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Help on understanding the Souls games?


Neogeo

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Hi, I'd appreciate some experience and knowledge from people who played Demon's/Dark Souls because there's one thing I don't understand on the series.

 

Why are they marketed as "hardcore" and why is almost everyone calling those games so freakin hard? When I gave DS1 a shot, I noticed two things.

 

1st thing, foes have hilariously high damage outputs while the player has a relatively low defense, health and stamina.

2nd thing, which might only be me but I cannot get a clue of that. The AI seems utterly dumb as hell. To me, combats felt like consisting of evade -> wait for foe to finish his attack animation -> roll forward + punch -> repeat. Is it really like that or am I just abusing things the devs were too dumb to take care of? I like the souls games for their atmosphere and all but these two things have been bugging me for ages now.

 

Hope someone can help me understanding the matter behind that a bit.

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You answered your own questions.   :P

 

The games are freaking hard due to:

1. The health\damage of the enemies relative to yours.

2. You can't hack and slash your way through combat.  You have to be patient as hell.......or you die.

3. You have to find the weakness of each enemy.  Fail to do that....you die.

 

Many gamer's don't have that level of patient and willingness to find and exploit the way to overcome tougher\stronger foes.   :(

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For me, it's just a matter of waiting till they start their attack animations and then I can just slowly walk around and stab them to death.

Or even simpler. Make them run over edges and kill themselves.

 

That's exactly why I don't understand why people call it hard at all, if the AI feels so dumb and abusive.

 

And I didn't even practive that or something. It's clearly visible and obvious after evading your first foe and watching him punch holes into the air.

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Play on PC, without a gamepad, is actually kinda difficult. Also, we are the generation "quicksave", the ultimate hero superpower, but that doesn't work here, so if you don't approach these souls-games carefully, you end up doing the same shit over and over again...

 

Personally, I only played until Seathe the Scaless before the boring (nonexisting) story turned me off forever (and GfWL, which I don't want on my new PC to return do DS), but it was kinda difficult to play, which was cool for a while, but most of this was trial and error, bad camera and controls and simply unfair situations you have to go through once or twice to have the advantage of knowing what awaits you (basically the same you'd do if you'd have a quicksave ... a quicksave merely spares us the boring repetition in-between two attempts)

 

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It's not that the story is nonexisting, it's that it's obscure. You don't have it explained to you by a plethora of NPC's, you have the (often incorrect) opinions of the very few people that are still sane and the descriptions from several objects such as souls and other items.

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For me, it's just a matter of waiting till they start their attack animations and then I can just slowly walk around and stab them to death.

Or even simpler. Make them run over edges and kill themselves.

 

That's exactly why I don't understand why people call it hard at all, if the AI feels so dumb and abusive.

 

And I didn't even practive that or something. It's clearly visible and obvious after evading your first foe and watching him punch holes into the air.

This sounds like the experience of someone who hasn't gotten further than the Undead Burg/Parish. The game gets a lot more complicated than that. There are quite a few enemies that will shake your strategy, like the rolling skeletons in the painted world.

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Especially the bosses!

 

I've finished dark souls 1 multiple times and I find it's bosses hilariously easy. Almost all of them can be defeated by running into them and hugging their legs. The real difficulty I found in those games is their complex level design and super vague directions. Ornstein and smough, Arturias (can't remember exact spelling it's the DLC knight like boss) and magnus the father of abyss are the bosses I found hard.

 

Now I have not played Demon's souls or Dark Souls 2 yet (waiting on a complete edition with all it's DLC) so I can't comment on that but dark souls 1 boss fights are hilariously exaggerated.

 

Infact the hardest challenge I had to overcome in dark souls was the 2 silver knight archers in anor lando, fuck those 2.

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The hydra kicked my ass many, many times until I found the sweet spot where I could fire arrows with impunity.  Much of it was like that.  You had to find the weak spot.  That damn huge dog with the sword was annoying as hell.  The dragon on the bridge was also a pain.  

 

Nothing was impossible, just annoying.

Keep in mind I was playing the game with keyboard and mouse.  I'm an old school gamer and allergic to pads.

 

 

The hardest part of the game was indeed the vague directions.  I don't remember how many times I had to back out of the game and go find an online guide just for freaking directions.

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I play Dark Souls 2 on PC. And I played Dark Souls before. Dark Souls 1 was really kinda easy after you know every enemy move etc. But DS2 is just hard. I'm in new game +++ atm with a mage, the bosses are kinda easy because I know them, but the dlc's, just wow. Its just pain in the ass as mage/caster nearly every boss and enemy has a high magic resistance, that means, my strongest spells deals only 160 dmg on a boss with, i dunno, 12000 hp ? And if they hit me only one time because I fail dodge or react to late, I'm dead. If I get hit by a bosscombo and cant blockk his last hit because I'm out of stamina, I'm dead. The game is that hard because you nly have to do on thing wrong and it can cost you your live. And for me as example, its kinda hard to get nearly 300.000 souls together for a lvl up because, first, they dont give many souls and as second if I die and die a second time because of stupidity, every soul is lost.

Dark Souls is getting harder and harder the more often you start new game +. Thats why the first playthrough is called "tutorial" to learn the game and the movements of the enemy. But new game + means new and stronger enemies, some of them get new movementsets what means you have to learn it again. They get more life/dmg while you get only a bit more dmg/life what means the fights take longer and that can cause you to fail and die more often.

Dark Souls is for sure a really hard game and the players dont call it so without any reason.

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