I love Dark Souls, but it is a dense game for a new player. You only have to look at the 10 paragraphs comments above explaining how simple and intuitive the game is to realise it's not.
The things I think it does wrong;
1. Weapon explanation - I know there are classes like, thrust, slash, etc. but my god, stat boosts over 5 different damage output, plus defensive capabilities (which I'm assuming only come into play if two-handing a weapon and blocking with it? Who knows? I sure as hell don't). And figuring out the minimum stat requirements, oh, and scaling systems, plus it depends what enemy it's good against.
Basically, the result is this; you pick up a weapon and without a lot of learning you have absolutely no idea if it's any good. Worse than that, you can try and it seems terrible so forget about it. 50 hours later you find out that if you had just upped this stat, and reinforced that, and lowered your load here, it would have been the best weapon you have. The word OPAQUE was correctly above. Yes, you can figure it out, but I can also figure out calculus, but I don't want to do that at 11pm at night while trying to kill the firesage demon.
And don't talk to me about magic/pyromancy. Magic seems even more powerful that physical weapons, just as soon as you can figure out who sells which spells. Oh, and how to make them sell those spells. And don't forget you need a wand, but what makes a "better" wand? What's it's range, why does it have physical defense stats? Effectivesness against certain enemy types is all well and good but I can't tell if fire/lightening/divine/magic/? is more or less effective??? Again, you can figure it out but it's hard. And despite a friendly community the average advice is something like this
"Although the Pyromancy Flames has INT scaling, this scaling does not affect the Flame's MagAdjust (which governs the damage spells inflict). The INT scaling is only for the strong attack's Fire damage. The only way to increase the MagAdjust is by upgrading the Flame." To the average dark souls veteran, this makes perfect sense. To someone just starting you have to learn what the Pyromancy flame is, what INT scaling is, what the "strong attack" means, and how to upgrade the Flame (Good luck finding einygi without using the internet!). There's nothing wrong with this, but it's a lot of learning expected that's OUTSIDE of what the game explains.
Counterpoint - Of course, this part of the point of Dark Souls. FROM Software said the mechanics and rules were deliberately obscure because it knows it's geeky audience love to discuss this stuff endlessly on the net. And we do.
2. Cheap deaths - To be fair, these aren't as common as people think, but there are times where your character slides off in the Crystal Cave, or gets bumped to their death. And some of the bosses have horrendous one-shot killers that can frustrate when you can't see the loophole to it.
Counterpoint - It's done with a sense of humour. You may notice that you feel pretty damned pleased you've finally figured out how to beat ever monster between the nearest bonfire and the fog gate. Good for you. Now you're ready to take on the boss..... SPLAT! YOU DIED! That actually meant for you to feel that way.
3. Didn't you know? - People make it sound obvious but you can miss whole worlds and chunks of good stuff unless you're extremely observant, or studying up online. Of course the counterpoint is that they wanted it to be that way so you become naturally cautious, and curious and reading about MagAdjust at 11pm for 20 minutes instead of fighting a Firesage Demon.
Things they did right!
1. Balance - You can look at any forum of Dark Souls and you'll see people say "STR/DEX build is the best, using the XXX armour set, with XXXX weapon", immediately followed by "NO! My XXXX with XXXX and XXXXX at 50 pwns in PvP!". The truth is they're all the best. Different enemies, different bosses, different play styles, there are hundreds of "best character builds" and they all work. The fact that all the veterans DON'T have the same setup tells you this is a very well designed game. So my tip is play it anyway you want, everything has got advantages and disadvantages, and most of the time you can completely change your mind and do it all differently because the equipment matters just as much as character stats.
2. Fair - I know, it seems contradictory of the cheap deaths criticism above, but to be honest with yourself, some of the cheap deaths could have been easily avoided if you'd be taking more care. The deliberate cheap deaths from the game are actually rare, and meant to be funny. They usually are in hindesight.
The truth is you could probably beat the whole game with no armour and the broke-ass sword you start off with. If you can become a master at how to dodge and timing your attacks about 90% of the baddies will never touch you and you can chip away at their health. All that fancy equipment does is make the game easier. Better armour and ranged magic means you don't have to be a master dodger, and those powerful weapons and boost items mean you can finish the fight quicker BUT the point is, they're not actually necessary.
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My advice to anyone starting out is to not worry too much about all that complicated stuff about weapon/spells/armour/items. It doesn't really matter what class you start as after the first few hours as you'll change your stats to whatever you want. And you'll never lose a single weapon/armour piece you pick up so you can decide whether or not to use it later.
I think the main problem people have with Dark Souls is changing their mentality. This game is NOT like other RPG's that want to give a guided tour of a mystical land. It's actually more like an old-school platformer like Mario.
Remember back to those games. You'd start a new platform game and you'd die 10 times just trying to beat the first level, basically because a) you're learning the character's move set so make bad jumps to begin with and b) learning the level map because you didn't know that lava pit was there.
And when you died you'd have to start the level all the way from the beginning again. How terrible!, the modern gamer might say "I've just played this game for an hour and I didn't make ANY progress? What a waste of time". But you just accepted it as part of the game because you know you weren't wasting your time. You were LEARNING the game. Each time you played you got a little better, a little further, eventually you make it all the way to the end of a level. HURRAH! Sense of accomplishment!
And that's how Dark Souls works. You start a level (bonfire), learn the enemies and path to the end of the level (next bonfire). The bosses are hard, but they're the same concept. Unfortunately I think they're almost TOO brutal. I love Dark Souls but tough bosses made me stop playing twice for extended periods because I really felt I WASN'T making any progress.
The beauty of Dark Souls is that they married this platformer/learn-the-game-through-multiple-deaths mechanics to an RPG. If you focus your goals too much on leveling up the RPG side of things, you'll get frustrated. Instead, if you look as each death as a learning experience, it feels a lot more pleasurable. And like a platformer a lot of the enjoyment is the complete surprise of new areas, and new enemy types.
The RPG elements become the icing on the cake. For example, you remember how frightening that Taurus demon was, and those 3 cheap hollow bastards that swarm you at that one bit? Well, you'll fight them again but this time you now have a f***ing great sword/spell/hammer/fireball for them, and revenge is oh so satisfying. And how would that be fun if they hadn't been terrifying and annoying the first time you fought them?
...and that's why I love Dark Souls.
