Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug

I doubt that some New Yorker journalist can really appreciate the gravity of what Miyazaki has done to gaming. The man switched careers in his 30s and literally changed the face of video games, releasing one highly influential game after another. Yes, you die a lot in his games, and they are hard, but that isn't the point. The point is that the influences of Miyazaki games are now visible in almost every AAA game these days. It's tough to really know how much Dark Souls changed the game design zeitgeist unless you play a lot of games (like me). With Elden Ring, he has only cemented his place as once of the great game designers of all time - I really hope some of the design decisions influence other games in the same way.

I bought ER the other day after hearing rave review and was super disappointed. I ended up returning it after a couple hours.

* Visuals: Disappointing. Looked like a cheap free-to-play MMO. Cheap-looking textures, stock-looking characters, bad rigging (e.g. characters holding things in unnatural poses), etc.

* Controls: Unpleasant. Controls felt very sluggish. If this is supposed to make the game more challenging or something, this isn't a very fun mechanic.

* Software quality: Terrible. Performance is not good, tons of bugs, graphics issues, wouldn't recognize my controller when I had multiple input devices plugged in.

* Dialogue: What little I saw was super corny. Used as a crutch for poor level design. E.g. a ghost telling you something to the effect of "you need to jump into this hole to continue the game".

* Multiplayer felt like a cheap gimmick. I wanted to turn it off.

And so on. This honestly felt like someone's first attempt at making a Unity game, not a magnum opus from an experienced developer.

Am I missing something? This is my first souls game; is feeling cheap and clunky part of the aesthetic?

I heard about these gamed and watched a few hours of gameplay each. I was unconvinced and closed the YouTube tabs after it became too boring.

I guess I have to play it to feel it? But most of the games I enjoy playing are fun to watch. Duke3d and Baldurs Gate are two examples. Can someone elaborate why Dark Soul is actually fun to play, and more importantly why sold for so many copies? I read other comments and the thing they mentioned (world building and music and game design) isn't really particularly recognizable from the few hours (actually about 10 hours) I watched, and even if they are excellent surely there are other games that match?

For the visuals, FromSoft has always been a step behind from a graphical fidelity level. But they make up for it in art design, which is some of the best in the industry. Some of the areas in Elden Ring are legitimately jaw dropping. But the graphical fidelity is certainly nowhere near the level of something like Horizon (or even the Demon's Souls Remake, which was done by another team).

For the controls, the game is all about animation timing. You may be used to games where you can cancel animations. FromSoft's games instead require you to commit to your actions, giving everything a lot of weight. It takes getting used to. In some ways it's more like a fighting game than a lot of other action games. It's also possible that you were playing a character with heavier equipment load: try taking things off, so you have a faster roll.

There's no excuse for the performance / port issues. It released in a pretty poor state, but they are at least working on patches. I'd imagine it'll be a lot better after a few more patches.

The dialogue is a bit of an acquired taste. I find the writing to be brilliant, but at first it just feels odd. It helps to realize you're meant to feel out of place, without enough initial context to understand fully what's happening. You have to put the pieces together as you play, and then things finally begin to make sense.

The multiplayer is quirky and different, and probably not for everyone. You can always turn it off if it's not your thing.

The difficulty isn’t particularly high, it’s just high for a mainstream AAA game in the year it was released, and was probably the first time many in the generation of Dark Souls encountered actual challenging gameplay. There are much, much more punishing games out there from the mainstream (Ninja Gaiden and Nioh) to Indie (IWBTG and Super Meat Boy).

I think Dark Souls is celebrated less for its difficulty and more for its beautiful world building.