Gave up on Dark Souls after my third attempt

[The_Liquid_Laser]

SvennoJ said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Heh, this thread reminds me of most of the comments I read when Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were new games.  Most people didn't like it.  Maybe that is still true, but people don't realize it.

 

To me Dark Souls feels like old school D&D.  You are trying to make your way through a death dungeon.  It is a lot like a roguelike.  It's a real-time roguelike.  I don't think of it as an action game. 

Having said that, Dark Souls is one of my favorite games of all time.  I think younger people want to play it as an action game, because they don't really make challenging action games anymore.  If I want to play a challenging action game, then I'll just play some game from the 80s.  But for younger people, they may not even consider these games, so they try to make Dark Souls into an action game instead.

I wouldn't compare it to a rogue like. Those are about procedural generation, different every time, see how far you get. Dark Souls is the opposite, every enemy is always in the same spot, behaves the same, nothing left up to chance. It's more like Ultima Underworld.

Approaching it like old school D&D is what got me stuck in my first play through. The stats are not all that important, equipment is. I had to throw my notions how to approach an RPG out the window and simply treat stats as 'unlocks' for weapons, armor and spells.

It's still an action game, just a slower paced one. You can't rush it, but you better have good timing and reflexes to dodge and parry. Very different from games like Everquest and WoW where you simply turn attack on and let the dice do the work. Everquest was much harder than Dark Souls even though the actual combat had very little to do with timing. Well, apart from tons of timers before you could use / stack an attack again.

I am talking about the overall design philosophy rather than specific mechanics.  The overall design philosophy of roguelikes (especially older ones) is "here is a big, nasty, deadly dungeon.  See if you can get through it."  That is also the design philosophy of Dark Souls.  The procedural generation of a roguelike is there to make the game more challenging and to extend replay value.  However, the main point of a roguelike is to experience a big, nasty, deadly dungeon.  That is also the point of Dark Souls.  You are still going to end up needing several tries to get through most parts of Dark Souls even though the dungeon isn't procedurally generated.  Also, both roguelikes and Dark Souls rely a lot more on thinking and strategy than a twitch game does.

Old school D&D often had a similar philosophy.  It often had deadly dungeons and the point was both to survive and also get lots of treasure.  You survived by your wits.  Dark Souls isn't as treasure oriented as old school D&D, but the rest of it has a pretty similar feel to it.