Okay, I didn't expand on my main point enough, so...longpost time.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that Dark Souls is not a difficult game. Well, okay, it's probably a bit above average difficulty-wise. But what it really focuses on is
intimidation. That is, giving the impression of being difficult without actually being as difficult as it seems.
Well...okay, as I said above, the shitty tutorial adds a great degree of difficulty, but let's assume that you've either looked up or been told the relevant stuff you need to know or the game doesn't tell you, or have restarted the game after figuring it out four hours in.
Okay, to a lot of you, this probably sounds like I'm being elitist or something, but how to put this...okay, people in this thread have mentioned that:
Prince Regent said:
Part of the appeal of dark souls is that it is hard and that you have to die dozens of times.
Well, yeah, you can expect to die a lot. But...that isn't particularly unusual. Play a campaign of the average FPS. Barring a huge gap in your relative skills at the genres, you will probably die just as often as you do during Dark Souls, if not more. But those games don't draw so much attention to it. If you die, you time-warp back ten to twenty seconds, and that's it.
Dark Souls, meanwhile, devotes a
huge amount of energy to ensuring that you're constantly thinking about death, even if it isn't particularly likely right at that instant. That would be why the most prominent elements of your HUD are your Souls and Humanity, the things you will lose if you die (but actually probably won't if you can do something you've clearly already done).
Furthermore, there are very few circumstances for which you can't just walk back to the Bonfire if you find yourself in a bad situation -- mostly boss battles, and even then, there's an item for that. But you don't
want to walk back to the Bonfire. It takes up time and makes you redo stuff. The whole mechanic is a way of creating cognitive dissonance; you want to go back, but you can't go back.
All this actually does in terms of
difficulty, though, is ensure that assessing the survivability of your situation is something you need to focus on as a player. It doesn't actually outright make the game harder. It just makes it
seem harder, as well as being slower-paced and more deliberate.
Okay, I'm kind of rambling away from the topic, and it occurs to me that there's one really strong reason why there's nothing wrong with an easy mode in Dark Souls:
The game
has an easy mode.
Yeah, you heard me. What did you think summons were for? On the hardest parts of the game, you have the opportunity summon another player to help you. No connection? No problem. The game features NPC summons, some of them powerful enough to reliably solo their associated bosses while you hang back and watch, even.
Of course, summoning has its drawbacks, as it requires you to be human, which is both the one thing you're guaranteed to lose on death and the circumstance that lets you get invaded. But invasions aren't constant, and the scripted ones are almost all avoidable (and the one that isn't is kind of pathetic).
But it does take up resources (resources which, interestingly, you tend to get as rewards for boss fights) and create a risk, which means that you probably don't want to do it unless A) you really need to and B) you're already low on the resources you lose on death. Like, say, you might be after losing to the boss on your own a few times. Thus, the game provides you with an easy option, then encourages you to use it only if you really need to.
Essentially, my take from Dark Souls is that the whole "Prepare To Die," this-game-will-be-the-hardest-thing-you've-ever-played marketing thing is a
somewhat misleading effort both to enhance the game's atmosphere of horror, and to make you feel like a badass for succeeding.
So...actually, thinking on that, I guess the game doesn't necessarily need a
traditional easy mode that you select from a menu, but rather should implement other ways of letting the player control the game's difficulty from within gameplay.
Sorry if this post was a bit rambling. I typed it right after waking up and right before going to work.