I know, and I like the sequels a lot less. Bloodborne was a great return to form with everything feeling like a mystery again. Maybe hiding DLC isn't the best way to achieve this for most people, but I enjoy it; "cringy" or not. Demon's Souls is still my favorite in the series precisely because it is ridiculously esoteric and unpredictable. I'm tired of games making everything obvious in the name of "good game design". Minimizing frustration, finding everything and "beating" them is not the reason I play games. At all.
I don't entirely agree, but I definitely see where you're coming from and agree with large parts of it. The "beating the meme hard game" mentality is absolutely the culprit for a considerable amount of the "it's too obtuse" criticism applied to things like character quests. The answer to "how was I supposed to know that?" in Souls games is often "by paying attention to NPC dialogue and reading item descriptions", which is the exact same way you follow the game's stories.
I'm not saying everyone has to follow the story in Souls games, and I definitely appreciate how it's not in your face and you can easily ignore it if you so desire, but any piece of information you'd gather by just paying attention to the story can't possibly be criticized for being too obtuse. That's entirely on the player if they missed it. When you decide to ignore so much of the game's content, it should be expected that you'll miss out on stuff. It's like skipping cutscenes in a Naughty Dog game and complaining you don't understand character motivations. You signed up for this when you started skipping the cutscenes.
I see people criticizing World Tendency all the time, and when the complaints can be summarized as "it's inconvenient to control", I keep waiting for the actual criticism. So what that it's inconvenient? I'm not saying World Tendency should be a thing in every game, but I definitely share the "man, they just don't appreciate this game at all" sentiment whenever I saw people asking for it to be removed from the Remake. Going through the steps required to achieve the Return ending in Sekiro was a blast on its own right, the quest was great, the characters involved are great, each step was exciting, and the ending felt like a reward for it. Complaining about it being "impossible to figure out" is asking for the games to become theme parks.
Just youtube the cutscene if you want to get it effortlessly, let us enjoy the process as well. Though I guess if you did just youtube the endings you'd miss out on the trophies that prove that you did 100% on the meme hard game, so instead we need to ask for it to be as painless as possible. I need my platinum and I don't have a lot of time! Oh well.
That too, though to nitpick, you mean "before Dark Souls 2", because that one was fine too. Bloodborne regressed on that, weirdly.
I always found fascinating how apprantely isolated the teams were during Bloodborne and Dark Souls II's development. That definitely changed after Bloodborne shipped, and you'd see a lot of people in credits for two games that came out a year apart, but it's crazy that the Bloodborne people were possibly unaware of things that went to become standard features for the series, like jumping on L3 and auto-hide HUD.
I'll defend Dark Souls 1's jumping over L3 jumping until the day that I die, but if there's one game where L3 jumping is just objectivelly superior it's Bloodborne, with blocking being such a niche use feature, instead of a universal one like in Dark Souls, which means you couldn't tie rolling while sprinting to it like they did in DS1. Bloodborne would really really benefit from L3 jumping.
I can't imagine defending this. You can love Souls, love how obtuse it can be and love the need for community engagement to help discover secrets etc while still thinking it's fucking dumb that you can't just dive into the DLC and worse still that it's easily missed.
Some of the best areas/moments in the series are easily missed. It shouldn't be controversial to not mind that applying to DLC as well.
If you have a save that did 100% of the game sitting right before Gwyn and you bought the Artorias of the Abyss DLC, all you need to do is kill a golem and grab the pendant, and the description of the pendant should give you the rest of the information. Should there be a hint somewhere after you buy the DLC (Firelink Shrine, as Morrigan suggested, would be fantastic) telling you to at least check the Duke's Archives? Absolutely, that's perfectly fair. "Just dive into the DLC" would definitely be a worse solution, however. I like that they're integrated into the games. It makes the whole experience stronger on repeated playthroughs, instead of its own thing.
Agree. I hate when people say "the point is to be lost!". First, that's not the point of these games for everyone. It's not for me at all. Second, there's a difference between exploring and thinking "hey I should go all the way back to one of the first areas of the game and check out a corner of a giant lake.".
But you can use guides for all of the games if you don't want them to be "about being lost". I don't agree that this is the point of the games either, but that experience can be mitigated. You can't add mystery by yourself when the game straight up tells you what to do, like Bloodborne does, however. You can't just forget what the game just told you and pretend you're figuring out yourself. People who don't want to engage with the search can skip it with google, people who do can only enjoy that experience if it's designed that way. You can't google mystery into a game.
And the lake part is properly communicated, actually, it's only the Broken Pendant that's obtuse. When you grab the pendant, the description says:
Half of a broken stone pendant.
The vine appears to originate from Oolacile.
A powerful magic can be sensed from this
ancient stone. Yet men of this time can
neither manipulate nor sense its power,
which has a distinct air consisting of
both reverence and nostalgia.
Oolacile is only mentioned elsewhere in the game, as far as I'm aware, through Dusk of Oolacile, an NPC that comes from that place, and sells items and sorceries from Oolacile, that always reference Oolacile in their description. You go back to where her summoning sign is, and it's no longer there if you have the Broken Pendant. If you check back on the place where you find her before unlocking the summoning sign, there's a portal for you to interact with. If your problem is the lake part, that is definitely much easier to figure out than accessing the Painted World.
And that is completely ignoring any kind of outside information, like the DLC's trailer and every bit of news about it that mentioned Oolacile, which should already make everyone at least consider freeing Dusk on their DLC save.
The thumb straight up shows where the portal is. Someone new to the game playing the Prepare to Die Edition / Remastered would naturally not watch this, but it certainly works as an argument against the "what about people who bought it as DLC back then? They wasted their money".
