The Hidden Secrets of Dark Souls Design | Design Delve

I could say a lot of things about dark souls, but I will at least leave two thoughts here. 1. Saying you can grind levels to defeat difficulty is... still not great. If you are good, you can beat this game at lvl 40. If not, you need to grind out for several hours until you can. But one thing Dark Souls does have is that it has way more ways to mitigate difficulty than you might expect. Different builds are much easier to play than others. And the whole summoning help is kind of a brilliant mechanic to opt in for someone to help you out. I think that Sekiro is "easier" than Dark Souls, but because of a lack of these kinds of ways to mitigate difficulty, your only option is to "git gud" and thus can often feel more difficult as a result. 2. Titinate shard are pretty bad though. I hate how it discourages experimenting with other weapons. Trying to compare if this new weapon is better than your current weapon is really hard to do if they have different upgrade levels. You either need to guess based on the moveset or just go, screw it, Rellana's Twin Blades (elden ring) are so cool that I'm using them no matter what.

I’ve heard two somewhat persuasive arguments against difficulty/accessibility modes. One, having a way to remove the challenge makes every challenge self-imposed and not “this is how it is, gotta go do it”. Two, crafting multiple satisfying difficulty levels takes away developer time that could be spent on something else. I don’t mind it in Dark Souls. But I’m really teed off at Silksong.

This was actually stressful for me to watch. I'm replaying Dark Souls 1 for the first time since it was released, just lost 40,000 souls, and I need to go get them in the Tomb of The Giants,