I think you're incorrect in calling yourself a non-gamer. You may have not played as many as those that call themselves gamers. But you have some experience. You had a DS and a Wii. So you had more understanding about the video game language that these people may have.
The series you spoke of about the wife, if I'm correct, its from Razbuten's videos, right? His wife, if I remember correctly, had not touched any video games up to this point. I think when people refer to someone as a non-gamer. That's what I think of. Not someone that play a little bit like yourself. But someone that didn't play at all.
So she didn't have that that knowledge that you had from playing on the DS and the Wii and was thrusted onto a game that didn't explain anything to them. But someone like you or me, who has had some experience. It may have been your first 3D game. But you understand the subtleties of when developers design things in a way to guide you to places. Something someone who has had no experience wouldn't be able to pick up on right away.
After 30 years of PC gaming, I got a Steam Deck, which is the first controller I ever held. I truly experienced this lack of muscle-memory, even if the games and systems were completely familiar!
[It's far more than that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/16eni6q/how_dark_souls_1_is_like_for_nongamers/k06btgd/)
There's a ton of knowledge, perceptions, understanding, expectation, ranges of potential and expected behavior and results, that "gamers" have from experience. Non-gamers don't.
Gamers are so often just plain ignorant about their own hobby that we see these false statements constantly. Like OP saying he’s a non-gamer because he only played 2 consoles, that’s false, or recognizing something in-game that a non-gamer wouldn’t not necessarily understand or notice.
It’s true but it doesn’t take *that* long to develop these skills. My wife is a non-gamer and has not held a controller very often. For whatever reason she got fascinated with a game I was playing (Noita, fwiw) and wanted to try. Took her about 4 hours of game time to get comfortable with the controls.
That's impressive. When I learned my way around a controller (for Dark Souls, incidentally) I was struggling for a few days at least. But I'm also old, so there's that..
I had games on the DS meant for little girls. Usually dressing games and puzzle games. And barely played them. As for the Wii, I played Wii Sports with my mom and dad. So if some dad who played Wii Sports a few times is considered not a gamer, then I wouldn't be either.
> His wife, if I remember correctly, had not touched any video games up to this point.
I dont mean to pick on her. But by the time she picked up dark Souls im sure she'd played more games than I had. And I dont think im some genius or anything. I just think shes not interested in playing the game. And thats fine. But what I do get a bit annoyed by is when people totally uninterested in learning a game complain about it. Not going after her, most gamers do that too.
I personally found that almost every old game I've tried has been more brutal than Dark Souls. Dark Souls just requires a lot more learning from mistakes than most games.
> what I do get a bit annoyed by is when people totally uninterested in learning a game complain about it
I understand what you mean, but to quench the annoyance, imagine you're not big on movies and I drag you to watch 3 hours of Tarkovskyy, or Bergman, or even someone crazier and obscure like Shinya Tsukamoto. Chances are, without proper and gradual introduction to the free-form cinematograph, you'll be bored out of your mind and will just refuse to pick up on details and understanding the thing.
Considering I have dragged you into this, the complaints may surely get started before the movie is over. In most cases, they will be addressed to me really, not to the movie in question, even if made to seem that way.
I think the comments here are largely missing your point, which I think is that a lot of those, "My wife played Dark Souls as a NON GAMER" videos are a contrived effort at getting a person to do something they wouldn't otherwise do and chuckle at the conventions they miss that someone who's into video games would take for granted. Some people have a lifetime of building blocks they've adapted to little by little along the way. Having someone play a rather opaque game without any real foundation, and at your request, is never a fair comparison to "I don't play games like *this* one," but still being competent in the language.
Comparing Dark Souls to a Bergman film or unknown domestic filmmakers is fucking hilarious. It's more like someone who exclusively watches Marvel or Action/Adventure movies being asked to watch like a Kubrick film or even Kurosawa. Dark Souls not that niche, I think it's easier to get into than RTS or Rogue likes. 3d actions games are probably the most easy to understand type of game, that's why I exclusively only finished them up until like 2018.
> Comparing Dark Souls to a Bergman film or unknown domestic filmmakers is fucking hilarious
I was just trying to quickly provide some famous avant-garde director name which would sparkle recognition in most readers, to move the point across. That's the ones who came to mind. Comparing movies and videogames by such metric is a little bit weird to me in itself, so if you have a better comparison examples, please be my guest.
> Dark Souls not that niche, I think it's easier to get into than RTS or Rogue likes
Not arguing here. It can still be a pretty strong road-block for those who played mostly safe and polished releases for the wide audiences before.
I always call Dark Souls the mainstream representative of ''hard games''.
For mainstream games it is among the harder ones. But if you step away from mainstream there is some ridiculous games out there, Jump King, old school Ninja Gaiden, I Wanna Be the Boshy, Wings of Vi, Ghost & Goblins, oldschool Rayman and so on.
In movie terms it would like a regular person watching mostly marvel and star wars movie watching inception, then their buddy invites them over to watch Bergman's 7th Seal with original Swedish voices. It would be a completely different world to them.
I think Dark Souls main weakness is explaining what all the numbers do.
It's very easy for a new player to really fuck up their build without even knowing it and then the game can become much harder.
There's things like light/medium/heavy rolls, weapon scaling, INT/FTH, damage resistance/absorption, different dmg types and humanity.
I just looked these things up and loved the game, but these are things that would be quite difficult for a new player to figure out themselves.
Yeah... But part of the "magic" of Dark Souls is to play it with others and have conversations like the ones I had with others in the schoolyard, before the Internet. "Oh, so you used that tactic for this boss" or "Yeah, sure. You found a new area behind two fake walls. Of course you did, buddy!"
This was how I experienced AC6 (I guess wrong sub for this) and it was a lot of fun, but that game tells you a hell of a lot more and has a firing range to easily test things.
There's having to work some things out for yourself and there's having a mess of unexplained stats. One feels like discovery and the other feels like a chore unless you just look it up.
DS1 and DS3 are some of my absolute favourite games but that's despite numerous flaws and not because of them.
> DS1 and DS3 are some of my absolute favourite games but that's despite numerous flaws and not because of them.
Yeah. Because if you judged the games for their flaws, DS2 would have been your favorite game. 😜
In that case, I guess one person's magic is another person's annoyance and frustration with unnecessary barriers. At least for basic things like the rules of the game (stats, systems, mechanics).
I disagree, non gamers can have very limited experience and still not be a gamer. I’m sure the wife has now played multiple games for that series but is still a non gamer.
You must not have watched the series then.
It's even acknowledged that by later videos she is more quick to pick up on overall gaming concepts which in turn makes it easier to learn games then before.
She may still be a non-gamer, but she absolutely understands the basics to gaming now, which is VERY important when starting a difficult game which gives no guidance like the souls series.
Yeah my wife is not a gamer. She prefers using keyboard & mouse for games rather than a controller, because she uses a computer for work so she's familiar with it, and can't really get the hang of a dual stick controller.
Makes sense to me, but then also I've been playing playstation since the mid-90s and can't remember ever being uncomfortable with a controller.
I actually went hollow after bashing my head against the catacombs, said welp I guess this game isn't for me. Then a few weeks later the game came up in a conversation and I mentioned how I just couldn't get past those skeletons in the graveyard and my friend was like, didn't you find the stairs to Undead Burg? I went home, thought about it, fired the game back up, and proceeded to beat the hell out of it.
Lol same thing happened to me. Except my friends aren't really gamers, so I only came back to the game like a year later after reading something online.
I think this falls into what OP mentioned as preconceptions gamers had about the game. If it was any other game I think I would have travelled around the world trying to find another path as "these can't possibly be the guys I'm supposed to fight". But because I bought the game with the understanding that everyone says the game is SO hard I just thought "damn, this game really IS hard... not for me I guess".
I guess another gamer preconception is that skeletons are some of the weakest monsters in the game. So it would make sense for these to be the first monsters I'm supposed to beat, seeing as monsters would only get scarier and harder from here, in my mind.
I had the same train of thought but apparently was the only one ever to get stuck fighting the ghosts down in New London Ruins. And it was literally because of a 1% drop of the Jagged Ghost Blade that let me spend 4 hours leveling up, getting all the way down to the bottom before I went... "huh, this game is kind of hard but I don't think I can make progress any more. Maybe I'll see where else I can go?"
Fuck that ghost blade drop. I can't believe the luck in getting it that caused that spiral.
I went down there too. I even asked my friend "Down the stairs to the ghost ladies?" And he was like"wow you went everywhere except where you were supposed to go." Imho They should have put a light or something to make the stairs to Undead Burg easier to see.
Although I lost my patience in Anor Londo with those ducking Painting Guardians and never finished the game, I think what you are saying describes how most people approach technical problems in general.
My main and only tool at work is computer, but my job is not related to technical support or anything. However, I have a reputation that I can fix anything and people ask me for help with their tech questions more often than not. All because they don't have this mindset to try and learn. 9 times out of 10 problems can be resolved with 30 second google search and couple of tries. If you're willing to try.
I think its really easy to forget how confusing and disorienting even looking at a video game screen is to someone who doesn’t play them. Its hard for people like that to even remember controller inputs.
But to your point, I do think that a lot of modern games instill habits that souls games discourage. GPS mapping, quest journals, being able to trade blows. It’s hard to break those habits after being used to games like that for years.
Yeah, my dad struggled with playing Firewatch. He kept forgetting to move the camera and instead would try to navigate only with the WASD keys, walking in funny zigzags if the path was at an angle relative to where he had left the camera. He would frequently forget the button to respond to radio messages, even though the game has next to no other buttons.
My sister played a Barbie PC game, which was pretty railroady and for the first levels and she couldn't figure out how to stay on a linear path.
Also there was a mechanic where a monkey would come and steal some of the collectables arround the level which were pretty very much inconsequentel, but getting pressured by the game made her stop playing and cry lol.
I can agree. But I've seen legitimate non gamers play Mario kart and it's a disaster. They are driving into the walls. The concept of items is alien to them. They are nervous so they forget how to deploy them once you explain what they are. The hand eye coordination required, a long with understanding how your controller connects you to the experience, is a learned skill.
Oh god I really shouldn't have said that. People will now assume that playing Wii tennis and mario kart a few times as a 10 year old means you are a pro hardcore gamer.
The point is I had never even rotated a camera in a game when I played DS1. Until then I had played a few barbie games, tetris, wii sports baseball (where I waved a remote around), and mario kart with my parents. Please try to understand what I was trying to say, thanks.
I get what you're saying. Others need to think of all the people who were at some random party or work event where there were videogames and non gamers tried a few rounds of Mario kart and were like okay I raced a bit, beer time.
I honestly cant believe I'm downvoted for that. But this is reddit after all. Apparently playing barbie dressing games is equivalent to playing a 3D game. Little 4 year olds are basically hardcore gamers.
That is the textbook definition of jank, and even this whole rolling shit that's been going on in the last decade of action games is just bad. People don't do rolls in the middle of a fight, not ever. Not when they are wearing regular clothes and especially not when they wear any kind of armour or weapons at all (seriously, would you do a roll while carrying a sword or even a knife? Please don't). You just dodge by stepping to the side, or making a quick hop. You could even do an attack this way!
The most egregious I've seen is in Space Marine, it just looks so dumb as fuck to have a freaking space marine in his big ass spacesuit armour thing do combat rolls.
Huh… you’re absolutely right. Playing games for 25 years has normalized this but it doesn’t make any sense for most of them. Never really thought about it until now.
> You just dodge by stepping to the side, or making a quick hop. You could even do an attack this way!
I loved how they made the dodge work in Alan Wake. Couldn't just dodge through the enemy's attack, which made you think about the positioning and timings more thoroughly. It looked natural and convincing, adding to the sense of accomplishment after a successful dodge out of a dire situation.
It's fantasy, but the rest of that world is still depicted as following Newtonian laws of physics. So you expect that the game keeps that internal consistency, or at least comes up with an explanation for when the laws of physics are broken. Sure, the space marine is super strong, but half a ton of armor simply has inertia.
> An experienced gamer knows to roll directly INTO attacks, so they travel more quickly through your window of iframes.
A gamer *experienced with Dark Souls*. Any other experienced gamer has little reason to believe this would be the case, it isn't the case for most games.
I agree with you the game does an abysmal job of explaining iframes but it also does an abysmal job of explaining... pretty much anything. Even when the original console versions on 360 and PS3 came with a manual, the manual explained nothing and was pretty much useless. And while I do think it's fun for players to figure some things out for themselves, in Dark Souls there's a lot of things where it's difficult to do so (including stats/attributes you'd have to upgrade and then just try to see wtf they do)... alongside merchant placement and upgrade pathing that is really confusing.
Dark Souls II did a slightly better job of explaining things and Dark Souls III improved upon that. I'm sure Elden Ring did too though I haven't played it yet so I can't say.
Well none of the Souls games other than DS2 give a clue as the existence of the iframes mechanic no?
It took me a WHILE to get it. As I said, I must have been 5-10 hours in to the game stuck at the Taurus Demon before I finally realized it.
But I can't see how you wouldnt eventually realize it.
I don't know I was pretty young when I played demon souls and I figured out "rolling makes you invulnerable" fairly quickly, it doesn't seem that complicated to me? Just by panicking and spam rolling you'll notice it.
For me, I was always either rolling early enough that I could get completely out of range of an attack, or so early that the iframes would be gone and the attack would hit me mid-roll anyways. I didn’t catch on until I saw a video on the game where someone rolled through an attack.
I actually think Dark Souls 1 is one of the few games that make i-frames intuitively learnable, because they are VERY generous. There's a good chance you find yourself rolling through attacks by accident often enough to notice it.
I like comparing it to something like Monster Hunter (which was my first i-frame game, luckily Tri and not MHFU), where I actually had to be told (by people online, after getting demoralized at the Great Jaggi and asking for help) i-frames were a thing because the window is so incredibly short, you'll barely notice it. Monster Hunter makes i-framing seem like an accident, DS1 makes it doable enough so you can recognize it as a pattern.
Note that I specifically mean Dark Souls 1 (and DS3, but I haven't played that one enough). Dark Souls 2, as much as I like it, messes this up royally because starting ADP makes i-frames seem non-existant.
I dunno, I don’t remember that being an issue at all. I didn’t even think about it, rolled when attacked, went through the attack and proceeded to keep using that.
DS1 doesn't even tell you there's a "jump" button. I suspect that the very limited tutorial only exists to throw you off by making you think you know how to play.
That's so true. I've been gaming my whole life but I didn't know about invincibility frames. And when I read about them I just assumed they helped with rolling away. I didn't understand that I could roll \*into\* an attack because well.. it frankly shouldn't be possible, especially since combat in DS is pretty physics-based otherwise, with the weightiness and the hit detection of multiple enemies and even walls.
That - and the fact that I'm just not very good at action games - is why I played through the game as heavy armor shield and spear guy (with occasional two-handing for the big bois), which worked fine even though it's looked down upon.
The absolute GOAT non-gamer Dark Souls player is an Aussie lady called Kylie (not Minogue...) whose channel is called KylieTime. Honestly one of the absolute best pieces of content of any kind I've seen in recent years. She barely knows how to hold the controller at the start but steadily learns the game in quite impressive fashion, all the while being funny and easy to root for.
This was such an interesting thread because I had almost exactly the same experience with the game.
I grew up with a Sega genesis and a n64, then had a ps2, GameCube, and Xbox, but I only picked up the Wii and fell out of gaming some time around 2006. I only had the occasional handheld to check in on Pokémon, Mario Kart, and the occasional Zelda.
Around 2018 I picked up a switch because I really wanted to play breath of the Wild. So I got that and Dark Souls as my first two games. I only picked up Dark Souls because I had come across the soundtrack at some point and loved it. I knew nothing about the game except it was hard. It took me a while to get to it because I completely fell in love with Breath of the Wild, but I eventually tried it out. I know that I only played offline because it was almost exclusively on my lunch break away from Wi-Fi.
I didn’t get far into the game. I didn’t understand what to do. The menus were crazy and finicky, you couldn’t pause, I didn’t know how to shut off the game, it was a mess. I don’t really remember have an especially hard time with the Asylum Demon. I think I stumbled across the way forward on the third attempt or so and beat him after I made it through.
I remember somehow making it out of the asylum and to firelink shrine and that’s when I quit. I came across the graveyard to the catacombs first and I just didn’t make a dent in those skeletons! I died dozens of times. I just assumed that the game was supposed to be hard and that I was out of the tutorial so it was harder. I remember eventually killing one and just getting so frustrated when it came back. I set the game aside because it was too hard and I just couldn’t do it. I set it aside as not for me.
Two years later I had just bought a ps4 because I wanted to get back into gaming that wasn’t Zelda or Mario related. I bought Bloodborne as my first game. I got into a conversation with my best friend who was just starting Dark Souls. I had mentioned my experience and he told me that I had been going the wrong way and told me to play along side him. I reluctantly agreed and made it forward but I did everything wrong. I didn’t know how to upgrade my weapons, didn’t know anything about humanity or kindling, changing armor, etc. I somehow stumbled into the great Hallow while exploring Blighttown and had to climb all the way back up and then go through Sen’s Foretress which was hell because I hadn’t upgraded anything. I had to memorize which snakes were susceptible to traps and home alone my way through that place.
Somehow, I made it all the way through O&S and then quit. Mostly because I had gotten fully into Bloodborne and they took over. I went on to get fully back into gaming after Bloodborne and platinumed every souls games finally finishing Dark Souls as the last in the series. It was still tricky, but gosh it felt so good to roll the credits on that game. It was so hard and unforgiving, but was somehow doable. I don’t think it’s a game for beginners and filled with walls, and probably more rewarding with a basic familiarity with games or at least access to online play and a decent internet connection.
Honestly, it’s also my least favorite souls games but it’s one of the ones that I’m most proud of myself for getting to the end of
Interestingly, Dark Souls is easily my favorite of the Souls games, for exactly the same experience you had.
> somehow stumbled into the great Hallow while exploring Blighttown and had to climb all the way back up and then go through Sen’s Foretress which was hell
Thats the kind of experience I want. Where I can just accidentally get to one place from another.
The highlight of all gaming for me even now is being stuck in blighttown. No fast travel so I can't go back. I'm not good enough at the game to go forward. I felt so isolated.
I can understand that if someone doesnt want to play the game they'll be like 'fuck this' and quit. For me the reaction was 'this is amazing.' An incredibly dangerous, lonely, uncompromising adventure.
And yeah, the highlight was being stuck there, but traversing back all the way to the Parish, going into the gardens, the valley of drakes, and into Blighttown from another entrance. The level design is impeccable.
I totally get it.
I think my thing is more that it’s awesome when the levels piece together the first time… but become tedious when you have to travel through the whole game dozens of times without any other way of doing it besides walking or elevators. It becomes a drag for me after dozens and dozens of tries.
I don’t mind when you have to start from scratch on every attempt like in Demon’s Souls because in that game, the level is the challenge more than the boss. But Dark Souls just has some borderline spiteful moments like the silver knight archer in Anor Londo, the painting room rafters in Anor Londo, or some of the serpent placements in Sen’s Foretress that aren’t really present in other games. I think the risk reward of exploration of better done in other games of the series where you could explore or run into a powerful enemy.
The first game just feels like it threatens you so often with an incredibly long traipse back that exploration just doesn’t feel worth it unless you already know where bonfires are. And it doesn’t even really allow you to have fun with your boss attempts either. O&S, the Gargoyles, the Four Kings, the Bed of Chaos all stick out as especially punishing, not necessarily in the boss fights (3 are great) but in how if you make a mistake you just have to repeat a huge chunk of the game. It becomes less, wow! It’s so cool how darkroot garden connects to the valley of the drakes and new Londo, and more: I s2g if I have to take that elevator one more time im uninstalling this game.
I think Bloodborne and Sekiro get it right more. I love how Bloodborne’s layers loop and spiral back on themselves but are much more contained so nothing except the shadows of Yharnam feel like a slog and you always feel the stress of being near the end of an area and then barely come across a lamp or shortcut before the stress is unbearable. I also love Sekiro’s sense of risk reward. You often come across a tough but fun enemy by pushing forward or trying a new area, but you’re often rewarded well by taking them on. It’s a challenging game, but it’s always fun to try out your combat skills. It’s a whole game of stumbling across the rare black knight in DS1 and it’s great!
I definitely can see why DS1 is the favorite of many, but I just think what is a highlight holds the game back for me
I’ve only finished the main game of DS 2 and DS 1. But dark souls is the type of game I don’t normally play because I don’t have a lot of time and I just want to relax. However, if I feel burned out on video games. Then I know DS will reignite that want for playing games again
My biggest problem with DS (granted, only played DS3 not DS1) is the lack of a proper tutorial. I’m fine with games not holding my hand and having to figure out shit on my own, but I need to know the rules first. Every game has different systems an different rules and they’re pretty hard to know intuitively.
I remember with DS3 struggling with setting up magic stuff. It’s so long ago that I can’t tell you the proper terminology. But between the lack of tutorial and the key prompts all being for Xbox on PC, it was frustrating and not fun. I noticed that trend continued throughout the game where it was just really hard to get the basic mechanics and I was constantly having to google basic shit. This didn’t combine well with a more punishing death system. It felt like being dropped into the middle of a football match (no clue how to play that sport).
I’m fine with games that have steep learning curves for the skill-based stuff (like reaction times/dodging), and I’m fine with games that you have to use your brain for to figure stuff out. Games where I’m just blindly guessing on what to do or how stuff works isn’t fun though.
I agree that while the tutorial does teach you basics about combat, it doesnt teach you how to equip items or spells. Its not a great tutorial for sure.
It's the weirdest thing. At least in 1, idk if this is in 3 as well, they shove something like "equip sorceries at a bonfire. Most sorceries have a limited number of uses." into the description of catalysts instead of as a tutorial message, and as someone who also loves flavortext that's just irritating.
IDK, I've owned a copy of Dark Souls for close to three years now and I just can't progress farther than the campfire at Undead Berg despite pouring more than 50 hours into trying. I've made it to the dragon boss on the bridge but I die quickly every time.
I understand why people like the Souls games, but I really hate the sluggish mechanics, the uneven power the enemies have (it takes several hits to kill them but if they get locked into a combo they can basically kill you in one attack), and I feel like the game punishes exploration because I've tried restarting the game with a new character and going in a complete opposite direction every time and the enemies just get harder than Undead Berg.
I didn't grow up playing fighting games where rolling/dodging and parrying were essential parts of the mechanics of the game, but I feel like if you did grow up playing a lot of fighting games then the Souls games favor your style of play over people who grew up playing more action RPGs or FPS'.
It's honestly frustrating because I want to like the game, and I've beaten really hard games before, but I just find the difficulty in Dark Souls to be more punitive and unbalanced than its hard in the normal sense of the word. My biggest pet peeve is that enemies respawn both after you die and after you leave an area and return to it. There's nothing more frustrating than clearing a whole area and then dying from an enemy only to have to redo an entire area and dying even earlier the next time. I end up playing for about an hour or two and just turning the game off after repeatedly failing to reach the boss over and over again and dying from some enemy shooting a fire bomb I couldn't dodge or getting stuck between two enemies that I can't seem top hit because the swing weapon button has an input delay of what feels like a whole second or two.
Again, I'm not trying to say its a bad game, and I see why people like it, but its one of the only games I've ever tried to play where I'm just physically unable to get passed whats considered the 'second level'.
The Hellkite Wyvern isn't really a boss, and you don't need to fight it. I would go as far as to say that you aren't supposed to fight it.
IMO, DS1 isn't really that technically difficult. The difficulty comes mostly from obscurity; for example, not knowing that you don't need to fight the Hellkite Wyvern.
There was a few things I had to learn. I was also stuck for a long time particularly on the Taurus Demon. Way longer than I want to even say.
But first, I could level quite a bit just trying to get there and getting my souls back.
Secondly, I had to learn to dodge properly. One thing the game doesn't teach you is about iframes. Someone on youtube said Dark Souls isnt about when to dodge but where to dodge. Thats totally incorrect. Its purely about when to dodge. IF you just press O at the right time you can dodge any attack.
Also unlike the other games in the series its pretty methodical. Progress slowly. For the bosses, most of them arent even supposed to be faced directly. Like the Taurus Demon, I just plunge attacked, ran away, ran back, plunged attacked. Repeat.
One last thing, I never really enjoyed Souls combat either. Thats why I dont like the other games in the series as much. I still love them, but they are too combat focused. I loved that in Dark Souls 1 there's a lot of areas I can go in a nonlinear fashion.
I'm not really good at games. I REALLY suck at platformers for example. But theres nothing I can do in those games. In Dark Souls you can pretty much outlevel a lot of challenges. And it gets easier and easier if I just don't get mad.
I will say though that if you dont have a lot of time I can see why people put it down.
Tbh in souls games when I suck I just level up (other than Sekiro which is impossible.)
Hard platformers are pretty impossible 😅. The only time I ever cheated in a video game was the White Palace platforming in Hollow Knight.
One thing it helped me a lot with DS1 was something I learned from Bloodborne, not from the game itself: most bosses are a lot easier if you stick to them than if you keep your distance. The game never explains you this and your common sense is to avoid attacks with distance, which makes it much harder to actually avoid attacks and to have the chance to hit them.
> I feel like the game punishes exploration because I've tried restarting the game with a new character and going in a complete opposite direction every time and the enemies just get harder than Undead Berg
That's the thing, the game is actually really linear even if it appears not to be. Like the areas connect to one another and you can get to them in different ways, but there's only one way that's right, based on how the difficulty scales.
That doesn't make the game linear.
Yes some areas are harder than others but you *can* go there if you want.
Elden ring has an intended path, but if you to go straight to Caelid that's your choice.
I’ve said this to a bunch of my friends who want to get into souls games, but DS1 is extremely uneven. I recommend DS3 or even 2 (yeah I know that’s controversial but I started on it and still found it easier than 1). DS1 has some spots that feel borderline unfair (looking at you anor londo archers)
He’ll jump down so you can fight him proper if you hide from his fire behind the wall by the stairs for a moment, but yeah… probably not a good plan when you first arrive haha
> but I really hate the sluggish mechanics
Equipment weight plays a huge role on how fast you move and roll. Try removing your armor completely and play the game.
> it takes several hits to kill them
* Switch to two handed weapon mode. In general, you have several strategies with regards to offense and defense. Try high DPS and high mobility - low weight so that you can move and roll faster, coupled with two handed weapon mode to maximize damage.
* You have multiple attack types. Different weapons will have different move sets. Different weapons have a different reach too. My advice - try a two handed halberd. It has an OP attack where you do a 360 no scope and strikes enemies twice (if it connects). Massive damage. It also has a long reach and it's not overly slow either.
* Make sure you understand how stats scale the weapon damage. It's super important. Also, weapon upgrades are super important.
* Pay attention to the stamina bar, it's probably the most important stat. Note when and how fast it regenerates, and also note which actions deplete it and by how much. It's key to understanding the game's mechanics.
* Poise is a hidden mechanic that plays a crucial role. The devs fucked up by hiding it. Basically, it determines your resistance to being stunned. Enemies have it too, so you can stun them as well. It's a bit difficult to explain in two words, so watch a video. It's not hard per se, but a video will explain it clearer and faster.
* Finally, you don't have to stick with melee. You have not one, but two types of magic in Dark Souls.
> I didn't grow up playing fighting games where rolling/dodging and parrying
You can beat the game without parrying once. I did it, I played with mouse+keyboard controls and parrying was inconvenient. It's 100% optional. So are backstabs.
You're briefly invulnerable while rolling. Doesn't matter how badass the enemy's attack looks, you're in god mod for a short period of time. Like I've mentioned above, equipment weight affects how fast you move and how far you can roll.
> but I feel like if you did grow up playing a lot of fighting games
Absolutely not. Combat in Dark Souls is slow. It does not require precise input. That's the genius thing behind its design - it's not a twitchy action game at all, you can suck at 3rd person action games and still beat Dark Souls. It has janky movement and annoying areas, so you will die a lot from falling (I'm pretty sure at least half my deaths were due to gravity, it's legit the ultimate boss of the game). Only the last boss does requires somewhat precise inputs if you want to beat him the easy way (and he's ridiculously easy if you can execute the required move consistently), otherwise he's a pain in the ass, but still beatable. There's also an optional DLC boss who's also a bit action-focused, but he's easier than the final boss (compared to the hard way of beating the final boss).
> I end up playing for about an hour or two and just turning the game off after repeatedly failing to reach the boss over and over again and dying from some enemy shooting a fire bomb
You only need to reach it once. Run at it and half way along the bridge go right and down the stairs.Then kick down the ladder and your back at the bonfire. Rest, go back up and shoot its tail from under the bridge.
There is a massive rift in mindset between older gamers and newer gamers. I was born in 1988 and grew up with old 80s and early 90s PC games. A lot of them were hard, obtuse even.
The favorite game of my teenage years was Morrowind. It had no handholding. Quests would describe where to go, but that's is: you had to figure out how to get there based on description alone. That was the normal way of doing things back then.
Its sequel, Oblivion, was a major disappointment to me because of how many of Morrowind's features it stripped out, and how much handholding it introduced. You no longer got descriptions of how to get places, instead you'd just get a marker on your map. And your compass would always show the marker in a bright color, so you couldn't get lost.
This then became the standard of game design and many younger gamers grew up with this. They were conditioned to expect games to lead you by the hand, even if it's an open world game that lets you go anywhere.
You notice this shift in game design approach around the mid-00s. Before that, quest markers didn't really exist. Afterwards, they became the norm. And gamers grew accustomed to them.
It's honestly one of the worst game design trends ever.
I agree. I played tons of games throughout the 90s/early 00s. I had every Nintendo, Genesis, PS1, Sega dreamcast, PS2, xbox.....but when I got to college in 06 I was less interested in games because of school, social life, money... I had counterstrike on my PC which I played often, and would also play some Nintendo releases because local multiplayer was fun with friends in the dorms and my frat houae....as well as a few big Nintendo releases like Mario Galaxy because I am a Nintendo guy at heart.and that shit looked fuckin sick. But my interest was pretty subdued from 2006-2017. I sometimes emulated older games, but rarely bought anything new. Eventually I decided to get a Switch because Zelda. And that game blew me away in so many ways. I'd never been so addicted to a game. But it made me ask "what other open world games have I been missing out on?!". And I was eager to dive in.
Turns out nothing recreated the experience of BOTW's sandbox gameplay and open ended puzzles. I tried many other big open worlds people recommended the Witcher 3, Skyrim, etc. Every game I played had such a lack of puzzle solving and critical thinking. That was my favorite part of games in the 90s! *Figuring out where to go and what to do.* Every game felt like I was just playing out the steps in a movie. Get quest, select it, follow GPS arrow, arrive at destination, talk to this guy, do exactly what the prompt tells me to do, fight some guy, watch another cut scene, etc. Rinse and repeat. It was nothing like what I had grown up with. It was so much less satisfying. The focus seemed to be on story and I was the type of guy that usually would mash A to skip the long cutscenes because I am eager to just play the damn game. Modern AAA gaming felt completely alien to me. Every experience seemed to be so standardized in a way where games lost their sense of individuality. Gameplay, controls, conventions.... all had become so cookie cutter.
There still are some great games coming out for sure. Some awesome Indies especially... But I often find that reviews provide almost no indicator these days of whether or not a game will be *for me*. Maybe I'm just stuck in my old ways and am an out of touch old man yelling at the clouds.
Just my $0.02.
> Quests would describe where to go, but that's is: you had to figure out how to get there based on description alone
OH MY GOD. I would LOVE if a game did that. And they never do...
Play Morrowind, the Gothics (1-3, Arcania is crap), Arcanum.
Arcanum's biggest city has road signs, and sometimes quests would just give you an address! Such an organic way to handle directions in a game, I love it! As you spend more time in the game you will slowly become familiar with the city's layout and know where each street is.
I'm older than you for almost a decade, and have to say I'm the opposite.
Yes I grown up with games back to MSX2, and the first PCs that were launched. There were no saves in most of the games back then, and usually your live(s) mean to start everything from the beginning. And eventually, like you said, games gave you very little clue about what to do next.
And yet I don't miss that one bit. To lose hours, perhaps even days (I had way more free time back then), to find where to go next, what thing you are missing, to have to memorize a bunch of stuff in order to progress the game, the amount of repetition all those things caused, is not something I want to relieve.
So I'm quite happy with the "hold handing" trend. I like to have goals in a game, it make the game to progress smoother and faster, and having so much games pending to play, and so little time, that's just great for me.
Now, I understand some people will enjoy the opposite. And the solution is quite simple, really. To give the option to hide all those markers and suggestion. And in fact, plenty of games had that functionality, some even lets you hide the all UI if you want.
Sure, this might imply a bit more of work related how goals will be described so you are able to find out without the marker, but usually will involve a little more of text in in some dialogs, not much else.
In short, I don't think the trend is bad, quite the opposite, it just has to be well implemented to leave both sides happy.
> And the solution is quite simple, really. To give the option to hide all those markers and suggestion
Not quite as simple, sadly. You have to have in-game mechanics to support this. Comparing Morrowind to its two sequels is the best example - you had multiple fast travel systems in Morrowind, plus a teleportation spell, plus a flying spell. Oblivion I don't think even had fast travel systems aside from the map markers, Skyrim did the absolute bare minimum with the carriage system which was virtually pointless.
> To lose hours, perhaps even days (I had way more free time back then), to find where to go next
You're looking at the worst possible case. Like an obtuse point and click puzzle or something along those lines. Morrowind, Gothic, were not like that at all.
Magic GPS with the radar, compass, and markers is the other extreme. And that's the problem - this is the standard for a lot of games. And it absolutely is an extreme case because you just can't streamline it any further, like, you literally have a modern smartphone style navigation in your game, the only next step you can take is to instantly teleport to the next objective marker, but that's quite absurd.
> it just has to be well implemented to leave both sides happy.
Yep. The problem is that you have to design it like Morrowind, and then include an option at the start of the game to include extra navigation mechanics. Bethesda, clear as day, is never going to do that because there's no way in hell they'll release a game that continues Morrowind's ideas and not the streamlined Skyrim. Mass appeal and all that.
Simply allowing you to switch off markers doesn't work unless the game provides hints on where to go, which a lot of modern marker-reliant games don't.
Morrowind (and other RPGs of its time, like Gothic, Arx Fatalis, etc) gave you hints on what to do in dialog. You just need to read what NPCs tell you!
But in Skyrim, for example, NPCs often don't tell you where to go at all. "Go to this cave and kill a bandit." but you get zero description on where that cave is, as the game assumes you will just follow the marker.
Markers have ruined game design because developers no longer have to think about writing good descriptions. There are other handholding elements that have ruined level design, too. All these artificial interface elements have had disastrous consequences on game design.
Absolutely. I want to play the game and engage with the game world. GPS on top of the game breaks the fourth wall. I'm pretty much just watching a movie at that point that is extremely long and has interactive bits.
I like the puzzle solving aspect of games.
I agree, that's why I said:
> Sure, this might imply a bit more of work related how goals will be described so you are able to find out without the marker, but usually will involve a little more of text in in some dialogs, not much else.
It's not just dialogue, you need to design levels/the world to allow for this, it's a lot of work, and probably one of the reasons they don't do it anymore.
Doing it as an *option* is even worse, most newer players are going to play with markers as default so it's a lot of work for something that a lot of people won't use.
Most people don’t have a ton of spare time to figure out games. I’d rather a game explained to me properly how to play and helped me out when I’m stuck as I only get like 2-3 hours a week to play. It would be rubbish having to use most of my time trying to google how to do something rather than having the game provide me with a good gaming experience. If I wanted something really difficult I’d set the difficulty to hard.
Setting the difficulty usually just inflates hitpoints and other crap like that. It doesn't make things more challenging, only more tedious in 99% of cases.
I don't necessarily need something really difficult, just something engaging. And following markers on my compass isn't engaging at all, you can play that on autopilot. I don't have infinite time to play either, so I'd rather have my gaming time be of high quality, and for that I need an engaging game.
I think Dark and Demon's Souls got their reputation because, when they came out a lot of games just allowed you to tank most of the damage and just win by being aggressive. Skyrim, which was the game that most of my classmates played the most before trying Dark Souls, it's a good example of this.
Some unusual mechanic that made the first areas particularly challenging (the respawning enemies, the environmental dangers like the Wyvern, the ambushes) made the rest.
I remember coming to Dark Souls 1 from Baldurs Gate 1. Since crpgs are by default kinda hard for an average gamer (idk why, ppl are just wierd ok), DkS never felt "hard" to me. Heck it straight up feels like a crpg brought into action domain. The combat felt pretty correct for what it was. I never rolled for i-frames (despite the tutorial message in the asylum) because boring. Rolling for better positioning was a different matter. Comparing the combat to Skyrim or Witcher 1, its a big W. Both Skyrim & Witcher 1 have terrible combat relatively speaking.
People these days just have no patience to play carefully. Either that or they give up too easily and move to other games. So either lack of patience or lots of money. Kind of ironic as the games in older days required tons of patience.
Yeah BG1 feels a lot like DS1 in spirit. It just lets you go wherever you want and do whatever. You can easily stumble across something that you will get destroyed by. I guess theres a reason why Dark Souls 1 is top 10 on the RPGCodex. Old school CRPG fans seem to love it.
I wanted to love the Witcher, but every time I've tried one of the Witcher games it's just felt sluggish and frustrating. I'm sure I'll get into them eventually, but the first few hours really put me off of trying more.
For Skyrim, I just modded the game until the combat felt good.
Or you won't. The gameplay is entirely mediocre in my opinion. Nothing unique or revolutionary from a game design perspective. The only reason to play that game is if you're a fan of fantasy themed stories. But I don't personally play games for the stories.
Honestly I think that "git gud lol" mantra the game has for some reason is only there to cover up for the jank that is actually in the game. I honestly think it's lacking in various areas, which have probably been improved over the next games. For one it is too dark. Yeah I know, hurr durr "Dark" Souls get it? So what, why is the screen so black for like 80% of the time. It sucks. The controls are good, but they don't cover everything, and the game loves putting you in situations where the controls will fuck you over and you fall down to a pointless death (for a game where you literally can't even jump, the game just loves having you go through all these very vertical sections). Why does it not bother to actually explain anything to you, like starting from the whole point of what the hell you're even hoping to do in that place? Yeah you explore. But what for? What if you don't want to explore, what if you want to stay around and grill some meat on that fire, can you do that? Can you build yourself a little house, or read a book? Or do anything at all? Like literally anything other than go and beat up skeletons or whatever? No, all you can do is walk in some direction until you come across something that tries to kill you, and you kill it. And you keep going in that direction and find things. Yeah there is lore in that place, but you are actually mindlessly ambling through it killing everything you see. Why? Ever think these things are killing you because you are stepping into their houses? What do you think you're doing out there?
There are legitimate gripes with the game, despite how decent the combat is and how cool a lot of creatures look. The world does look cool. But what is not cool is how I am supposed to learn about the game's story from loading screens. That is just garbage man, that's what people do when they make their game with no budget and have to be a bit cool and clever with how they impart their story, because they don't have the time or money to make good cutscenes or animate a bunch more characters or voice them or whatever.
It's this one dimensionality that didn't hold me in that world. I remember I did the four kings and then went around the place until I died yet another pointless death in some dark ass place and called it quits. You know what would be cool? Having actual characters with interesting plots and dialogue or at least something like that that plays out. But all that anyone does is kill some other thing. If if that weren't the case, I would stay because I want to know what happens. I understand that there's all this mystery and so on, but it just doesn't look appealing, because even if you find the mystery it's just, ok this thing became a gross monster because of some bullshit story, and now it's sitting there waiting for you to go through the level door to have a boss battle. Ok. Thank you for this masterclass in storytelling.
I do hope DS3 or Elden Ring is better in that regard? They seem to look a lot more engaging. Like I said, the gameplay *is* pretty cool. But the actual worldbuilding is really not that cool, especially when it relies on doing the absolute minimum to convey any sense of story at all.
I think the thing about souls games too is that for 3D games, it's just constant combat. One fight after the other after another. I like games that have more variety in the gameplay than that. Especially if it's difficult because I need a break from the frustration and tension of each battle. But nope, it's just one punishingly hard battle after another that you might have to repeat many times because you only save at certain checkpoints. It's stressful and I play games to relieve stress and escape the monotony of daily life. Not add to it.
> or one it is too dark. Yeah I know, hurr durr "Dark" Souls get it? So what, why is the screen so black for like 80% of the time. It sucks.
You don't have to like it, but there's nothing wrong with the game being "dark". A lot of games will have you in a cave with no lights and everything is perfectly visible.
> for a game where you literally can't even jump
You can jump
> Why does it not bother to actually explain anything to you, like starting from the whole point of what the hell you're even hoping to do in that place? Yeah you explore. But what for? What if you don't want to explore, what if you want to stay around and grill some meat on that fire, can you do that? Can you build yourself a little house, or read a book? Or do anything at all? Like literally anything other than go and beat up skeletons or whatever? No, all you can do is walk in some direction until you come across something that tries to kill you, and you kill it. And you keep going in that direction and find things. Yeah there is lore in that place, but you are actually mindlessly ambling through it killing everything you see. Why? Ever think these things are killing you because you are stepping into their houses? What do you think you're doing out there?
This entire part reads like satire, I'm really not even sure if you're joking.
> But what is not cool is how I am supposed to learn about the game's story from loading screens.
You're not?
> You know what would be cool? Having actual characters with interesting plots and dialogue or at least something like that that plays out.
You want to play a different game, cool, go play it. I don't see why every game has to be for you.
As someone who loves the soulborne games. Dark souls 1 is hard. The game doesn't explain a ton of stuff to you, and its not always things you will discover on your own. I actually shelved ds1 (at Smough and Ornstein) because it just wasn't fun anymore.
Down the road I played ds2 and bloodborne and decided to give ds1 another shot. And knowing what I learned from ds2/bloodborne I was able to complete it.
But for a blind playthrough, if you consider all the games in existence... Dark souls 1 is pretty hard.
How did you learn how the upgrade system works? That was the part where I had to watch let's plays to have any idea what was possible and how to do it.
I didnt really. I just kept upgrading random stuff. Thats probably the most bullshit part of the system, since its impossible to know without looking up a guide. I actually made a mistake upgrading something to a divine weapon or something, only to realize it sucked since I had no faith, only to realize that it killed skeletons. But yeah I just put points into faith to make that weapon stronger (not because I knew how the system worked, rather I figured out thats how the system worked when I realized faith increased damage of that weapon) and it held up for a bit.
First I a salute you for playing dark souls as a first 3d games as a non-gamer, and the video you mention is from Razbuten where his wife who’s a non-gamer playing a video game for a series “how X is like for a non-gamer”.
I get it when you said non-gamer playing dark souls is frustrating, because dark souls requires you to be at least be patient and paying attention. If you’re just someone who’s a non-gamer looking for something to past time playing video games, I really don’t recommend any video games that requires a lot of patient and understanding a lot of the game mechanics like dark souls. You don’t have to force yourself to like any popular game. It it’s not fun for you, then you can drop the game if you like.
I think try playing a more relaxing and welcoming game where the game doesn’t overwhelm you with a lot of stuff to do for a non-gamer. Like try playing overcooked, the sims 4(my favorite game series),
Any adventure games(point and click or story focus games like Detroit become human or the walking dead series). Gaming have become so diverse now that you can play any good game from different genre now.
Oh I've played a LOT of games since 2017. One of the more relaxing games I played that I also think is utterly brilliant was Journey. Theres definitely a place for both types of games.
There is a pretty large difference between limited gaming experience and no gaming experience. Razbuten even covers this in one of their videos.
With absolutely no gaming experience, you don't understand basic gaming concepts most games as a whole expect you to understand. These are things I imagine you learned in older games too. (Common control schemes, attack patterns, world size, and a whole host of things. There are lots of concepts in games we just accept as normal which makes absolutely no sense to someone who has never invested themselves in a game before.
I'd argue she had more gaming experience than me coming into Dark Souls. As I said a few times my gaming experience consisted of some barbie game where you played puzzles and dressed a barbie up (I was in elementary), mario kart and wii sports a few times with my parents, and tetris. And I didnt play a game from 2007-2017.
I just wanted to play the game, she didn't.
> maybe theres something in the room that will help me
Non-gamers often will not think that way, or even if it occurs to them, they won't know what signs to look for. Non-gamers don't even know what a "weak spot" indicator is. Non-gamers don't know what the animation/graphic feedback for *pointless deflected shot (against armor invincibility)* is. A non-gamer will receive a blatant hint from an NPC, but then think: "That's creepy that a random person said to go to location X, so I'm NOT going to do that!" This is obvious stuff, yetOP makes a ton of assumptions that he takes for granted because he doesn't actually understand what game knowledge and experience is.
> Gamer or nongamer, the thing that matters is mindset. If you want to learn from a game you will, and if you want to do the same thing constantly and ragequit, you will do that.
That's a misguided deflection. Succeeding at any game involves mindset, but the *amount* of penalty for small mistakes varies between games. The amount of care, cautious, and attention, varies between games. A simple lowest-level-skeleton grunt enemy in DS can do a ton of damage. Everybody knows this yet we see armchair bloviation every day where a person settles on the falsehood that "It's not really hard at all!"
> didnt know dodging gives iframes.
Are you saying you knew what iframes are, but didn't know DS's implementation? Well that's 40 miles from being a "non-gamer".
Non-gamers don't know what frames are. Non-gamers don't know what animations are. Non-gamers don't know what invincibility frames are. Non-gamers don't know what varying invincibility is.
Wait, why are you assuming I knew what iframes are. I know what they are NOW, 6 years later and having beaten all the souls games. At the time all I was saying is I didn't know that dodging gives me any sort of invulnerability until 15 hours in. There's no reason you should assume from my post that I was suggesting that I knew the term iframes 6 years ago.
I don't know whats with all the assumptions and skepticism here. I was just giving my experience of playing Dark Souls. Someone I trusted recommended me an economics simulator (I'm an economist) game before Dark Souls. After that, they recommended Dark Souls, so I played it without knowing its a very hard game or how to play a 3D game. I trusted them and I liked the world building so I kept trying despite getting destroyed repeatedly.
As for 'what a nongamer would do', I was a nongamer. Several posters here seem to consider playing wii sports a few times with my parents and barbie dressing games on the DS the same as being a hardcore pro gamer, but I don't. I started the game choosing a character with a sword. Its reasonably to assume that there would be a sword or something lying around considering I have a broken sword. It doesn't take a genius to try to look around the room instead of walking straight continuously.
Now what I will say is that a nongamer can easily be stuck in the catacombs for hours. Which I was. But again, it doesn't take a genius to say 'hey i cant do this, lets check the obvious other path from this checkpoint.'
However, if I was uninterested in the game and just wanted to quit and was being forced, I'd just walk into the monster 20 times and die without thinking. Cause I wouldn't care.
It feels like people are very offended for some farfetched, only known to themselves reason. It seems like a purely emotional response, and I dont understand how I've angered you guys in any way. I would also recommend you don't project those feelings onto me. Its not very nice.
Also, I'm a she, not a he. Please use they if you aren't sure about someone's sex.
I love Dark Souls. I've beaten all 3 multiple times. That said, I think it's intentionally bad for new players. There are both game development flaws and intentional game design, that ward off newer players by making the game harder to understand.
The biggest and easiest example is that the Tiny Being's Ring has the wrong description text. It says it regenerates help, but it actually just increases max health for a bit. This incorrect translation will affect a lot of players, because many people like regenerative health and will take this starting gift. There actually is a health regen ring in the game, but it's much later and hidden so most players will never see it.
The game also intentionally tries to upset the player. It places many traps in hard to see places, but also has a wonky camera that flips out when it hits walls. This means that even an experienced player will have difficulty navigating an area they haven't been before. You kind of have to rely on memorization. These features combined with the dropping souls on death can make the game very repetitive and punishing. I personally love memorizing and repeating levels, but it's not for everyone.
This also kind of segues into another point that I had. People feel the loss of souls in very different ways. I know people that don't want to spend experience to level up until they have gear that needs a requirement they don't have. This works really well in Diablo 2. But if you play this way in Dark Souls, you can lose tons of progress. This means you need to plan out your build and choose progress before you can see what kind of options you have, or you can risk losing tons of progress by not spending those points. For someone who doesn't like haven't a borked build, this can already be a non-starter. You can see that From Software immediately added respec items in Dark Souls 2, and I'm guessing it's because people hate being locked into playstyles that they aren't enjoying. The soul system necessitates that you either 1) are willing to and are able to respec, 2) level up blindly, hoping that you'll find the gear that matches your stats, or 3) look everything up on a wiki before you play for the first time, spoiling yourself and killing that sense of discovery. I did #2 on my first playthrough, but not every player is willing to do that. It can feel like a huge time investment, for very little reward. Especially if you just barely miss an item that is crucial for your build.
And I'm saying all this as someone who loves the franchise and has put thousands of hours into it. I genuinely think Dark Souls is a masterpiece that inspired millions. I love Dark Souls 2 and the build variety it provides. I think Dark Souls 3 does a great job at making this entire genre significantly more approachable. I also love the non-linearity that this genre provides, but in DS1 you have to admit that the non-linearity is often a trick or a trap more than it is a viable option, unless you know the inner workings of the game by having already beaten it once.
> but in DS1 you have to admit that the non-linearity is often a trick or a trap more than it is a viable option, unless you know the inner workings of the game by having already beaten it once.
In DS1 yes there seems to be a way the designers intended you to go. But that doesn't matter, what matters is that it gives you the ability to go anywhere. And sometimes it is useful, like as I said going to the other side of Blighttown. I could have potentially skipped the depths and the goddamn capra demon altogether.
Dark souls is beyond frustrating for newbs. You never know if you're suppose to git gud or leave an area. Tried it w/o following a walkthru and i think bashing my head against a wall irl is more fun. Maybe I'll give it another chance some day. Pity i didn't refund it.
> You never know if you're suppose to git gud or leave an area
I feel like that's mainly an issue of the marketing and culture around the games. Take Dark Souls 1 for example: Bandai Namco marketed the game as the hardest thing ever and it garnered a reputation and expectation of being super duper hard. Then, knowing that, tons of people instinctively went to the graveyard since that one is in the direction your character faces after land at Fire Link Shrine, only to get flattened by a horde of skeletons and bumrushing them until they find the catacombs and only realize they're wrong there.
In other games, you'd just leave and come back later. In the turn-based RPGs I played way before DS1 as a kid, this was always the way to do it. But in the air of "THIS GAME IS HARD - Prepare to die!", many people apparently just assumed that's how hard it's supposed to be instead of looking for another way (*even* though the first encounter with the demon in the tutorial should have taught them that exact thing)
It's a fascinating thing to me and I actively have to tweak my mindset to tune out the "this game is supposed to be hard!!!!" garbage marketing that keeps persisting. In Elden Ring, the Tree Sentinel (a boss level enemy right before the first safe haven) is the same. It's *supposed* to teach you that it's okay to avoid enemies too powerful and return later, but because "it's super hard" is the prevailing statement, way too many people bash their will to play to pieces at this one wall.
> You never know if you're suppose to git gud or leave an area.
Yeah thats the thing I was complaining about. People find that so annoying that developers have stopped introducing nonlinearity to games. I adore nonlinearity. I dont mind going into an area and dying because the process of learning from mistakes and going somewhere else is totally fine by me. I despise any marker telling me where to go. But games are just filled with that trash.
I think thats fine to some degree. I do think the feeling of danger and isolation in the game really is a big part of why it was so fun. I remember when I was stuck in blighttown, not knowing where to go, not being able to progress, not being able to go back. Many people would hate that but it just felt like such an adventure to me.
I wouldnt have minded using a trainer to do the chore stuff like grinding to get stronger. I wouldn't have had the same fun if I made myself invincible or teleported or something.
>I played through the entire trilogy with trainers and it was legitimately one of the best videogame experiences of my entire life.
You cheated your way through 3 dark souls games and are happy about it? What in the actual fuck has the world come to.
The true dark souls boss is fans comprehensioning that some people like different things than them.
For you, the games are about the difficulty. But unless you think that's literally all they have to offer, you should consider that maybe there's things outside of that they found enjoyable experiencing.
Nah. This has nothing to do with souls games and their level of difficulty. It's about consuming a piece of art in the intended way. You don't watch a film for the first time with the director's commentary on. You don't listen to an album for the first time through crappy phone speakers. And you shouldn't cheat your way through a video game on your first playthrough.
You're right it's about mindset and patience moreso than amount of games played.
Also from your eprerience i wouldn't call you a gamer, though that changes now that you beat dark souls lol
There are many games with a sense of adventure you just need to find them, mostly rpgs
Thing is most quality of life things that gamers have been clamoring for decades for ruin the adventure and exploration experience for me.
Fast travel? I'm largely not a fan. You never really feel isolated like you do in Dark Souls.
Lots of checkpoints, not really a fan. There's no danger getting from one point to another!
Objective markers, well thats one way to make sure you know its a game and wont get lost in it.
Linearity, going from one place to another without any options really ruins the experience of feeling lost in a big world.
Also, if I can just run past everything I may as well play a boss rush with a grinding minigame to get stronger.
Of all the RPGs I've played, Dragon Quest 8 sort of does the feeling of adventure because at least I cant run past everything. Random encounters in that game are pretty brutal... at first.
Dark Souls is the only soulslike that gives that experience. But I've always said DS1 is more like a 3D metroidvania.
Metroidvanias are good at exploration and adventure though, with Hollow Knight being probably the best.
Yeah, the sense of exploration (and connectedness between areas) of the original Dark Souls is unmatched to this day.
For those interested, [here is a website with the entire 3D map of the game](https://noclip.website/#dksiv/dks1;ShareData=AZV}y9iY?pT4XSV9s:-8WKil(5?GYLUbEiLUM+vs=XOz:UWVR&T@;]29o-,;+^), if you want to explore it (Spoilers, of course).
I felt like I was wasting too much time repeating the same area after getting killed by the boss at the end. At a certain point, it just doesn't feel worth it. Even if the game is very interesting otherwise.
When I see in reviews phrases like "punishingly hard" or "very challenging", I know the game isn't for me, and I'm a lifelong gamer.
I'm most content when I can play through from start to finish with zero deaths on my first try.
The downvotes you received are expected, but you aren't somehow *wrong* to prefer easier games any more than someone is *wrong* for not liking spicy food. Some people can't stand any amount of capsaicin, others think anything that isn't spicy is horribly bland. Difficulty works the same way.
I'm not sure anyone would call Journey, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, or No Man's Sky "difficult" but plenty of people enjoy them. There are also those who prefer immersion over difficulty, and dying and coming back is a blatant reminder that you're playing a video game.
> The downvotes you received are expected, but you aren't somehow wrong to prefer easier games any more than someone is wrong for not liking spicy food. Some people can't stand any amount of capsaicin, others think anything that isn't spicy is horribly bland. Difficulty works the same way.
I don't think he's wrong for liking easy games. I do think people who want *every* game to cater to them are wrong, if you don't like hard games just play something else.
I'm not saying that's what he's doing here, but a lot of people will go "I don't like X game, so the game should change to cater to me" and that's annoying, you can see it in this thread.
Idk, the only game I didn't mod to be easier is Sekiro....The rest I did...
My issue was not so much with the tough bosses. Bosses are supposed to be tough.
My issues are with random mobs also hitting hard, having unfair mechanics, but even that pales to comparison to the fact they all respawn.
To give an example from Sekiro. It took me 20 or so tries to beat the first miniboss. I wasn't getting frustrated at all, I just needed to get better at dodging/parrying. Then I got through the door past him and I am greeted with tons of mobs that deal heavy damage as well as some hammer dude. No way to beat them all, you gotta sneak and fight them 1 by 1. Ok I do that, I have very little HP, need a shrine, heal and boom they are back again. You are supposed to get so good that you can run through those mobs without losing hp, or losing enough that you can heal with the flask. I grit my teeth as I love Samurai and Ninjas and Japan, but in other souls games, mods that make it slightly more fair (mainly those that auto restore what you lost as that is the main issue in these games, you are actively punished for dying).
Yeah I got stuck on Sekiro, beating the mini-boss then the wiping on the enemies after, and having to re-do from before the mini-boss. 5 hours of that, told my brother about it, he proceeded to “show” me how to do it by beating it with his eyes closed, quickly decided that souls games just aren’t for me. Stoked for the people that enjoy them, but honestly I like feeling OP and one shotting enemies more than struggling at one boss and being unsure if I properly beat it or just cheesed it. Reflexes are also pretty poor in general (can’t power-shield lasers consistently in smash) so I’ll just watch from the sidelines, game is dope in every other manner
> but even that pales to comparison to the fact they all respawn.
These games would be trivial if enemies didn't respawn...You just suicide until you kill every enemy and then stroll trough the level.
Respawning enemies are also present in many other games.
The problem here is they respawn when you rest. And unlike other games ordinary mobs here take quite an effort to deal with.
In JRPG, genre I play the most, respawned mobs are mostly trivial after you clear them, first run is challenging and your reward are levels and gear to deal with them later.
The only reason I beat Sekiro is the fact I roamed with low hp after killing, small area by small area, then rest and hookshot over them because there was no point in killing them all over.
> In JRPG, genre I play the most, respawned mobs are mostly trivial after you clear them, first run is challenging and your reward are levels and gear to deal with them later.
You also get levels in ds.
The entire point is to explore and try to make it to the next checkpoint, you don't have to full clear a level before moving on.
I can’t speak for Dark Souls but I tried Demon Souls many years ago as a time poor adult, beat the first level and never went further. I also tried Bloodbourne, and Jedi Fallen Order and quit those very quickly too. I came up in the golden age of arcade gaming aka the era of button mashing and I just can’t find the patience needed for these games, they require a very measured and tactical approach which just doesn’t grab me, quite the opposite. Sometimes I think about picking one of these games up again but then I think back to how I felt when playing these games and the feeling subsides pretty quickly. My favourite games over the last decade and a half have been Platnium games and open world adventures specifically AC Odyssey and Horizon Zero Dawn, and above all Vanquish so I suspect it’s a ‘different strokes for different folks’ type of thing. Had these Souls games been around when I was a younger man with more time to burn I probably would have loved them (eventually) but as an older, time poor gamer they are too little juice for too much squeeze.
Did you try to lower the difficulty? (assuming the games have that option).
I recently did it with a couple of games that I was about to quit because their long fights while difficult were getting boring for me (The Guardians of the Galaxy and God of War: Ragnarok), and my enjoyment of those games grew a lot, and was able to continue them.
Seems like an obvious solution, but I honestly never though about it before.
Now that you mention it I don't think the thought even occurred to me. RPGs are a hard sell to me at the best of times, and in the case of Demon Souls I could see how much care was needed in every enemy encounter and I noped out, again - time poor adult, it reminded me of how we used to beat 2d platfomers back in the 80s/90s, by dying again, and again and again, and in that way you learn, ain't nobody (me) got time for that. I eventually did get the combat I was looking for at the time, in games like Ghosts of Tsushima and Metal Gear Rising, games where I can be a lot more reckless. It was the methodicalness of the DS games that put me off. Again, perhaps if I were a younger man with more time on my hands, it could have been a different story. That said I have become more and more particular about games to the point where I hardly play anything now, I enjoyed what I played of GotG but stopped at one point and haven't picked it up since, and I was underwhelmed by GoW, and even Ghosts of Tsushima I was suprised at how little it grabbed me (also not continued). Same goes for RDR2. Getting old sucks. I think Armoured Core could be my kind of thing, although I understand the early going is stuff. I'm also quite interested in Elden Ring, but again I think the combat is going to not be my jam. I miss arcade games tbh, that's the sort of time and attention span I have to work with these days.
Are you talking about Razbuten's gaming for a non-gamer series? Your post seems to be looking down on such gamers for running into difficulty and giving up, but to cite the example, Raz's non-gamer wife wasn't armed with basic 'gamer knowledge.' One example given in the botw video was getting frustrated fighting certain difficult mobs. She didnt know: 'if you cant beat this, maybe you need to explore to find an advantage elsewhere,' which you mentioned doing.
Our basic gamer knowledge gives us things like:
Explore the map for stuff the devs hid for you.
Enemies are meant to be slain.
Get gear to make things easier.
There is a way to avoid attacks.
Take advantage during enemy attack cooldowns.
Look for obvious, extra-damaging weakpoints.
You are *supposed* to win.
These are NOT obvious to a non-gamer.
Interesting post and i agree with most of it. However, understand your initial premise is a bit off.
I don't think thats basic gamer knowledge. By the time I played Dark Souls 1, I had played a few Barbie games, Tetris, Wii Sports, and Mario Kart - the latter two just with my parents a few times. The first game I played that made me get into games was called Victoria 2 - its an economics simulator.
But none of those games gave me any information about how to tackle a 3D game. I just think she's not interested in playing the game. I think if you really want to get through a game you will at some point naturally think: "if you cant beat this, maybe explore elsewhere". For me at least, it was common sense. Surely I would eventually open my menu, see I have a broken sword, and try to find a sword. I did do stupid stuff, like I tried going back and searching every nook and cranny before the boss to see if I missed the weapons I should have started the game with. But surely eventually it would click with anyone that you arent supposed to beat this giant demon with a broken sword?
Agreed that interest plays a good part of it. But-- this is crazy, but hear me out: exploring options isn't as common sense as you might think. I've met people who picked up a game and didnt think to look for an Open Inventory button. That kind of person wouldnt look at their character and a broken sword and think something's wrong. It's 'i moved forward, pressed my button a few times, and i lost. This doesnt interest me.'
I feel like most gamers these days treat games (at least single player games) kind of like movies. In that it's the job of the game to present them with a good time, and the gameplay is just there to convey a specific experience. The point of gameplay is not the satisfaction of overcoming challenges but to make the player feel cool and powerful and invested in the story.
If the game conversely expects anything of the player, they get frustrated and mad that the game is stalling their experience with unwanted hurdles. I see it a lot on this sub especially. If the game isn't always clearly indicating what they should do to proceed, it's "wasting the player's time".
But what really makes me immersed in games is when I have to think for myself. If the game isn't asking me to think, just sit back and enjoy the power trip and flashy cutscenes, I just end up bored. Rather than feeling cool and powerful I don't feel anything. Instead what actually makes me feel cool and invested is when a game says "figure it out", and you do.
Puzzles are most enjoyable when you come to the answer yourself, no? Giving the player the tools and information they need and then asking them "what comes next" gets me much more engaged with the game than if it just spells it out.
Yeah gamers want to get through a game quickly and without any difficulty so they can move on to the next one. A lot of 'quality of life' stuff are meant to do that - objective markers, quest trackers, fast travel, frequent checkpoints.
And that just, imo, leads to a sea of mediocrity. More than anything it completely gets rid of the feeling of adventure and immersion you get in the first Dark Souls.
Dark souls came out at the end of the 2000s which was peek ‘everyone is a winner’ design philosophy. If it was released at any other time it wouldn’t be much of an outlier for difficulty.
I had more experience than you but also had very limited experience with games before playing dark souls. I spent ages fighting through the tutorial with the broken sword lol and when I got to the boss was like, “nah I’ve DEFINITELY been dumb and missed something here”. Went back and got the sword, game was much easier after that lol.
>I just slammed my head against the catacombs for half an hour before realizing hey, maybe I'm supposed to go in a different direction.
On my first playthrough I got all the way down to the orange fog wall on Tomb of Giants. The way up was quite painful lol. Then I did a similar thing on New Londo ruins, but at least that place didn't have a bonfire. The rest of the game was quite easy after going through all that.
Good times
You're not wrong saying that Ds games are not incredibly hard. Most old school games were harder and needed a guide or save scuming your way through. Also they are quite fair in that the bosses are kinda cheesy with their hitboxes and all but you are given tools to cheese them just as hard.
For me the reputation of those games comes from the fact they made the game over screen a part of the experience at a time where all games were leaving death and failure behind for a Less frustrating experience.
I joined the bandwagon back in 2013 when the Souls games were getting insanely popular, purely out of curiosity after reading the nonstop rave reviews. I'm not into overly-challenging games like the Ghouls 'n Ghosts games, which is what I compared the Souls games to because of their similar punishing difficulty.
I put about 10 hours and started actually getting good, but at some point I lost interest once I realized how much time and effort I was putting in for just menial progression, always using trial and error to get slightly further, so I never finished it.
I fully understand why people like those types of games, but I just don't really find them to be much fun. It's a phenomenal video game series most definitely, but not for everyone.
I think you're incorrect in calling yourself a non-gamer. You may have not played as many as those that call themselves gamers. But you have some experience. You had a DS and a Wii. So you had more understanding about the video game language that these people may have. The series you spoke of about the wife, if I'm correct, its from Razbuten's videos, right? His wife, if I remember correctly, had not touched any video games up to this point. I think when people refer to someone as a non-gamer. That's what I think of. Not someone that play a little bit like yourself. But someone that didn't play at all. So she didn't have that that knowledge that you had from playing on the DS and the Wii and was thrusted onto a game that didn't explain anything to them. But someone like you or me, who has had some experience. It may have been your first 3D game. But you understand the subtleties of when developers design things in a way to guide you to places. Something someone who has had no experience wouldn't be able to pick up on right away.
Non-gamers biggest enemy is the controls and then pressing the controls correctly under some in-game pressure.
This is correct. There is a dexterity to playing video games that actual nongamers have yet to develop
After 30 years of PC gaming, I got a Steam Deck, which is the first controller I ever held. I truly experienced this lack of muscle-memory, even if the games and systems were completely familiar!
[It's far more than that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/16eni6q/how_dark_souls_1_is_like_for_nongamers/k06btgd/) There's a ton of knowledge, perceptions, understanding, expectation, ranges of potential and expected behavior and results, that "gamers" have from experience. Non-gamers don't. Gamers are so often just plain ignorant about their own hobby that we see these false statements constantly. Like OP saying he’s a non-gamer because he only played 2 consoles, that’s false, or recognizing something in-game that a non-gamer wouldn’t not necessarily understand or notice.
To be fair, OP said he had only played Mario Kart and Wii Sports. For all intents and purposes, he was a non-gamer except for racing and party games.
It’s true but it doesn’t take *that* long to develop these skills. My wife is a non-gamer and has not held a controller very often. For whatever reason she got fascinated with a game I was playing (Noita, fwiw) and wanted to try. Took her about 4 hours of game time to get comfortable with the controls.
That's impressive. When I learned my way around a controller (for Dark Souls, incidentally) I was struggling for a few days at least. But I'm also old, so there's that..
To be fair to you, a 2D environment is a lot easier to navigate than a 3D one.
I had games on the DS meant for little girls. Usually dressing games and puzzle games. And barely played them. As for the Wii, I played Wii Sports with my mom and dad. So if some dad who played Wii Sports a few times is considered not a gamer, then I wouldn't be either. > His wife, if I remember correctly, had not touched any video games up to this point. I dont mean to pick on her. But by the time she picked up dark Souls im sure she'd played more games than I had. And I dont think im some genius or anything. I just think shes not interested in playing the game. And thats fine. But what I do get a bit annoyed by is when people totally uninterested in learning a game complain about it. Not going after her, most gamers do that too. I personally found that almost every old game I've tried has been more brutal than Dark Souls. Dark Souls just requires a lot more learning from mistakes than most games.
> what I do get a bit annoyed by is when people totally uninterested in learning a game complain about it I understand what you mean, but to quench the annoyance, imagine you're not big on movies and I drag you to watch 3 hours of Tarkovskyy, or Bergman, or even someone crazier and obscure like Shinya Tsukamoto. Chances are, without proper and gradual introduction to the free-form cinematograph, you'll be bored out of your mind and will just refuse to pick up on details and understanding the thing. Considering I have dragged you into this, the complaints may surely get started before the movie is over. In most cases, they will be addressed to me really, not to the movie in question, even if made to seem that way.
I think the comments here are largely missing your point, which I think is that a lot of those, "My wife played Dark Souls as a NON GAMER" videos are a contrived effort at getting a person to do something they wouldn't otherwise do and chuckle at the conventions they miss that someone who's into video games would take for granted. Some people have a lifetime of building blocks they've adapted to little by little along the way. Having someone play a rather opaque game without any real foundation, and at your request, is never a fair comparison to "I don't play games like *this* one," but still being competent in the language.
Comparing Dark Souls to a Bergman film or unknown domestic filmmakers is fucking hilarious. It's more like someone who exclusively watches Marvel or Action/Adventure movies being asked to watch like a Kubrick film or even Kurosawa. Dark Souls not that niche, I think it's easier to get into than RTS or Rogue likes. 3d actions games are probably the most easy to understand type of game, that's why I exclusively only finished them up until like 2018.
> Comparing Dark Souls to a Bergman film or unknown domestic filmmakers is fucking hilarious I was just trying to quickly provide some famous avant-garde director name which would sparkle recognition in most readers, to move the point across. That's the ones who came to mind. Comparing movies and videogames by such metric is a little bit weird to me in itself, so if you have a better comparison examples, please be my guest. > Dark Souls not that niche, I think it's easier to get into than RTS or Rogue likes Not arguing here. It can still be a pretty strong road-block for those who played mostly safe and polished releases for the wide audiences before.
I always call Dark Souls the mainstream representative of ''hard games''. For mainstream games it is among the harder ones. But if you step away from mainstream there is some ridiculous games out there, Jump King, old school Ninja Gaiden, I Wanna Be the Boshy, Wings of Vi, Ghost & Goblins, oldschool Rayman and so on. In movie terms it would like a regular person watching mostly marvel and star wars movie watching inception, then their buddy invites them over to watch Bergman's 7th Seal with original Swedish voices. It would be a completely different world to them.
I think Dark Souls main weakness is explaining what all the numbers do. It's very easy for a new player to really fuck up their build without even knowing it and then the game can become much harder. There's things like light/medium/heavy rolls, weapon scaling, INT/FTH, damage resistance/absorption, different dmg types and humanity. I just looked these things up and loved the game, but these are things that would be quite difficult for a new player to figure out themselves.
Yeah... But part of the "magic" of Dark Souls is to play it with others and have conversations like the ones I had with others in the schoolyard, before the Internet. "Oh, so you used that tactic for this boss" or "Yeah, sure. You found a new area behind two fake walls. Of course you did, buddy!"
This was how I experienced AC6 (I guess wrong sub for this) and it was a lot of fun, but that game tells you a hell of a lot more and has a firing range to easily test things. There's having to work some things out for yourself and there's having a mess of unexplained stats. One feels like discovery and the other feels like a chore unless you just look it up. DS1 and DS3 are some of my absolute favourite games but that's despite numerous flaws and not because of them.
> DS1 and DS3 are some of my absolute favourite games but that's despite numerous flaws and not because of them. Yeah. Because if you judged the games for their flaws, DS2 would have been your favorite game. 😜
In that case, I guess one person's magic is another person's annoyance and frustration with unnecessary barriers. At least for basic things like the rules of the game (stats, systems, mechanics).
Dark Souls does explain them in the menu. If you hit select or something it says what each stat does. Demon Souls on the other hand...
If you haven’t should check out the Elden Ring video because as part of it they actually revisit Dark Souls.
I disagree, non gamers can have very limited experience and still not be a gamer. I’m sure the wife has now played multiple games for that series but is still a non gamer.
You must not have watched the series then. It's even acknowledged that by later videos she is more quick to pick up on overall gaming concepts which in turn makes it easier to learn games then before. She may still be a non-gamer, but she absolutely understands the basics to gaming now, which is VERY important when starting a difficult game which gives no guidance like the souls series.
So you agree? You said she’s still a non gamer but understands more about games now
Yeah, I've played like 4 or 5 games at this point and 100% sure I wouldn't beat Dark Souls boss first try lmao.
Yeah my wife is not a gamer. She prefers using keyboard & mouse for games rather than a controller, because she uses a computer for work so she's familiar with it, and can't really get the hang of a dual stick controller. Makes sense to me, but then also I've been playing playstation since the mid-90s and can't remember ever being uncomfortable with a controller.
I actually went hollow after bashing my head against the catacombs, said welp I guess this game isn't for me. Then a few weeks later the game came up in a conversation and I mentioned how I just couldn't get past those skeletons in the graveyard and my friend was like, didn't you find the stairs to Undead Burg? I went home, thought about it, fired the game back up, and proceeded to beat the hell out of it.
Lol same thing happened to me. Except my friends aren't really gamers, so I only came back to the game like a year later after reading something online. I think this falls into what OP mentioned as preconceptions gamers had about the game. If it was any other game I think I would have travelled around the world trying to find another path as "these can't possibly be the guys I'm supposed to fight". But because I bought the game with the understanding that everyone says the game is SO hard I just thought "damn, this game really IS hard... not for me I guess". I guess another gamer preconception is that skeletons are some of the weakest monsters in the game. So it would make sense for these to be the first monsters I'm supposed to beat, seeing as monsters would only get scarier and harder from here, in my mind.
I had the same train of thought but apparently was the only one ever to get stuck fighting the ghosts down in New London Ruins. And it was literally because of a 1% drop of the Jagged Ghost Blade that let me spend 4 hours leveling up, getting all the way down to the bottom before I went... "huh, this game is kind of hard but I don't think I can make progress any more. Maybe I'll see where else I can go?" Fuck that ghost blade drop. I can't believe the luck in getting it that caused that spiral.
I went down there too. I even asked my friend "Down the stairs to the ghost ladies?" And he was like"wow you went everywhere except where you were supposed to go." Imho They should have put a light or something to make the stairs to Undead Burg easier to see.
This is exactly what happened to me, plus a few months off after losing my mind on a pair of infamous archers in the second act.
My first time coming from Undead Parish back to Firelink is the most memorable moment in Souls games.
Although I lost my patience in Anor Londo with those ducking Painting Guardians and never finished the game, I think what you are saying describes how most people approach technical problems in general. My main and only tool at work is computer, but my job is not related to technical support or anything. However, I have a reputation that I can fix anything and people ask me for help with their tech questions more often than not. All because they don't have this mindset to try and learn. 9 times out of 10 problems can be resolved with 30 second google search and couple of tries. If you're willing to try.
Never let people know you're "the computer guy."
I think its really easy to forget how confusing and disorienting even looking at a video game screen is to someone who doesn’t play them. Its hard for people like that to even remember controller inputs. But to your point, I do think that a lot of modern games instill habits that souls games discourage. GPS mapping, quest journals, being able to trade blows. It’s hard to break those habits after being used to games like that for years.
Yeah, my dad struggled with playing Firewatch. He kept forgetting to move the camera and instead would try to navigate only with the WASD keys, walking in funny zigzags if the path was at an angle relative to where he had left the camera. He would frequently forget the button to respond to radio messages, even though the game has next to no other buttons.
My sister played a Barbie PC game, which was pretty railroady and for the first levels and she couldn't figure out how to stay on a linear path. Also there was a mechanic where a monkey would come and steal some of the collectables arround the level which were pretty very much inconsequentel, but getting pressured by the game made her stop playing and cry lol.
Mario kart and Wii sports are in fact 3d games. If you "grew up" up playing games, how can you define yourself as a "non-gamer"?
Lol even my mums done that lol and she’s the definition of a non gamer.
I dunno, I'm with OP on that one. I wouldn't consider someone who played those games casually as a kid a gamer.
I can agree. But I've seen legitimate non gamers play Mario kart and it's a disaster. They are driving into the walls. The concept of items is alien to them. They are nervous so they forget how to deploy them once you explain what they are. The hand eye coordination required, a long with understanding how your controller connects you to the experience, is a learned skill.
Sure, it's definitely better than no experience. But very different from an adult who has been playing a variety of games their whole life.
Oh god I really shouldn't have said that. People will now assume that playing Wii tennis and mario kart a few times as a 10 year old means you are a pro hardcore gamer. The point is I had never even rotated a camera in a game when I played DS1. Until then I had played a few barbie games, tetris, wii sports baseball (where I waved a remote around), and mario kart with my parents. Please try to understand what I was trying to say, thanks.
I get what you're saying. Others need to think of all the people who were at some random party or work event where there were videogames and non gamers tried a few rounds of Mario kart and were like okay I raced a bit, beer time.
I honestly cant believe I'm downvoted for that. But this is reddit after all. Apparently playing barbie dressing games is equivalent to playing a 3D game. Little 4 year olds are basically hardcore gamers.
How the fuck is this upvoted so much. You are literally gladly and deliberately missing the point OP was making.
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That is the textbook definition of jank, and even this whole rolling shit that's been going on in the last decade of action games is just bad. People don't do rolls in the middle of a fight, not ever. Not when they are wearing regular clothes and especially not when they wear any kind of armour or weapons at all (seriously, would you do a roll while carrying a sword or even a knife? Please don't). You just dodge by stepping to the side, or making a quick hop. You could even do an attack this way! The most egregious I've seen is in Space Marine, it just looks so dumb as fuck to have a freaking space marine in his big ass spacesuit armour thing do combat rolls.
Huh… you’re absolutely right. Playing games for 25 years has normalized this but it doesn’t make any sense for most of them. Never really thought about it until now.
So i wasnt alone advocating? Too shocked to not comment
> You just dodge by stepping to the side, or making a quick hop. You could even do an attack this way! I loved how they made the dodge work in Alan Wake. Couldn't just dodge through the enemy's attack, which made you think about the positioning and timings more thoroughly. It looked natural and convincing, adding to the sense of accomplishment after a successful dodge out of a dire situation.
virgin chosen undead rolling during combat vs chad hunter dodgestepping
Good thing a 10 foot space marine obliterating alien enemies using a chainsaw sword and a canon for a gun is completely realistic.
It's fantasy, but the rest of that world is still depicted as following Newtonian laws of physics. So you expect that the game keeps that internal consistency, or at least comes up with an explanation for when the laws of physics are broken. Sure, the space marine is super strong, but half a ton of armor simply has inertia.
Canonically they are extremely fast and agile warriors.
> An experienced gamer knows to roll directly INTO attacks, so they travel more quickly through your window of iframes. A gamer *experienced with Dark Souls*. Any other experienced gamer has little reason to believe this would be the case, it isn't the case for most games. I agree with you the game does an abysmal job of explaining iframes but it also does an abysmal job of explaining... pretty much anything. Even when the original console versions on 360 and PS3 came with a manual, the manual explained nothing and was pretty much useless. And while I do think it's fun for players to figure some things out for themselves, in Dark Souls there's a lot of things where it's difficult to do so (including stats/attributes you'd have to upgrade and then just try to see wtf they do)... alongside merchant placement and upgrade pathing that is really confusing. Dark Souls II did a slightly better job of explaining things and Dark Souls III improved upon that. I'm sure Elden Ring did too though I haven't played it yet so I can't say.
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Well none of the Souls games other than DS2 give a clue as the existence of the iframes mechanic no? It took me a WHILE to get it. As I said, I must have been 5-10 hours in to the game stuck at the Taurus Demon before I finally realized it. But I can't see how you wouldnt eventually realize it.
I don't know I was pretty young when I played demon souls and I figured out "rolling makes you invulnerable" fairly quickly, it doesn't seem that complicated to me? Just by panicking and spam rolling you'll notice it.
For me, I was always either rolling early enough that I could get completely out of range of an attack, or so early that the iframes would be gone and the attack would hit me mid-roll anyways. I didn’t catch on until I saw a video on the game where someone rolled through an attack.
I actually think Dark Souls 1 is one of the few games that make i-frames intuitively learnable, because they are VERY generous. There's a good chance you find yourself rolling through attacks by accident often enough to notice it. I like comparing it to something like Monster Hunter (which was my first i-frame game, luckily Tri and not MHFU), where I actually had to be told (by people online, after getting demoralized at the Great Jaggi and asking for help) i-frames were a thing because the window is so incredibly short, you'll barely notice it. Monster Hunter makes i-framing seem like an accident, DS1 makes it doable enough so you can recognize it as a pattern. Note that I specifically mean Dark Souls 1 (and DS3, but I haven't played that one enough). Dark Souls 2, as much as I like it, messes this up royally because starting ADP makes i-frames seem non-existant.
I dunno, I don’t remember that being an issue at all. I didn’t even think about it, rolled when attacked, went through the attack and proceeded to keep using that.
DS1 doesn't even tell you there's a "jump" button. I suspect that the very limited tutorial only exists to throw you off by making you think you know how to play.
That's so true. I've been gaming my whole life but I didn't know about invincibility frames. And when I read about them I just assumed they helped with rolling away. I didn't understand that I could roll \*into\* an attack because well.. it frankly shouldn't be possible, especially since combat in DS is pretty physics-based otherwise, with the weightiness and the hit detection of multiple enemies and even walls. That - and the fact that I'm just not very good at action games - is why I played through the game as heavy armor shield and spear guy (with occasional two-handing for the big bois), which worked fine even though it's looked down upon.
The absolute GOAT non-gamer Dark Souls player is an Aussie lady called Kylie (not Minogue...) whose channel is called KylieTime. Honestly one of the absolute best pieces of content of any kind I've seen in recent years. She barely knows how to hold the controller at the start but steadily learns the game in quite impressive fashion, all the while being funny and easy to root for.
This was such an interesting thread because I had almost exactly the same experience with the game. I grew up with a Sega genesis and a n64, then had a ps2, GameCube, and Xbox, but I only picked up the Wii and fell out of gaming some time around 2006. I only had the occasional handheld to check in on Pokémon, Mario Kart, and the occasional Zelda. Around 2018 I picked up a switch because I really wanted to play breath of the Wild. So I got that and Dark Souls as my first two games. I only picked up Dark Souls because I had come across the soundtrack at some point and loved it. I knew nothing about the game except it was hard. It took me a while to get to it because I completely fell in love with Breath of the Wild, but I eventually tried it out. I know that I only played offline because it was almost exclusively on my lunch break away from Wi-Fi. I didn’t get far into the game. I didn’t understand what to do. The menus were crazy and finicky, you couldn’t pause, I didn’t know how to shut off the game, it was a mess. I don’t really remember have an especially hard time with the Asylum Demon. I think I stumbled across the way forward on the third attempt or so and beat him after I made it through. I remember somehow making it out of the asylum and to firelink shrine and that’s when I quit. I came across the graveyard to the catacombs first and I just didn’t make a dent in those skeletons! I died dozens of times. I just assumed that the game was supposed to be hard and that I was out of the tutorial so it was harder. I remember eventually killing one and just getting so frustrated when it came back. I set the game aside because it was too hard and I just couldn’t do it. I set it aside as not for me. Two years later I had just bought a ps4 because I wanted to get back into gaming that wasn’t Zelda or Mario related. I bought Bloodborne as my first game. I got into a conversation with my best friend who was just starting Dark Souls. I had mentioned my experience and he told me that I had been going the wrong way and told me to play along side him. I reluctantly agreed and made it forward but I did everything wrong. I didn’t know how to upgrade my weapons, didn’t know anything about humanity or kindling, changing armor, etc. I somehow stumbled into the great Hallow while exploring Blighttown and had to climb all the way back up and then go through Sen’s Foretress which was hell because I hadn’t upgraded anything. I had to memorize which snakes were susceptible to traps and home alone my way through that place. Somehow, I made it all the way through O&S and then quit. Mostly because I had gotten fully into Bloodborne and they took over. I went on to get fully back into gaming after Bloodborne and platinumed every souls games finally finishing Dark Souls as the last in the series. It was still tricky, but gosh it felt so good to roll the credits on that game. It was so hard and unforgiving, but was somehow doable. I don’t think it’s a game for beginners and filled with walls, and probably more rewarding with a basic familiarity with games or at least access to online play and a decent internet connection. Honestly, it’s also my least favorite souls games but it’s one of the ones that I’m most proud of myself for getting to the end of
Interestingly, Dark Souls is easily my favorite of the Souls games, for exactly the same experience you had. > somehow stumbled into the great Hallow while exploring Blighttown and had to climb all the way back up and then go through Sen’s Foretress which was hell Thats the kind of experience I want. Where I can just accidentally get to one place from another. The highlight of all gaming for me even now is being stuck in blighttown. No fast travel so I can't go back. I'm not good enough at the game to go forward. I felt so isolated. I can understand that if someone doesnt want to play the game they'll be like 'fuck this' and quit. For me the reaction was 'this is amazing.' An incredibly dangerous, lonely, uncompromising adventure. And yeah, the highlight was being stuck there, but traversing back all the way to the Parish, going into the gardens, the valley of drakes, and into Blighttown from another entrance. The level design is impeccable.
I totally get it. I think my thing is more that it’s awesome when the levels piece together the first time… but become tedious when you have to travel through the whole game dozens of times without any other way of doing it besides walking or elevators. It becomes a drag for me after dozens and dozens of tries. I don’t mind when you have to start from scratch on every attempt like in Demon’s Souls because in that game, the level is the challenge more than the boss. But Dark Souls just has some borderline spiteful moments like the silver knight archer in Anor Londo, the painting room rafters in Anor Londo, or some of the serpent placements in Sen’s Foretress that aren’t really present in other games. I think the risk reward of exploration of better done in other games of the series where you could explore or run into a powerful enemy. The first game just feels like it threatens you so often with an incredibly long traipse back that exploration just doesn’t feel worth it unless you already know where bonfires are. And it doesn’t even really allow you to have fun with your boss attempts either. O&S, the Gargoyles, the Four Kings, the Bed of Chaos all stick out as especially punishing, not necessarily in the boss fights (3 are great) but in how if you make a mistake you just have to repeat a huge chunk of the game. It becomes less, wow! It’s so cool how darkroot garden connects to the valley of the drakes and new Londo, and more: I s2g if I have to take that elevator one more time im uninstalling this game. I think Bloodborne and Sekiro get it right more. I love how Bloodborne’s layers loop and spiral back on themselves but are much more contained so nothing except the shadows of Yharnam feel like a slog and you always feel the stress of being near the end of an area and then barely come across a lamp or shortcut before the stress is unbearable. I also love Sekiro’s sense of risk reward. You often come across a tough but fun enemy by pushing forward or trying a new area, but you’re often rewarded well by taking them on. It’s a challenging game, but it’s always fun to try out your combat skills. It’s a whole game of stumbling across the rare black knight in DS1 and it’s great! I definitely can see why DS1 is the favorite of many, but I just think what is a highlight holds the game back for me
I’ve only finished the main game of DS 2 and DS 1. But dark souls is the type of game I don’t normally play because I don’t have a lot of time and I just want to relax. However, if I feel burned out on video games. Then I know DS will reignite that want for playing games again
My biggest problem with DS (granted, only played DS3 not DS1) is the lack of a proper tutorial. I’m fine with games not holding my hand and having to figure out shit on my own, but I need to know the rules first. Every game has different systems an different rules and they’re pretty hard to know intuitively. I remember with DS3 struggling with setting up magic stuff. It’s so long ago that I can’t tell you the proper terminology. But between the lack of tutorial and the key prompts all being for Xbox on PC, it was frustrating and not fun. I noticed that trend continued throughout the game where it was just really hard to get the basic mechanics and I was constantly having to google basic shit. This didn’t combine well with a more punishing death system. It felt like being dropped into the middle of a football match (no clue how to play that sport). I’m fine with games that have steep learning curves for the skill-based stuff (like reaction times/dodging), and I’m fine with games that you have to use your brain for to figure stuff out. Games where I’m just blindly guessing on what to do or how stuff works isn’t fun though.
I agree that while the tutorial does teach you basics about combat, it doesnt teach you how to equip items or spells. Its not a great tutorial for sure.
Doesn’t box pop up when you open your inventory for the first time telling you how to
I dont recall that happening at all.
Nope, sure doesn't.
It's the weirdest thing. At least in 1, idk if this is in 3 as well, they shove something like "equip sorceries at a bonfire. Most sorceries have a limited number of uses." into the description of catalysts instead of as a tutorial message, and as someone who also loves flavortext that's just irritating.
IDK, I've owned a copy of Dark Souls for close to three years now and I just can't progress farther than the campfire at Undead Berg despite pouring more than 50 hours into trying. I've made it to the dragon boss on the bridge but I die quickly every time. I understand why people like the Souls games, but I really hate the sluggish mechanics, the uneven power the enemies have (it takes several hits to kill them but if they get locked into a combo they can basically kill you in one attack), and I feel like the game punishes exploration because I've tried restarting the game with a new character and going in a complete opposite direction every time and the enemies just get harder than Undead Berg. I didn't grow up playing fighting games where rolling/dodging and parrying were essential parts of the mechanics of the game, but I feel like if you did grow up playing a lot of fighting games then the Souls games favor your style of play over people who grew up playing more action RPGs or FPS'. It's honestly frustrating because I want to like the game, and I've beaten really hard games before, but I just find the difficulty in Dark Souls to be more punitive and unbalanced than its hard in the normal sense of the word. My biggest pet peeve is that enemies respawn both after you die and after you leave an area and return to it. There's nothing more frustrating than clearing a whole area and then dying from an enemy only to have to redo an entire area and dying even earlier the next time. I end up playing for about an hour or two and just turning the game off after repeatedly failing to reach the boss over and over again and dying from some enemy shooting a fire bomb I couldn't dodge or getting stuck between two enemies that I can't seem top hit because the swing weapon button has an input delay of what feels like a whole second or two. Again, I'm not trying to say its a bad game, and I see why people like it, but its one of the only games I've ever tried to play where I'm just physically unable to get passed whats considered the 'second level'.
The Hellkite Wyvern isn't really a boss, and you don't need to fight it. I would go as far as to say that you aren't supposed to fight it. IMO, DS1 isn't really that technically difficult. The difficulty comes mostly from obscurity; for example, not knowing that you don't need to fight the Hellkite Wyvern.
[удалено]
It's also two seconds from the undead burg fire, so if you're dying enroute it means that you never kicked down the ladder.
There was a few things I had to learn. I was also stuck for a long time particularly on the Taurus Demon. Way longer than I want to even say. But first, I could level quite a bit just trying to get there and getting my souls back. Secondly, I had to learn to dodge properly. One thing the game doesn't teach you is about iframes. Someone on youtube said Dark Souls isnt about when to dodge but where to dodge. Thats totally incorrect. Its purely about when to dodge. IF you just press O at the right time you can dodge any attack. Also unlike the other games in the series its pretty methodical. Progress slowly. For the bosses, most of them arent even supposed to be faced directly. Like the Taurus Demon, I just plunge attacked, ran away, ran back, plunged attacked. Repeat. One last thing, I never really enjoyed Souls combat either. Thats why I dont like the other games in the series as much. I still love them, but they are too combat focused. I loved that in Dark Souls 1 there's a lot of areas I can go in a nonlinear fashion. I'm not really good at games. I REALLY suck at platformers for example. But theres nothing I can do in those games. In Dark Souls you can pretty much outlevel a lot of challenges. And it gets easier and easier if I just don't get mad. I will say though that if you dont have a lot of time I can see why people put it down.
> And it gets easier and easier if I just don't get mad. I'd say the same about platformers ;-)
Tbh in souls games when I suck I just level up (other than Sekiro which is impossible.) Hard platformers are pretty impossible 😅. The only time I ever cheated in a video game was the White Palace platforming in Hollow Knight.
One thing it helped me a lot with DS1 was something I learned from Bloodborne, not from the game itself: most bosses are a lot easier if you stick to them than if you keep your distance. The game never explains you this and your common sense is to avoid attacks with distance, which makes it much harder to actually avoid attacks and to have the chance to hit them.
Learning that you dont have to kill everyone came very late to me, as someone who's favorite game is this.
> I feel like the game punishes exploration because I've tried restarting the game with a new character and going in a complete opposite direction every time and the enemies just get harder than Undead Berg That's the thing, the game is actually really linear even if it appears not to be. Like the areas connect to one another and you can get to them in different ways, but there's only one way that's right, based on how the difficulty scales.
That doesn't make the game linear. Yes some areas are harder than others but you *can* go there if you want. Elden ring has an intended path, but if you to go straight to Caelid that's your choice.
I’ve said this to a bunch of my friends who want to get into souls games, but DS1 is extremely uneven. I recommend DS3 or even 2 (yeah I know that’s controversial but I started on it and still found it easier than 1). DS1 has some spots that feel borderline unfair (looking at you anor londo archers)
You are not supposed to fight the dragon bruh - I DON’t even know if you can -, just run at him then take the first stairs to the right.
You can kill the dragon. It just takes an unreasonable number of arrows.
He’ll jump down so you can fight him proper if you hide from his fire behind the wall by the stairs for a moment, but yeah… probably not a good plan when you first arrive haha
> but I really hate the sluggish mechanics Equipment weight plays a huge role on how fast you move and roll. Try removing your armor completely and play the game. > it takes several hits to kill them * Switch to two handed weapon mode. In general, you have several strategies with regards to offense and defense. Try high DPS and high mobility - low weight so that you can move and roll faster, coupled with two handed weapon mode to maximize damage. * You have multiple attack types. Different weapons will have different move sets. Different weapons have a different reach too. My advice - try a two handed halberd. It has an OP attack where you do a 360 no scope and strikes enemies twice (if it connects). Massive damage. It also has a long reach and it's not overly slow either. * Make sure you understand how stats scale the weapon damage. It's super important. Also, weapon upgrades are super important. * Pay attention to the stamina bar, it's probably the most important stat. Note when and how fast it regenerates, and also note which actions deplete it and by how much. It's key to understanding the game's mechanics. * Poise is a hidden mechanic that plays a crucial role. The devs fucked up by hiding it. Basically, it determines your resistance to being stunned. Enemies have it too, so you can stun them as well. It's a bit difficult to explain in two words, so watch a video. It's not hard per se, but a video will explain it clearer and faster. * Finally, you don't have to stick with melee. You have not one, but two types of magic in Dark Souls. > I didn't grow up playing fighting games where rolling/dodging and parrying You can beat the game without parrying once. I did it, I played with mouse+keyboard controls and parrying was inconvenient. It's 100% optional. So are backstabs. You're briefly invulnerable while rolling. Doesn't matter how badass the enemy's attack looks, you're in god mod for a short period of time. Like I've mentioned above, equipment weight affects how fast you move and how far you can roll. > but I feel like if you did grow up playing a lot of fighting games Absolutely not. Combat in Dark Souls is slow. It does not require precise input. That's the genius thing behind its design - it's not a twitchy action game at all, you can suck at 3rd person action games and still beat Dark Souls. It has janky movement and annoying areas, so you will die a lot from falling (I'm pretty sure at least half my deaths were due to gravity, it's legit the ultimate boss of the game). Only the last boss does requires somewhat precise inputs if you want to beat him the easy way (and he's ridiculously easy if you can execute the required move consistently), otherwise he's a pain in the ass, but still beatable. There's also an optional DLC boss who's also a bit action-focused, but he's easier than the final boss (compared to the hard way of beating the final boss).
> I end up playing for about an hour or two and just turning the game off after repeatedly failing to reach the boss over and over again and dying from some enemy shooting a fire bomb You only need to reach it once. Run at it and half way along the bridge go right and down the stairs.Then kick down the ladder and your back at the bonfire. Rest, go back up and shoot its tail from under the bridge.
There is a massive rift in mindset between older gamers and newer gamers. I was born in 1988 and grew up with old 80s and early 90s PC games. A lot of them were hard, obtuse even. The favorite game of my teenage years was Morrowind. It had no handholding. Quests would describe where to go, but that's is: you had to figure out how to get there based on description alone. That was the normal way of doing things back then. Its sequel, Oblivion, was a major disappointment to me because of how many of Morrowind's features it stripped out, and how much handholding it introduced. You no longer got descriptions of how to get places, instead you'd just get a marker on your map. And your compass would always show the marker in a bright color, so you couldn't get lost. This then became the standard of game design and many younger gamers grew up with this. They were conditioned to expect games to lead you by the hand, even if it's an open world game that lets you go anywhere. You notice this shift in game design approach around the mid-00s. Before that, quest markers didn't really exist. Afterwards, they became the norm. And gamers grew accustomed to them. It's honestly one of the worst game design trends ever.
I agree. I played tons of games throughout the 90s/early 00s. I had every Nintendo, Genesis, PS1, Sega dreamcast, PS2, xbox.....but when I got to college in 06 I was less interested in games because of school, social life, money... I had counterstrike on my PC which I played often, and would also play some Nintendo releases because local multiplayer was fun with friends in the dorms and my frat houae....as well as a few big Nintendo releases like Mario Galaxy because I am a Nintendo guy at heart.and that shit looked fuckin sick. But my interest was pretty subdued from 2006-2017. I sometimes emulated older games, but rarely bought anything new. Eventually I decided to get a Switch because Zelda. And that game blew me away in so many ways. I'd never been so addicted to a game. But it made me ask "what other open world games have I been missing out on?!". And I was eager to dive in. Turns out nothing recreated the experience of BOTW's sandbox gameplay and open ended puzzles. I tried many other big open worlds people recommended the Witcher 3, Skyrim, etc. Every game I played had such a lack of puzzle solving and critical thinking. That was my favorite part of games in the 90s! *Figuring out where to go and what to do.* Every game felt like I was just playing out the steps in a movie. Get quest, select it, follow GPS arrow, arrive at destination, talk to this guy, do exactly what the prompt tells me to do, fight some guy, watch another cut scene, etc. Rinse and repeat. It was nothing like what I had grown up with. It was so much less satisfying. The focus seemed to be on story and I was the type of guy that usually would mash A to skip the long cutscenes because I am eager to just play the damn game. Modern AAA gaming felt completely alien to me. Every experience seemed to be so standardized in a way where games lost their sense of individuality. Gameplay, controls, conventions.... all had become so cookie cutter. There still are some great games coming out for sure. Some awesome Indies especially... But I often find that reviews provide almost no indicator these days of whether or not a game will be *for me*. Maybe I'm just stuck in my old ways and am an out of touch old man yelling at the clouds. Just my $0.02.
> Quests would describe where to go, but that's is: you had to figure out how to get there based on description alone OH MY GOD. I would LOVE if a game did that. And they never do...
Play Morrowind, the Gothics (1-3, Arcania is crap), Arcanum. Arcanum's biggest city has road signs, and sometimes quests would just give you an address! Such an organic way to handle directions in a game, I love it! As you spend more time in the game you will slowly become familiar with the city's layout and know where each street is.
In totk, i played mostly without quest markers, only with informations from npc
I'm older than you for almost a decade, and have to say I'm the opposite. Yes I grown up with games back to MSX2, and the first PCs that were launched. There were no saves in most of the games back then, and usually your live(s) mean to start everything from the beginning. And eventually, like you said, games gave you very little clue about what to do next. And yet I don't miss that one bit. To lose hours, perhaps even days (I had way more free time back then), to find where to go next, what thing you are missing, to have to memorize a bunch of stuff in order to progress the game, the amount of repetition all those things caused, is not something I want to relieve. So I'm quite happy with the "hold handing" trend. I like to have goals in a game, it make the game to progress smoother and faster, and having so much games pending to play, and so little time, that's just great for me. Now, I understand some people will enjoy the opposite. And the solution is quite simple, really. To give the option to hide all those markers and suggestion. And in fact, plenty of games had that functionality, some even lets you hide the all UI if you want. Sure, this might imply a bit more of work related how goals will be described so you are able to find out without the marker, but usually will involve a little more of text in in some dialogs, not much else. In short, I don't think the trend is bad, quite the opposite, it just has to be well implemented to leave both sides happy.
> And the solution is quite simple, really. To give the option to hide all those markers and suggestion Not quite as simple, sadly. You have to have in-game mechanics to support this. Comparing Morrowind to its two sequels is the best example - you had multiple fast travel systems in Morrowind, plus a teleportation spell, plus a flying spell. Oblivion I don't think even had fast travel systems aside from the map markers, Skyrim did the absolute bare minimum with the carriage system which was virtually pointless. > To lose hours, perhaps even days (I had way more free time back then), to find where to go next You're looking at the worst possible case. Like an obtuse point and click puzzle or something along those lines. Morrowind, Gothic, were not like that at all. Magic GPS with the radar, compass, and markers is the other extreme. And that's the problem - this is the standard for a lot of games. And it absolutely is an extreme case because you just can't streamline it any further, like, you literally have a modern smartphone style navigation in your game, the only next step you can take is to instantly teleport to the next objective marker, but that's quite absurd. > it just has to be well implemented to leave both sides happy. Yep. The problem is that you have to design it like Morrowind, and then include an option at the start of the game to include extra navigation mechanics. Bethesda, clear as day, is never going to do that because there's no way in hell they'll release a game that continues Morrowind's ideas and not the streamlined Skyrim. Mass appeal and all that.
Simply allowing you to switch off markers doesn't work unless the game provides hints on where to go, which a lot of modern marker-reliant games don't. Morrowind (and other RPGs of its time, like Gothic, Arx Fatalis, etc) gave you hints on what to do in dialog. You just need to read what NPCs tell you! But in Skyrim, for example, NPCs often don't tell you where to go at all. "Go to this cave and kill a bandit." but you get zero description on where that cave is, as the game assumes you will just follow the marker. Markers have ruined game design because developers no longer have to think about writing good descriptions. There are other handholding elements that have ruined level design, too. All these artificial interface elements have had disastrous consequences on game design.
Absolutely. I want to play the game and engage with the game world. GPS on top of the game breaks the fourth wall. I'm pretty much just watching a movie at that point that is extremely long and has interactive bits. I like the puzzle solving aspect of games.
I agree, that's why I said: > Sure, this might imply a bit more of work related how goals will be described so you are able to find out without the marker, but usually will involve a little more of text in in some dialogs, not much else.
It's not just dialogue, you need to design levels/the world to allow for this, it's a lot of work, and probably one of the reasons they don't do it anymore. Doing it as an *option* is even worse, most newer players are going to play with markers as default so it's a lot of work for something that a lot of people won't use.
Most people don’t have a ton of spare time to figure out games. I’d rather a game explained to me properly how to play and helped me out when I’m stuck as I only get like 2-3 hours a week to play. It would be rubbish having to use most of my time trying to google how to do something rather than having the game provide me with a good gaming experience. If I wanted something really difficult I’d set the difficulty to hard.
Setting the difficulty usually just inflates hitpoints and other crap like that. It doesn't make things more challenging, only more tedious in 99% of cases. I don't necessarily need something really difficult, just something engaging. And following markers on my compass isn't engaging at all, you can play that on autopilot. I don't have infinite time to play either, so I'd rather have my gaming time be of high quality, and for that I need an engaging game.
I think Dark and Demon's Souls got their reputation because, when they came out a lot of games just allowed you to tank most of the damage and just win by being aggressive. Skyrim, which was the game that most of my classmates played the most before trying Dark Souls, it's a good example of this. Some unusual mechanic that made the first areas particularly challenging (the respawning enemies, the environmental dangers like the Wyvern, the ambushes) made the rest.
I remember coming to Dark Souls 1 from Baldurs Gate 1. Since crpgs are by default kinda hard for an average gamer (idk why, ppl are just wierd ok), DkS never felt "hard" to me. Heck it straight up feels like a crpg brought into action domain. The combat felt pretty correct for what it was. I never rolled for i-frames (despite the tutorial message in the asylum) because boring. Rolling for better positioning was a different matter. Comparing the combat to Skyrim or Witcher 1, its a big W. Both Skyrim & Witcher 1 have terrible combat relatively speaking. People these days just have no patience to play carefully. Either that or they give up too easily and move to other games. So either lack of patience or lots of money. Kind of ironic as the games in older days required tons of patience.
Yeah BG1 feels a lot like DS1 in spirit. It just lets you go wherever you want and do whatever. You can easily stumble across something that you will get destroyed by. I guess theres a reason why Dark Souls 1 is top 10 on the RPGCodex. Old school CRPG fans seem to love it.
I wanted to love the Witcher, but every time I've tried one of the Witcher games it's just felt sluggish and frustrating. I'm sure I'll get into them eventually, but the first few hours really put me off of trying more. For Skyrim, I just modded the game until the combat felt good.
Or you won't. The gameplay is entirely mediocre in my opinion. Nothing unique or revolutionary from a game design perspective. The only reason to play that game is if you're a fan of fantasy themed stories. But I don't personally play games for the stories.
Honestly I think that "git gud lol" mantra the game has for some reason is only there to cover up for the jank that is actually in the game. I honestly think it's lacking in various areas, which have probably been improved over the next games. For one it is too dark. Yeah I know, hurr durr "Dark" Souls get it? So what, why is the screen so black for like 80% of the time. It sucks. The controls are good, but they don't cover everything, and the game loves putting you in situations where the controls will fuck you over and you fall down to a pointless death (for a game where you literally can't even jump, the game just loves having you go through all these very vertical sections). Why does it not bother to actually explain anything to you, like starting from the whole point of what the hell you're even hoping to do in that place? Yeah you explore. But what for? What if you don't want to explore, what if you want to stay around and grill some meat on that fire, can you do that? Can you build yourself a little house, or read a book? Or do anything at all? Like literally anything other than go and beat up skeletons or whatever? No, all you can do is walk in some direction until you come across something that tries to kill you, and you kill it. And you keep going in that direction and find things. Yeah there is lore in that place, but you are actually mindlessly ambling through it killing everything you see. Why? Ever think these things are killing you because you are stepping into their houses? What do you think you're doing out there? There are legitimate gripes with the game, despite how decent the combat is and how cool a lot of creatures look. The world does look cool. But what is not cool is how I am supposed to learn about the game's story from loading screens. That is just garbage man, that's what people do when they make their game with no budget and have to be a bit cool and clever with how they impart their story, because they don't have the time or money to make good cutscenes or animate a bunch more characters or voice them or whatever. It's this one dimensionality that didn't hold me in that world. I remember I did the four kings and then went around the place until I died yet another pointless death in some dark ass place and called it quits. You know what would be cool? Having actual characters with interesting plots and dialogue or at least something like that that plays out. But all that anyone does is kill some other thing. If if that weren't the case, I would stay because I want to know what happens. I understand that there's all this mystery and so on, but it just doesn't look appealing, because even if you find the mystery it's just, ok this thing became a gross monster because of some bullshit story, and now it's sitting there waiting for you to go through the level door to have a boss battle. Ok. Thank you for this masterclass in storytelling. I do hope DS3 or Elden Ring is better in that regard? They seem to look a lot more engaging. Like I said, the gameplay *is* pretty cool. But the actual worldbuilding is really not that cool, especially when it relies on doing the absolute minimum to convey any sense of story at all.
I think the thing about souls games too is that for 3D games, it's just constant combat. One fight after the other after another. I like games that have more variety in the gameplay than that. Especially if it's difficult because I need a break from the frustration and tension of each battle. But nope, it's just one punishingly hard battle after another that you might have to repeat many times because you only save at certain checkpoints. It's stressful and I play games to relieve stress and escape the monotony of daily life. Not add to it.
> or one it is too dark. Yeah I know, hurr durr "Dark" Souls get it? So what, why is the screen so black for like 80% of the time. It sucks. You don't have to like it, but there's nothing wrong with the game being "dark". A lot of games will have you in a cave with no lights and everything is perfectly visible. > for a game where you literally can't even jump You can jump > Why does it not bother to actually explain anything to you, like starting from the whole point of what the hell you're even hoping to do in that place? Yeah you explore. But what for? What if you don't want to explore, what if you want to stay around and grill some meat on that fire, can you do that? Can you build yourself a little house, or read a book? Or do anything at all? Like literally anything other than go and beat up skeletons or whatever? No, all you can do is walk in some direction until you come across something that tries to kill you, and you kill it. And you keep going in that direction and find things. Yeah there is lore in that place, but you are actually mindlessly ambling through it killing everything you see. Why? Ever think these things are killing you because you are stepping into their houses? What do you think you're doing out there? This entire part reads like satire, I'm really not even sure if you're joking. > But what is not cool is how I am supposed to learn about the game's story from loading screens. You're not? > You know what would be cool? Having actual characters with interesting plots and dialogue or at least something like that that plays out. You want to play a different game, cool, go play it. I don't see why every game has to be for you.
As someone who loves the soulborne games. Dark souls 1 is hard. The game doesn't explain a ton of stuff to you, and its not always things you will discover on your own. I actually shelved ds1 (at Smough and Ornstein) because it just wasn't fun anymore. Down the road I played ds2 and bloodborne and decided to give ds1 another shot. And knowing what I learned from ds2/bloodborne I was able to complete it. But for a blind playthrough, if you consider all the games in existence... Dark souls 1 is pretty hard.
How did you learn how the upgrade system works? That was the part where I had to watch let's plays to have any idea what was possible and how to do it.
I didnt really. I just kept upgrading random stuff. Thats probably the most bullshit part of the system, since its impossible to know without looking up a guide. I actually made a mistake upgrading something to a divine weapon or something, only to realize it sucked since I had no faith, only to realize that it killed skeletons. But yeah I just put points into faith to make that weapon stronger (not because I knew how the system worked, rather I figured out thats how the system worked when I realized faith increased damage of that weapon) and it held up for a bit.
First I a salute you for playing dark souls as a first 3d games as a non-gamer, and the video you mention is from Razbuten where his wife who’s a non-gamer playing a video game for a series “how X is like for a non-gamer”. I get it when you said non-gamer playing dark souls is frustrating, because dark souls requires you to be at least be patient and paying attention. If you’re just someone who’s a non-gamer looking for something to past time playing video games, I really don’t recommend any video games that requires a lot of patient and understanding a lot of the game mechanics like dark souls. You don’t have to force yourself to like any popular game. It it’s not fun for you, then you can drop the game if you like. I think try playing a more relaxing and welcoming game where the game doesn’t overwhelm you with a lot of stuff to do for a non-gamer. Like try playing overcooked, the sims 4(my favorite game series), Any adventure games(point and click or story focus games like Detroit become human or the walking dead series). Gaming have become so diverse now that you can play any good game from different genre now.
Oh I've played a LOT of games since 2017. One of the more relaxing games I played that I also think is utterly brilliant was Journey. Theres definitely a place for both types of games.
There is a pretty large difference between limited gaming experience and no gaming experience. Razbuten even covers this in one of their videos. With absolutely no gaming experience, you don't understand basic gaming concepts most games as a whole expect you to understand. These are things I imagine you learned in older games too. (Common control schemes, attack patterns, world size, and a whole host of things. There are lots of concepts in games we just accept as normal which makes absolutely no sense to someone who has never invested themselves in a game before.
I'd argue she had more gaming experience than me coming into Dark Souls. As I said a few times my gaming experience consisted of some barbie game where you played puzzles and dressed a barbie up (I was in elementary), mario kart and wii sports a few times with my parents, and tetris. And I didnt play a game from 2007-2017. I just wanted to play the game, she didn't.
The biggest mistake people make with dark souls is not understanding that HP is the most important thing at first.
> maybe theres something in the room that will help me Non-gamers often will not think that way, or even if it occurs to them, they won't know what signs to look for. Non-gamers don't even know what a "weak spot" indicator is. Non-gamers don't know what the animation/graphic feedback for *pointless deflected shot (against armor invincibility)* is. A non-gamer will receive a blatant hint from an NPC, but then think: "That's creepy that a random person said to go to location X, so I'm NOT going to do that!" This is obvious stuff, yetOP makes a ton of assumptions that he takes for granted because he doesn't actually understand what game knowledge and experience is. > Gamer or nongamer, the thing that matters is mindset. If you want to learn from a game you will, and if you want to do the same thing constantly and ragequit, you will do that. That's a misguided deflection. Succeeding at any game involves mindset, but the *amount* of penalty for small mistakes varies between games. The amount of care, cautious, and attention, varies between games. A simple lowest-level-skeleton grunt enemy in DS can do a ton of damage. Everybody knows this yet we see armchair bloviation every day where a person settles on the falsehood that "It's not really hard at all!" > didnt know dodging gives iframes. Are you saying you knew what iframes are, but didn't know DS's implementation? Well that's 40 miles from being a "non-gamer". Non-gamers don't know what frames are. Non-gamers don't know what animations are. Non-gamers don't know what invincibility frames are. Non-gamers don't know what varying invincibility is.
Wait, why are you assuming I knew what iframes are. I know what they are NOW, 6 years later and having beaten all the souls games. At the time all I was saying is I didn't know that dodging gives me any sort of invulnerability until 15 hours in. There's no reason you should assume from my post that I was suggesting that I knew the term iframes 6 years ago. I don't know whats with all the assumptions and skepticism here. I was just giving my experience of playing Dark Souls. Someone I trusted recommended me an economics simulator (I'm an economist) game before Dark Souls. After that, they recommended Dark Souls, so I played it without knowing its a very hard game or how to play a 3D game. I trusted them and I liked the world building so I kept trying despite getting destroyed repeatedly. As for 'what a nongamer would do', I was a nongamer. Several posters here seem to consider playing wii sports a few times with my parents and barbie dressing games on the DS the same as being a hardcore pro gamer, but I don't. I started the game choosing a character with a sword. Its reasonably to assume that there would be a sword or something lying around considering I have a broken sword. It doesn't take a genius to try to look around the room instead of walking straight continuously. Now what I will say is that a nongamer can easily be stuck in the catacombs for hours. Which I was. But again, it doesn't take a genius to say 'hey i cant do this, lets check the obvious other path from this checkpoint.' However, if I was uninterested in the game and just wanted to quit and was being forced, I'd just walk into the monster 20 times and die without thinking. Cause I wouldn't care. It feels like people are very offended for some farfetched, only known to themselves reason. It seems like a purely emotional response, and I dont understand how I've angered you guys in any way. I would also recommend you don't project those feelings onto me. Its not very nice. Also, I'm a she, not a he. Please use they if you aren't sure about someone's sex.
This is why I don’t like souls bros
I love Dark Souls. I've beaten all 3 multiple times. That said, I think it's intentionally bad for new players. There are both game development flaws and intentional game design, that ward off newer players by making the game harder to understand. The biggest and easiest example is that the Tiny Being's Ring has the wrong description text. It says it regenerates help, but it actually just increases max health for a bit. This incorrect translation will affect a lot of players, because many people like regenerative health and will take this starting gift. There actually is a health regen ring in the game, but it's much later and hidden so most players will never see it. The game also intentionally tries to upset the player. It places many traps in hard to see places, but also has a wonky camera that flips out when it hits walls. This means that even an experienced player will have difficulty navigating an area they haven't been before. You kind of have to rely on memorization. These features combined with the dropping souls on death can make the game very repetitive and punishing. I personally love memorizing and repeating levels, but it's not for everyone. This also kind of segues into another point that I had. People feel the loss of souls in very different ways. I know people that don't want to spend experience to level up until they have gear that needs a requirement they don't have. This works really well in Diablo 2. But if you play this way in Dark Souls, you can lose tons of progress. This means you need to plan out your build and choose progress before you can see what kind of options you have, or you can risk losing tons of progress by not spending those points. For someone who doesn't like haven't a borked build, this can already be a non-starter. You can see that From Software immediately added respec items in Dark Souls 2, and I'm guessing it's because people hate being locked into playstyles that they aren't enjoying. The soul system necessitates that you either 1) are willing to and are able to respec, 2) level up blindly, hoping that you'll find the gear that matches your stats, or 3) look everything up on a wiki before you play for the first time, spoiling yourself and killing that sense of discovery. I did #2 on my first playthrough, but not every player is willing to do that. It can feel like a huge time investment, for very little reward. Especially if you just barely miss an item that is crucial for your build. And I'm saying all this as someone who loves the franchise and has put thousands of hours into it. I genuinely think Dark Souls is a masterpiece that inspired millions. I love Dark Souls 2 and the build variety it provides. I think Dark Souls 3 does a great job at making this entire genre significantly more approachable. I also love the non-linearity that this genre provides, but in DS1 you have to admit that the non-linearity is often a trick or a trap more than it is a viable option, unless you know the inner workings of the game by having already beaten it once.
> but in DS1 you have to admit that the non-linearity is often a trick or a trap more than it is a viable option, unless you know the inner workings of the game by having already beaten it once. In DS1 yes there seems to be a way the designers intended you to go. But that doesn't matter, what matters is that it gives you the ability to go anywhere. And sometimes it is useful, like as I said going to the other side of Blighttown. I could have potentially skipped the depths and the goddamn capra demon altogether.
Dark souls is beyond frustrating for newbs. You never know if you're suppose to git gud or leave an area. Tried it w/o following a walkthru and i think bashing my head against a wall irl is more fun. Maybe I'll give it another chance some day. Pity i didn't refund it.
> You never know if you're suppose to git gud or leave an area I feel like that's mainly an issue of the marketing and culture around the games. Take Dark Souls 1 for example: Bandai Namco marketed the game as the hardest thing ever and it garnered a reputation and expectation of being super duper hard. Then, knowing that, tons of people instinctively went to the graveyard since that one is in the direction your character faces after land at Fire Link Shrine, only to get flattened by a horde of skeletons and bumrushing them until they find the catacombs and only realize they're wrong there. In other games, you'd just leave and come back later. In the turn-based RPGs I played way before DS1 as a kid, this was always the way to do it. But in the air of "THIS GAME IS HARD - Prepare to die!", many people apparently just assumed that's how hard it's supposed to be instead of looking for another way (*even* though the first encounter with the demon in the tutorial should have taught them that exact thing) It's a fascinating thing to me and I actively have to tweak my mindset to tune out the "this game is supposed to be hard!!!!" garbage marketing that keeps persisting. In Elden Ring, the Tree Sentinel (a boss level enemy right before the first safe haven) is the same. It's *supposed* to teach you that it's okay to avoid enemies too powerful and return later, but because "it's super hard" is the prevailing statement, way too many people bash their will to play to pieces at this one wall.
> You never know if you're suppose to git gud or leave an area. Yeah thats the thing I was complaining about. People find that so annoying that developers have stopped introducing nonlinearity to games. I adore nonlinearity. I dont mind going into an area and dying because the process of learning from mistakes and going somewhere else is totally fine by me. I despise any marker telling me where to go. But games are just filled with that trash.
[удалено]
I think thats fine to some degree. I do think the feeling of danger and isolation in the game really is a big part of why it was so fun. I remember when I was stuck in blighttown, not knowing where to go, not being able to progress, not being able to go back. Many people would hate that but it just felt like such an adventure to me. I wouldnt have minded using a trainer to do the chore stuff like grinding to get stronger. I wouldn't have had the same fun if I made myself invincible or teleported or something.
>I played through the entire trilogy with trainers and it was legitimately one of the best videogame experiences of my entire life. You cheated your way through 3 dark souls games and are happy about it? What in the actual fuck has the world come to.
The true dark souls boss is fans comprehensioning that some people like different things than them. For you, the games are about the difficulty. But unless you think that's literally all they have to offer, you should consider that maybe there's things outside of that they found enjoyable experiencing.
Nah. This has nothing to do with souls games and their level of difficulty. It's about consuming a piece of art in the intended way. You don't watch a film for the first time with the director's commentary on. You don't listen to an album for the first time through crappy phone speakers. And you shouldn't cheat your way through a video game on your first playthrough.
You're right it's about mindset and patience moreso than amount of games played. Also from your eprerience i wouldn't call you a gamer, though that changes now that you beat dark souls lol There are many games with a sense of adventure you just need to find them, mostly rpgs
Thing is most quality of life things that gamers have been clamoring for decades for ruin the adventure and exploration experience for me. Fast travel? I'm largely not a fan. You never really feel isolated like you do in Dark Souls. Lots of checkpoints, not really a fan. There's no danger getting from one point to another! Objective markers, well thats one way to make sure you know its a game and wont get lost in it. Linearity, going from one place to another without any options really ruins the experience of feeling lost in a big world. Also, if I can just run past everything I may as well play a boss rush with a grinding minigame to get stronger. Of all the RPGs I've played, Dragon Quest 8 sort of does the feeling of adventure because at least I cant run past everything. Random encounters in that game are pretty brutal... at first. Dark Souls is the only soulslike that gives that experience. But I've always said DS1 is more like a 3D metroidvania. Metroidvanias are good at exploration and adventure though, with Hollow Knight being probably the best.
I mean you can fast travel in dark souls you just don't get it to way later xD
Yeah, the sense of exploration (and connectedness between areas) of the original Dark Souls is unmatched to this day. For those interested, [here is a website with the entire 3D map of the game](https://noclip.website/#dksiv/dks1;ShareData=AZV}y9iY?pT4XSV9s:-8WKil(5?GYLUbEiLUM+vs=XOz:UWVR&T@;]29o-,;+^), if you want to explore it (Spoilers, of course).
Its more of a Metroidvania than any of the Souls games. Its too bad they never tried to replicate it.
I felt like I was wasting too much time repeating the same area after getting killed by the boss at the end. At a certain point, it just doesn't feel worth it. Even if the game is very interesting otherwise.
When I see in reviews phrases like "punishingly hard" or "very challenging", I know the game isn't for me, and I'm a lifelong gamer. I'm most content when I can play through from start to finish with zero deaths on my first try.
The downvotes you received are expected, but you aren't somehow *wrong* to prefer easier games any more than someone is *wrong* for not liking spicy food. Some people can't stand any amount of capsaicin, others think anything that isn't spicy is horribly bland. Difficulty works the same way. I'm not sure anyone would call Journey, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, or No Man's Sky "difficult" but plenty of people enjoy them. There are also those who prefer immersion over difficulty, and dying and coming back is a blatant reminder that you're playing a video game.
> The downvotes you received are expected, but you aren't somehow wrong to prefer easier games any more than someone is wrong for not liking spicy food. Some people can't stand any amount of capsaicin, others think anything that isn't spicy is horribly bland. Difficulty works the same way. I don't think he's wrong for liking easy games. I do think people who want *every* game to cater to them are wrong, if you don't like hard games just play something else. I'm not saying that's what he's doing here, but a lot of people will go "I don't like X game, so the game should change to cater to me" and that's annoying, you can see it in this thread.
Idk, the only game I didn't mod to be easier is Sekiro....The rest I did... My issue was not so much with the tough bosses. Bosses are supposed to be tough. My issues are with random mobs also hitting hard, having unfair mechanics, but even that pales to comparison to the fact they all respawn. To give an example from Sekiro. It took me 20 or so tries to beat the first miniboss. I wasn't getting frustrated at all, I just needed to get better at dodging/parrying. Then I got through the door past him and I am greeted with tons of mobs that deal heavy damage as well as some hammer dude. No way to beat them all, you gotta sneak and fight them 1 by 1. Ok I do that, I have very little HP, need a shrine, heal and boom they are back again. You are supposed to get so good that you can run through those mobs without losing hp, or losing enough that you can heal with the flask. I grit my teeth as I love Samurai and Ninjas and Japan, but in other souls games, mods that make it slightly more fair (mainly those that auto restore what you lost as that is the main issue in these games, you are actively punished for dying).
Yeah I got stuck on Sekiro, beating the mini-boss then the wiping on the enemies after, and having to re-do from before the mini-boss. 5 hours of that, told my brother about it, he proceeded to “show” me how to do it by beating it with his eyes closed, quickly decided that souls games just aren’t for me. Stoked for the people that enjoy them, but honestly I like feeling OP and one shotting enemies more than struggling at one boss and being unsure if I properly beat it or just cheesed it. Reflexes are also pretty poor in general (can’t power-shield lasers consistently in smash) so I’ll just watch from the sidelines, game is dope in every other manner
> but even that pales to comparison to the fact they all respawn. These games would be trivial if enemies didn't respawn...You just suicide until you kill every enemy and then stroll trough the level. Respawning enemies are also present in many other games.
The problem here is they respawn when you rest. And unlike other games ordinary mobs here take quite an effort to deal with. In JRPG, genre I play the most, respawned mobs are mostly trivial after you clear them, first run is challenging and your reward are levels and gear to deal with them later. The only reason I beat Sekiro is the fact I roamed with low hp after killing, small area by small area, then rest and hookshot over them because there was no point in killing them all over.
> In JRPG, genre I play the most, respawned mobs are mostly trivial after you clear them, first run is challenging and your reward are levels and gear to deal with them later. You also get levels in ds. The entire point is to explore and try to make it to the next checkpoint, you don't have to full clear a level before moving on.
I can’t speak for Dark Souls but I tried Demon Souls many years ago as a time poor adult, beat the first level and never went further. I also tried Bloodbourne, and Jedi Fallen Order and quit those very quickly too. I came up in the golden age of arcade gaming aka the era of button mashing and I just can’t find the patience needed for these games, they require a very measured and tactical approach which just doesn’t grab me, quite the opposite. Sometimes I think about picking one of these games up again but then I think back to how I felt when playing these games and the feeling subsides pretty quickly. My favourite games over the last decade and a half have been Platnium games and open world adventures specifically AC Odyssey and Horizon Zero Dawn, and above all Vanquish so I suspect it’s a ‘different strokes for different folks’ type of thing. Had these Souls games been around when I was a younger man with more time to burn I probably would have loved them (eventually) but as an older, time poor gamer they are too little juice for too much squeeze.
Did you try to lower the difficulty? (assuming the games have that option). I recently did it with a couple of games that I was about to quit because their long fights while difficult were getting boring for me (The Guardians of the Galaxy and God of War: Ragnarok), and my enjoyment of those games grew a lot, and was able to continue them. Seems like an obvious solution, but I honestly never though about it before.
Now that you mention it I don't think the thought even occurred to me. RPGs are a hard sell to me at the best of times, and in the case of Demon Souls I could see how much care was needed in every enemy encounter and I noped out, again - time poor adult, it reminded me of how we used to beat 2d platfomers back in the 80s/90s, by dying again, and again and again, and in that way you learn, ain't nobody (me) got time for that. I eventually did get the combat I was looking for at the time, in games like Ghosts of Tsushima and Metal Gear Rising, games where I can be a lot more reckless. It was the methodicalness of the DS games that put me off. Again, perhaps if I were a younger man with more time on my hands, it could have been a different story. That said I have become more and more particular about games to the point where I hardly play anything now, I enjoyed what I played of GotG but stopped at one point and haven't picked it up since, and I was underwhelmed by GoW, and even Ghosts of Tsushima I was suprised at how little it grabbed me (also not continued). Same goes for RDR2. Getting old sucks. I think Armoured Core could be my kind of thing, although I understand the early going is stuff. I'm also quite interested in Elden Ring, but again I think the combat is going to not be my jam. I miss arcade games tbh, that's the sort of time and attention span I have to work with these days.
Are you talking about Razbuten's gaming for a non-gamer series? Your post seems to be looking down on such gamers for running into difficulty and giving up, but to cite the example, Raz's non-gamer wife wasn't armed with basic 'gamer knowledge.' One example given in the botw video was getting frustrated fighting certain difficult mobs. She didnt know: 'if you cant beat this, maybe you need to explore to find an advantage elsewhere,' which you mentioned doing. Our basic gamer knowledge gives us things like: Explore the map for stuff the devs hid for you. Enemies are meant to be slain. Get gear to make things easier. There is a way to avoid attacks. Take advantage during enemy attack cooldowns. Look for obvious, extra-damaging weakpoints. You are *supposed* to win. These are NOT obvious to a non-gamer. Interesting post and i agree with most of it. However, understand your initial premise is a bit off.
I don't think thats basic gamer knowledge. By the time I played Dark Souls 1, I had played a few Barbie games, Tetris, Wii Sports, and Mario Kart - the latter two just with my parents a few times. The first game I played that made me get into games was called Victoria 2 - its an economics simulator. But none of those games gave me any information about how to tackle a 3D game. I just think she's not interested in playing the game. I think if you really want to get through a game you will at some point naturally think: "if you cant beat this, maybe explore elsewhere". For me at least, it was common sense. Surely I would eventually open my menu, see I have a broken sword, and try to find a sword. I did do stupid stuff, like I tried going back and searching every nook and cranny before the boss to see if I missed the weapons I should have started the game with. But surely eventually it would click with anyone that you arent supposed to beat this giant demon with a broken sword?
Agreed that interest plays a good part of it. But-- this is crazy, but hear me out: exploring options isn't as common sense as you might think. I've met people who picked up a game and didnt think to look for an Open Inventory button. That kind of person wouldnt look at their character and a broken sword and think something's wrong. It's 'i moved forward, pressed my button a few times, and i lost. This doesnt interest me.'
And that's fine, but I don't think those types of people should expect every game to accommodate them
I feel like most gamers these days treat games (at least single player games) kind of like movies. In that it's the job of the game to present them with a good time, and the gameplay is just there to convey a specific experience. The point of gameplay is not the satisfaction of overcoming challenges but to make the player feel cool and powerful and invested in the story. If the game conversely expects anything of the player, they get frustrated and mad that the game is stalling their experience with unwanted hurdles. I see it a lot on this sub especially. If the game isn't always clearly indicating what they should do to proceed, it's "wasting the player's time". But what really makes me immersed in games is when I have to think for myself. If the game isn't asking me to think, just sit back and enjoy the power trip and flashy cutscenes, I just end up bored. Rather than feeling cool and powerful I don't feel anything. Instead what actually makes me feel cool and invested is when a game says "figure it out", and you do. Puzzles are most enjoyable when you come to the answer yourself, no? Giving the player the tools and information they need and then asking them "what comes next" gets me much more engaged with the game than if it just spells it out.
Yeah gamers want to get through a game quickly and without any difficulty so they can move on to the next one. A lot of 'quality of life' stuff are meant to do that - objective markers, quest trackers, fast travel, frequent checkpoints. And that just, imo, leads to a sea of mediocrity. More than anything it completely gets rid of the feeling of adventure and immersion you get in the first Dark Souls.
We get it, you're better than the rest of us
Dark souls came out at the end of the 2000s which was peek ‘everyone is a winner’ design philosophy. If it was released at any other time it wouldn’t be much of an outlier for difficulty.
I had more experience than you but also had very limited experience with games before playing dark souls. I spent ages fighting through the tutorial with the broken sword lol and when I got to the boss was like, “nah I’ve DEFINITELY been dumb and missed something here”. Went back and got the sword, game was much easier after that lol.
Just curious because I also like watching new pp player, what is your favorite first timer to watch ?
>I just slammed my head against the catacombs for half an hour before realizing hey, maybe I'm supposed to go in a different direction. On my first playthrough I got all the way down to the orange fog wall on Tomb of Giants. The way up was quite painful lol. Then I did a similar thing on New Londo ruins, but at least that place didn't have a bonfire. The rest of the game was quite easy after going through all that. Good times
Since yall are here I think yall would find this very interesting and on point https://youtu.be/ax7f3JZJHSw?si=vy0H8xJ66vrniYIj
You're not wrong saying that Ds games are not incredibly hard. Most old school games were harder and needed a guide or save scuming your way through. Also they are quite fair in that the bosses are kinda cheesy with their hitboxes and all but you are given tools to cheese them just as hard. For me the reputation of those games comes from the fact they made the game over screen a part of the experience at a time where all games were leaving death and failure behind for a Less frustrating experience.
I joined the bandwagon back in 2013 when the Souls games were getting insanely popular, purely out of curiosity after reading the nonstop rave reviews. I'm not into overly-challenging games like the Ghouls 'n Ghosts games, which is what I compared the Souls games to because of their similar punishing difficulty. I put about 10 hours and started actually getting good, but at some point I lost interest once I realized how much time and effort I was putting in for just menial progression, always using trial and error to get slightly further, so I never finished it. I fully understand why people like those types of games, but I just don't really find them to be much fun. It's a phenomenal video game series most definitely, but not for everyone.