Namco on Dark Souls 2 marketing: "treating it as a massive AAA title, would be nice to attract Skyrim players"

[mtu9356]

I think the difficulty is fine you just need patience and the willingness to learn from mistakes.

One way of getting new players into the game would be improving the tutorial level/area to help ease them into things. I wouldn't be surprised if Dark Souls 2 had a more fleshed out tutorial to help prepare new players.