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[MilkBeard]

List of actual issues I have with the series:

-Camera is shit when fighting larger enemies.
-Most grab attacks are bullshit, a grab should only activate when it hits your character's torso, not your toes.

Everything else are just minor annoyances.

Yeah I agree. This is about it for my own complaints.

90% of the Op's list is subjective, like boss Souls and the dead ends. They aren't going to place items at every freaking corner. It's part of exploration.

 

[Sullichin]

You can see how much a boss soul is worth by looking at it in the sell menu when talking to the shrine handmaid

 

[Astral]

You would never get hit by an arrow otherwise.

I'm assuming it's due to some limitations but it's still pretty annoying.

 

[MegaSackman]

To be honest some of those aren't a complain to me or are the most minimal invisible thing.

What I do hate and think it's terrible cheap game design is that to scale difficulty the devs put: A big or tough enemy with some others weaker but annoying enemies mixed with enviromental effects that drain your life or fuck you in someway and one or two snipers in a really difficult to reach place.

That is cheap really cheap game design.

-Most grab attacks are bullshit, a grab should only activate when it hits your character's torso, not your toes.

Everything else are just minor annoyances.

Especially when animation kills are so fucking long, the first time it's ok but after that... I already know that I'm dead, get in to it quick freak!

 

[Aureon]

Don't get me wrong, I think the Dark Souls series deserves a lot praise. However, after nearly finishing Dark Souls 3 I have noticed that a lot of the "lows" in the game come from sheer frustration in response to terrible design decisions, not the actual challenge (which is severely overblown IMO). I think Dark Souls 1 was such a unique experience for many of us that we were quicker to overlook the jank.

We are now several games in and a lot of the same design decisions persist and I don't think they benefit the game:

-Large enemies frequently slash around large weapons in tight spaces killing you, but if you try to swing your sword it clanks against the walls.
Constraining the player creates fun gameplay. Constraining enemies creates bugged AIs.

-Enemies can swing their weapons through walls and doors (such as prison gates) to hurt you
Constraining the player creates fun gameplay. Constraining enemies creates bugged AIs.

-Enemies can take an incredible amount of fall damage, but you can barely survive a fall of much lesser height.
Anti-cheesing measure.

-Thick swampy water slows your movement, but enemy movement is never affected (even enemies that aren't native to swamps).
Constraining the player creates fun gameplay. Constraining enemies creates bugged AIs.

-Environmental hazards (poison, lava, etc) illogically don't affect enemies.
Constraining the player creates fun gameplay. Constraining enemies creates bugged AIs.

-Working really hard to defeat an enemy to get past a door only to find a dead end with a worthless item.
Part of the design - swings between useless and very useful rewards are more exciting than flatlines of moderately useful stuff.

-Using a great soul from a boss only to find it was only worth 10,000 when you have souls you have picked up from corpses that are worth the same or more.
Boss souls are for weapons. Souls from them are basically the consolation if you didn't want the weapon.

-Your blood stains are frequently in the wrong place when you return to retrieve your lost souls
That's to avoid them being in unreachable positions.

-Kicking is the same button press as your standard sword swing. You press RB to swing and you have to press RB + up to kick. This can lead to obvious problems and is just awkward.
I'll give you this one. Kicking and jumping are bad.
-Enemies that not only snipe you, but fire projectiles that home in on you like a charged plasma pistol shot from Halo.
Constraining the player creates fun gameplay. Constraining enemies creates bugged AIs.

-Enemies often have incredibly weird hit boxes and can hit you when they clearly missed by a wide margin.
I can't say i've seen this much. Perhaps two or three bosses.

-Different enemies have "invincibility frames" that you can't predict or know until you get punished over and over.
.. Not really many do, unless you're talking about getting up, which is a anti-cheesing measure.

-The game heavily relies on invincibility frames and is overly generous in providing enemies invincibility frames (such as smacking an enemy into the ground only to find that they are invincible when getting back up. This wastes your stamina and they resume slashing at you).
Anti-cheesing

-Bosses often resort to incredibly cheap moves that cause area of affect damage when it makes no sense (such as slamming a hammer on the ground in front of them and nearly killing you when you are behind them)
.. I'm not really seeing how this could even theoretically be a problem. Bosses are meant to be unfair.

-Certain classes and attributes are extremely worthless in comparison to others, frustrating players that don't have experience with the "way these games usually work."
Not all games are Sid Meier's "Series of interesting decisions" - RPGs and storytelling in general can get value from worthless choices.

Nigh all of these are heavily intentional, OP. The rest are technical limitations.

 

[halfbeast]

I just feel like that is just terrible design. The game establishes rules, but then you find that you can exploit the jank to your advantage or you find the enemy does the same. It's terribly inconsistent and IMO very bad design to keep persisting through all of your titles.

These are not minor nitpicks to me, especially when a lot of the problems mentioned can result in a death that you frankly didn't deserve. It's not challenging, it's just time wasting and boring.

I agree with the swamp movement, fuck fighting BP selen in defilement! but there were instances where you can use environmental hazards to your advantage. all the traps in all of soulsborne, the poison urns in harvest valley. in dark souls 3 there are even enemies that attack other enemies, I thought that was pretty cool.

 

[Fahzgoolin]

In regards to the bloodstain thing, yes I understand it's their to help you retrieve your souls. Maybe it's just in Dark Souls 3, but I have unfortunately encountered my blood stain in a completely different location than where the game "should" put it.

A lot of people are assuming that I think my points made are just across the board always true. That's not the case, but the problems do persist and occur enough where it causes unnecessary "lows" that inhibit my enjoyment of the game.

I guess I don't like the game's design very much anymore. It's become irksome instead of enjoyable.

Spoiler

It's so satisfying to progress though, so I will probably always torture myself with these games =/

 

[Kazuhira]

Seems like minor nitpicks to me that is limited to only a few situations.

Yeah,i was thinking the same.

 

[AWizardDidIt]

Making video games is hard OP. I don't think any of the Dark Souls games are perfect by a wide stretch, but I agree with above posters that almost all of your complaints are either thoughtful design decisions that are necessary for the gameplay or are simply technical limitations because video games are video games. They never work 100% perfectly and things like hitboxes can often be a bit suspect even in the best designed games. Even impeccably designed 2d fighting games played competitively can have really questionable hitboxes and those only exist on a single plane. For hitboxes in the Souls games to be as good as they are is frankly pretty impressive work on From's part.

 

[Imperfected]

-Large enemies frequently slash around large weapons in tight spaces killing you, but if you try to swing your sword it clanks against the walls.

Okay, granted. The way weapon collisions work with terrain is poor and somewhat unintuitive. Basically, each weapon has certain "startup" frames where a collision will happen, and then "active" frames where the weapon will pass through colliding terrain because it's basically too far into the animation to do a rebound without problems.

This is sensible, except in DS3 it admittedly creates some really bizarre situations where huge weapons can swing freely in tight confines (because their startup frames won't collide, just the active ones) but even very small weapons like twinblades bounce off seemingly every bit of terrain possible.

-Enemies can swing their weapons through walls and doors (such as prison gates) to hurt you

As you might surmise from the above, you can do this as well if you have a larger weapon with the right types of swing. The only real advantage the enemies have is that non-"human" enemies usually don't have any collision with environment checks for startup frames.

-Enemies can take an incredible amount of fall damage, but you can barely survive a fall of much lesser height.

Depends on the enemy type. Human enemies (invaders, NPCs) actually are treated the same, and you can cheese some of them (Lautrec or Anri, for instance) pretty easily by baiting them into a fall or pushing them off a ledge.

They seem to handle other monsters on a somewhat unpredictable case-by-case basis, though as far as I know a "guaranteed lethal" fall kills all forms of monsters, it's just that non-lethal falls sometimes will do reduced/no damage to them. This may simply be due to extensions of factors that affect player fall damage. (You take less fall damage if you're not wearing armor in DS1, and in DS3 you take less fall damage if you have higher Dexterity. The way the game is programmed many enemies may logically be treated as having no armor and very high DEX.)

-Thick swampy water slows your movement, but enemy movement is never affected (even enemies that aren't native to swamps).

"Human" type enemies are equally affected by mires. I'm guessing you mean things like the drowned corpses, giant crabs, basilisks, etc.

Personally, I don't like "mires" as part of the level design at all--I think it's a really dumb thing to spend so much time fine-tuning the responsiveness of controls and animations and then build entire areas where the game controls like damp ass--but some players seem to love them, so what can you do?

-Environmental hazards (poison, lava, etc) illogically don't affect enemies.

They actually do. The statues in Cathedral of the Deep can poison the Cathedral Knights if they stand in them. Human invaders (with the apparent exception of Yellowfinger Heysel) can also become poisoned, toxic, or die from walking into lava. For instance, if you want to kill Knight Slayer Torrig you can lead him up to the nearby bridge over the lava room and just bait him into falling in.

It's true that enemies that actually spawn in poison or lava (leeches, lava slimes, etc.) aren't affected by it, but that... makes a certain degree of sense? Try baiting other enemies that don't spawn in the hazard into it; it will usually work, though keep in mind many enemies have very high Poison/Toxic resistance.

-Using a great soul from a boss only to find it was only worth 10,000 when you have souls you have picked up from corpses that are worth the same or more.

Yeah, fair dues, this is just a total crapshoot in DS3.

I don't know why some Transfusions have a soul cost attached to them, when the soul cost should be assumed because you're using the soul to make the weapon instead of expending it to get the number of souls it would be worth. (ie, the weapon already by default costs a number of souls equal to the value of the boss soul used to make it)

I don't know why the value of boss souls is completely unpredictable--Deacons of the Deep and the Soul of a Demon are worth 20k, the same as the last boss and more than almost all other bosses in the game!--or why the value of boss souls hits a wall at 20k and stops.

I don't know why the value of boss souls does not scale with NG+, even though normal soul items (as found on corpses) are in fact scaled to NG+.

I don't think From knows either. I don't think anyone actually thought very much about any of this.

-Your blood stains are frequently in the wrong place when you return to retrieve your lost souls

Your blood stain is about 3 seconds "behind" where you were when you died. This is to make it a little easier for you to recover them, especially if you died due to falling damage. That's generally a pretty good system and better than the alternative.

-Kicking is the same button press as your standard sword swing. You press RB to swing and you have to press RB + up to kick. This can lead to obvious problems and is just awkward.

Yeah, kicking as an input is not particularly reliable.

-Enemies that not only snipe you, but fire projectiles that home in on you like a charged plasma pistol shot from Halo.

Homing projectiles are kind of lame, but basically needed because the speed of projectiles in the game is generally quite slow. If they didn't home in on you, they wouldn't really be a threat at all.

The alternative--making them non-homing but faster, as with spells like Soul Stream--would make it really hard for players to manage situations where they're being peppered with ranged attacks while trying to fight/avoid enemies in a melee.

-Enemies often have incredibly weird hit boxes and can hit you when they clearly missed by a wide margin.

Most of the hitboxes are really good. There are just a few attacks--mostly "grab" attacks--that have always been dubious, and a few specific enemies with really crummy hitboxes (Sulyvahn's Beasts are just awful).

-Certain classes and attributes are extremely worthless in comparison to others, frustrating players that don't have experience with the "way these games usually work."

I'm assuming you mean builds, because starting class is basically meaningless.

To be honest, there's no truly worthless build at the moment. The speedrun strategy of choice is actually to run a LUCK build of all things, with a quality weapon. There are strong STR and DEX builds. You can find videos of people beating the game literally only ever using Pyromancy, Miracles, or Sorcery.

You might have trouble finding the right weapon or spell to make a particular build "work", but making an actually worthless build is surprisingly hard compared to previous games.

Also, I can't believe you complained about all of this stuff without saying one word about the true bullshit: enemies don't have stamina. They have guard-break to "fake" it, but it's also the responsibility of the AI programmer to insert "breaks" into their routines to simulate stamina recovery after attacking...

... which worked fine in previous games, but someone involved in DS3 dropped the fuck out of that ball. There are some seriously disgusting unshackled boss AIs in this game that can spam attacks without openings for absurdly long periods if you have a run of bad luck in terms of their attack RNG.

 

[Fahzgoolin]

Making video games is hard OP. You should try it sometime.

I just wanna say I really really hate that kind of response. I clearly stated I love the games and keep playing them (giving them my money), but as soon as I criticize it someone has to come in here and ignore everything and say "You should go make a game." That's bullshit.

Also, just an FYI I have been learning game development.

Also, I can't believe you complained about all of this stuff without saying one word about the true bullshit: enemies don't have stamina. They have guard-break to "fake" it, but it's also the responsibility of the AI programmer to insert "breaks" into their routines to simulate stamina recovery after attacking...

... which worked fine in previous games, but someone involved in DS3 dropped the fuck out of that ball. There are some seriously disgusting unshackled boss AIs in this game that can spam attacks without openings for absurdly long periods if you have a run of bad luck in terms of their attack RNG.

I didn't want to make my post too long, but yeah you are right. That's a big problem I have as well.

It's so weird to love a game and hate it almost just as much. It means the series is truly special, but I think my bullshit meter is tired to going full tilt.

 

[lord_of_flood]

-Large enemies frequently slash around large weapons in tight spaces killing you, but if you try to swing your sword it clanks against the walls. Yep. Agree with this 100%.
-Enemies can swing their weapons through walls and doors (such as prison gates) to hurt you Sort of agree. You can do it too sometimes, but it still doesn't justify the enemies being able to do it seemingly all of the time.
-Enemies can take an incredible amount of fall damage, but you can barely survive a fall of much lesser height. Was never really a huge issue to me, but yeah, I can see how it would be infuriating.
-Thick swampy water slows your movement, but enemy movement is never affected (even enemies that aren't native to swamps). Yep.
-Environmental hazards (poison, lava, etc) illogically don't affect enemies. They do though. I know poison clouds certainly affect enemies in Bloodborne, and lone patches of fire will screw with most enemies pretty badly.
-Working really hard to defeat an enemy to get past a door only to find a dead end with a worthless item. Indeed.
-Using a great soul from a boss only to find it was only worth 10,000 when you have souls you have picked up from corpses that are worth the same or more. You should be using those souls to make weapons though.
-Your blood stains are frequently in the wrong place when you return to retrieve your lost souls Seems overly nitpicky.
-Kicking is the same button press as your standard sword swing. You press RB to swing and you have to press RB + up to kick. This can lead to obvious problems and is just awkward. Yeah, it's messed me up a few times too.
-Enemies that not only snipe you, but fire projectiles that home in on you like a charged plasma pistol shot from Halo. Use your cover.
-Enemies often have incredibly weird hit boxes and can hit you when they clearly missed by a wide margin. 100% yes. I hate when I get ganked by something that shouldn't have hit me. It feels like their hitboxes extend far beyond where they should be sometimes.
-Different enemies have "invincibility frames" that you can't predict or know until you get punished over and over. Usually isn't much of an issue once you learn to be patient.
-The game heavily relies on invincibility frames and is overly generous in providing enemies invincibility frames (such as smacking an enemy into the ground only to find that they are invincible when getting back up. This wastes your stamina and they resume slashing at you). Most action games rely on i-frames, this isn't new. Heck, games like Ninja Gaiden rely on them more than Dark Souls ever would.
-Bosses often resort to incredibly cheap moves that cause area of affect damage when it makes no sense (such as slamming a hammer on the ground in front of them and nearly killing you when you are behind them) Yeah. Blood-Starved Beast in particular has a really nasty ground pound with an invisible AoE.
-Certain classes and attributes are extremely worthless in comparison to others, frustrating players that don't have experience with the "way these games usually work." Souls games are generally really obtuse, which is how things like this happen. I don't necessarily think that's a good thing, but it's sort of the nature of the beast.

Thoughts in bold.

 

[bigjig]

The fact is a player is going to be able to be much better path map around tight spaces than an AI so some concessions are given to the AI to avoid having either incredibly easy to manipulate AI or maps that are just boring wide open spaces.

In that sense these are far less flaws that have been overlooked, rather than just general balance.

I do agree about the kick controls being bullshit though, I only have a 50/50 success rate pulling off a kick lol

 

[daman824]

The kick is horrible and is horribly mapped. Countless times I've been moving toward and enemy and have tried to hit them, only to get that stupid kick instead

 

[MilkBeard]

The games do have their jank. It's just part of the ability to be able to play these games in a timely manner and without worry that they will risk sales. If everything was perfected, it might take them 5-6 years to put out a game. I'm OK with the games being a little janky as long as it is within reason. From Software jank is well known. It is just that their systems have a logical design for the most part. And it is good where it counts.

Although, they really should work on that netcode.

 

[Producer]

Some of these points are just not true, some are very minor and specific, and some are just a case of you needing to be a better player

 

[Vena]

Why are you using Great Souls to get souls? Mod that shit into a weapon, yo

And weird hitboxes? In 2 maybe, but in 1, 3, and Demon's, the hitboxes are perfect

Hitboxes in DS3 are also terrible for certain enemies, weapons, etc.

Some of the grab activation boxes are incredibly terrible. The dancer will grab you if you roll through her animation because it lasts longer than your roll IFrames. You warp into her hand from her elbow.

 

[HeeHo]

I agree about it having terrible design choices when it comes to multiplayer. Almost half the covenants are unavailable if your SL is too high in DS3.

 

[Riposte]

You think it's unfair that enemies with large attacks don't bounce off walls, but you are overlooking the fact that you have a fully functional human brain and their behavior is based on a couple lines of code and thus everything is extremely in your favor. Making enemies with large weapons competent even in smaller spaces is not a terrible design decision, being able to neutralize those enemies by standing in archway would be (in fact, that's too prevalent as it is).

It's telling that pretty much every complaint you list is basically arguing in favor of giving the player more power.

 

[TeddyShardik]

I'll give you the kick complaint as well. Though only in DS2 and 3. Either I'm crazy or the input is just not as reliable as it was before. I could shove in Demon's Souls no problem, same with kicking in DS1. Since DS2 though it's more like a "pray and see what comes out" deal.

 

[ElFly]

"Human" type enemies are equally affected by mires. I'm guessing you mean things like the drowned corpses, giant crabs, basilisks, etc.

Personally, I don't like "mires" as part of the level design at all--I think it's a really dumb thing to spend so much time fine-tuning the responsiveness of controls and animations and then build entire areas where the game controls like damp ass--but some players seem to love them, so what can you do?

Dark Souls 1 solved this problem p elegantly; it gave you a ring that let you move normally in water (deep water still killed you, you didn't become Jesus).

But dunno why that ring disappeared in DS3; DS2 areas wouldn't have required it, but in 3 it would have been p useful, and you have 4 ring slots now, forcing the player to waste one of them for normal movement in shallow water would have been great.

 

[mishakoz]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

 

[TeddyShardik]

I agree about it having terrible design choices when it comes to multiplayer. Almost half the covenants are unavailable if your SL is too high in DS3.

That's not even the worst of it. That priority thing starting with bloodborne that always puts you into highly unfavourable odds as an invader is absolute garbage. Everything is like the worst of forest invasions now.

 

[Ragnar Blackmane]

The kick is horrible and is horribly mapped. Countless times I've been moving toward and enemy and have tried to hit them, only to get that stupid kick instead

This. Jumping in DS 1 and 3 is also a horrible experience after the far better jump mapping in DS2 and Bloodborne, no idea why reverted it back. There is just no excuse for the kick though, they could have solved it far better (e.g. by executing a kick when you hold R1 instead of tapping it), as it is you kick when you don't want to and when you want to kick you'll most likely bounce on a shield with a normal attack, leaving you open to get hit.

I'll probably get some flak for it, but there are plenty of areas in the Souls games that are rather bullshit when it comes to balancing. Cheap, scripted environment oneshots in DS2 (which had a wonky balance in general), deadly one-shot murder death lasers in Bloodborne you actually have to run through head on instead of being able to circumvent them and endlessly respawning creeps tied to respawning summoners in hard to reach places (yep, that one area just sucked the fun right out of the game) and the swamp in DS3... ugh (yeah, fighting giant crabs with a shitload of damage and HP and a hilariously long ranged super grapple while your movement is impared is so much fun, especially if they randomly decide to burrow away, respawn wih full HP a few seconds later, and thanks to their insane aggro range are probably charging at you right again. They also respawn and drop unique rings you'll want, yeah).

I'm assuming you mean builds, because starting class is basically meaningless.

To be honest, there's no truly worthless build at the moment. The speedrun strategy of choice is actually to run a LUCK build of all things, with a quality weapon. There are strong STR and DEX builds. You can find videos of people beating the game literally only ever using Pyromancy, Miracles, or Sorcery.

You might have trouble finding the right weapon or spell to make a particular build "work", but making an actually worthless build is surprisingly hard compared to previous games.

Agreed, From finally managed to nail build and weapon balance (except perhaps for miracles which are a bit underpowered).

First and only Souls game where I randomly decided to use the bow with lock on auto aim at close ranges rather than just a long range kiting tool and it actually WORKS, thanks to solid damage, high hit chance, strong power attacks (gotta love the longbow powershot that throws even mini-bosses back) and the fact that you can cancel out the string pulling/firing animation anytime with a roll if the enemy attacks faster than you anticipated. It was a godsend in the swamp where you can barely move at all. It works even so well that I decided to skill DEX rather than STRG for the first time when I hit that area, going for a Halberd build rather than the usual Claymore.

 

[zma1013]

They aren't referred to as flawed masterpieces for nothing. Luckily what they do well far outweighs what they don't.

There is certainly room for improvement in many areas and I hope one day they do it.

 

[Eumi]

Don't you understand though? All the games flaws are just woven into the game's overall narrative! Unless it's DS2 in which case it's garbage.

Yeah for real though people are way to forgiving of souls games. To a lot of these people the idea that the franchise is anything less than perfect is heresy, and they'll pull out any excuse to cover for any faults.

 

[Kill3r7]

No game is perfect. The flaws you mention OP are valid but not game breaking. You learn to overcome them. Death afterall is an essential part of a Souls experience.

 

[jotun?]

Oh hey, it looks like I can drop down to that ledge and probably find a secret!

*slide off invisible wall and die*

 

[MegaSackman]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

Easier difficulty defeats the purpose of the game, of course it can be done but it changes the experience completely and I'm sure devs wouldn't want that. I understand the rest and agree with some of them.

Regarding difficulty, what I hate is cheap difficulty, it doesn't happen often but it happens.

 

[Imperfected]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move

Yeah, okay, this one bothers me. The fact that the voice acting is in English even in the Japanese version makes it really hard to justify not having basic lip-synching for the VA.

The best explanation I've ever heard is "they know they don't have to, so they won't".

 

[AWizardDidIt]

I just wanna say I really really hate that kind of response. I clearly stated I love the games and keep playing them (giving them my money), but as soon as I criticize it someone has to come in here and ignore everything and say "You should go make a game." That's bullshit.

I didn't mean to make that comment as aggressive as it was and tried to edit it so sorry if it was dismissive but the topic of your post indicates that your complaints were terrible design decisions but as others have demonstrated you're wrong about a few of them, a few of them aren't actually design "decisions" but limitations of games in general, and some of them are kind of necessary for the game to function. I agree with you that forward and attack to kick is not the greatest...

"Terrible design decisions" are things like Poise not working for players and certain enemies having unlimited stamina in DS3. Those are two clearly intentional design decisions you can point to and say something weird was going on somewhere.

 

[Skyball Paint]

Why are you using Great Souls to get souls? Mod that shit into a weapon, yo

It's a waste to transpose Great Souls for weapons you can't use, when you can take the 10,000 souls and buy something you can.

 

[Fahzgoolin]

Oh hey, it looks like I can drop down to that ledge and probably find a secret!

*slide off invisible wall and die*

Lol yuuup

 

[Weltall Zero]

You think it's unfair that enemies with large attacks don't bounce off walls, but you are overlooking the fact that you have a fully functional human brain and their behavior is based on a couple lines of code and thus everything is extremely in your favor. Making enemies with large weapons competent even in smaller spaces is not a terrible design decision, being able to neutralize those enemies by standing in archway would be (in fact, that's too prevalent as it is).

It's telling that pretty much every complaint you list is basically arguing in favor of giving the player more power.

Pretty much. And of these, half of them are "give me this thing that would allow me to break the AI.

I just wanna say I really really hate that kind of response. I clearly stated I love the games and keep playing them (giving them my money), but as soon as I criticize it someone has to come in here and ignore everything and say "You should go make a game." That's bullshit.

Actually, what's bullshit is using the "but I love the games" card. That doesn't make your criticism, or the fact that it's a very naive, uninformed one coming from an armchair non-expert, exempt of criticism itself.

I didn't want to make my post too long, but yeah you are right. That's a big problem I have as well.

That is a more valid issue than the entirety of your OP. I find it hard to believe you had space for over a dozen spurious items (many of them repeated) and decided to leave out the single valid criticism!

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

I... can't tell if this post is satire or not. Sarcasm detector broken or a truly exagerated version of OP's design blindness?

 

[spliced]

Somebody needs to sit Miyazaki down and tell him to quit it with the stupid slow movement poison water areas. Every friggin game the same thing...

 

[Inuhanyou]

All of that you mentioned makes the Souls experience OP, in the same way Drakengard and Nier's imperfections made them such cult classics

 

[NinjamicWZ]

-Enemies can swing their weapons through walls and doors (such as prison gates) to hurt you

You can do that yourself with giant great weapons. You could kill any wretched hollow with their face to the bars ever since Latria 3-1. Daggers and smaller hilt swords going through shut wooden doors is usually just collision and AI problems, rather than a design decision.

-Environmental hazards (poison, lava, etc) illogically don't affect enemies.

You can lure out of their element enemies, like Black Knights, into lava and kill them easily. Something like the giant dragon legs in DS1's Izalith aren't going to be standing where they live, dying from fire damage. In instances where an enemy is lava proof but still capable of being damaged by fire properties it's really just logic inconsistency.

-Working really hard to defeat an enemy to get past a door only to find a dead end with a worthless item.

This isn't terrible design. A lot of the game is built on temptation... is it worth it, is it not worth it? Hmm... maybe I'll just leave it vs man, why did I bother vs oh that really paid off.

-Using a great soul from a boss only to find it was only worth 10,000 when you have souls you have picked up from corpses that are worth the same or more.

The souls that go over 10k are great heroes etc... people who are essentially comparable to you in soul level, and since you're regularly strong enough to defeat many bosses several times, your soul would probably be worth more than one boss soul as well.

-Your blood stains are frequently in the wrong place when you return to retrieve your lost souls

The bloodstain is always a few events or moments back from whatever fatal error you made. If you jump off a ledge, and then accidentally roll off the part you're trying to land on, it will probably put your blood stain where you started this erroneous sequence, rather than asking that you repeat it and get to the second ledge that your feet only touched for a millisecond.

-Kicking is the same button press as your standard sword swing. You press RB to swing and you have to press RB + up to kick. This can lead to obvious problems and is just awkward.

That's like saying punch and fireball motion also using punch is a terrible design decision. You get pretty good at only ever doing what you want to do after awhile, and then intentionally performing a kick is so much swifter and easier to execute precisely because it's activated by buttons you're already pressing 99% of the time.

-Enemies often have incredibly weird hit boxes and can hit you when they clearly missed by a wide margin.

Not a design decision, it's just something that obviously needs improvements. Also not something that anyone ignores, since gifs of cyclops hitboxes is what helped meme the initial release of DS2 to death.

-Bosses often resort to incredibly cheap moves that cause area of affect damage when it makes no sense (such as slamming a hammer on the ground in front of them and nearly killing you when you are behind them)

If it has a visible AOE effect, I don't understand what the problem is. When you say "incredibly cheap moves" this just sounds like frustration with getting hit. Even the hypothetical example you gave would be something specifically designed to keep you from doing nothing but staying behind the boss and wailing away, without ever needing to dodge, momentarily retreat or reorient yourself

-Certain classes and attributes are extremely worthless in comparison to others, frustrating players that don't have experience with the "way these games usually work."

This is just called balancing, where some builds are better than others. The ideal goal is always that everything is relatively effective. Nobody ignores this as it's often a huge point of contention in why one entry in the series is better than another. "Let's make the game unbalanced" isn't the design decision.

The point about new players being able to make mistakes with their build seems bizarre. You could make the wrong build in something like Diablo 2 as well, sink hundreds of hours into it and never know until you start looking at faq's for loot, and realizing you can barely survive on higher difficulties let alone kill bosses like butter. Diablo 3's cure to decisions being set in stone completely eliminated the replay value of the game. There's positives and negatives to opting for either or.

I could rattle off more, but I think you get the point.

You could, but I think you already did enough reaching. There's plenty of things that the Souls games could do better and no games are perfect, but I don't think you've got all the answers that everyone else is too blind to see.

 

[icespide]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

 

[LegendofLex]

Easier difficulty defeats the purpose of the game, of course it can be done but it changes the experience completely and I'm sure devs wouldn't want that. I understand the rest and agree with some of them.

I think it needs to be said that

the devs wanted it that way =/= it's better that way

 

[MilkBeard]

Yeah, okay, this one bothers me. The fact that the voice acting is in English even in the Japanese version makes it really hard to justify not having basic lip-synching for the VA.

The best explanation I've ever heard is "they know they don't have to, so they won't".

Well, I just assume that it's expensive and they'd rather not put the money into lip syncing. If it keeps the cost down I'm okay with it. It would be nice, but not necessary for me.

 

[Lagamorph]

You need to add cheap, undodgeable instant kills to your list OP.

It was at the point in DS1 where, after taking ages to defeat Tauros, I think, I came to a giant bridge. As soon as I was slightly across that bridge a dragon swoops down and engulfs the entire bridge in flames that kill you instantly. There is also no bonfire between this bridge and the boss you've just beaten. That was where I knew it was time to just give up and stop wasting my time and energy and move on to superior games.

Also, easier difficulty does NOT defeat the purpose of the game. It makes it accessible to a wider audience and is entirely optional to people who don't want that.
The main reason people seem to not want souls games to have easier difficulties isn't because they think the game is better that way or it's "how the game is meant to be", I tend to find that it's more simply so that people can brag how awesome they are at games because they can win at Soulsbourn and don't want more people intruding on 'their turf'.

 

[Imperfected]

It's a waste to transpose Great Souls for weapons you can't use, when you can take the 10,000 souls and buy something you can.

It's sort of a waste to transpose most of them even for weapons you can use, since boss weapons inexplicably can't be infused or buffed for some unknowable reason, which means they're all just automatically worse than equivalent mundane weapons.

They're more for fooling around and (hopefully) getting to be able to do a neat-looking "boss move" with the weapon art than actually ever being good.

 

[MUnited83]

Most irritating thing in DS3 is the ammount of enemies that can hit you through a fucking wall. Feels really unpolished.

Why are you using Great Souls to get souls? Mod that shit into a weapon, yo

And weird hitboxes? In 2 maybe, but in 1, 3, and Demon's, the hitboxes are perfect

Lmao, i'd love if this was true, but it really, really isn't. All of the games are full of bad hitboxes.

 

[Silent Chief]

-Large enemies frequently slash around large weapons in tight spaces killing you, but if you try to swing your sword it clanks against the walls.
-Enemies can swing their weapons through walls and doors (such as prison gates) to hurt you
-Enemies can take an incredible amount of fall damage, but you can barely survive a fall of much lesser height.
-Kicking is the same button press as your standard sword swing. This can lead to obvious problems and is just awkward.
-Enemies that not only snipe you, but fire projectiles that home in on you like a charged plasma pistol shot from some other game.
-The game heavily relies on invincibility frames and is overly generous in providing enemies invincibility frames (such as smacking an enemy into the ground only to find that they are invincible when getting back up. This wastes your stamina and they resume slashing at you).
-Bosses often resort to incredibly cheap moves that cause area of affect damage when it makes no sense (such as slamming a hammer on the ground in front of them and nearly killing you when you are behind them)
-Certain classes and attributes are extremely worthless in comparison to others, frustrating players that don't have experience with the "way these games usually work."

You seldom see large enemies in tight spots and when you do they usually have appropriate weapons.

There is some glitches that let you hit enemies through walls and the other way around, but it happens rarely.

I kill enemies with falls all the time.

Remember, you can remaps controls if you want. The kick is a very powerful shield breaker move. It's good that it's not easy to use.

How are enemies sniping you and using homing projectile a bad design? You have access to homing magic too.

There's nothing wrong with area of effect move that hit behind an enemy. It's followed by a long recovery. Some creatures have moves that can hit you when you are behind them like the Beasts and the Dragon Men's bites.

The games aren't perfect, but they are miles ahead of anything else.

 

[Red Hood]

The dumbest of which is not being able to pause altogether in offline or non-PvP/co-op mode. I definitely get - and appreciate - not being to pause the game while accessing your inventory and equipping weapons or using items, but why can't they just implement a very old fashioned and basic SNES-like "PAUSE" that freezes the game? More than once I'm playing minding my own business and then somebody is at the door or somebody is calling me on my phone. It just seems so basic and easy to implement that it boggles my mind as to why they haven't done that.

 

[MilkBeard]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

Lol here we go.

I say, don't start with the pause/easy difficulty nonsense. You're not getting it. And it's a damn good thing.

 

[JudgmentJay]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

Yikes.

 

[TeddyShardik]

From playing bloodborne and talking about it, it seems like the defense for bad design is always "but that's bloodborne/souls baby"

*Lips dont move
*Controls written lazily on the floor
*Can't pause
*One hit kills no matter what level you may
*Some things aren't explained
*Some areas are incredibly obscure to reach
*No easier difficulty

Drives me insane, that's not a defense, those are flaws and they are overlooked because dammit it's a great game, I just wish people weren't so blinded to how it can be improved.

*Yeah, lips not moving annoys me as well. Especially since there is one NPC whose lips DO move!
*Controls on the floor is fine. Everyone who needs it can stop and read and everyone else can just get on with the game. Spare me the Zelda tutorials.
*Pausing in offline mode would be nice but i don't know what would ever be so urgent to not be able to use the alternative that takes a couple more button presses.(maybe some half presses would be faster... )
*There are hardly any one hit kills in all of the games. Some combo attacks can kill you when you don't dodge well but actual one hits are a rarity.
*Some things not being explained is one of the draws to these games. Some other things not being made clear are stupid though, like what covebants do etc.
*Well, secrets are secrets.
*And thanks for that.

 

[Blueblur1]

I totally agree with the OP on a lot of the janky ones. I would prefer that part of the challenge would not come from gameplay jank and unfair advantages enemies have.

 

[Fahzgoolin]

Just because a point I made is not always true doesn't mean it's false all the time. People aren't understanding that. Perhaps I should have been more specific.

Also the fact that enemies do cheap things "but you can do it too" response doesn't work for me. That's just irksome design that should be reworked.