...clearly? If he "doesn't play many games", why pick this one to harp on instead of much more visible games?

Meh, people need to stop worrying why someone else loves or hates things.

It's been said but I'll reiterate: the .com portion of Forbes is basically a blogging site and they'll publish anything by any crazy person.

Forbes reviews a lot of games. Erik Kain, the writer of that article, has written dozens of articles about Dark Souls, which he loves, as well as Dark Souls 2. Also, spoiler for the article, he likes DS2 and does his best to defend it against his colleague's claim that it's the worst game ever.

Don't be crazy guy. You can't compare these two. Hitler misused his intelligence to manipulate the people around him and in fact succeed in controlling an entire nation to do his sick and disgusting work.

This Michael Thomson guy doesn't have any intelligence.

I haven't ready the article nor do I care to read it, but please tell me someone has posted "git gud" in the comments section of that article.

Huh, I can see why gaming writers attack Forbes so often on twitter.

I just played Magus on the ps3 at a friend's recently. THAT is the worst game ever made. At least ET on the atari and Superman was bad in a real funny way. That game was just terrible.

He does have a thesaurus though, and that's basically the same thing.

He doesn't like it because however you decide to play Dark Souls the result is the same. At least that's what I took away from the text. Mage, knight or whatever class you use the results are the same. Kill enemies to hopefully progress before you die and repeat. The 150 hours (and 300? in DS1) make me think this is some elaborate troll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

So basically... this guy is video game's Armond White.

@golguin said:

Oh god, I would love that. Such a comment would be the appropriate amount of respect that should be given to this sort of headline.

There are so many directions in which I could begin to criticize this article, but I won't waste my time or yours because this article is so, so, so self evidently silly. It is sort of entertaining to read though from a "Wow this guy is oblivious to how weird he is." perspective.

Just to clarify, it's not the reviewer's liking or disliking of the game that's the problem. The problem is paragraphs like this:

"It’s the worst and least ethical form of play, taking the naturally constrained single encounters of Chess or Go into the heart of an infinity spiral rotating out from the center of a box of microprocessors built out of a grand network of exploitive labor practices around the world, creating a transfixing hallucination sublimely disassociated from the networks of labor required to produce it. The friendships formed in message boards and YouTube comment threads offset by the number of lives pinned in place by the economic conditions necessary for the creation of such hallucinatory machinery, offering the great thrill of achievement for having done nothing but press a few half-inch buttons, hypnotized by the unseen patterns passing through the screen, scrutable only to those others who’d undergone the same rite of initiation and spoke the secret lexicon."

No shit. If I hate a game the odds of me putting in more than a handful of hours is pretty much lower than the odds of winning 12 mill on the lottery. Me thinks the reviewer doth protest too much.

He reminds me of where my edited writing style often leads me. Sometimes the words just come out like that guys. :(

It really is a bit much though, and that truly is an understatement. I think it's fine to have a contrary opinion, and I personally don't find much interest in discussion with people I readily agree with, but he happens to be incredibly rude and shortsighted throughout. The article is so filled with hyperbole and he's so enthusiastic about dressing up his own emotions he seems to have lost any sense of what he's actually meant to be communicating. His opinion.

This structure of play is ideally matched with a culture of emotionally and socially isolated individuals—still primarily men—who rush toward non-intimate prompts for social exchange, creating the impression of a community without requiring any reciprocal vulnerability nor emotional obligation.

I mean, what is anyone supposed to make of that, regardless of what they thought about the game themselves. The biggest problem with criticism is that people write as if they're not just spouting their own opinion, and that happens because morons keep insisting reviews shouldn't be "biased". They should be "objective", "am I getting my moneys worth?" product reviews. Just, no. It leads to rhetoric like this. It's almost not his fault. In the comments he claims it's just purely based on his own experiences, but entire article doesn't help to convince anyone that reads it.

It's really why I consider Giantbomb the most valuable source of games coverage. Because it's sloppy, and without pretence, but backed up with eclectic taste and decades of experience, and I know I'm welcome to disagree.

Just one last thing. Just to show the stupidity of making huge statements like 'worst' or 'best' in regards to anything. This game exists...

I bet the author of this article would dislike playing it more than Dark Souls 2.

Is Dark Souls II The Worst Game Ever Made?

“…you are the only men who think you know the future more clearly than what is before your eyes…” – Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

I'm out.

Ive seen a number of Forbes articles on games, who reads them I dont really know. But this isnt really a new thing for them.

Yes, Rambo The Video Game is a better game than Dark Souls II

It frustrates me that he's getting paid to write what is essentially nonsense pointed vaguely in the direction of an opinion.

Reading that review is like watching someone try to walk somewhere while blindfolded. Yeah, if you know the general direction you're supposed to go, you'll end up somewhere close, but it's unlikely that you'll actually make it to your destination. Even if you do, it's still an extremely inefficient method of getting there.

It sounds like this guy actually really, really liked Dark Souls II, and he was a huge fan of Dark Souls I.

He just strikes me as one of those people that aggressively denies who they are. Like those hateful people who rail against a homosexual agenda while later accepting that they are themselves homosexual. The deeper reality that they can't accept turns from confusion into unreasonable dismissal and self-hatred.

This "review" reads like a man having an existential crisis regarding who he is, and I think he can't seem to accept that Dark Souls and Dark Souls II may now be his favorite videogames ever.

In the end, this is really just a deeply disturbed and meandering love letter to the game.

They didn't do anything to prevent people from hacking so yes, it is the worst game even though I love it.

I have very little time and patience for "Games Journalists" who seem utterly fed up by the vast majority of what the medium has to offer and instead spend all their time sneering at everything that doesn't meet their impossibly narrow standards of excellence or artistic merit. This article doesn't even get that part right. From what I could dig out of the impressive amounts of purple prose this guy is spouting, I guess Dark Souls is the worst because it's a video game?

Probably relevant to the conversation but this Dude loves Demon Souls

Warning there are spoilers for Demon Souls below,hopefully the spoiler block works. Here's what he wrote awhile ago about it and pointed out on his twitter.

from

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/11/07/how-video-games-became-the-addicts-art

...Many games edge toward a self-aware commentary on the emptiness in these structures, but Demon's Souls is among the most intense, a near-perfect combination of artistic pathos and inescapable compulsion. The game is a nightmare of subtle complication that besets even simple goals with an exhausting number of secondary requirements and branching alternatives.

To turn your +4 Falchion into a magically charged Crescent Falchion, you'll first need 12 shards of Sharpstone, hoping they'll drop from the Miners in Stonefang Tunnel. Once you've farmed enough by repeating runs in one area, you'll be able to upgrade the Falchion to +6, and then you'll have to go harvest Darkmoonstones from Reapers in the Shrine of Storms, then return to the Stonefang blacksmith and have him convert the weapon. It's not complicated, and at no point is it especially difficult to imagine doing the necessary work to reach your goal. Yet the complications are just significant enough to trigger the part of the brain susceptible to the Zeigarnik Effect.

You can see the desirable endpoint, and the steps between it and your current state are systemically palpable. To this acquisition lust Demon's Souls adds several other systems that ask players to prioritize several simple goals -- each with their own slightly more complicated achievement paths. In the hour or two it will take to farm upgrade stones you could instead grind to increase your strength and dexterity, or else learn to use another weapon already in your inventory. Or else you could simply go on with the quest, choosing to sharpen your technique against the next tough boss and find a way to beat him with your current gear and stats. Demon's Souls is a vast network of simple tasks, and they are insidiously balanced against one another so that even when the player is diligently on her way to completing one, it comes at the cost of knowing there are several others left undone by that choice.

“

Demon's Souls is a vast network of simple tasks, and they are insidiously balanced.

From Software seems to have been well aware of the torturously irresolvable desires Demon's Souls would evoke in players, appointing its lore and art with avaricious bastards, imprisoned liars, and a smothering sense of rot and waste. The game seems to taunt bleary-eyed grinders with its absence of musical accompaniment in most areas, filled with distant echoes that can't immediately be placed (the ghostly ringing of tiny bells in the Tower of Latria, the smoldering of torches in the distant haze of the Valley of Defilement). As one runs through these spaces where everything wants only to kill you, to prevent you from retrieving the ornament of order nested at the far end of the level, one's thoughts drift off into craven, irritable obsessiveness like a drunk returning to the liquor cabinet after everyone's gone to bed.

Addiction is a difficult and irreducible subject, but coded into the language of game systems we find a deployment of addiction's most basic properties in a way that intends to be emotional and artistic rather than destructive and stigma-laden. Games can make addiction art, and in doing so they point us toward an irrational fear we have about addictions in the first place. They begin in us; they are not exogenous spirits that invade us, but ways in which our best and most human characteristics can sometimes turn against us.

We are surrounded by addictive things, most people live with their lives in a matrix of complicated consumption choices with major positive and negative repercussions. We joke about being caffeine junkies, accept the modest thrills of a sugar high, and advertise pretty people having libidinally-charged conversations at cocktail hour.

And so a simple pleasure or a quirk of rationality can become unmoored from its purposeful context and turn into a histrionic tautology, both a means and an end. How this can happen to some of us, and to such extremes, is still unclear enough to leave room for our worst and most parochial superstitions, filling the void with dull stereotypes about zombie-eyed addicts who have abdicated their human dignity.

Games can free us from these separatist desires, if only by nudging us a tiny bit closer toward those we'd subconsciously forced into new identities: addicts, failures, broken people. In games we might yet discover our own weakened seams, which, when led on in the right environment, could rupture and leave us obsessively thinking about our next fix, our next level, our next button press. And with this comes the implicit challenge that everyone must answer for themselves: when will you stop, when will you have gained enough levels, chased after enough rarities, pressed enough buttons? We end with ourselves, after all, and it was only ourselves that we secretly feared when we set out to escape.

Underline and Italics are mine.

I read his Dark Souls 2 "review" as he hates how he much he loves it because he thinks videogames are a massive waste of time and perhaps the reason he feels he has squandered some potential for greatness he thinks he has (judging by the sheer volume of 5 dollar words he tosses around). Like an addict who hates what his favorite passion does to him, yet can't bring himself to quit it.

My take is this dude is crazy conflicted and tortured by his passion for games and Dark Souls 2 is the worst for him because it enthralls him the most.

Is that...is that real? I mean, I refused to click the link based on the headline, but that's just fantastic. Fantastically bad.

I am disappointed in the number of commenters in this thread who either did not read or totally missed Thomsen's point.

In a nutshell, he thinks that Dark Souls games are the worst ever made simply because they are so good at being video games, by presenting the player with an endless feedback loop. They present an unsolvable puzzle that a person can, if video games are their personal addiction, completely lose themselves in. What he is questioning more than anything is not the quality of Dark Souls (he clearly admits often to how much he likes playing it, how much it calls to him), but rather himself. He is questioning himself and his recurring choice to remove himself from the physical world and instead explore an intricately crafted, but all the same false world - an experience that is, due to infinite NG+, never-ending.

One might think that he takes too long to get to this point by beginning his article complaining about the emptiness of the completed world, but he is not complaining about the game, he is complaining about himself taking the time to empty the game, and to be about to empty it again, to continue to solve its puzzle.

I would think that nearly everyone in the community that is Giant Bomb could take a moment to contemplate the impact of similar behavior in their own lives on their own lives... and perhaps the impact of our fascinations, beyond video games, with unproductive, socially disconnecting escapisms - whatever they may be - on not only ourselves as individuals but on society, on the world. I bet we could all identify plenty that we wish were different, from some period of our lives, if we are being honest with ourselves, and took the time...

That is what this author is thinking of. He isn't asking if Dark Souls is fun - he agrees that it unequivocally is. He is asking if all that fun is worth its opportunity cost. It is a question worth asking - it's up to you to decide. The author is no troll - if he is, he is trolling himself.

It's sad that so many miss his point, especially the other video-game writer at Forbes, who many people pointed to as a "great" video games writer, who also completely missed the point. Others simply called the man pretentious and claimed that he doesn't like games... he clearly does, and he thinks that is part of the problem.

Someone said:

"I personally find enjoyment in beating a particularly hard video game or section of game, because I feel like I've achieved something."

... I think Thomsen does, too... and that is what worries him - he thinks he has achieved something, until he thinks again and thinks about what else he could have achieved with those 400 hours.

I played at least 12 hours of games this week. Many weeks I play more. I am saving Dark Souls II for the end of my school year and of grad school because I want to disappear in it for two weeks because I love the exact experience Thomsen is describing. I love playing games, and I don't think Thomsen is pretentious, or a troll, or necessarily wrong, and I also don't think that feeling all those things is a contradiction.

the 1% is now judging what we hold dear

"I hated the first Dark Souls and so I decided I should learn it better than any other game." <- Hated Dark Souls, was given (or chose) the review. Seems legit.

I disagree that many have missed his point, it's not exactly that elusive. That he has a point doesn't save him from being inarticulate, indirect, pretentious, and sophomoric. In fact I think you're wrong to say that he does feel like he's achieved something, in the end he's thinks anything he's achieved is completely hollow and meaningless. He's not focusing on opportunity cost, if he were he might have spent more time arguing for what one should be doing with their time instead. To him it's not that there are better uses of time it's that everything is a better use of time.

I already said I wouldn't go through and deconstruct everything and I'm not going to now, but don't presume that people just can't grasp his self searing, anti-video game, ideological muck that wouldn't survive the critique of a philosophy 101 classroom.

@rorie:

I imagine he wrote the article with an open thesaurus near by.

Apparently it appears that he feels playing videogames for a sense of achievement is meaningless and I completely agree with him. It's a sad day when people use videogames to give meaning and a sense of achievement to their lives.

I understand why he played so many hours, how can his opinion be taken seriously if he only clocked in a couple of hours? First thing to be said is get gud or you didn't play it enough. He completely took that out of the equation so now he's crazy?

For the record I love the series, have more than 376 hours in DS2 and can kill anything and everything within minutes if I use my upgraded gear. I don't fancy PvP because of the imbalance, but as far as PvE, I'm already "gud". My disdain comes not from the game, but a segment of the fanbase that is going to end up holding the series back from evolving.

I think that part is where a lot of us stopped reading. It is amazing how some people are able to sit there and polish such gems to immaculate vocabulary turds.

If ever you wondered what actual click bait was. There's nothing wrong with disliking DS2 but the way this presents itself is plain attention seeking, hornets nest stirring.

i'm not about to start reading forbes articles for the sake of any game, same goes for long ass comments, but i'm going to assume that what he's actually saying is that darks souls 2 is quite possibly the best game ever made, because that could kinda make sense, and that y'all been trolled, because that's what one does with gamers.

@humanity: Yep. That paragraph was the one that really got me too. He's just straight up hating on video games in general and squeezing in as many writing flourishes as he can.

I don't know, if the problem with the *.souls game is that gameplay is fun and addictive I can't see too much fault in that.

It's not like the game is designed around grinding and ever crazier bosses to get specialized gear from. (well, I guess one of the reasons I am going through ng+ now is to get the fire buff from sinner :) ...)

There are MMO's and free to play games out there that are much much worse and the sense of accomplishment doesn't come from a well pressed plastic button but from a sword on your back that took you 200hours of grinding the same enemies over and over and over again. And the next sword is just around the corner.

“…you are the only men who think you know the future more clearly than what is before your eyes…” – Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

Fucking LOL.

It's just the nerve, the audacity to spill such self-important drivel in an endless loop while discussing a video game of all things. Like really, this Dark Souls 2 "critique" is where you will shoehorn your views on foreign production policies, and worker exploitation? Oh right, just below your select quote from everyone's favorite Greek father of scientific history - oh wait, you mean this is a quote from the Peloponnesian War? Ohhh well excuse my ignorance!

In case it wasn't clear that I was serious, I really do think there's a chance this is more of a self-hating post by this man than anything to do with the quality of Dark Souls II or videogames.

He is basically flogging himself for playing and enjoying Dark Souls and Dark Souls II so much. The post is him repeatedly considering and then lamenting just how much he loves videogames. He talks more about the insidiousness of gaming itself than anything to do with this one game. It is a sorrowful reflection on the time he has spent on games and the time he imagines he and others will spend on them in the future. He calls this game the worst, because in some ways, he feels like it may be the best.

Sounds to me like a troubled fellow questioning his most basic appreciation of the medium.

Generally I like Forbes' gaming coverage, since it is somewhat disconnected from the execrable "games journalism" hivemind and forbes.com doesn't rely on incestuous ad-buying relationships with major publishers.

The downside is that attitude occasionally produces stuff like this article, which was dumb. I assume it was dumb, because I couldn't make it past the headline and the Thucydides quote either.

Oh, one more thing. I wholheartedly agree with the author on the ancient dragon. It is a boss battle that has absolutely no place in a souls game.

But then, he is strictly optional. Not even required for a plat. I made a few runs at him and decided he will stay alive in my game. The old whip is taking care of vendrick just fine. And you keep the giant souls anyways, so vendrick should become a joke in later playthroughs?

This reads like one of those random commenters who occasionally signs up just to make a thread asking,

"What are we all doing with our lives? Why spend so much time on gaming? I'm giving it up..."

Then it gets locked and we get back to gaming.

Forbes.com is basically Wordpress, isn't it? It's a blogging platform, and anyone(?) can write articles there under the Forbes name. This is the link to the articles written by actual Forbes staff writers. There's a reason why Forbes.com is banned on NeoGAF, most of it is clickbait garbage.

This article makes some good points, but it's waaaay too click baity-y and hyperbolic.

Still this is something that surpasses subjectivity. I, in good conscience, could never say that Big Rigs, or a lame atari 2600 game is better than Dark Souls 2. I'm not even a Dark Souls' fan.

He probably never heard of ET, Big Rigs, Superman 64, Bullet Witch, Naughty Bear or even Rogue Warrior.

I read half of it and all I could think of is how pretentious this man's writing style is. He's trying so hard to sound smart that he comes off as cold and condescending throughout his writing. Imagine Adam Sessler without the charisma and softness.

It's his opinion, and I don't disagree with it one bit. The Dark Souls franchise has some problems, most of which I let pass as I personally dig the franchise. I just hate the point of this article and his writing.

It's not really Forbes though, at least not if you look at Forbes as the business magazine. It's more of a blogging platform like Wordpress, or sports sites like SB Nation. So people shouldn't really mistake articles written on Forbes.com as articles written by actual Forbes writers. At least that's my understanding. Forbes.com/forbes is the link to the actual magazine.

That's why you get so many games articles on Forbes.com. And if this article is to be believed (it's from 2011, so things might've changed), the people who write for Forbes.com get paid a flat fee + money if an article hits a traffic goal, so it's in the writer's interest to write click bait-y headlines like this one.

Forbes.com is apparently a pretty big success, but it does make the Forbes name pretty worthless on the internet.

I second this.

Also, this article? Doesn't matter. It's really not worth being upset about at all.

I just noped the moment I saw that quote. Anyone who starts a discussion on VIDEO GAMES cannot be taken seriously if they start like that.