What makes dark souls hard

This gives the player another layer of decision making. Do you continue to press on? You may be risking running into an ambush or a tough enemy. Do you head back? The path is long, and once you rest in the bonfire, all enemies will respawn. Not to mention that the next bonfire might be just around the corner. This gives the game a pace and a dynamic between the player and the world that not many other games out there are capable of doing.

Most games have a straightforward narrative that gives context to the world you inhabit and what you or your character is doing in it. Instead, it is fed to you in crumbs, given like pieces of a puzzle that you can choose to solve or not. But basically, the knight at the very start of the game in the Asylum, the one who gives you the Estus Flask and then dies, is the one who gave you the mission to link the fire.

You see, in the world of Dark Souls, people who have the Undead Curse and lose their way, either through despair, horror, sorrow, or grief, lose their purpose, making them forget who they really are, and turning Hollow. Then, when you reach the Firelink Shrine, you encounter the Crestfallen Warrior, who gives you instructions about how to complete your task.

Ring two bells, one above and one below. These two pieces of storytelling are not force-fed to you. In fact, you can skip the dialog in your first time around and have no idea how pivotal these two characters are to the context of the story.

Bonfires are part of the gameplay, they are a mechanic of it, but I figured it deserved a place on its own separate from this one as it affects a lot of different elements, as I explained before. And while some of these may be found in many other games, the way they are used and mixed together turn the experience into what we know as a Souls game.

That is harder than even Heides tower if you are actually trying to fight the skellys and not run past speed runner style. The Burg is pretty easy, DS2 forest wasnt that bad. Taurus Demon is a bit trickier than Last Giant though because the environment and at first rolling doesnt really occur to many.

Its in no way bad game design though. Dark Souls can potentially be really hard at the beginning, not so much the mobs, but the bosses. You fight your first boss already in the tutorial, the second one you fight on a narrow bridge limited maneuverability , the third one is two bosses at once, the fourth one has two dogs and is located in a totally tiny room again, limited maneuverability , etc. However, the tutorial also teaches you about using the plunging attack on the boss, the bridge where you fight the second boss conveniently lets you execute just such a plunging attack and just before it you find a powerful buff for your weapon , and if you go human you can summon help for the third boss.

The only thing about the beginning of Dark Souls that I think is unnecessarily difficult is fighing Capra in that small room, with two dogs with him, one of which is instantly aggroed when you enter the area, with Capra usually doing a jumping attack immediately. And then when you get rid of the dogs and are only left with Capra, the room is so small that you can't properly strife around him because from certain angles you can't see him as the stupid camera is blocked by that stupid tree in the room.

I hate that room. Other than that, the game's not too hard, you just need to be patient, because you'll necessarily fail, until you get better.

DS2 vanilla is easy. There is no argument. Once you get to the DLCs, thats when it starts to murder people. I thought DS1 might have been too easy now, as I was a pyro, so I started again as Deprived, and found that there was a ladder connecting the Dragon area to a bonfire Okay maybe it wasn't designed so bad Zuletzt bearbeitet von TheUprising ; Perhaps you need to practice rolling or something..?

No "souls vet" would stop playing Dark Souls I because they thought it was poorly designed or too hard The game doesn't hold your hand nearly as much as Dark souls II does, and it's not nearly as linear. That's one of the things that prevents Dark Souls' difficulty from being too demoralising: it has a sense of community. You know that you're going through it with thousands of other people, too, and seeing their messages and ghostly presences in your own game helps you feel like you're not alone.

It's also important to feel like we have control. Unfair difficulty is never fun. And though some deaths in Dark Souls are unexpected, they're rarely inexplicable and are usually your fault. If you play through the same sections over and over again, as most people have to, you come to realise that there is fundamentally almost no randomness in Dark Souls. The environment and enemies always behave in the same way.

It's what you do that changes, and the predictability of everything else makes mastery possible. So I think that's one reason why [Dark Souls] is so appealing: once you start to learn it, it's essentially predictable. Over the course of writing this book, one thing I've heard over and over again from Dark Souls players is that, because of the high stakes, both victory and defeat feel more meaningful. This is something that especially appeals to people who have been playing games for decades, because since the early '00s, games have generally been trending away from that kind of challenge.

Dark Souls' translator Ryan Morris sums it up: "[Dark Souls] put the significance of things that were happening back into games. Like, you have to care about dying when your souls are on the line.

You have to assess a situation and figure out if it's really worth taking the risk and doing it. And so it keeps you on the edge of your seat, because your time investment in the game is actually at risk, so you get spooked and freaked out. That physical component to the Dark Souls experience - the sweating palms, the racing heart, the cold, nauseating dread when you fall victim to a little gang of Hollows on your way back to a bonfire and lose 20, souls - intrigued me.

Other games are exciting, sure, but I don't think I've ever leaped up and screamed at the television, arms raised in jubilation, whilst playing any other game. The way you feel during the final minutes of those tight boss fights, where both you and your foe are millimetres from death and you've been holding your breath for seemingly minutes at a time, is not something most video games are capable of eliciting.

You have an endorphin release not dissimilar to what you'd have with an orgasm: when you reach a goal your brain releases chemicals that make you feel happy and satisfied. When you're doing something demanding, your heart rate goes up, your skin galvanises, you start to perspire and breathe faster, you have all these physiological reactions - and there's lots of research in the psychology literature showing that those things can feed on each other and cycle back.

You're excited, and because you're excited, your heart rate goes up, and you become aware that your heart rate has gone up and you interpret that as evidence that you're excited, and so you get more excited and your heart rate goes up more. And these physiological and psychological systems go back and forth. It's possible to trick people into this kind of feedback loop, of course. Consider the insidiously addictive, but not meaningfully rewarding appeal of slot machines and less scrupulous free-to-play games, for example.

But it's difficult to fake for long. If achievements are illusory, we become wise to it, and the thrill dissipates. Because Dark Souls keeps the stakes consistently high, its thrill does not noticeably dissipate - well, certainly not until you're past your first few playthroughs. For all the suffering that Dark Souls has inflicted upon us, it's rarely totally demoralising.

There's always something else to try or someone to turn to in search of help. And even when they are smacking you in the face with your own incompetence, you get the impression that From's designers are often doing so with a cheeky smile on their faces rather than a sadistic grimace.

You can read our full review of dark souls here! Instead, as a general rule, playing Dark Souls should push you to the brink of quitting. The harder a game is, the more difficult it becomes for the player to play it, and subsequently share their thoughts on the experience. Similarly, if the game is too difficult it has the same effect of making players less receptive to criticism because they had such a negative experience.

This I think is incredibly important, because the Souls series forces people to take themselves seriously; always thinking about their decisions and how they affect their current situation. The Souls games are some of the only titles I can think of that somehow strike a perfect balance between player choice and guidance. You go out and buy it real quick.

Seriously though, I think everyone who calls themselves a gamer should play this series at least once to get an idea of how difficult games can be while still staying fair.

You just have to accept the fact that some games will be more challenging than others and embrace the moments of triumph when you beat them. You should also make good use of lock-on with ranged weapons—items like poison throwing knives can be very effective since they do a ton of damage over time.

There are also some weapons that are really helpful if you get them early-ish in the game.