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. |
The losing progress stuff makes it much more intense and the player more cautious of environmental cues so they can't just hack away at enemies and run through the game at a brisk pace. The dragon on the dragon bridge makes a sound to alarm the player and you can see its shadow on the bridge well before it burns everything there which is something you would have seen coming if you had understood anything from playthrough till that time, reading environmental cues.
Dark Souls isn't highly regarded because its hard, its the amazing world designs and interconnectedness of the world, which you didn't experience because you quit the game too early. Its also the weighty and tight combat and the variety of weapons, something you couldn't have experienced so early in the game. The boss fights are amazing though you only fought two of them among twenty six. The games have amazing stories as well which you have to piece together using item descriptions.
