Fenixp: I ... Just ... All right, I've just played it a bit over 4 hours now, so I feel like I've finally given it a fair chance - with a controller, no less. The game itself is kind of fun, with combat having a lot of weight behind it which makes it quite satisfying. I've honestly not seen much of story to speak of, and while it's nice that you can piece it together from stuff like item description and the half-crazy dialogue, I have very little incentive to actually attempt to do that - I've not really seen anything interesting about it so far.
But I digress, it's gameplay that's important, right? So yeah, gameplay. It's good. I like how the weapons and especially their attack arcs behave, that's very nice. I also like the possibility to switch between one-handed and two-handed weilding, very neat idea, and some of the primitive 'combos' are interesting enough. What I do not understand are these things:
a) Where's the fun in repeating already memorized? So far, I have spent like 8 attempts to take down the gargoyle boss thing. The game was pretty much a breeze until then, this being a massive difficulty spike that just kind of ... Happened. So yeah, I fight the boss, I'm being careful, keeping my distance, learning its tells - 3 deaths. Me actually trying to utilize what I have learned - 4 deaths. The last death was the OTHER gargoyle which just sort of emerged all of the sudden, and BOTH of them suddenly using an attack I have never encountered in the game before. So yeah, that was the last death ("But it's your fault when you die!" my ass, I could have only predicted that if I seen a youtube playtrough.) Now I'm actually okay with that, I'm used to repeating boss fights from other hack and slash games so meh - what just constantly riles me up is that I repeatedly need to go trough the same set of enemies to get there. Some would argue that I learn the game better that way, but I never take damage - they're just an annoyance which slows every replay of the boss by good 5 minutes or so. It's like watching a 5 min long cutscene before I'm allowed my another go - and that's just an excercise in patience, not fun gameplay in any way. Well-designed games make me ragequit. Dark Souls made me leave in disgust while expecting another slog trough the same set of opponents.
b) What's the point of obscuring information? Now, I get games which don't hold your hand, but Dark Souls deliberately doesn't tell you anything. Oh yeah, "It's up to you to figure out" - that basically either means wasting loads of time with trial and error or booting up Dark Souls wiki, yet my experience is that the moment I'm forced to use a guide or walktrough, I will stop enjoying a game. Sooo... Yeah, I hope my mistake was not building my character wrong, because the game sure as hell won't tell me (lvl 17 or so Warrior, focused on Dex, Str and Vit)
So... Yeah. I no longer think it's terrible, just... Lacking. There doesn't seem to be much to do, and there doesn't seem to be much of interest to be found (and if there is, it's barred by the monsters with tons of HP that my weapon barely cratches). I do like the world design tho, especially how you keep unlocking paths connecting you to the previous locations, and then unlock paths FROM them. That's really cool.
I completely agree about "deliberately obscuring" information. That was the most annoying part of the game. There's a whole system in place and they tell you zilch about it. They've made up words to describe things that we have words for.
I think a part of it is for immersion. They want you to be just as confused about being dead as one might be if they suddenly died and found themselves in the land of the dead. But things made so little sense that I had to look them up after maybe 10 hours or so of completely unproductive gameplay.
As far as the gargoyles go, I beat them on my very first try. Once I got to them. I also built my character wrong. And that's another thing I didn't like about the game. They've obscured the mechanics enough that you have no idea if what you're doing is good. So, naturally, I started looking things up online to see what in the world different attributes did.
Once I did look some things up, I was surprised by some very horrible design choices. A rule of choice is that A) You know there's a choice, B) You know more or less the result of making the choice. I remember a character that if you happened to knock him off a cliff, you win! If you don't, you lose. And significantly. There was no indication in the game that this was even a valid action, let alone something that could save you.
But I first learned about it because someone left a marker telling me to kill him. And so, there is an indication. And I think this game had the Internet communications going on as part of its design. So, although this game would have failed miserably in 1980, the Internet along with the vague communication abilities make the game viable today -- and thrive.
Overall, I enjoyed the experience. But it was laden so heavily with repetition, grinding and eventually no location I could find without things insta-killing me, that I finally quit.
What I like is that I quit and others persevered. For some folks, they absolutely love the challenge, the thrill of real and meaningful discovery in a game and excitement of hard-fought victories.
