Jaxel
Administrator
I am 40 hours into the game; just beat the 4 kings... I think I can confidently give my assessment of this game.
This is NOT a good game. Demon's Souls was a fantastic game, my favorite game of the current console generation. But this game is just not the same. I've said many times that Demon's Souls is NOT HARD; its STRICT... there is a major difference. "Strict" is the sense that the game has rules, and if you break those rules, you get punished harshly. Dark Souls however is not only "strict", it is also cheap.
When you died in Demon's Souls, it was a learning experience. You knew you did something wrong, you figured it out, learned from your mistakes and moved on. Because of this, the sense of accomplishment was paramount. No matter what, even when you died, you were achieving something. It seems like the developers of this game mistook the love of the "strictness" of this game, for a love of "difficulty".
Because of this, they made deaths in the game very cheap. When you die in Dark Souls, its almost rarely a learning experience. Its not because you made a mistake, its because the developers of the game are a bunch of assholes and wanted to troll you. You don't learn anything from your mistakes because more than likely, you didn't do anything wrong; the developers just trolled the fuck out of you.
As well, the lack of a Nexus area greatly diminishes the sense of achievement in the game. Demon's Souls had levels, and levels had numbers... 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, etc. Because of this, you always felt you were making progress. As the level numbers went up, you were doing better. Dark Souls is open world and without direction, its often very hard to tell if you are making progress at all. Hell, I still have no idea what my motivation is for the story...
This is NOT a good game. Demon's Souls was a fantastic game, my favorite game of the current console generation. But this game is just not the same. I've said many times that Demon's Souls is NOT HARD; its STRICT... there is a major difference. "Strict" is the sense that the game has rules, and if you break those rules, you get punished harshly. Dark Souls however is not only "strict", it is also cheap.
When you died in Demon's Souls, it was a learning experience. You knew you did something wrong, you figured it out, learned from your mistakes and moved on. Because of this, the sense of accomplishment was paramount. No matter what, even when you died, you were achieving something. It seems like the developers of this game mistook the love of the "strictness" of this game, for a love of "difficulty".
Because of this, they made deaths in the game very cheap. When you die in Dark Souls, its almost rarely a learning experience. Its not because you made a mistake, its because the developers of the game are a bunch of assholes and wanted to troll you. You don't learn anything from your mistakes because more than likely, you didn't do anything wrong; the developers just trolled the fuck out of you.
As well, the lack of a Nexus area greatly diminishes the sense of achievement in the game. Demon's Souls had levels, and levels had numbers... 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, etc. Because of this, you always felt you were making progress. As the level numbers went up, you were doing better. Dark Souls is open world and without direction, its often very hard to tell if you are making progress at all. Hell, I still have no idea what my motivation is for the story...
