Dark Souls 3 isn't that difficult as most make it to be

First time souls player here, i have long heard and read about the SO-CALLED difficulty of these games and finally got around playing dark souls 3 this time. I started a char as mage, got to high wall but didn't like it as spells took too long to cast and re-rolled as a Knight.

Sure i am not denying that i died a lot in the high walls of lothric area trying to understand the mechanics and how to parry etc. The first knight mob in HWoL gave me lot of headache but once i figured out the basics it has been smooth sailing.

I killed Abyss Watchers in first try with over 5 flasks remaining. Deacons of the deep? I don't know why they are even a boss, a laughable encounter but now i killed dancer of the boreal valley at level 43 without any help or exploits. Took around couple of hours, i tried first at around level 35 but was way too low health and most of her attacks were 1 shotting me so got back with more vigor and killed her on my 2nd attempt.

I have yet to set foot in next area after Farron's deep so i haven't find real brick wall where i just can't progress without any help or guide so far. I played wow for over 5 years and once i started the game for the first time i was expecting wow raid boss equivalent difficult bosses in DS3 where it would take you hours and hours of learning mechanics and farming better gear to even have a chance. Guess i was wrong, if i can kill one of the difficult end bosses at earlier level with basic longsword upgraded to +3 and starting knight gear i guess this game isn't that difficult as most make it to be. Either that or i have yet to face the real challenge ahead, i have read nameless king to be a real toughy, can't wait to find out.

But yes if you compare it to games like skyrim, dragon age inquisition or mass effect then its darn hard.

Didn't most reviewers call it the easiest Souls game yet?

Anyway, I'd agree with you. I'm currently at a small brick wall (that silly giant skeleton boss - who should be easy, but his summons always swarm me at that last sliver of health)...but other than that, I've strolled through everything else without breaking a sweat.

Playing through Dark Souls 1 without any guides was a very puzzling experience for me, with many hours spent doing things 'incorrectly' - but Dark Souls 3 explains itself really well. It's definitely the most linear and least needlessly convoluted game in the series.

Killing dancer really broke the game for me i think as it opened lothric castle far early then intended, giving high level items so i got my dark sword upgraded to +9 now and breezed through catacombs area in around 1 hour, didn't even had to use flask on boss.

@serialkisser: I haven't gotten DS3 yet, but I played 1 and BB a bunch. I had the same feeling on DS1, which carried into BB. Before I played Dark Souls I had a co-worker who constantly told me how 'brutal' the game was, that I would struggle to catch up to him. He'd been playing for 6 months and only got as far as Blighttown, took me less than 3 weeks to get there and I spent a lot of time just farming rather than progressing through the game.

I think people are just too used to playing games where you can run & gun and there are no consequences, then they get to a game like Dark Souls and get mobbed. Souls games require a lot more patience than most other games, and can't be played mindlessly compared to your average game. Once you figure out how the game is meant to be played though, it really is incredibly simple to beat. The bosses can pose a problem at times, but mostly you just have to learn their pattern and adjust accordingly.

Yeah it's pretty easy.... Especially if you've played previous Souls games. I really like a lot of the boss designs, but some of them should be a lot more difficult (faster/more health).

@Planeforger: I liked the needlessly convoluted stuff..... It made me feel smart (or sometimes stupid) when I figured things out.

It probably is the easiest in the Souls series due to how it's built, but that's not entirely a bad thing. As the games primary focus was never difficulty, the developer has stated this numbrous times. 'Difficulty' being a focus was just Bandai Namco marketing gone wrong.

Two factoring reasons why this game is overall less difficult than previous entries.

1) Gaming balance, everything in the game has a more equal flow making all but (Luck) useful. Chances are you'll find a play style you'll be confident in before you reach the GreatWood boss. And it can work throughout the main game, probably not PvP. But that's a different scenario.

2) It's also worth noting sometimes your Estus Flask refills due to events. This is for killing enemies that had unused Estus, and you can even get them for killing Invaders. Making you actually have more health options than you thought. Add to that Estus Soup in multiple zones and you've got a more steady journey.

I've played every Souls game and am happy with the changes, I want more people to play and get why this RPG is great, more people, potentially more diverse PvP :)

Just wait. I thought it was easy too and then I hit a major wall not TOO much farther than that. We are talking 0-100 REAL QUICK!

@LostProphetFLCL: What was your wall in DkSIII? Just curious.

I thought there was a massive difficulty jump starting with Pontiff Sullivan, and Annor Londo and the Irithyll Dungeon. WAY harder than anything that came before it (even with my struggling with the frozen ice knight my first playthrough).

I have this odd feeling that most people who have claimed that the souls games were hard, were simply playing them wrong. They are slow and methodical games, that's all.

I really like them, but The only one I found to have really hard areas or bosses to rage over was Dark Souls 2. But not in the area of being brutally difficult.

I think that the Souls games reminds us that it is the goal is for the player to adapt to the game, not have the game adapt to the player.

I have stated many times, that a game like the Mega Man games (1-5) are a good deal harder then the souls games for me, far more punishing.

The Souls games are not shy of punishing you when you mess up, but the punishment is not really that bad, I have seen far worse. What is important is HOW and WHERE it puts the difficulty, and where it does not bow to the player.

But I think they are games that should at least be attempted to play, sadly the rumor of how brutally hard they are, is rather bloated and sadle likely scared away some potential gamers from them.

part of it is that there's very little variation from boss to boss. You have the large boss with the massive swing radius and then the multi-boss. Only thing that changes are the timings, which really aren't that hard to learn. This franchise is really not that clever...it just feasts off your impatience.

I think where DS really got its reputation is that in an era where player death is just an inconvenience, DS really tries to take something from you when you die, whether its souls or distance from the last bonfire. But, i mean, if I'm actually counting deaths, I can point to other games where I've died more often, it's just that usually in those games the checkpoint system makes it shrug worthy.

@LostProphetFLCL: Witches right? in the Dungeons, caught me off guard as well. That curse was a weird new thing that I didn't see coming. .

Pontiff Sullivan however I found quite easy for my glass-cannon build. Parried him three times and made the fight relatively easy, though one could argue that if I was a heavy armor/ Str class this would have changed the fight entirely because he was a combo heavy fiend lol.

Likewise I had a pretty good strategy with the Frost Knights, you can't parry them like PS but they're easy to roll behind and stagger easily after a 3 hit combo, resulting in a critical hit for the win. This strategy also works on the Large Crystal Lizards.

My biggest wall was probably the twin Pontiff pets down in the water area. That to me toppled every boss encounter minus The Nameless King. But this was alittle my fault of arrogance, I assumed you could fight both at once with little to no trouble, because the one on the bridge was a push-over.

There's your answer right there. The Souls games aren't hard. They punish impatience and cockiness. With patience, a plan and a strong will, they can be exceptionally easy games to run right through.

The first Dark Souls for instance, you can get one of the most powerful weapons in the game (one of the scythes) by running through the catacombs right next to the starting area, making a couple deft roll-jumps and warping back to the last bonfire upon death.

Its funny that some of the mobs are FAR more dangerous and relentless then the bosses themselves. As i said earlier i killed dancer of the boreal valley early and got into lothric castle before venturing futher then Farron's keep.

The cathedral knights in the garden area especially near the ocerios boss room are just silly, they keep swinging their greatsword without pause like they have unlimited stamina, i died their a few times but then one shotted the boss. In untended graves i killed Champion gundyr without dying again but died to black knights in the next area again due to pathing issues. Same deal with pontiff sulyvan, killed him with maybe using one or two flasks. I am almost nearing level 90 and the game is just too easy now.

Its funny Silver Knights after the pontiff sulyvan boss deals like twice the damage per hit then boss does.

So here's my list of boss and number of tries it took me to kill them so far:

Iudex Gundyr (Around 10, it was my first souls boss ever and i was playing as mage. One shotted next time re-rolling as knight)

Vordt of the boreal valley (About 5 tries)

Tree boss (About 10 or so tries)

Crystal sage (3-5 tries)

Deacons of the deep (first try)

Dancer of the boreal valley (20+ tries, i killed her at level 42)

Abyss watchers (first try)

Wolnir (first try, perfect kill i think without him landing a successful single hit)

Old demon king (first try)

Oceiros (first try)

Champion Gundyr (first try)

Pontiff sulyvahn (first try)

@LostProphetFLCL:

I dunno what difficulty spike but i was exploring Lothric castle at ~45ish level, those knights are easy as hell if you can abuse parry, get large titanite shard and chunks, upgrade your sword of choice to +9 and you are rolling through anything.

I finished Irithyll valley and killed pontiff without dying once, yup i died in the next area 3 or so times where there are a bunch of silver knights shooting arrow towards you on the roof, 2 of those times was because i fell of the roof trying to dodge. I just lit the Annor Londo bonfire but will play through the dungeon tomorrow first, i think i can't progress in annor before completing dungeon because the door was locked an said it needed some mechanism to open so my guess is something you get from the dungeon to continue ahead.

For all of my talk about this game being linear...I totally didn't see the path to the Crystal Sage until after I'd worked through the catacombs. Huh. :p

At first I thought he was just a funky optional really easy boss, but then I noticed the path behind him. Guess I've got some new areas to explore...which were terribly signposted, but hey, I found them eventually.

its not a matter of difficulty that's the problem its a matter of why even though dark souls 3 sucks people are giving it 10/10 ratings which is utter lunacy. its story is perhaps the most horrendously boring and unengaging I have ever seen. For any good game you need a good story. Go ahead keep sucking the companies tits. heck its your choice to play such a awfully overpriced game but I refuse to fall to such pathetic levels of corruption and stupidity. Sorry just not my type of dick, to salty I guess.

@known: "For any good game you need a good story."

Said who? You, some random immature jerk who likes games to be movies.

Take note. Tetris is the best selling game ever made, and widely considered a timeless classic. . . Stories are fine if it benefits the game, otherwise I'd rather read a book, Game mechanics are the essence of the industry. Everything else is icing.

If you play a game with the sole intent to be for-filled with an engaging narrative? Try other mediums.

It's harder than Bloodborne IMO, I cheesed like maybe 4-5 bosses with other players while I beat Bloodborne all on my own. Am currently at level 82 and I hope I'm at the last boss.

Tetris got jammed down everyone's throats by being included in every portable device and PC since...ever. There are plenty of us that hate it utterly but have 10+ copies of it. And you know a lot of those copies are being counted. Tetris is most definitely not the reason gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry and self-important "hardcore gamers" can put it at the top of their silly lists, but they know damn well if they had to choose one game to bring with them to a remote island it wouldn't be tetris.

Also, people can game for whatever reason they want. Their money is as good as yours. It all goes to growing the industry. Game mechanics are important, like grammar, but I don't love a book because the grammar's good. Maybe you're fine with nothing more than pressing buttons, but other people might like something different. Those people don't need to go somewhere else because they disagree with you. Attitudes like that are what kept gaming in the basement for so many years.

Now, with Dark/Demon's Souls and Bloodborn, the combat is trash. You talk of good gameplay being so important and yet here is a game with such shoddy design - attacks, including fire and poison clouds that go through walls, enemy AI that's so smart the best leveling spot in DkS was an area of the forest where you lure the enemy into running off a cliff (a strategy which still works in DS3 very well, i might add), enemies that just recycle the same attack patterns but with different animation speeds, weapons with two attacks...it just reeks of laziness and poor craftsmanship. However, i love these games for their worlds and the depth of the exploration...entire worlds hidden behind the secrets whether it's a painting or a beach stretching off into a distant nothing. NPC stories which were heavily dialed back in DkS3 were also a very rewarding part of the exploration - stories that I had to discover rather than be told. I own every game of this franchise entirely for this reason while simultaneously believing the gameplay to need a massive overhaul. You benefit from that money I'm paying. Should I just not play them because it's not the same reason as you play?

@Ish_basic: Never did I tell people what they can think, however, when someone states a good game will "need" a story; that's when things are less about personal opinion but more an apparent rule in the medium. & certainly had nothing to do with this 'hardcore' you rambled about.

Just like your opinion of the combat being "trash" in BB & DkSIII, you don't explain why it's trash very well, you just write a lot of false ramble, despite it being positively received for the combat mechanics (Your "two attacks" garbage made me facepalm big-time). So forgive me if I don't care what you're posting about those games. I'm guessing you don't play them based on your laughable comment, or you just want them to be something else? (for whatever reason)

As Tetris is concerned that's a lot of speculation ,as we're mentioning a game that hasn't been ''included in every portable device and PC since...ever''. If P.C. freebies was considered I'm pretty sure Solitaire would be up for consideration, which isn't 'though also doesn't has a story-mode'. Furthermore the 45 million is from the (2006) editions so that's your theory out the window. As I've only seen that 'free' on mobile for a short time, and some DS bundles.

So again, your information is speculation based as a gamer that clearly has nothing positive to state about Tetris. That's fine bye the way, I don't care if you like it. It sold, is exceedingly well received (by most). & has no story!

That's the only point I was making! Jumping to conclusions is your gripe and I want nothing to do with it.

You are more than free to dislike games, games I like, chances are I don't like your favorite games. But I probably have a better reason than "trash" and made up gibberish.

Every Souls game gets easier because we get more and more used to the formula.

I didn't play Dark Souls 3 yet but I didn't find previous games that difficult.

I think it has less cheap bullshit than previous games which makes it seem easier.

It still has some tough areas though. Anor Londo, the Great Cathedral and Ithryll Prison were all pretty challenging in their own ways for me.

I thought the difficult was just right for 90% of the game

Dark Souls 1 isn't even that difficult, it is really difficult, but there are games that are harder like NES games or cRPGs.

@RSM-HQ: I mean some games that lean more heavily on a story have good gameplay.. but a bad story or the other way around..... stuff like that is unacceptable and we should be demanding more from the gaming company's. (then you call me a immature jerk). But what type of person would make irrational judgements upon people they barely know? its not that hard to know it. (Back on topic) Tetris was a good game in its OWN way. Tetris succeeded only because it was different. maybe something I said was wrong and I don't blame you for finding fault for that. instead of all games I mean maybe ones that lean more heavily on the story to make it a good game. like a rpg or anything else that leans more heavily on a story. I admit what I said about all games needing to have a good story is a little broad but the meaning I was trying to say was that nowadays games are becoming poor quality and are starting to get downgraded.

@known: Wow that's a late reply!

Well, if you recall what you stated ^above^ you go to harsh lengths to make anyone who likes DkSIII sound like sheep, or idiots. (thanks)

So yes. Your post was very immature, and if nothing I probably wasn't mean enough with my wording in comparison to your hate ramble.

I disagree with pretty much everything you've posted as well, it's high speculation on your part. Though will give you thanks for wording it better than an angry gorilla. I don't 'think' gaming as a whole is getting downgraded, however some games have and that's a fair point, >but< DkSIII certainly isn't one of them, git gud boi.

If 'you' prefer story games? That's a different thing entirely, and could have been worded without criticizing a LARGE player-base. Instead you previously trash other peoples tastes, as your narrow view on gaming is what everyone should follow? The level of arrogance. . I have a more appropriate reply for that. But I don't want to make the moderators work any harder than they already do.

@RSM-HQ: WOW that is dang disrespectful! hey if you want to be the jerk here go ahead. Sorry to say to you but dark souls 3 sucks, if you want to deny it then go the beep ahead. (oh and sheep is actually a pretty good and accurate term thx) then you have the audacity to call my speech hate ramble?!? sorry but its quite accurate and... YES I corrected myself at the comment you responded to... then disagreeing with everything I said? hey its YOUR opinion but either way its a flawed opinion that has no general fact... the most rudest part of all is saying: "wow that's a late reply!" do you expect me to keep my eyes on everything someone says? (the answer is NO!) then you say that its all speculation?!? (sorry that's a joke and a attempt to make me mad, just like all your comments) then you disagree that dark souls 3 has a bad story? wow you must love this game to be protecting it like this! (you also have the stupidity of saying "gg") Then you assume I like story games only? do you think you can dictate what I think? then call it arrogance? geeze you must be one piece of work to call me arrogant! most people don't follow exactly what I think and I understand, but when absolutely obvious facts show themselves fan boys protect them even though they have critical flaws. Finally you mention that you have a more appropriate reply but you don't want to give the moderators work any harder... that's nasty to say... (extremely arrogant in my opinion)

@Maddie_Larkin:

You are absolutely right. I actually think dark souls looks really good but i havent bothered playing it because of how hard it is supposed to be. These days im just not into playing seriously difficult games because i just dont have the time to keep replaying an area becaise ots too hard, even though i will likely beat it.

Does the perception of it being hard possibly come from the fact that 95% of games these days are actually just far too easy?

I like a challenge in games like having to properly learn how to play is fine because you are failing because you are not doing it right, the game isnt just hard for the sake of it.

Dark Souls games are nothing compared to older games from before 2000.

I'm currently just getting into the series, starting with Dark Souls 1. I'm immensely enjoying the game, and it's definitely really hard, but not like everyone makes it out to be.