The soul of Demon's Souls lives on in Dark Souls

[Arcanum]

Link (http://kotaku.com/5748513/get-ready-for-the-hardest-game-youll-play-this-year?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kotaku%2Ffull+%28Kotaku%29)

So Dark Souls (previously known as Project Dark) is the spiritual successor to Demon's Souls. Did you hate Demon's Souls for its difficulty? Well that's too damn bad because it only gets harder. I think my favorite part is this:

The game will have large areas that can be explored, so if players see, for example, a field in the distance, then they will be able to make their way there and have a look around.
[...]
Areas won't be only be horizontally expansive, but also vertically so. Thus, the focus on exploration is increased in Dark Souls.

That's one of the few gripes I had against Demon's Souls; the game's world was amazing, but you were very restricted in regards to what you actually saw.

I am definitely looking forward to this, whenever the hell it will come out.

Is anyone else out there excited for another Demon's Souls-like game? Or is the difficulty too off-putting?

[bluestarultor]

TBH, Demon's Souls' difficulty was, in fact, offputting for me among other factors. I really don't see how putting in tons of empty space for its own sake would really improve it. Or to put it this way, given the same difficulty, I don't see them actually rewarding you all that much for exploration, because that would conflict with the aim of making it difficult. A JRPG can have tons of empty rooms because those rooms are in general safe and often do contain worthwhile rewards, whereas Demon's Souls specifically punished exploration by various means of death and anything you found was less a "reward" and more a "badly-needed remedy."


Basically, at best, the image that comes to mind is a gray, empty field with maybe a healing herb at the end of it if they feel particularly nice that day of development, realistically a gray, empty field with enemies hiding in all the tall grass and bushes with maybe a healing herb at the end of it if they feel particularly nice that day of development, and cynically, "Oh, look! A breakable barrel at the end of what appears to be a gray, empty field, with no bushes or tall grass for foes to even hide behind! It's free for the taking! I'll just carefully walk up just to be sure and- *incinerated from above by a dragon*" and then once you get all the timing down after dying a million times, the barrel is empty.