I had to give on on this game and "Demon's Souls" for various problems so it's nice to see that they are working on the issues.
My big issue with the games themselves is that I don't associate difficulty with cheapness. Some aspects of the game are not so much thinking outside the box, or using odd tactics yourself, but hoping your not done in by the RNG guiding the AI. Doing the same areas at times I have found it laughably easy, or almost arbitrarly homicidal by pure chance based on what the AI decided to do, as I fundementally did the same things. Since I can't always see what the AI is doing given that the bad guys are not always visible to you, it's not a matter of adapting to tactics. Something as simple as whether a mob is going to jump off a roof or stay up there and throw firebombs at me, or if he's even going to be visible if it goes with the firebomb option isn't really a difficulty issue.
Perhaps my biggest problem though is the god awful magic system. I'm a guy who calls himself "Therumancer" online, I like to play mages. I feel like these games punish me for this, and ultimatly wind up forcing me to assume a kind of hybrid warrior-mage role, with far more focus on the "warrior" aspect. At least "Demon's Souls" had an option that let you start with a mana-regen ring to make a spellcasting based approach viable, but really in "Dark Souls" magic is too limited a commodity, especially starting out, to make it your de-facto method of play. The difficulty of obtaining new spells (well relatively, since you have to rescue NPCs) also leads you in the warrior direction at least for a while. Selecting "mage", or "pyromancer" still means your probably going to be using a lot of sword or spearwork.
The above doesn't have much to do with difficulty, it's just that I get miffed at Sword and Sorcery games where I can't focus on Sorcery as a viable gameplay choice.
I probably would have appreciated "Dark Souls" more if it had used the mana system, and given all characters a mana regen abillity scaled with some of the attributes, and at least a few decent "mage-type" spellcasting options from the getgo. Instead of armor let me use a magical force field that has parity, instead of weapons make it so I can just as easily wield a barrage of magical attacks and aim them at the same needed locations on the baddies. It's a conceptual thing.
