mZuzek said:
It's true, though. Certain games aren't meant to be "fun", in the same way that certain movies, for example horror films, aren't meant to be either. Movies, games, books or whatever else, can entertain us in several different ways, and that can often mean not fun. As for Dark Souls, well... I'm no fan, either. I tried getting into it twice, and I hated it. I hated the difficulty, yes, but specifically my biggest issue wasn't with the trial-and-error nature of it, but rather with how extremely punishing the game is. You often lose up to 20 minutes of progress each time you die, and on top of that you also lose all the experience you got, which you can only recover by making it back to where you died - which is one reason to make you more eager to "just get through" the backtracking, on top of also wanting to do it asap because you don't wanna waste a lot of time replaying stuff you already did, and well, ultimately it leads to you dying again and losing even more progress. It's a completely toxic gameplay loop. I stopped playing at the (apparently infamous) dragon bridge, because that was the point where I died twice in a row to things I couldn't avoid without prior knowledge, and lost far too much progress for me to bother investing again in a game I was simply not enjoying in any way (and this was my second time playing it, the first time I quit even earlier). I very much dislike all the culture that's been created around this game, the "IT'S HARD" thing, because it is hard in all the wrong ways, and actively wants the player to quit playing. Well guess what, I did quit. It's the modern day equivalent of oldschool games giving you a "game over" and sending you back to the beginning, it's just bullshit. I love me some hard games, and have beaten my fair share of them, but I can only appreciate difficulty if it's well made, and Dark Souls' wasn't. |
Dark Souls difficulty is very well made, in fact I would say they have the best difficulty "setting" of any game out there. The whole game revolves around dying and becoming more and more hollow is actually part of the lore, dying is part of the experience. The problem is that you are looking at dying like you do in other games, as a time waste, unfair, a failure. When you should be looking at it as a learning experience and something that is supposed to happen several times throughout the game.
Did you really think you could beat any of the Souls games with 0 deaths? You were being delusional, dying is part of the game, not dying in a souls game is like spiderman not being able to websling in a spiderman's game. I died hundreds of times on my first demon souls run and it was a crazy and amazing experience.
