» Fri Feb 18, 2011 8:37 pm
I'm currently playing Demon's Souls (my first playthrough). I like the game, but sometimes the difficulty is just infuriating and they claim to have made Dark Souls even more difficult, which worries me a bit. I'm not done with Demon's Souls and I'm still greatly enjoying it, but I do believe there should be a limit on video game difficulty and that limit for me may or may not have been Demon's Souls' level of difficulty (I'll reach my concensus by the time I'm done playing, I'm sure). Without the online feature, the game would too difficult, at times (To come back to life, I must spend either one of the limited stones of ephemeral eyes or kill one of a limited number of bosses), but I'm keeping my eye on Dark Souls. I love Demon's Souls and, even as a result of the difficulty, I love the feeling of accomplishment I get from getting past a challenge. I also love the combat, the customization options (seems to me like Skyrim is copying Demon's Souls with the weapon/spell/shield dualwielding and other action features), the game's sense of scale (in other words, the boss fights), and the online play (which is, admittedly, the first online gameplay I've ever actually played, due to the way it intrigues me and leaves me actually wanting to play with it all the time and not just for an hour or two like every other online video game mode I've experienced; the way it's subtly inegrated into the gameworld and single-player campaign is fantastic and I've rarely, if ever, had a more thrilling fight than I have against another player in the form of a black phantom), but again, there are definitely limits, for me, on game difficulty (or rather tedium that gets mistaken as difficulty, at times) that I don't want to see passed.
Demon's Souls isn't completely overwhelming and a sequel just as difficult would work fine for me, from what I've seen of the game so far, but I'm truly worried Dark Souls may be too much more difficult. One thing I don't like about Demon's Souls is how constantly dark and depressing it is, though. I know it's meant to be a dark game at its core, but some brightness and/or the occasional break from the darkness with some vibrant or somewhat sunny areas would really make me happy. I remember seeing a picture of Dark Souls in a magazine that seemed to show a brighter area, but I'm not sure. I also read the gameworld would be a bit more open in Dark Souls, but I'm not sure about that, either. Is it true? What do we know about the game, thus far?