Dark Souls isn't hard, IT'S TEDIOUS!

[Realitycrash]

The same line of thought rushes through my mind every time I respawn, having been dispatched by the Black Knight for the seventeenth time in a row; "Why do they call this game hard? The Black Knight is hard, but the game?".
I cut my way through the same boring, cookie-cutter enemies, rushing forward as I do. As I do, a third enemy I know was somewhere in the background kills me. He did not kill me because I lacked the skill to deal with him, or because I was not aware of his presence. He killed me because I did not care, and I hoped that it would not matter.
You see, after getting killed by the one hard area in a level for the gazillionth time, you lose patience. This means you rush forward in order to try to get to the hard area again, so you can get some practice. But when you rush, you leave yourself open for attack, and you die.
That, my friends, is the very definition of tedious.
It's just a relentless grind that is no way near hard, but just drawn out and dull, and the one area that IS hard, the one area that IS fun, the one area where you need practice, is hidden behind all the tedious bullshit.
It's fake difficulty, and it's fucking NES-games all over again.
I'm only at the Undead Burg, and I am pondering quiting the game, simply because the few fun, challenging areas is spaced out with tedious, grinding bullshit.

 

[Pearwood]

You can't take on a self-imposed challenge like fighting every black knight as soon as you see it then complain that the game is full of fake difficulty. None of them are in areas you have to go to, you choose to fight them that early on.

 

[Realitycrash]

You can't take on a self-imposed challenge like fighting every black knight as soon as you see it then complain that the game is full of fake difficulty. None of them are in areas you have to go to, you choose to fight them that early on.

Untrue. The Black Knight isn't very hard (when you learn him), it's just about timing your ripostes. So you can really fight the damn thing whenever you choose (and oh, btw, I'm lvl 24 now. Been grinding same area since the start since I die every time..)
See, the fake difficulty is the fact that the game is filled with tedious bullshit which kills you with it's dull relentless crap.
The hard moments are hard, and I don't mind them. It's the cookie-cutter crap in the middle that's just makes me want to quit.

 

[Brad Shepard]

Wait wait wait, dying has consequences? DEAR GOD INFORM THE NEWS!

the game is meant to be tough, so pick yourself up by your bootstraps, dust yourself off, and get back into the game. This picture is what i like to call "Progression of a dark souls player."

You will get use to it OP, just stick with it for a truly rewarding and awesome game.

 

[Lazy]

I agree, sort of. Everyone builds Dark Souls up as this insanely difficult game, but I had almost no trouble with it until I got to Blighttown, the point at which I got bored and gave up. Even the black knights are fairly easily outwitted by circle strafing, and other than the two Gargoyles I never had to try any boss more than two or three times.

My problem is that the game is just a dark, dingy slog that isn't fun to play 90% of the time.

 

[Pearwood]

Untrue. The Black Knight isn't very hard (when you learn him), it's just about timing your ripostes. So you can really fight the damn thing whenever you choose (and oh, btw, I'm lvl 24 now. Been grinding same area since the start since I die every time..)

Yeah you can but you're sure as hell not supposed to as far as the designers intended so it's not fake difficulty that they're so disproportionately tough. I don't think it makes sense that having easy enemies is fake difficulty either, of course the first area isn't going to throw anything too crazy at you.

To be honest it's not that hard a game, it punishes mistakes very hard but avoiding the mistakes in the first place isn't really hard at all to learn. God knows what you were expecting since you seem bored by anything that doesn't threaten to instakill you but you won't find it in Dark Souls at least until late game/new game plus.

 

[TrevHead]

The undeadburg is the make or break point of the game, all I can suggest is that put to the back of your mind such notions as "fake difficulty" (mini rant: what a retarded buzzword it is) and at the very least play the game till you beat the first 2-3 of bosses and ring the bell, you might start liking the game.

Atm you are experiencing the pain (the deaths and longer than normal death penalty), without the reward (defeating bosses and lighting new bonfires.)

The game is designed to kill every type of gamer, just because you have technical skills doesn't mean you are off the hook.

 

[Realitycrash]

God knows what you were expecting since you seem bored by anything that doesn't threaten to instakill you but you won't find it in Dark Souls at least until late game/new game plus.

What is it you are missing in my posts? I ENJOY the though boss-battles. Really. I wish I could ENJOY THEM A LITTLE MORE without the tedious bullshit in-between them. That's my problem.

 

[Realitycrash]

The undeadburg is the make or break point of the game, all I can suggest is that put to the back of your mind such notions as "fake difficulty" (mini rant: what a retarded buzzword it is) and at the very least play the game till you beat the first 2-3 of bosses and ring the bell, you might start liking the game.

Atm you are experiencing the pain (the deaths and longer than normal death penalty), without the reward (defeating bosses and lighting new bonfires.)

The game is designed to kill every type of gamer, just because you have technical skills doesn't mean you are off the hook.

I'm fine with getting killed, and I am fairly sure I won't give up (I'll just run past the knight, though it really seems to be "giving up" according to me), but I wish the hard parts were a bit more spread out, honestly.

 

[CAPTCHA]

I sort of agree as well. The game isn't that hard, bar a few rare enemies (like the Black Knights which take a bit of learning) and a few difficulty spikes that I'm going to put down to poor design (Capra Demon & Anor Lando Archers being standouts for me).

It also has real problems with the camera getting jerked all over the place, showing you the back of walls or zooming in on an enemies nutsack when your stuck running on the spot and pinned against them. There's one spot where the camera actively tries to kill you every time. Go to New Londo Ruins and cross the bridge to get the Fire Keeper Soul, now turn around and walk back across that narrow walk way. As soon as you do the camera will shift to the left, changing your direction and forcing you to walk into the water and die. That's just one spot, but that sort of stuff happens all the time. Lock on an enemy who rolls/jumps past you while you are walking towards him; you might as well have the game reverse the axis on your pad. It's the worst camera I've seen in a game since Ninja Gaiden 2.

The whole multiplayer thing: unique yes, but utterly broken and twisted by the community who take part in it. Being a level one character and forced into fights with other players who have the best gear in the game is not fun. Or how about that forest guild which is supposed to centered around hunting people who trespass in the woods, except you will spawn and be killed by groups who sit around farming YOU for easy kills. The multiplayer seems designed around a roleplaying aspect, but like any multiplayer component, players will be competitive and use every exploit in the book to get ahead, even if that means ignoring the functions the multiplayer was intended for.

The message system seem unnecessary with about 1 in a 100 having something worth reading in it. "Blacksmith Ahead", written by the blacksmiths feet. "Be aware of Skeleton" in the place where you've been fighting nothing but skeletons for 20 min. Occasionally you'll find one worth reading, but not because it's helpful, but because it's funny.

The RPG system is extremely unbalenced. Magic just flat out hands the AI its ass everytime. The starting builds aren't evenly matched. Pyromancy is just unfixable and overpowered. Enchancing your weapons and armour is overpowered. Leveling is worthless beyond giving you more equipment options and it's not only easy to complete the game at level 1, it's actually prefereable given the horrid nature of the PvP.

NPCs are boring and characterless. Not Skyrim boring, just completely superfluous.

I liked the world however and the background plot while hidden away was fairly interesting.

The game had a nice sense of exploration to it when you entered a new area. Sadly the games best point is lost on replays.

 

[hazabaza1]

I get instakilled by a scripted, undodgable enviromental event.

Spoiler

The bridge has burns on it, you saw the drake fly up to the bridge previously, and if you run slightly forward and then back out you can trigger the event and won't get killed.

There's only one scripted death in the game and that comes around the half way point.

OT: l2p nub
If you're dying in Dark Souls you need to take a moment and think: "Why did I die?" In your case, it seems like you're dying because you keep on trying to fight the Black Knight in the Undead Burg.
Yes, starting off can be tedious and annoying if you keep on dying, but if you pause, think for a bit, and consider why you're dying, and how you can make a change to that reason, as well as take the standard precautions of "shield up, be patient" then it quickly becomes fulfilling and fun.

 

[Soopy]

Its a game for chronic masochists. Pure and simple.

 

[hazabaza1]

I get instakilled by a scripted, undodgable enviromental event.

Spoiler

The bridge has burns on it, you saw the drake fly up to the bridge previously, and if you run slightly forward and then back out you can trigger the event and won't get killed.

There's only one scripted death in the game and that comes around the half way point.

Considering you see the guy about 3 times beforehand and he doesn't do jack shit, I still find it rather unfair. There is no real way of predicting it.

Fair enough.
From what I understand it was sort of a throwback to Demon's Souls which had a similar situation.

 

[shrekfan246]

And you're like, the tenth person to make a thread about this exact thing.

The entire point of the game is for the player to move slowly, calculating, with their nerves on guard around every corner. There is no respite, if you think you're safe you need to think again. And if you start getting reckless, even the weakest enemies are likely to kill you.

Can that be tedious? Of course. It's also basically the only unique selling point of the game. Dying is supposed to be frustrating. And if you're dying more and more often because you're getting impatient, it's probably time to take a break. That's what I would do with Demon's Souls, and when I came back to it at a later point, I did significantly better than when I was getting annoyed at dying so often.

On the other hand, it could just not be your type of game. It's an extremely unforgiving game and requires a rather large amount of time to sink into it because the general rule is that unless you know exactly what to expect, when to expect it, and how to react in the same split second, you will die.

I say that Dark Souls isn't 'hard', it's 'challenging'. It challenges me to think about my surroundings, about my course of attack, about where I need to go. It challenges me to be extremely careful because I don't want to lose all of my souls and progress by one silly mistake. But all the while it makes me feel like I'm capable of overcoming these obstacles. That's a hell of a lot more than I can say for the 'Hard' modes in most other games these days, who think that difficulty is just caused by the enemies having more health and doing more damage.

Also, if you're dying because you're getting impatient, then you can't exactly blame the game for poor design.

 

[Erttheking]

You see, if you didn't have to fight your way through a legion of monsters to get to the boss, you wouldn't get the same feeling of euphoria that you do get when you finally win. You don't want to lose because it will set you back, if it didn't being killed by a boss wouldn't hold any weight and they would come across as defanged.

 

[TrevHead]

Its a game for chronic masochists. Pure and simple.

You are oversimplyfying when the game is more complex than a std Farmville skinnerbox. For example how is it any different from any hard game, like say someone in MP CoD who is pwning you? You fail, which provokes you to try harder and if you win you get a sense of achievement and a cathartic feeling.

This game just does it in a different way, and while some might find the deaths tedious, I see it as not just a battle with the game but with myself, the zero handholding the difficulty spikes and other curve balls the game throws at you adds to the effect.

This article explains the whole climbing a mountain thing better than I can http://shmuptheory.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/one-credit-completion.html

I used to play EVE and the penalty of death in that game does very much the same as DS, it makes play more emotionally rewarding and you can't sleepwalk ever. There are many other comparisons with EVE and DS that I could make, the main one is that the ppl who love it don't describe the game as a hard game in the traditional hard mode sense, but that the game is more rewarding for been hard.