a lot of game design crimes that people wallpaper over with ’it’s hard’. Nah, it’s ’Hard’s’ ginger step child - ‘Obtuse’.
That’s not to say the games don’t have their good points and when it works, it really works - Ornstein and Smough are one of the finest bosses ever to grace gaming for example. Fair, just genuinely (bastard) hard.
Hoping to fuck Elden ring has tidied up some of these black marks and is as good as they say.
