Compared to other games that aim to be in the same difficulty league as it, at least. While I had many moments of frustration, and one trip to a walk-through to figure out where to go, I thought it was fairly comparable in difficulty to Salt & Sanctuary and Hollow Knight. I’m not sure if I want to include Dead Cells in with these game, because I never came close to “finishing” it, seeing as I couldn’t practice the same area over and over again until I got it right.
I also needed a bit of help to figure out where to go another time and did a meticulous search of everything I had explored to find it, including beating my head against the wall (and finally defeating!) a boss that had nothing to do with the current critical path, so that was a lot of wasted time that could have also been solved with another trip to a walk-through, and it’s probably what caused me to give up relatively quickly the next time it happened. I don’t think I needed a walk-through for those other two games though, and I certainly was perusing the Wiki while playing a whole lot more than I did with the other games. So maybe it was a little harder in the sense of “WTF is going on here? WTF am I supposed to be doing?”, whereas with the other two games I always knew exactly what to bang my head against to make progress - the way forward was never obfuscated.
71 hours, plus a few hours playing around with other characters. Pretty good for the $20 it was on Switch on sale, and I might even consider coming back to it someday, though I’m not going to do what I did for Salt and Sanctuary and replay it all with a different class immediately - I was pretty sick of dying to silly things. I then went and played a game where it was literally impossible to die despite basically being a Metroidvania (Yoku’s Island Express) to kickback and unwind.
Dark Souls was the real coming-out party for the From Software style gameplay. Yeah I know Demon Souls came first but DS was the first smash hit. So many (great) games have aped the gameplay since then that if you’ve played any of them you already know the fundamentals of how to explore, survive and progress in a Soulslike world. When it first came out it was truly headscratching as there were no maps, no sense of direction or forboding of consequence until you stepped in it, no traditional story telling. Combat was slow and methodical and if you messed up you died, lost everything unless you survived the fully populated trek back to your body to reclaim your XP. If you died before getting there it was all gone forever. You could easily spend hours fighting your way thru a very challenging area, dying over and over, just to walk into a boss fight with no hints on how to beat them and they would generally one-shot you, sending you all the way back to BFE.
Like I said at the beginning, now we all know the basics of the gameplay in that genre so it’s simply not as daunting or perplexing. If you’ve played any of the later games in that genre you’ve got a significant leg up on those of us that played through it when it was a brand new game/genre. Salt and Sanctuary, though 2d, is a virtual carbon copy of DS for instance. It’s a great game but the systems in there are identical so when you played DS you didn’t really need to figure that out.
Certainly, I learned a lot playing Salt & Sanctuary, and it definitely gave me an advantage in figuring out what kinds of things I needed to do, but when I compare S&S to any other Metroidvania, it really doesn’t have much in terms of differences. Dark Souls has less Metroidvania elements to it, but it’s still kinda sorta one. In Super Metroid, and let’s say Bloostained for something more recent, you don’t make any permanent progress until you hit the next save point since there’s no auto save, which is very similar to a game that does have autosave but gives you the ability to have most of your progress undone by failing to reach a checkpoint before dying.
I suppose what really makes Dark Souls really stand out is there are very few bosses that there are checkpoints immediately before. Now that I’m thinking about it, that’s really the bulk of the frustration in the game. Bosses being hard wouldn’t be a problem if you could just step right back in. But instead they make you trek across dangerous areas, and they especially like to hide checkpoints that might make boss runs less daunting. I remember there was one boss in Hollow Knight they hid a bench much closer to the boss than the one I had been running back from, and it really annoyed me when I found it because of the amount of time that I had already spent getting back from the previous one. I was very glad that the run for the Centipede Demon wasn’t that long, so I could try something crazy without worrying it just completely wasted a long run back, but then the run to Bed of Chaos was annoying, even if not hard, simply because of how easy it was to die to silly stuff in that fight and how long the run back was.
That sort of annoyance is never going to get better. Each boss fights usually requires a few attempts to figure out what you’re supposed to do, and having played similar games doesn’t provide much help other than knowing it’s probably mostly about dodging their attacks, which you can’t learn until you see them. I suppose you can just get used to it happening, but for me, it didn’t take Souls-like games to get used to running back from hard bosses - I had done it tons of times in World of Warcraft, and there were a few bosses you had to clear a gauntlet to similar to having to avoid/kill the enemies in Dark Souls on the way back. So I’d say the few years I spent wiping constantly in WoW prepared me more for the most anguishing part of the game more than playing S&S and HK - I had even while playing those games noted that the difficult bosses were simply like MMO raid bosses, and I just needed to settle in to learning how to do the fight.
I didn’t hate that Dark Souls was difficult. I hated that Dark Souls was no fun whatsoever. I imagine there are people for whom the sense of achievement that comes with memorizing and executing the exact moves necessary to win combat (like the OP) makes it worth it. But, to me, that would be the only reason to play such an unfun game.
Definitely agree with the OP. After each time I complete it I’m always left with a sense of the incredible fairness in the original Dark Souls.
Those bosses aren’t one-shotting you because of cheesy abilities or because it’s part of the story (I’m looking at you Witcher series). THAT is unfair.
Instead, the bosses are simply that strong and have that much armor/HP. It’s difficult because you’re a newborn baby zombie trying to fight zombies which have been alive for hundreds or thousands of years.
The game makes a point of pitting you against former bosses as a normal enemy later on; it’s the same enemy with the same stats. Then you get to extract sweet revenge as you easily crush what seemed so tough once upon a time.
I agree with this (Hamlet’s comment). Had the coop function not been present, I would have quit early on with the series. However, I loved every aspect of the games that was not boss related, it felt like the old days if playing Wizardry with the mysterious arcane exploration under constant threat of danger. I learned to enjoy the games by simply coop-ing my way quickly past the bosses so I didn’t need to deal with that aggravating repetitive nonsense.
That was probably the main reason why I never finished Dark Souls; I found all of the backtracking tedious. I’m also not the kind of person who gets joy out of finally winning a frustrating fight after losing over and over again – instead I just feel “I never, ever want to do that again”.
I had fun exploring the weird spooky environment. And I never did any memorizing moves or patterns; I just spammed the attack and dodge buttons and that seemed to work OK for me in most cases (although, as noted, I never finished the game so maybe it would have failed me eventually).
I play a lot of Souls - play DS1 pvp to this day, and it’s definitely the case that none of them are the mega-hard challenges that their reputation suggests, nothing like the outright technical difficulty of some old school titles (DS1 pvp is very hard, though, vertiginous learning curve). Their meteoric impact comes from what Cubsfan said above - a totally different gameplay structure to the prevailing trend of the time which was to be extremely pandering to the player.
That being said, they are hard games so Chapeau to the OP for sailing through on their first Souls title - you are probably pretty skilled at games in general. I finished Bloodborne recently and it was fairly smooth, didn’t have too many difficulties, but that was my fifth Soulsborne game with many many hours under the belt. I found my first game, DS1, really challenging.
Thought the Demons Souls remake was outstanding if anyone has had a go at that on the PS5? I didn’t have high expectations as the idea of a faithful remake, warts and all, of such an old title didn’t make a lot of sense to me - I basically didn’t understand how profoundly good Demons Souls was / is. I think you could legit argue that it is the GoaT Souls game.
I actually just beat DeS yesterday. It was a great remaster. I would say the actual levels in DeS were harder/longer than DS but the bosses in DeS were cakewalks compared to many in the DS series. May have something to do with magic being grossly OP in DeS too though. I also think the remaster dramatically increased the drop rate of healing herbs too.
I heard Bloodborne is getting a remaster but not by Bluepoint.
I guess I don’t really understand what is involved with remastering / remaking a game because why wouldn’t you just go ahead and take out the bad bits (e.g. boss difficulty level is way out of date like you say), even with a masterpiece like DeS? I guess there is the issue of what is a consensus bad aspect to a game, and you start pulling one thing apart you’re sort of tugging on the frayed end of the jumper and things could completely unravel. But it was overall a great effort from Bluepoint no question.
Bloodborne remaster would be a huge deal - I guess DeS was PS only so if that can get remade then Bloodborne can.
Me too. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the best kind of fight is where I screw up, start improvising, and still win. There’s no drama in doing things perfectly.
It’s just a certain type of challenge that some people enjoy. I like that kind of gameplay myself, where I can objectively measure how good I am by how far I get. When you remove randomness and it’s about memorizing patterns then it just takes practice to get better rather than luck.
It’s no different than a game like Guitar Hero. The songs don’t change, you always have to hit the right notes at the right time and getting used to the fingering, letting muscle memory set in, and recognizing where something is going to be tricky and you’ll have to be sure to get ready for it, that’s something that you develop by practicing. Some gamers will find that monotonous while others enjoy the challenge to improve themselves over time. It’s a matter of taste, there’s no objective measure for fun.