Now that I've finished Dark Souls, I feel I can give some better input.

The biggest thing I didn't enjoy, was having to look up information on the weapons, their scaling as well as a few of the more obscure mechanics/stats. Having said that, I don't have a solution other than some tutorial boxes/text. Which I don't think work in Dark Souls. Maybe guidance messages?

Otherwise, there were some annoying things, like the bed of chaos, the invisible walkways in the crystal caves and blighttown.

Also, framerate in some areas. Hopefully that's been resolved in Dark Souls 2.

With just some random asshole at the end with some kind of speaker that makes dragon noises. They have that Duke's Archive alarm thing, just modify it.

I'm curious as well. There was a quote somewhere saying there will be a way to mitigate that.

As long as there are no Anor Londo Archer situations I will be at least somewhat hopeful. I would like the see the true roots call backs continue though. Moonlight sword being in game (maybe buff it a little :p?), a class that starts at level 1 and has 1 spell (aka every starting character in the King's Field games), big ass dragon with one eye. Stuff like that.

I started replaying Demon's Souls finally and it is crazy to go back to it after playing so much Dark Souls, that ball of bodies in 3-1 I used to be so scared of is actually really easy to deal with, huh?. Before I started anew I loaded up my old character that I used to beat the game and can finally see just how I messed up my build the first time. Mostly it came down to not understanding scaling or why you'd want to upgrade shields, really, with Dark Souls as a reference the menus are a lot easier to understand.

Anyhow, I looked over my old stuff and I REALLY REALLY love the gold cloth headgear thing you get for defeating a player in 3-3, there's a similarly dumb item in Dark Souls in the form of the Xanthous Crown so I'd say they should keep with tradition and have another one of those in DS 2.

Armors do have strength requirements now, thankfully. I love that low level players will no longer be able to prey on beginners with the best heavy armors in the game.

hope they have separate servers for players who play dark souls for the PvP and those that play it for co-op. Hated having to miss out on playing with others to avoid the mp wash outs only interested in invading. or at least a way to banish them away. ds mp players and ds sp players want different things for ds2 for different reasons and play/enjoy the series for different reasons.

I really don't understand why people find Bed of Chaos so hard. If you run along the ring next to her, it's impossible to fall into a pit. After that, just jump onto the stupid branch and then kill her, it's not hard at all, and this is coming from someone who stopped playing DS multiple times over the course of an entire year because I suck too much at it. (I FINALLY beat it today!)

I agree with everything else, though. I dunno, I just kinda want the whole game to be the quality of the beginning areas in Dark Souls. They were fun to play through, and were interesting to look at. The later areas were just kinda lazy, in my opinion.

I don't want to see my weapon hitting air because the lock-on isn't very good.

Could you imagine the shitstorm that would stir up?

There is a reason that it's a major staple of the series. It's fun as hell. If you put a little effort into learning how to do it, you'd probably enjoy it, too.

I want invasions to remain a human thing only, but I'm kind of fucked on that one. Pretty lame.

Myself and many others play this as a single player game. And before someone says "play offline" I like seeing bloodstains, messages, etc. What I don't want to deal with is some griefing asshole going after newbies or me making a bunch of progress through some area and getting killed in some cheap way by an invader.

backstabs

boss fights

i'll settle for losing one of the above

I never engaged in the PVP before, but in a way I think this is sort of neat. I didn't actively seek out PVP because I needed to un-hollow, go to a bonfire etc etc. If invasions will happen passively then that's fine by me, I'll get to participate in some duels and go along my merry way.

If you get invaded by someone who has a lot of PVP experience there's nothing you could really do when it comes to fighting them. They could fight you with fist weapons and still parry and riposte you to death. There's nothing cheap about it. The good news is that you can join a covenant that will summon another PVP player to defend you from every invasion. You can look forward to always having a 2v1 advantage over invaders.

You are going to need to learn how to fight human players. At least one boss is going to be able to summon real people to kill you so you should probably try out some PVP in Dark Souls to prepare for Dark Souls 2.

Being invaded while hollow could get annoying when you have a flake83 situation on your hands. As for the things OP wants to see go, I want them all to stay. Give me more NPC's that have malicious intent. Really though, I just want to see how From iterates or messes with my expectations of what the Souls games are.