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voxpoplar wrote (edited )

I am going to offer a counterpoint to the Dark Souls promoters here and as someone who hated Dark Souls when they first played it and then came back to it years later and finished it and thought “That was pretty alright this time” what made it click with me was accepting that the game is badly designed and fails to tell you how shit works properly and, despite what everyone says about these fucking games, it actively punishes experimentation. After that I just looked shit up. Just read fucking stupid, annoying wiki pages to understand basic game mechanics and how I should be using upgrade materials and shit.

People who think Darks Souls is intuitive have either played so much of these games they have forgotten what the first experience is like or watched other people playing it first before playing it themselves or were playing it at the same time as a bunch of friends and sharing information.

To put this in a nicer way and meeting the game more on its own terms: These games were designed to be collaborative. That is why they have messages from other players. That's why you can summon people. They are not intended to be sat down and played by yourself with no extenral input. You aren't actually meant to figure everything out, you are meant to collaborate and share information. And if you aren't caught up in the initial frenzy and excitement of a release and have a bunch of friends sharing information the first time you play one of these then you are not getting the actual experience the game was designed around and you need to look up forum posts and wikis about how upgrading your weapons works.

Or just play a better game.

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twovests OP wrote

This contextualizes it a lot and I appreciate it.

To add on to this, the Dark Souls and related wikis seem to be pretty bad (Fandom??) and a lot of the knowledge seems to be on YouTube videos, which is a culture of knowledge I don't respect and don't want to put up with.

I did try to get into Elden Ring when it launched but it didn't run on my computer, and the community was insufferable. People on r/eldenring got personally offended by the criticism of "it has a launch bug" so I gave up on them.

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Dogmantra wrote

the upgrade materials are bullshit for sure, especially in the earlier games. I didn't finish elden ring on my play but I managed to play it almost completely blind, compared to when I went through dark souls 1 where I used a lot of external help

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