Well, I think it's a bit of a masterpiece and one of the most profoundly rewarding games I've played in my life (the gaming part of which goes back to the mid/late '80's), so methinks 'it's not just for you but was for me' suffices.
Athennesi said:
I'm not sure I died a single time across about 300hrs of DS[1] due to camera, so--- er, I can only offer a quizical
shrug to that complaint?
The camera's not magically awesome, or anything, but I never felt I was fighting it as opposed to Lordran's denizens.
2. Lock on
Directly affected by camera, but also glitchy on it's own. Randomly stops during targeting, causing the player to spin around and shoot in opposite direction.
Never had those issues, either. I was playing on 360, btw, and then for a little while on XB1.
For me the lock on was wonderfully agile, once you got used to it; a canny DS fighter learns when to fight with it, and when to fight without. Both techniques are essential for high[er] level play.
3. Backstab and Parry
There is always a split of a second before animation starts that feels like experiencing bottleneck. Then the camera tries to catch up and it janks to the side, making entire transition feel incredibly clumsy( compare it to how it's done in Arkham games).
Um... You're comparing it to a largely skill-less combat system in an arcade game? Why?
Arkham's combat was superb, but unless you're on an NG+ run without the prompts or diving in to the more demanding challenge rooms, its combat was little more than a rhythm game; keep jabbing the right buttons and you'll string together a 100+ combo. DS has a kind of cut'n'thrust positional brutality, so the two systems are incomparable.
And no, I had none of those issues. DSII's parries were flaky, but the less said about
that entry the better... DS1's windows were varied depending on weapon, but I feel they were often generous, and arguably OP. Fishing for backstabs could arguably undermine the entire flow of combat, too, but for the most part I feel it was reasonably well implemented.
Oh, but yes, the slide-into-position was clunky, but there was a precision to its triggering that DS2, f'instance, never had.
The animation itself is pointlessly long and breaks the flow of combat...parry should be a quick slide of enemy's weapon followed by instant counterattack...
"Should be"? Any reason something "should be" in a game? It's a matter of taste, for designers and players. I loved the slow brutality and weight to backstabs, in particular, and they tended to feel like tiny moments to catch one's breath if you were still defending yourself, given you could whip the camera around to gauge the next threat.
4. Archery...the weakest I've seen in years. Completely unsatisfying sounds, no "feel" of tension when drawing the string or piercing armor, no first person, plus enemies are slow and weak at dodging.
Well, there was an aim function, soo...
DS's combat was not geared to archery, any novice can surely see that. Bows in DS are often superb ways to draw and control enemy aggro, or - if the player didn't use the binoculars - they provided another means of looking around the world, zooming in to possible enemies or choke points and so on.
By the later stages, the larger bows (the greatbows being obvious examples) could be
very potent, but if the player was patient and/or cheap, arrows could be used to whittle down enemies. They gave the player another tactical choice about how to proceed, and how to deal with the numbers and types of threats waiting ahead. I think bows were a remarkably subtle piece of great design.
5. Magic...uninspired and borderline broken. 90% of it consists of recasting the same spell, over and over. Soul Arrow-Great Soul Arrow- Heavy Soul Arrow- Great Heavy Soul Arrow- Crystal Spear, etc, etc. No visual or audio appeal, not even remotely comparable next to almost any rpg out there.
Spellslinging is certainly often considered DS's Easy Mode, and whilst for a while I saw that as a negative, I think George Weidman/Extra Credits/Sterling (can't recall which. I think they've all touched on this aspect of the game and series) did a piece on how DS1 essentially offers the player a dynamic difficulty setting, and that comes from the builds and the use or non-use of certain armour types or attack disciplines.
Magic is certainly not a dynamic part of DS1's design, but felt it could still lead to interesting playstyles; magic could be used to light the way, to navigate the world in slightly more risky ways, to manipulate enemies, or simply confound them in the middle of a scrap to facilitate an escape.
6. Enemy AI...At first they seem impressive, because of variety of movesets, however AI is very simple and easily exploitable. / The game, not once surprised me with a sense of enemies intelligently responding( like I've had with Exanima for instance)...they feel more like dolls, each limited with a few types of attacks and very predictable/or cheap sometimes encounter design( giving the world a gimmicky feel, like everything exists to kill you and is placed like they knew you were coming and from which direction).
It depends on what someone wishes from their experience.
To me Dark Souls [1] was meticulous, measured, machined, in a wonderfully beguiling mix of approximated realism (the setting, weapons/armour, elements of the actual combat) and absolute artifice (placement of enemies, no real punishment for deaths, the static NPC's forever locked into place, etc).
One could argue highly adaptive dynamic AI would've made the game 'better', but it would have changed its character/soul; Lordran had 'rules', and cause and consequence was almost its immutable law. You could struggle with certain enemies, and you'd know it was pretty much your fault... That you had to react to the world ranged against you, that you always had a chance to learn and to overcome. At times DS was almost a logic/puzzle game - an area and a foe to be solved.
7. Physics and "cheesy difficulty"...
Can't say much to that as I don't agree, or, rather, what you wrote doesn't match my own hundreds of hours.
They jump from corners or are placed in illogical places( Twin archers in Londo).
Oh? They are "illogical"? Why? What logic do long dead servants of a fallen city and god/s operate under, and how can you discern this? Again, to me the enemy placements are like that of a puzzle. The world and its denizens are there to grief you, you savage you for mistakes. To me there is perfect design logic to the famed/infamous Anor Londo archers.
No weapon interaction( they just phase through one another), or anything even remotely comparable to Dark Messiah and similar games.
Well, I'd say DS's combat is amongst the most 'realistic' I've ever seen in a game.
Most RPG's treat swords and spears or halberds as identical in locational function; they are just different items which cause different kinds or amounts of damage. In DS? A claymore is a very clumsy instrument in a winding staircase, ditto a spear.
In real fencing the 'speed' which most videogames are obsessed by is rather meaningless; 'speed' typically equates to reach in fencing, ergo a spearman can strike 'quicker' -
sooner in the engagment - than a swordsman (and waving a dagger around is meaningless if you can't get close enough to use it). Dark Souls' combat system is very gamey, and very simple, but I've never played a game of its kind which had a feel for that element of reach being so important, and of forcing the player to abide by the functional realities of melee weapon combat (e.g. broad horizontal attacks in a stairwell or corridor will just get you killed; what matters in fencing isn't what you want to do or what is fancifully 'best', it's what works in a given place, at a given time, with a given weapon. DS uses the idea of tempo/range superbly, if quite crudely given it's still just a game with set attacks and defence postures).
8. UI...too clumsy and without allowing instant access to weapons/abilities.
Again, never had an issue. I also tended to play heavily hybrid characters, too, so your specific mention of issues with hybrid builds doesn't chime with me.
9. Hitboxes and visual inaccuracies
As above; never had an issue. From the looks of it, DS3 might have some of the best damn hitboxes evah, but aside from various demons 'butt slams' I never legitimately had an enemy hitbox strike that I could honestly whine about. To me, DS's specificity of contact - for you, and for the enemies - was arguably the foundational building block of the entire experience (arguably the backstabs were the weakest element of that experience, simply because of how simple and effective they were against numerous enemies. still, they were a tool in the players choice - to use or not to use).
10. "Fun" factor...this is subjective, but feels entirely lacking in DS.
Well, as I said, to me it's one of the most rewarding gaming experiences of my life, so subjectivity is as subjective does.
One of the reasons was I found it to be an incredibly compelling existential experience; much of DS's themes relate to purpose of action, and the possible attainment of goals. The player is presented with a world, yet very little
reason for being [there]. 'What's my motivation?', the player could, and probably always does, say. Lordran's fellow travelers mostly seek something, be it tangible or otherwise. Typically, when they have found it - when they have reached the perceived summit of their aims - they crumble, or are broken by the world.
And why fight the hordes, when the hordes reset after your death? Was the fight futile if you all your efforts are wiped clean? In a 'meaningless' world, I found the smallest of actions and decisions came to have great meaning (there was no 'point' in bowing to NPC's I was allied with, yet to me it always had value because it was a choice of respect and expressed gratitude/empathy), and after a couple of runs I appreciated how the game's thematic subtext may be interpretatively summed up with 'find value/meaning in the act of the journey, not in obtaining something or concluding the journey'.
To me, Dark Souls was a genuinely affecting and profound experience, and it's a gaming journey I'll remember fondly for many years to come. There's been nothing else quite like it.
Plus the endless repetition of dying and going through same encounters that always play exactly the same...video game labor.
...perhaps if you stopped to reflect about the possible futility of your actions/achievements/non-achievements, you may have begun to see that loop a little differently. As I elaborated on above; to me that's not just a game mechanic, it became a--- well, philosophical prompt, to get a tad pretentious... One that fitted hand-in-glove with the stories/journeys of the NPC's the player crosses paths with.
The world is wonderfully indifferent to your very existence, and to every accomplishment. Kinda like the real world? We die, and in a few decades or generations our very existences will be little more than memories, or fragments of history, half remembered, half documented. The world keeps spinning, life keeps getting lived, regardless of what seismic events happen to us individually. So to me, Lordran was paradoxically 'real' whilst being demonstrably gamey, which I found fascinating.
11. Controls...not as terrible as some exaggerate , but for a game entirely oriented toward action: not good. Plus, there is a noticeable input lag, especially with jumping/dodging/rolling.
Er, no. All actions have weight and a time window to them, that isn't the same as 'lag' when it's meticulously designed into the system. You either like it or do not, but it isn't a flaw. I loved it, as I'm sick of arcadey flapping around in combat, particularly where bladed weapons are concerned.
12. Boss fights... not bad, but disappointed in more than a few: Nito, Gwyndolin, Discharge, Butterfly, Seath, Capri demon, Hydra, etc... Majority are fairly standard with only a few exceptional ones.
I adore many of the aesthetic designs, but the actual patterns and challenges of the bosses in DS1 certainly isn't a strong point, I'll grant you that.
I came to value them as experiences, almost like narrative punctuations as opposed to just bland videogame bosses, but if there was ever a remastered version I would like to see all the bosses get beefed up a bit. O&S still wiped the floor with me a fair few times, though... and on my first run I was painfully terrible against the Stray Demon at the Asylum.
13. Overrealiance on I-frames...which makes evasion feel counterintuitive and positioning far less important.
The idea that positioning in Dark Souls wasn't important because of i-frames is bizarre to me, but each to their own. I-frames were part of the system, and I don't see how their use or non-use was a negative. If you're terribly positioned, no i-frame in the world's going to really save your ass if your next dive is into their weapon, off a cliff, or into another enemy. Decision making was still what killed you or kept you alive in tough situations.
...or just tanking with Havel's gear, but again, that's a player choice essentially shaping diff to their own requirements. DS so often gave the play
choice about how to deal with Lordran.
Why is this praised ( by it's fan base at least) as top tier combat system?
Perhaps because a "top tier combat system" isn't where DS's brilliance begins or ends? A rather glib reply, I admit, and one certainly made by a fan of the first game (and Demon's Souls, even if I never got to play it) but DS's combat was just one part of the whole.
