Current Events > Having completed Dark Souls now, on the topic of "difficult"

(+) Yeah! (+)

Yes I suppose it was difficult. It was so difficult at the start that I didn't even really enjoy it and wondered if people just had some weird masochistic streak or truly felt it would be a badge of honour to waste this much time defeating some fucking skeletons. I must have spent literally an entire day in the Undead Burg wondering if I'd ever get to the next bonfire.

On the other hand, that difficulty drastically, drastically plummeted over time, to the point where I beat the 4 final bosses of the game almost immediately and was one-shotting most other enemies without even trying. The difficulty was scaleable because I could level up and get gear and then curbstomp things, just like any other game.

The one aspect that stayed consistently difficult was how you can't ever really relax. Even 3 low level zombies can fuck you up if you let them swarm you. At no point can you just breeze through some fodder without paying at least a little bit of attention.

The other part was just having to accept the bullshit. Some Gamers (capital G) would say it's fair that you just spent 45 minutes doing something and then lost literally all of your progress and now you have to do all of that again because some fucking scripted encounter insta-killed you. Sure, that's fair. See, the game was just teaching you! It's teaching you that your time is fucking worthless and you need to git gud at the game.

Getting hit by lightning is fair too, if you squint.

I guess the main takeaway is that the game doesn't give you much margin for error and you have to be very patient in everything you do, so the difficult part is in whether you can find the patience for it. But once you learn how to do that everything becomes pretty easy.

Uh but was it difficult compared to say, Hollow Knight? No. That game was difficult on an athletic level to me. Like no amount of gear or levelling can prepare you for Nightmare King Grimm, which took me about 4 days and 10 hours to beat, and I still never beat the Path of Pain.

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Dark souls will always be - padded and cheap difficulty

Imagine if the combat was like devil may cry 5 or the new tales of arise. From software couldn't even dream of making a souls game like those. I'll give elden ring a chance though. Look at reviews when it's out. See if from software went next gen with their combat and open world designs. Or if it's the same old crap again

Interesting that you beat it but still have that opinion of the game. I disagree. There are really only two encounters in the game that I would call a cheap death.

1. The Hellkite Drake on the bridge.
2. Your first encounter with Seath, in which you must lose.

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The only reason Dark Souls is 'hard' is because of the fact it was mostly unknown
If you took advice online it was simple

Most of the fights in the game can be summed up as 'watch when the boss does a sloooooow move and then attack afterwards'

Certain games are harder than others. Dark Souls is more like a survival game level hard like Resident Evil and really falls apart when you get told what is coming up next.

Dark souls is only considered hard because it doesn't reward you for every little thing and punishes you for mistakes.

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HaVeNII7 posted...

Interesting that you beat it but still have that opinion of the game. I disagree. There are really only two encounters in the game that I would call a cheap death.

1. The Hellkite Drake on the bridge.
2. Your first encounter with Seath, in which you must lose.

I think there are a lot of situations where an enemy gets the drop on you and you'd have next to no way of pre-empting that unless you literally roll through every door way or do some camera ninjutsu on every opening just in case. Even then, chances are you're just rolling to your death. The game wants/expects you to get fucked up on the first time through so that you can do it again and be more cautious, that felt inevitable.

To the point where I would just simply try to exhaust all my souls before going into any new areas, even if they seemed mundane, because I was just expecting to be dead in the next 30 seconds.

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LightningAce11 posted...

Dark souls is only considered hard because it doesn't reward you for every little thing and punishes you for mistakes.

Well yeah, but then what does hard even mean if not that, lol

That's pretty much the textbook definition of hard by any standard.

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Most other games just increase enemy damage and make them health sponges in hard mode and call it a day. You don't need to adjust your play style there.

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LightningAce11 posted...

Most other games just increase enemy damage and make them health sponges in hard mode and call it a day.

uhhhh
ng+?

Yeah that's sorta why the discussions around easy mode for Dark Souls is rather exhausting really.

There's plenty of ways within the game to make things easier. Following a guide alone makes things a lot easier.

But people just want a toggle.

It's weird because plenty of games handle it like this. But yet the discussion is solely around FROM and Souls games.

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nothanks1 posted...

uhhhh
ng+?

Yes a lot of games have ng+

I remember playing Spider-Man PS4, started on normal then switched to hard but didn't notice much change since I kept mashing as before and the game never discouraged screwing up.

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as far as cheapness in this game goes, for a first time player, these instances were definitely cheap:

• Anor Londo archers
• blow dart guys who inflict toxic in Blight Town, when you can't even see them at first
• basilisks and their curse status
• and the dragon thing on the bridge that was posted already, since it's difficult to get the timing right, and it's mandatory to do so to progress

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Accidentally wandering into the graveyard or the Catacombs at way too low a level is pretty much a rite of passage for new Dark Souls players.

It kind of works against the game in a way, since it has such a reputation as literally the hardest game ever made that some players think that it's supposed to be that way and give up.

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There is a lot more
all spoilers for Dark Souls 1 and in no particular order

asylum demon, open door isn't fucking obvious
3 hollow gangbang in undead burg
balder knights parrying
sen's
gaping dragon with AI summons both are fucking useless
gargoyles
anor londo double boss health recovery
return to the asylum with the floor
capra
mimics
invisible path in crystal caves
londo ruin enemies needing an item to hit them
darkness in fucking tomb of giants
falling into pinwheel (lel pinwheel)

Point is the game is played as tho it's a survival horror and devs literally expected playing online with players leaving messages warning others

UnholyMudcrab posted...

Accidentally wandering into the graveyard or the Catacombs at way too low a level is pretty much a rite of passage for new Dark Souls players.

I honestly don't mind that because it's at the beginning
That's more of a 'hey, sometimes come back later' thing.

LightningAce11 posted...

Most other games just increase enemy damage and make them health sponges in hard mode and call it a day. You don't need to adjust your play style there.

That's true, but still, we were talking about what hard is, not what hard isn't. I think games that just tack on more HP to make a game hard is a crappy way to handle it. But dark souls is just hard man. You make 3 mistakes in a boss fight and you're done, most of the time.

Darmik posted...

Yeah that's sorta why the discussions around easy mode for Dark Souls is rather exhausting really.

There's plenty of ways within the game to make things easier. Following a guide alone makes things a lot easier.

But people just want a toggle.

It's weird because plenty of games handle it like this. But yet the discussion is solely around FROM and Souls games.

Yeah that's true, but I partly put it down to the weird nerdery around some Dark Souls fans, like they take it personally that someone else found the game hard...while also being proud of that fact...

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nothanks1 posted...

I honestly don't mind that because it's at the beginning
That's more of a 'hey, sometimes come back later' thing.

no because I worked out the "puzzle" of that you can kick the reanimating skeletons off the cliffs to get to the bottom at low level, and end up stuck in the Tomb of the Giants before finding out that's the wrong way

don't have a guy sitting near the graveyard with stairs going downwards say that the next bell is "far below"

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Neoconkers posted...

no because I worked out the "puzzle" of that you can kick the reanimating skeletons off the cliffs to get to the bottom at low level, and end up stuck in the Tomb of the Giants before finding out that's the wrong way

don't have a guy sitting near the graveyard with stairs going downwards say that the next bell is "far below"

To be fairif the enemies were so hard to kill that you had to use gravity, and you STILL PERSISTED all the way to the bottom, rather than simply trying one of the other directions available, thats not really the game.

Thats you being stubborn lol

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I felt this way about Salt and Sanctuary

I adored that game when it was hard and I had to plan and worry and carefully make my way through

It wasnt very fun when I started killing bosses in 20 seconds and stomping everything in my path

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HaVeNII7 posted...

To be fairif the enemies were so hard to kill that you had to use gravity, and you STILL PERSISTED all the way to the bottom, rather than simply trying one of the other directions available, thats not really the game.

Thats you being stubborn lol

but "it's a super hard game! you will die over and over!"

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