there’s definitely something to it, but i don’t think it fits as neatly or coherently as your earlier post nudged at
I think one of the few posts I made on 1.0 was praising Dark Souls 2’s PS2-ness – I may have been the first person to do this cuz yeah I’m a total trendsetter baby – but then I returned to the game, realized I was not having a good time, and immediately sold it cuz I couldn’t afford no $60 game I wasn’t totally in love with.
I think my opinion of the game has remained pretty consistent. Maybe even softened a bit thanks to SotFS. This conversation seems pretty chill to me. 
I find this interesting because it was the opposite of my experience and I’ve always wondered if it’s because I was so into Demon’s Souls that the changes in Dark Souls threw me for a loop. Demon’s Souls was very challenging for its time but it was still a level-based affair. If I was having trouble in one area I could easily switch over to another by just clicking on another archstone. But post-tutorial Dark Souls was fucking brutal at release. Those respawning skeletons in the graveyard! New Londo! Can you also access that bridge that leads to the locked door that leads to Blighttown at the start too? And the lock-on was prone to bugging out! I spent so much time getting my ass kicked by this shit and it was pretty unpleasant. And that’s one thing I love about the game, but it’s one of the big reasons I was so surprised it became such a hit. It seemed even more hostile than Demon’s Souls to me, and I had to take a long break from it before I was able to return and beat the damn thing.
Though I suppose post-GTA3/Oblivion an open world game might be considered more natural and accessible than some Mega Man or Mario 64-style choose your own level/hub world shit.
I wonder if they’ll ever make another game with shit as harsh as the Curse was at Dark Souls 1 launch.
I remember getting all the way to the bottom of the crypts and not being able to access the boss or unlocking fast travel. Holy shit. That was so brutal.
I love that game so much.
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Nobody is talking about the lack of corpse football in the SotFS refresh. My next Ds2 playthrough will probably be vanilla!
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Huh.
Yeah, we definitely had a different experience with this one. I did not find Dark Souls 1 to be brutal in the least after its release (particularly after Capra Demon). I didn’t have many problems with the lock-on. The only really difficult moment I had (and I’m not sure I think it was difficult so much as cheap) was with the ledge archers.
Additionally though, I have never thought of most of the Souls games as brutal. Bloodborne might be the first game where I felt anything remotely like that, and it’s mostly because some enemies are more aggressive and you don’t have a shield. Even then, by the end of it my own thinking was more along the lines of, “well that was interesting” and if there was anything else I wanted to dig down into more. The whole reason I loved Demon’s Souls had little to do with its difficulty or even the standard gameplay loop at all really. It was the world, the lore, the characters, the vague teetering at the end of the world… etc. The combat was better than average but nothing spectacular, and it wasn’t until 3-1 and the Valley of Defilement that I really felt something was special about the game. I ended up digging down into who all these characters were and what happened to the world and went through all the dialog trees and wanted to know what each of their storylines were… that was what made it special to me. The game, for me, was piecing together a broken world in my own head.
I guess when I think of a game that I’d qualify as brutal, my assumption tends to be that failure makes the game harder rather than easier (i.e., shmups, fighting games, Contra-esque titles, etc.). And none of the Souls games really do this. You’re just put back to neutral and maybe lost as much as an hour of time (at most, probably). Now, before the whole “but you lose access to X, Y, Z”, I learned pretty early on to assume that being “Hollowed” is basically the normal state in any given Souls game, because I spent so much of my time in that state that the rare occasion I wasn’t was usually for some very specific thing (e.g., summoning help for an encounter or boss fight). Thus the mechanic was much more of a, “here’s a way I can get some extra power”, rather than, “this is the state I expect to be playing the game in”. So, given that the hollow state was always what I considered baseline, anything lost or gained from it rarely factored into my play, given I simply expected to be hollowed and it was more happy coincidence if I wasn’t.
In Dark Souls 1, my first playthrough was something like 60 hours, and I don’t think what’s lost is all that much, considering that all you lose is time. This is also why I say the ledge archers were cheap. I was dying because the game was setup in a way to kill me, and to do so multiple times until I had the timings down absurdly well. It was pretty much the only place I got stuck, and not because I was lost, but because there was no other route (and my thinking was, “there has to be another way because this is ridiculous”). You had to go through these enemies in a situation that made them extremely difficult to fight (and I died more to them than any single boss in the entire game). They ultimately felt like a waste of time because they were pretty clearly a set piece and that kind of obnoxious construction was never in a game before or after in the Souls series.
So… yeah. Some occasional cheap/annoying stuff? Sure. But I’ve never pictured the Souls game as brutal. You don’t really lose enough for that to be the case.
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I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you are in the minority on this one
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Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 1 become very easy with enough player knowledge. There are at least a half-dozen endgame-quality weapons you can just go get right away in Dark Souls (maybe give or take a reload for a random drop). And enemies are largely in predictable spots, and there aren’t a lot of ambushes or traps outside of Sen’s fortress, and humanity is more abundant than you think. But you don’t know any of that shit your first time through. No one did.
my first playthrough is always gonna be the best one because i also played it offline, unpatched, no DLC, with the dark wood grain ring and full Havel’s :B
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1-1 is more of a gauntlet than Undead Burg, particularly since you can’t level up in 1-1, but for the entire rest of the game after that, DkS is much harder for a new player. The linear Demon’s levels (4-1, 4-2, 5-1, 5-2) all have conspicuously trivial bosses that I first-tried (I think, probably second try on one of them) on my first Demon’s playthrough. I think that was deliberate.
Meanwhile DkS has toughish bosses very far from bonfires like Seath, and failing to find hidden bonfires is a real concern (I beat Quelaag from the top-of-Blighttown bonfire on my first playthrough).
I think the biggest difference in terms of tone is that DkS has progress-negative “traps”: curses (usually from falling into a literal sewer trap), and getting stuck in Ash Lake or Tomb of Giants. It’s the only Souls game containing this type of trap and that alone gives it a sadistic edge.
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Ah, you are right. Looks like misuse of the term dog whistle I’ve seen by others has led me to misinterpret what it means myself.
Though the clapping should have hopefully made it obvious it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
What I was trying to say is that “Dks2 is bad because B-Team” is a silly reductionist criticism that you typically see in more stereotypical “gamer” forums and youtube comments
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I don’t disagree, but games that seem brutal to me are typically those where the through-course is more obfuscated or difficult on failure rather than the same or easier. Like, Souls bosses don’t become harder if you fail. They’re just the same bosses, waiting at the same place, and doing the same things. Figuring out how to 1CC a shmup seems brutal to me, because the answer to doing this is to not credit feed. Meaning the actual path towards getting better, towards progress, is not the obvious one. A Souls game is pretty much built to train you to succeed, and even if the paths throughout the games are closer or farther depending on the entry, the core of ideas and solutions never changes.
Thus what I see as being complex about them largely relates to how the game world interacts with that core, and the difficulty is… well, again, not so much difficult as just a process of learning.
So, I followed you up until the point of traps. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever fallen into these traps, but do they prevent stuff like using a homeward bone or just dying to escape them?
It’s cool, thanks for elaborating. I guess it’s a neogaf shibboleth?
CoD is definitely patient zero for “oh, this isn’t made by the same guys as the other one, huh, are you trying to trick me?”
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Indeed they do. Curses permanently halve your health in DkS1 until you use a purging stone (bought from gargoyle pardoner guy) or talk to Lordvessel-for-key guy. When you are cursed, there is a dialog box telling you to go to New Londo to talk to that guy but the purging stone option is not mentioned. In New Londo, you don’t need to use Transient Curse items to kill ghosts since you are actually cursed. But as you can imagine clearing 20 or so ghosts with a +5 weapon at half health is absolutely vicious, and you can’t exactly keep progressing until you deal with your problem.
If you sit in Tomb of Giants or Ash Lake without the lordvessel, the homeward bone warps you back down to the bottom, naturally. That one is a “curiosity killed the cat” situation.
I fell into all three traps on my first playthrough and it’s naturally my most vivid memory of the game
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god i love dark souls 1
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there was a glitch in the release version involving the dragon head stone’s fire breath you can abuse to gain millions of souls. i got very good at running down to ash lake and back up again to do crazy cheats, i could do it in about 10 minutes tops no deaths.
That one geometry glitch obstructing walking back up the Great Hollow branches made me gnash my teeth so hard. I think I died to it three times.
Also there is a risk of getting cursed there as you walk back up!!!
Yeah, I didn’t have any of those happen to me and I think I only got cursed on my third playthrough as a Giant Club build.
Those certainly sound pretty brutal if you’re unsure how to handle them. I guess not running into these particular issues is probably also due to my overly cautious playstyle (which was also why I struggled with the parry stuff in Bloodborne).
dark souls 2 is actually the only good souls game
I played it first and I was a boxer and wore just a kilt and tunic and giant scarf and in all the others you can’t be a boxer and have nothing but different sets of armor to wear. if I’m going to slog though these miserable ass games I want to do it with my fists
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Yeah I certainly knew I was attempting some kind of sequence break when I headed into Tomb of Giants instead of doing Sen’s (I think that’s where I was at). I was incredibly bad at timing the swinging Sen’s traps on my first playthrough, and I think I got sick of it enough to just go down the other available path for a change of pace.
I think this is absolutely true and it’s one of the reasons I put Dark Souls 1 at just about the bottom of the pile. Demon’s Souls makes a concerted effort in Boletaria 1-1 to build a tutorial level, with meaningful shortcuts, escalation, and a threatening but easy tutorial boss.
After Dark Souls’ tutorial dungeon (nicely done, I love their compact looping levels), the opening levels are brutal. The stretch from the bonfire in the Undead Burg to the Taurus Demon is brutal for that skill level, and the next available levels are significantly harder than the breadth of Demon’s *-1 levels. It just doesn’t feel well-polished, considering they expressed interest in meaningfully designed difficulty curves before.
I dunno, Dark Souls 3 is the only game with a very smoothly increasing difficulty curve from an easy base and we all think it’s kind of boring.
Dark Souls 1 is interested above all in emotional variety, from my POV. It’s filled with funny and frustrating events when you least expect it, and swings from nervousness to confident mastery and back. The difficulty spikes are part of that.
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