This is an academically approved argument on why the Souls games badly needs a redesign of the core mechanics...

This is an academically approved argument on why the Souls games badly needs a redesign of the core mechanics. According to Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design, the Souls games have a lot of flawed mechanics.

>Strive for consistency
In DS1, Lost Izalith and Blight Town are the biggest offender to this rule in regard of level design. Some of the enemies, such as the bridge dragons, the floating dragon statues, izalith's giant feet, and the tree boss show extreme lack consistency.

>Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
Due to the crappy level design and lack of fast traveling, long backtracking is a must in every souls game before 2.

>Offer simple error handling.
Souls is a punishing game rather than a challenging game, this is a sign of bad design. Error handling is simply impossible. Die twice, lose all souls and humanities. Pits are insta-death. The error handling in this game is simply horrendous, all the errors the user make are serious error.

>Permit easy reversal of actions
The lack of quicksave, or just manual saving in Souls makes players unable to reverse their actions.

4 out of 8, all huge gaping flaws.

:')_git_gud_:')

Based on some bullshit theories.

gitgud

Just improve the framerate to at least 30fps and we're good. 60 would be ideal. Every single game in this franchise performs like crap, they should hire a good company to make them next time, just in case.

>Souls is a punishing game rather than a challenging game, this is a sign of bad design. Error handling is simply impossible. Die twice, lose all souls and humanities. Pits are insta-death. The error handling in this game is simply horrendous, all the errors the user make are serious error.

Except the punishment is simply losing all your souls and humanity. It's not like the game forces you to restart the entire level, and you still get a chance to get back all your shit.

There is still a challenge to the game; even if you don't know certain enemies' patterns you can still win the fight if your fundamentals are good enough.

(((Shneiderman's)))

>simply
Heh, have this reddit face.
:^)

>purely pattern based combat
This is why you die of boredom.

>Shneiderman

Though I agree Dark Souls could have more consistency towards the end of the game, if you were to change the last three mechanics mentioned, they could potentially ruin the game. The level design is fine as is and fast traveling usually hinders world design (See sequels), which is a major feature of DaS. Dying in DaS is a mere slap on the wrist, making it less punishing would be removing any incentive to get better at the game. Quicksaving is just a stupid idea for a Souls game

>Souls is a punishing game
except it gives you all the tools you need to not get punished every 5 steps...

wow its not even hard you fucking casual...I beat it SL1 no magic no shields no rolling no estus console v1.0 one eye closed no summoning no upgrading equipment
get fucking good

Only the first one is correct.

>Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
This is how we ended up with warping from the start, bonfires every ten feet, and shitty level design.

>Offer simple error handling
Yes, the game has pretty harsh consequences for your actions if you do something wrong, but it's literally built around the dying and respawning mechanic to the point where it's a part of the lore itself. You're supposed to learn by dying; that's how the game fundamentally deals with errors on your part. All this talk of cheap and harsh deaths that you hear all the time is missing the entire point.

>Permit savescumming
That's some tasty bait you got there.

>(Shneiderman)

Merely a coincidence

Don't know what the first part of that reply means, but whatever this board is shit right now so I'll bite.

>This is why you die of boredom.

Except the combat isn't considered boring according to the huge fanbase it developed. You say that because it's pattern-based that it's boring but there are enough variables in enemy encounters that for the most part it'll never feel like a bore. Obviously that isn't the case with certain encounters (such as the dragon asses), but no game is perfect.

And like I said before, just because the enemy has a pattern doesn't necessarily mean you have to know that pattern. Having good fundamentals on how to read into enemy animations, when do dodge and when to block/parry means that you don't need to know the enemy perfectly to be able to win.

>it's not like the the game forces you to restart a whole level

wut?

As in if you die you're not going back to the very beginning of the level. I guess that was a bad point since you could easily end up far away from where you died depending on how far away your bonfire is, but I still believe that the game's "punishments" aren't really that extreme.

>It's not like the game forces you to restart the entire level
Except in new londo and maybe Sen fortress because the bonfire is hidden there.

>Interface design is game design

>Souls is a punishing game rather than a challenging game, this is a sign of bad design. Error handling is simply impossible. Die twice, lose all souls and humanities. Pits are insta-death. The error handling in this game is simply horrendous, all the errors the user make are serious error.

>Die twice
If you got to an area once without dying, doing it again should be way easier since you know what to expect. Or you can run by enemies, they're slow as fuck.
And the bloodstain drops where the game last saved before you died, so way before falling in a pit if that happened.

And yes, Izalith is a weak area and BoC is shit, that's 5% of the game, guess DS1 is suddenly a 1/10 because of it.

Sen has an elevator that takes you to the boss, once you unlock it, you don't need to do the level again.

You're right, if you die any switches you hit or doors unlocked stay that way, you keep any items you found, you can even go get your experience back
Most other games would just have you reload your last save

>The lack of quicksave, or just manual saving in Souls makes players unable to reverse their actions.

Wish more games did this.

And let's not forget not having to redo dialogue, like when you die in an RPG and need to skip 100 lines of text my mashing buttons.

amusingly dark souls 2 solves all of these apart from the last one

Exactly. Even if you die in the middle of the level you can still have made progress. I feel like OP's argument tries to say that dying is a punishment when dying really doesn't have that much consequence. The game is very fair in that regard.

>Due to the crappy level design and lack of fast traveling, long backtracking is a must in every souls game before 2.

Are you ignoring all of the possible shortcuts you can use in DS1? The game has a shit ton of speedrunning potential, that alone should tell you that it satisfies the "enables frequent users to use shortcuts" stipulation perfectly.

DS1 has some good ones but not nearly enough.
There's still huge ass mostly empty areas like the start of Anor Londo, Lower Blightown, Demon ruins.

I won't defend lower Blighttown or Demon Ruins, those were definitely shitty areas.

What was wrong with Anor Londo, though? All you had to do was go from the bonfire to the rafters to the swivel bridge.

>Except the combat isn't considered boring according to the huge fanbase it developed.
>according to some autismo faggots

>enough variables
When you need to repeat a section multiple times, the variables run out.

>Having good fundamentals
That's when the game gets boring.

Dark Souls is a gateway video game of the worst kind. It's a bad game, a clusterfuck of story and gameplay that isn't very well done by any aspect, but which attempts to compensate for its weaknesses by adding in excessive artificial difficulty faggotry and DARKNESS. The normal user can see this as the shit it is, and may enjoy it, hate it or be indifferent to it, but all the while recognizing that the game itself, regardless of their opinion, is plain bad.

However, these very aspects that try to smear over the shit of its core make it a breeding ground for aspie, unsociable underageb& faggots who engage in every kind of faggotry both online and in the real world. The undead characters all trying their hardest to be useless, the grimdark lore, slow, boring weapons, the whole ninja-flip faggotry and everything about the Dark Souls world fuels their escapist fantasies, while the pity-party character backgrounds, emphasis on suffering, and overall edginess of the game make it fit just right with the cut-wrist drives of your average preteen and his sense of unwarranted self-importance towards the world. Exactly the kind of shit that makes little kiddies and underageb& retards eat this shit right the fuck up.

Dark Souls is basically THE game to attract the most hated video game fanbase known to Sup Forums, which is why, regardless of individual opinions, it is the responsibility of every user to troll the fuck out of this game and everyone who likes it, and ensure that no Souls threads ever encourage the newfriends to show their faces here.

>t. I just died and i'm angery

Stopped playing DS1 when I was walking up or down some stairs, fell down a pit, then got the Stone status or some shit from balloon frog enemies. Well over half my health useless. Traded the harpy bitch for the cure, but stopped there.
Liked Demon's Souls more.

i found des and das1 more tedious then fun. it was fun making a character and finding out how to defeat enemies but tedious to back track after you died. even when i "got gud" and died less frequently i started to get bored with the game mainly because it started to seem like a "live die repeat" loop the longer i played. also i would get this sense of urgency and panic if i went to long not dying or finding a bonfire. that started to take me out of the game because then the objective of the game became "die so i have a sense of a safe zone/sense of progress" or "find a bonfire". so i just quite playing them. i didn't get maybe more then 1/4 of the way through des and even less than that in das1.

GOY

Serves you right for not looking where you're going.

DeS does this shit even more.

>got gud
>dying

Now you're just treating subjective stuff as objective. The fact that you're calling relatively large fanbase of Souls games "some autismo faggots" tells me you aren't interested in having an actual discussion on it.

>When you need to repeat a section multiple times, the variables run out.

While I won't say the combat changes all that much if you're fighting the same enemy multiple times, I will say that almost no other game does. There's only so many ways you can handle an enemy encounter in a single video game, and even more popular games have even less variety. That said, this game still gives you a lot of variables in a normal run. Build variety and enemy variety go a long way in keeping things fresh, and this game has an (arguably) good amount of both.

>That's when the game gets boring.

That's entirely subjective. People can have fun playing Pokemon. People can have fun with the grinding in Monster Hunter. There's no point in trying to convince you that there's little objectively wrong with the combat when you've already decided for yourself that it's subjectively boring.

Looks like no one's biting, here's a (you).

It's an edit of a copypasta m8.

>long backtracking is a must in every souls game before 2.
Actually its only a must in DaS, there isn't any long backtracking in DeS.

Interface design and game design are different things m88.

yes. i got good at the game once i understood the mechanics. i still made mistakes that caused death. i stopped dying from not knowing how to play the game.

try giving a more intelligent and critical reply next time, kid. i realize that might be asking too much though.

>making mistakes
>being gud
choose one

That's just bullshit that people who started to play videogames during the last gen came up with.

>In DS1, Lost Izalith and Blight Town are the biggest offender to this rule in regard of level design. Some of the enemies, such as the bridge dragons, the floating dragon statues, izalith's giant feet, and the tree boss show extreme lack consistency.
I'll give you this one, but this is the only actual flaw you point out.

>Due to the crappy level design and lack of fast traveling, long backtracking is a must in every souls game before 2
Wrong. Dark Souls 1 has great level design. Areas string together often enough for backtracking to not be such an issue. A great example of this is the bonfire in Undead Burg, where after defeating the Taurus Demon you are lead back to the bonfire, giving you access to the Undead Parish and the door to the Basement. Other examples is the elevator from the Undead Church to Firelink, the Valley of Drakes to New Londo which goes back to Firelink. I fail to see where there are no shortcuts, instead I see a child mad that he can't immediatly fast travel to some place because he has ADHD.

>Souls is a punishing game rather than a challenging game, this is a sign of bad design. Error handling is simply impossible. Die twice, lose all souls and humanities. Pits are insta-death. The error handling in this game is simply horrendous, all the errors the user make are serious error.
Holy shit, git GUD. Stupid mistakes are supposed to be punished; that's what makes things challenging in the first place. Souls are not hard to recover, and if they are bad place and you died right after you get them, just make your souls drop closer and closer to a place that is better to get them at. Dark Souls is built around dying. Pits aren't hard to avoid falling into. Just don't be retarded and think for once.

>The lack of quicksave, or just manual saving in Souls makes players unable to reverse their actions.
Using this logic, every game that ever came out before 1990 is flawed. Which is retarded. Git gud, my dude.

>When you need to repeat a section multiple times, the variables run out.
Either this is a completely baseless assumption or it's speculation. If "multiple times" is an unclear potentially infinite number then yeah no shit, applies to every game. If it's not then whose numbers/experience are you basing this on? The "variables" won't "run out" after a few attempts if the player hasn't mastered the particular area, or if the player's willing to experiment.

>posting this when the series is ending
Ok

New londo has 2 shortcuts one on the bridge and another once you lower the water
Sens has a bonfire and a shortcut

and it's funny how its the worst

It makes sense because DaS2 "solves" them in the worst ways possible.
>consistently mediocre
>no good shortcuts, just warping
>repairable ring to save your souls, so many bonfires that screwing up is no big deal

Wew lad, now thats a massive stretch. Interfaces and games arent built for the same purpose. Interfaces are just a means to an end, game systems are appreciated for their own sake. Is Dark Souls so perfect that you have to use vaguely related standards to judge its quality rather than judging it as a game?

define good.

seems you think that means flawless. fine. i'm not and never was good by that definition.

i implied good meant understanding the mechanics of the game. by that, i got good at the game.

i doubt anyone playing their first souls game played it flawlessly. maybe, but i doubt it. proof of that would be fun to watch though.

what is overwatch

I understand the mechanics of Street Fighter however I cannot execute them therefore I am not "gud" at it. By the way, in the english language "i" is written with a capital "I". Not that I'm chastising you or anything but I like to feel I'm arguing with people on an equal intellectual standing and to be frank, juvenile speedtexting misspellings like that demonstrate a distinct lack of prowess in that field.

and yet its better than 99% of the shit thats come out in the last decade

Not dying isnt flawless play in Souls because you can have a ton of health and healing items, not to mention all the broken cheesy builds. It's not even hard for the most part, there are some exceptions here and there in the form of boss fights, but from my experience people rarely did on consecutive playthroughs.

Can someone who thinks the game is inconsistent explain how? What makes some parts of the game consistent and not others? What do you even mean by consistent; consistent with what?

Not an argument

>why the Souls games badly needs a redesign of the core mechanics

Its this sort of shit that killed Resident Evil you douche. Its fine as it is.

you stupid bitch nobody cares whether i is capitalized. Fr you're such a fag how is that even relevant

back to redd it, smartass

Only autistics or newfags follow design templates to the letter.

Soulsbabbies are so fucking quick to defend their overhyped game none of them even noticed op is shitposting, as made obvious by the fact that the metric he's talking about is used to measure user interfaces. Video games are far more complex than software uis.

At this point I'm just going to call out shit threads when I see them.

>I wish EA made Dark Souls
FTFY

PvP is largely inconsistent. Fromsoft are amazing designers and developers, but when it comes to netcode they're like 15 year olds in computer science. My shitty freshman projects in college had better netcode than souls games.

DS3 doesn't even work online for half of the people without them doing the proper port forwarding on their router, even on console. For most others summoning and invading fails half the time for no reason. It's a lot of fun when it works, but it often doesn't work at all.

Guys, they should change all the things that make a game unique!

1 and 3 run at 60fps on my shit ass pc. havent tried 2 because it looks like dick shit

These rules are for User Interface design not for game design. If you designed games like a UI you would just have a button that says "win" which you click to win.

Great specs, I love anal.

if you payed attention you would have noticed i typed that i stopped dying from not knowing how to play the game. i misjudged some dodges here and there or how far a drop from an edge was or mistimed a block. things like that. sometimes that caused a death.


>Not that I'm chastising you or anything but I like to feel I'm arguing with people on an equal intellectual standing and to be frank, juvenile speedtexting misspellings like that demonstrate a distinct lack of prowess in that field.

so then why reply? ohhhh, that's right. you just want attention.
also, "speedtexting" is two words.

>ooops
lol

and you've confused my replies as being "argumentative" instead of being replies of clarification with annoyance implied.

I was referencing the level design that OP complained about, but I totally agree with you. I love to host fight clubs on 3, and I get a bunch of disconnects during the fight. I didn't recognize a netcode problem in 1 (bad memory?); I just had gripes that every encounter was a backstab circle jerk. I thought 2 was clean enough.

>mistiming dodges and blocks
>knowing how to play the game

paid*

>academically approved argument
That's all fine and good, but fun is subjective and when I played Dark Souls for the first time a few months ago, I had more fun than I've had playing a video game in years.

spoken like a true liberal cuck nu-male Undertale fan

So many memes in such a short post.

yes. sometimes i got over excited ( mostly from having fun, because i thought the combat was fun for what it was ) and pressed a button too soon or too late. it wasn't that i didn't know to block or dodge or how to block or dodge. i just simply got caught up in the moment and made a mistake.

you really need to move on. you are terrible at trolling. if only you realized how stupid you seem trying to troll. but i guess you got to practice somewhere. have you ever been to debate.org? you might like that sight. it's pretty cool, imo. you can really polish up your trolling from studying the debates on there.

This user knows exactly whats up.

git gud

>make retarded early decisions in chess
>lose

WOW BUGGED GAME DESIGN I COULDNT UNDO MY SHITTY DECISIONS

pay me. i'll be the greatest souls player ever with money as my motivation.

Only oldfigs will get this

If you need money that bad have you tried getting a job?

so we've come back to becoming flawless at the game. i don't care to. there is nothing to be rewarded with for "gittn gud". unless you're an achievement or trophy whore. but why degrade oneself to such level? i can't think of any good reason.

why the fuck would i want to get a job for? money? girls? pfffftt. fuck that.

>...to become gud.. you have to become gud...
Why indeed

Sounds like you're just kind of shit at the game. Notably, you're judging a game based on a guide to user interface design. Of course a video game is going to fail those criteria, because Microsoft Word and Dark Souls are different entities.

>error handling is simply impossible

Dying repeatedly is not always an error on the part of the game. If one specific enemy is absolutely shitting on you, that's probably the game's way of telling you that you should maybe come back when you're better/more levelled. Don't run into the Catacombs at the start of the game, get your ass kicked, then complain about it. You're supposed to go in the exact opposite direction for 20 hours, and the game makes this extremely clear.

>pits are insta-death

As opposed to all those other action games where falling down an incredibly steep crevasse doesn't kill you.

Having a basic understanding of how a game works isn't the same as being gud. I understand frame data in fighting games but that doesn't mean I'm good or I don't get my ass kicked in them.

>I understand the mechanics of Street Fighter however I cannot execute them therefore I am not "gud" at it

yeah, so you mean become flawless.

i executed but mistimed once in awhile.

also, why didn't you capitalize all of your "I"'s as you say is proper english? ohh, that's right. you forgot or maybe don't know that "I" is only capitalized as a subject pronoun.

Yes "I" the word, thus the quotation marks.
If you understand the dodging mechanics you should not get hit.

and to add: and you were just going on memory of how to use "I" when using it as a subjective pronoun and that's why you didn't capitalize it anywhere else. not that you knew the reason why you did what you did.

this is what "speedtexting" got me.

Sup Forums has no reading comprehension.

Those are rules of interface design, meaning those are things to keep in mind while building the UI for a system such as a webpage. "Shortcuts" refers to things like bookmarking pages, while "error correction" refers to stuff like the undo or previous page button. The rules deal with ways a UI designer can make an interface more convenient for a user.

Those rules do not apply to game design. They're good guidelines on how to make a system convenient to use, not on how to make a system enjoyable to play.

>Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
>Due to the crappy level design and lack of fast traveling, long backtracking is a must in every souls game before 2.

Did you even play the game? Unlockable shortcuts are one of the main features of how the entire game is structured. The "crappy level design" you're talking about actually set a trend that's being copied in more and more games. They didn't make the choices they made because they're idiots, they made those choices because that was the vision they had for the game which fast travel runs counter to.

Let me take a wild guess that you're currently taking a UI/UX course. I appreciate that you want to use your knowledge to improve games but this really isn't your realm as a UI designer. Games are hard to make and you might think that a lot of what ends up in the final product is an accident, but almost nothing ever is.

Not that user, but sentences start with a capital letter.

>Schneider
Stopped reading there.

>Schneiderman
literally who

unless i mistimed the dodge/block due to reasons i've already gave in a previous post.

you got me thinking that you are actually stupid and don't understand what i mean, or know what you are doing and get what i mean. either way, i'm getting what i want.

or is it given in this instance? oh well.

Imagine being THIS bad at video games.