Dark Souls.
I'm sure this is the part where I get tomatoes thrown at my head, but I honestly don't enjoy it. It has a pretty world, but it embodies all the fucking garbage that I miss the
least from the Nintendo Hard era.
- Buggy as fuck PC ports that basically require a controller to be properly playable--one of which was never fixed and charged 60 dollars. (Yes I am aware a community patch fixed it. No, I don't think that's something I'm just gonna ignore.)
- Combat so fucking hilariously broken that you need to exploit invincibility frames to properly play the game.
- Getting hit half of the time in spite of not being touched at all, or avoiding damage in spite of seeing a meat cleaver travel straight through me. (Also see: Shittily programmed hitboxes.)
- A delay on the control inputs no matter whether I use a controller or keyboard/mouse. This makes it nearly impossible to do split-second decisions without inherently knowing every single move a boss has off by heart. This is apparently a feature. Because fuck you.
- A community so toxic, that at one point I had to disable the multiplayer functionality of the original so high level players would stop camping low level player zones and murdering me so often, that I couldn't progress the fucking game.
- A story that is trumped up to be far more meaningful and in-depth than it really is. (Seriously, the story basically exists just to give you boss fights. Which is fine, but it is so highly overblown that it fucking blows my mind that people think this is a great story. It's clever at points, it uses visual cues which is good, but most of it is just "look, an excuse for a boss fight!")
- "Praise the Sun" meme being so necrotic that it hijacked a Sunny-D joke I made a long while back. Then beat the ever loving life out of it because this is one of the few memorable phrases actually in the game, so people repeat it to try and make themselves feel better that the dialogue in the games ranges from non-existent to nonsensical.
- An AI that is just... I'm fucking dumbstruck by how dumb it is. From Demon's Souls to Bloodborne, every single fucking game this company has made in this line of brutalhardmurdersimulators, comes complete with a potato AI. In Bloodborne, ranged enemy units will just stand in one spot and shoot at you. If an obstruction is in the way, they just shoot the obstruction. They're literally only programmed to stand in place and shoot at you, that's it. They didn't even program them to walk around a wall to shoot at you. Do you know how fucking lazy that is? I have actually designed a better AI in a Computer Science class... And they charge 60 dollars for this. Fuck.
- Areas that are designed just to murder you if you don't know what's coming, thus artificially inflating the length of the game by murdering you without warning. Granted, some areas do actually leave visual cues to warn you, and you can sometimes listen for danger--which is fine. But then you have other shit, like in the original Dark Souls, when a dragon swoops down and burns an entire bridge in an undodgeable attack of fuck you unless you know it's coming. (For jokers that want to go "but death is part of the game!" I'm aware. I don't object to dying to bosses I don't understand, so long as I know they're fucking there. Just straight up murdering you by designing a murder trap without warning is lazy design, it shouldn't be cheered on.)
- A "balance" team. That has no idea how to balance anything. Some things are just straight up, blatantly better than others. Between games, they'll then arbitrarily nerf, add, or remove entire sections of the game, because fuck you. (Like how Bloodborne removed shields. Because... Fuck you, now dodging and exploiting invincibility frames is the only way to play.)
- There are no ferrets. >: |
Seriously though. I actually dislike this game. I don't enjoy it. I don't get how they can release the same game with features arbitrarily added or missing, not address some of the most critical errors in the entire series (delayed controls, buggy hitboxes, et cetera) and people... Praise them for it. Yet, other developers--even indie developers--would get shit on for having an AI this fucking badly designed, or for having arbitrary murder rooms that murder you because... Fuck you, artificial inflation of game time. People not only give this game a pass for its terrible design practices, but they embrace it. Under the idea that it's... "Nintendo Hard." Which, granted, it is. Unfortunately, it makes no effort to fix why the Nintendo Hard genre died out. For those who weren't around for Nintendo Hard (or who wear pink sunglasses remembering it), there was a
lot of fucking awful design in the Nintendo Hard era. It was hard because there was no other way of making a quality product that people would remember, so it had to be hard. That was the one thing games could really sell at that point.
Unfortunately, this usually meant that a lot of games turned into Simon Says, where you would just memorize the order the game wanted you to do to avoid dying so you could progress. Dark Souls does this and
adds delayed controls and fuckawful hitboxes.
Having that design mentality in a game released now? Are... Are you fucking kidding? Remember, these guys aren't indie devs. They're ultimately owned by
Kadakawa Dwango which holds 20 billion yen in assets alone, and they're published by Namco Bandai. They've had three games (if you don't count any of the DLC or Demon's Souls or Bloodborne) to fix some of the worst aspects of their design.
Instead they've doubled down on it.
And people want it.
This is forever an example that the consumer base is indeed fucking stupid and will buy anything on brand recognition alone. I just... I don't get it.
That being said, if anybody reading this is busily typing an angry comment telling me how dumb I am for not sharing your obviously inferior taste in video games (snerk), understand that this doesn't mean that my tastes are the be-all end-all. One day, my tastes my change and I might finally enjoy Dark Souls. It's all subjective. Just because you enjoy it and I don't doesn't mean you're an inferior person or that I'm a superior person. It just means we have a difference of opinion and a difference of taste. Maybe you like the design, maybe you think it's not flawed. I don't. You can argue all day otherwise, you likely won't change my mind, because this is a purely subjective matter.
Maybe one day, they'll actually release a game that doesn't have input lag in the year 2016.
I doubt it.
But I can dream.
