So, in the last post I fleshed out the good things present in Dark Souls, or, as I worded it, why I love Dark Souls. Now, let's speak about that stinky part of the games. You know, the things that make you go: 'What the hell is wrong with the people who made this?'.
- Hitboxes
Since the first game in the series, the hitboxes were kinda shoddy : arrows stuck at half a meter from a wall, using a pole weapon inside a corridor was useless and countless such examples. Somehow, in Dark Souls II they got worse, to the point of the dodge roll not working about 40% of the time. In the third game, they reverted to the badness of the first game, which is clearly better than in the second game, but I wouldn't praise them for it, for obvious reasons.
- Shoddy multiplayer infrastructure
When the community has a name for what happens in that gif ( lag stabbing, by the way), you know your netcode is absoute arse. What is even arsier is the fact that there is no protection against hackers, so the PVP if FUBAR. Thank god the co-op works a lot better, so the game has that going for it, which is nice.
Still, doesn't excuse the unplayable PVP in the game...
- The 'git gud' crowd
Nothing gets on my nerves more in these games than the elitist arseholes. Congratulations, you beat the game, but it doesn't make you a god among men and your ego is clearly far too inflated for you to be a good human being. Just saying, maybe if you are so good at the game, just maybe, help the newbies like the rest of the community who beat the game. Just a thought. Don't mind my insane words...
- Level design
Ok, the games look great. Dark Souls, the first that is, has mostly good level design. Then, Lost Izalith and subsequent areas happen. I don't know, but a huge, flat lava lake filled with the rears of dragons as enemies, which is followed by a long corridor doesn't strike me as stellar level design. It is lazy and rushed, at best. Also, let's not speak about the boss of the area, the Bed of Chaos. Actually let me tell you about it: a huge kinda humanoid tree with giant arms that collapses the fight arena and almost without any effort knocks you into the holes, making you go along the neverending corridor mentioned earlier. Cool, right?
At least the Dark Souls levels were interconnected with shortcuts, and looped in a number of times so you could get to the boss easier the second time around. How do the sequels fare? In short, disappointing. Dark Souls II and III give you the warp ability from the beginning, so the designers got lazy. Levels are less overlapping, there are fewer shortcuts, and the games are a lot more linear (no backtracking required either), cutting into the exploration aspect of the games, making the world feel a lot less authentic.
- Reused assets
I know that games need to use assets more than once to cut down on file size and work needed to actually make the game. It comes without saying (although I did say it). Dark Souls, as a series, abuses this. In Dark Souls the first, a boss is fought twice for story progression and one more time as an optional encounter. There are also the Capra Demon and the Taurus Demon, which are early game bosses, but become normal mobs in, you guessed it, Lost Izalith. Pretty cool stuff, right? What about the dragon butt army mentioned earlier in this post? Dark Souls II does this too. There is a boss called The Pursuer, who you have to fight to progress, but he spawns literally out of the ground in a few places during the game as a miniboss, which is tedious. It doesn't help that another boss, the Flexile Sentry, pops up as a normal mob before the Lost Sinner encounter, and also the Dragonrider, which is a main encounter twice in the game. Dark Souls III fares the worst in this aspect, bringing back entire NPCs from the first game: name, textures, models...everything.
- Framerate
This applies only to the first game. The console version of Dark Souls had pretty shoddy framerates, especially in Blighttown. The PC version still suffers of cinematic death, but this is somewhat fixed by a mod called DSFix. Still, I call that cheating on the devs part, because they had no hand in making it. The silver lining of this is the fact that subsequent games have vastly improved in this aspect.
- Keyboard and Mouse controls
There is no saving grace here. The games are literally unplayable with a keyboard and mouse. Instead of fixing this, they recommend you use a controller to play them. But that is not the point, the point is that third person combat games had good controls on PC. Look at Severance: Blade of Darkness, Rune, Oni. Those games understood the concept of good PC controls.
All in all, each game has its faults, but this series persisted in making the same mistakes, which seems pretty weird seeing as they improved in other ways, like animation quality, framerate, quantity of content, but all's well that ends well, and From Software somehow managed to pull through with these fatal flaws hanging heavily from their games.