I think the crafted mechanical exceptions, like the traps you mentioned (I had to do the ghost run in New Londo my first time too) and Sen’s fortress are outstanding, but the structure constrains the player’s ability to poke around different levels while they’re learning how to play (as opposed to Demon’s allowing the player free reign of 1-2, 2-1, 3-1, 4-1, 5-1 after 1-1), and the opening levels are brutal.
In Demon’s, I still experienced being scared and overmatched and running away, but I had the ability to pick a different level and poke at it for a while. In Dark Souls 1 there isn’t much choice in those first 10 hours.
Maybe I should also say that while no game exposes the foolishness of game design dogma like this one, I don’t think Dark Souls 1 is playing fair in Undead Burg, Undead Parish (or, it doesn’t control the introduction of difficult elements particularly well).
It runs counter to the ‘learn by doing’ framework expressed best in Bloodborne, which features that big brawl around the bonfire as a capstone lesson/enforcement of a certain play skill that’s analogous to Resident Evil 4’s opening Village fight. Dark Souls 1’s intro levels aren’t interested in the player experimenting and shaping like those more open combat spaces, it’s interested in the player overcoming this obstacle now and leaving little room for interpretation.
this reminds me of when I was telling my friend who is the art programmer on darkest dungeon to play getting over it and he said he’d avoided it because it looked like it didn’t “respect the player” and I was like, buddy, that’s the only game that does
That’s true. DkS early-game optional paths also have undamageable enemies to tell you you really shouldn’t be going there. They’re more hypothetical optional paths for flavor rather than true optional paths to allow the player to control the pacing and difficulty. I really like that flavor and think it’s missing from the other games in the series, but I can see the opposite view.
I find the difficulty of all of them to be pretty flat and it’s more a question of whether or not the enemies are constructed in engaging vs frustrating scenarios (unless you’re doing a level 1 run or a no upgrade run or something).
Aside from the interactions facilitated by PvP, I find the PvE engagement more interesting from a story-oriented perspective than a combat-oriented one.
The burg and parish are absurdly polished levels and escalate beautifully, you’re crazy for this one Busted
That group of enemies on the aqueduct stairs right before the start of the burg is such an awesome compact encounter, it has a little sample of almost every element in the level itself.
i think if i have to ding Souls for beginner unfriendliness it’ll be over Capra Demon. That boss fight is sort of a wonderful nasty surprise the first time you encounter it (enter fog door -> WHOA SHIT WHAT’S THAT RUNNING AT ME (dead)), but it’s too harsh and is a major bottleneck for part of the game (assuming you don’t pick the master key and wander in the back gate… like i did the first time). You die too quickly on most attempts to meaningfully learn the fight and it comes down to “can you kill the dogs quickly” even if you know what you’re doing. Also, if you haven’t figured out how poise works it’s a nightmare, and you probably haven’t. Never liked that fight.
I never quite got the praise for Ariamis. I mostly experienced it as a bunch of easy and samey one-on-one/two fights in a bunch of samey staircases. The dense warren-type level design is a change of pace from the rest of the game and I give it some points for sheer variety, but I wouldn’t play a whole game of this.
I think maybe I found it too late in my first playthrough. I was overleveled.
It actually took me much longer to find the lower burg than to beat Capra, to this day I can never remember how to actually get down there. I remember running around Darkroot forever (which was still great).
i actually sorta like Demon Ruins for being so blatantly a filler JRPG dungeon. It’s practically a boss rush, it has revisiting bosses as enemies and one of the bosses is a palette swap.
It’s a shame that the bosses are all either uninspired or flat-out god-awful but HEY
Izalith gets points from me for looking really cool. It’s a whatever level but people wouldn’t hate it so much if bed of chaos wasn’t so frustrating.
Like those fire-breathing demon statues, did they decide after modelling they may as well be statues so that they didn’t have to bother making a single animation for them
i thought it was super profound and great that these huge nasties from before are just normal enemies now, and you can engage them as such, but like fair point lol