@HerbieBug said:
-The bonfire placement is a little bit more forgiving for boss proximity than Demon's physical checkpoints were. Of the bosses I've taken on so far, none required more than 5-ish minutes of backtracking (although one required membership in a Covenant to ensure minimal fighting between bonfire and boss). There hasn't been any egregious bits like 1-2 or 4-2 Demon's where it's all LOL PLAY THE ENTIRE LEVEL AGAIN! It's still a design decision I disagree with. Boss fights are intended to be hard. You are likely to die repeatedly on many of them. To have to slog through tedious crap for minutes just to try again is pointless busy work. I'll gladly take on a harder boss if it has a bonfire immediately next to the fight trigger. As a player I don't like having my time wasted. But, as you said, it's not so bad in Dark Souls.
The only thing I really have a problem with in Demon's and this is permanent repercussions for committing certain easy to make mistakes (intentionally so). Finite number of spawns for a particular breed of slippery ore carrying lizards in Demon's, and the HP curse/item degradation stuff in Dark. The kind of thing where missing the thing/dying not only takes away your current progress, but additionally sets you back even further than you were when you started. It's one thing if the mistake is something you can see coming and have an opportunity to prepare for without having to read an FAQ, quite another if its something the game springs on you quickly and without warning. All that aside, I'm having a blast with this game. It's a great sequel to another great game.
I think that you quite well summarize my argument with the above, and bring up a fantastic point with the bolded statement below: the inherent scarcity not of resources, but of opportunity. Much like the blink-and-you'll-miss-'em 100% item completion criteria that plague some JRPGs (at least where completionists like myself are concerned), to me, one of the biggest wrongs that can be committed in game design is to give a player a - what I will confusingly deem - 'non-choice choice'. This is a choice that is formed around the player being able to obtain or do something (let's take, for example, killing a Crystal Lizard in Demon's Souls), where the possibility to do either gradually diminishes over time, not comparable with the vanishing of player capability, but with the deliberate taking away of the choice itself.
So, the player is presented with the "choice" to return and attempt to kill the Lizard as many times as he may seem fit, until the expiration of its predetermined number of appearances. Or, using the item degradation example: the player is presented with an item that is acquired through play and thought, but is shown that the acquired item will, eventually, have to pass from his/her hands via absolutely no fault of their own. In the Crystal Lizard example, the player's non-choice choice is to choose to attempt to kill the Lizard now, at the risk of never seeing it again (although the player does not know this); and in the item example, it is to use what the player has been trained to think is an item to be acquired by gameplay, only to know that it will be taken away all the same (which, although a conscious realization, it is one the player has very little to no input upon).
I think this kind of design is really what puts me away from some games, no matter how amazing their premise, and swell their execution. Because of this kind of design, the mere possibility of thoroughly "screwing up" one's Demon's Souls experience is so high that even walking around the Nexus causes me some slight palpitations, even though that very feeling of walking on eggshells is what I admire about the game.
Perhaps, in the end, while I won't be trying Dark Souls - I have ever so little time to even enjoy the games I've barely begun to play - I will feel comfort in that it's only going to get more interesting from here on out.
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