And weapons with wide swing arcs, of course. Main reason to use halberds imo.

Most of the time you ARE going to go one on one, or at least TRY to. If you get an enemy behind you, you are going to get back stabbed. Then again, you can do the same. Whatever the enemies can do, YOU can do. And you are amazingly wrong about the blocking. Blockin is absolutely vital. Of course you are not being able to block the first boss's attacks, since he is ABSOLUTELY enormous and its attacks are very, very forceful. Bad idea.


Again you are supposed to draw them out. The skeletons are more or less a "Yeah. Don't come here. You are going to get SLAUGHTERED" thing. If you are good at the game you can handle them (that, or use spells. Spells work). You need to get better at the game and understand its mechanics before goingto the cemetery/catacombs.
It used to be worse though. Skeletons used to not give souls, and before a patch, if you did not kill the catacomb skeletons with a Sacred weapon, they came back to life. I miss that.


Kick and jump are kind of confusing yes, if you have played Smash Bros. it becomes easier, it is pretty much just like performing a smash Attack in those. I agree that kick and shield bash can be a bit fiddly, but not with the rest of your complaint. There is hit detection, but they were not going to change the way timing works if it connects. That's the thing about it, if you did it right, the enemies WILL stagger, but your animation will go as if it was through thin air to allow you to REACT. You will stagger if the enemy blocks OR ripostes you (yes, they can do that)


The souls games do not play like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. Parry/riposte is hitting block thew VERY instant you are going to get hit by a humanoid enemy. You can then execute. You are not a sidestepping thing. You can ALSO take advantage of enemy windup/windback animations between attacks but they are not instant kills or anything, you just attack them when they are not blocking. I fail to see how the way it handles is not good.

Again, combat in the Souls games is more of a puzzle. Find out what works, what doesn't wht openings the enemies have.

hYPERBOLE MUCH?

In any case, I really do not know where you are coming from and what you were expecting. It's not like the game hasn't been out for a while, you could've seen a video of HOW it handles.
Sounds to me like you were wanting to be able to mow down scores of enemies easily, eventually, one can. But it takes KNOWING the damn game's in and outs, and how to exploit the enemies' openings. You are not going to know that the first few hours you play the game.

[/i][i] Actually, I wanted a game with slow and careful progress, exploration and interesting, good combat.

So far I got badly designed combat with artificial difficulty (but the rest works).

Just an example:

When an enemy is making a long swing, naturally you do a shield bash (which is also shoddy ingame as you always take a swing with the shield. You don't do that with a shield bash a attack interupter). But, until you hit an artificial time slot, the shield passes through the enemy without interupting the attack. That is not proper combat. Not to mention the very limited options of the player character or that kicking seems to me more reliant on luck than anything else (which is the opposite of what kicking should be).

Also, I don't want to do fancy pirouettes with my sword. I fand a plain an simple swordfight.

For me, the game is a pattern learning game were you need to learn exact patterns of enemy movement for parrying and riposte. Which is artificially made difficult by not being based on enemy movement but some timing you only can learn by trying and dying.

For me the whole game seems like some forced "cool and edgy" hardcore game. "If you can't do it, you are not a proper gamer" and so on. For which I'm frankly just to old.

I'm giving it a final try when I'm at home later, because I really like the atmosphere and maybe read some beginners guide (which is also a sign of bad design).

You are using things wrong then. The shield bash is NOT to be used when the enemies are telegraphing their attacks. You do a shield bash to break their defense/stagger them so you get an opening, or to push them off ledges, NOT as a counter move. Kicking is not at all reliant on luck, but getting the timing for it can be a bit difficult at first, easier if one thinks of it as a "smash attack", but the use of it is somewhat limited. You are using the tools in the wrong way.
You are trying to play the game in a way that it was not meant to be played, and you are not catching on the rythm it has.

You don't learn the exact patterns the enemy have, but you do NEED to focus on learning what attacks they have and how they move, they do not have static patterns, but they do have a limited set of attacks where each has several strengths and weaknesses, if you go rushing and attack first without knowing, you are going to get wrecked. You learn by trying, remembering, and doing better next time. Each new encounter needs to be treated like a puzzle, even if it is composed of enemies you already know of. It is not an artificial difficulty (what? Really, I don't get how the difficulty of THIS title could be artificial.) SINCE ONCE you know how things work, you can adapt and improvise working strategies to advance through areas. Just don't expect to be able to clear things on a first visit, and ALWAYS always be cautious.

"If you can't do it, you are not a proper gamer"
No one is saying that. Just that you are trying to play the game in a way that won't work. Being a self-identified "hardcore gamer" has nothing to do with anything. This doesn't have anything to do with impressing anyone online.

By all means, watch a video guide! And/or watch this of the previous title, it helps tremendously, since a lot of what worked in Demon's, works in Dark quite well.
http://lparchive.org/Demons-Souls/

That being said, yeah, the game IS needlessly obtuse about some things. Then again it was made like that because the developers were thinking about HOW the internet would be obsessive about the game and document every single thing. That's kind of a metagame thing and it does detract a bit from the game, not very elegant to require a goddamn wiki for some of the most obscure elements.

I really hate that. I want to discover a game step by step. Not by reading some wiki on the internet. One of the biggest draws for me is how you need to "evolve" or "work for" the story yourself. Reading stuff on the internet is something I only do after I've seen most of a game, due to spoilers.

Nobody's forcing you to read anything or do any sort of metagame stuff. You might miss some secrets, but not much else. Read item descriptions for background.

You seem to lack the patience or willingness to just sit back for a bit and learn the game. If you don't allow yourself to do that, than yeah - 20 bucks, and a potentially great gaming experience, wasted.

Class is largely unimportant in the long run, don't worry too much. Although a pyromancer gives you fire magic (no intelligence or faith required for pyromancy) right from the start. Invest in endurance, it's really important. The skeletons in the beginning are bad, go to the mountain instead. Take your time, relax, use the force, don't be afraid to die etc.

I have a lot of patience. Actually, I like it when I can play games slow and discover them. (My favourite games are the Paradox strategy games. That is why I bought the damn game. The problem is the game gives you wrong information. If at all. I'm currently reading stuff up on the internet that should be in the game.

You can only learn if the game give you instructions. This game doesn't.

Edit:

But I'm not spending an hour to learn how to kick! That is just bad design.

The whole "kicking/jump attack/parrying/riposte infromation" from the tutorial is either really bad desribed or just plain wrong.

The tutorial is a disaster. Which is, for a game that focuses on learning and exploration, pretty much unexcuseable. I got the feeling the devs expected you to know Deamon Souls before playing this.

How is it a disaster? It gives you short instructions on the basic actions. Afterwards, you are on your own.

The game does not lie, it will not hold your hand, but it does not lie to you.
The game gives BASIC instructions. Then leaves you to your devices to learn more. It is not going to tell you HOW to go forward. It doesn't care to do that. It encourages you to try new things if you fail by doing something before. Hell that is the whole point of it.

You don't need to spend an hour to learn how to kick. You just need to do it a couple of times to get a sense of the timing required. That is not bad design, if you are requiring one hour to do THAT basic move, then really, there is something wrong with you.

Not like there's anything bad about being subpar in execution. I know I am terrible at execution in fighting games, That I cannot pull off a VERY STRICT timing set of links in SF4 or get the timing down for a set of cancels in King of Fighters does not mean that the games are badly designed. It means that I am not good enough at them, and the failure is mine at them.

Kicking:

Left Stick + RB

That is it. Left Stick what? Move forward, click, move backward? And trying is bothersome, because those actions drain stanima. That means after three tries I need to wait a second again before I can try again to figure out what to do.

That is how the whole "tutorial goes". That is not exploration or giving instructions. That is cheap.

...You'd have to elaborate on this, because, like so many other game flaws you have mentioned on this thread, this just left me scratching my head out of confusion. The only way this can make sense to me right now is if the game actually described wrongly how to perform these actions, which it doesn't.

Smash attack forward + the button. That's it. Smash attack forward + hard attack is a lunge attack.

What is smash attack?

It isn't mentioned in the game.

...I am pretty sure the tutorial message does say it's left stick forward + normal attack. I didn't read the internets before playing Dark Souls, and I didn't learn this in Demon's Souls (because this was introduced in Dark), so yeah, tutorial was more than sufficient for me to learn all the basics such as this.

Edit: scratch that, I actually just checked and indeed it's exactly as you said. So, don't ask me how I figured it out just by reading left stick + rb. :p