A game that can do this well, that is allowing the player to set their own difficulty by how they play the game, has the potential to appeal to a much wider audience than a game that is simply extremely difficult.

I especially loved this about Dark Souls. I've been playing From Software games since King's Field I, and I've always loved their insane difficulty. The reason these games are difficult is because they don't tell you anything until you've already gotten past the part where you were expected to know it.

I liked that aspect of the game: You defeat the minotaur boss and then after killing it, the Minotaur boss becomes a common enemy and you are told: "Hey, they are weak to lightning.". It's sort of like rewarding the player for bashing their face into a wall by telling them how to get past the challenge easier next time. It makes playing the game satisfying because of how hard things are. At first, when you finally accomplish something, the feeling of elation is huge. Then, the second playthrough when you know all the tricks, you get a huge feeling of accomplishment because of how much easier it was this time around.

Dark Souls has kept my attention for over 400 hours. It's one of the few games I play. To this day, I still go back every few months and come up with some crazy new build that is stupidly challenging and then run through the game again and do some PVP.

Dark Souls is a perfect hybrid of "on rails" and "free form", in that there are walls that steer you away from doing whatever you want, but at the same time, being clever enough will allow you to scale those walls.

For instance, a friend and I burned through that game in 3 days all the way up to Gwyn. We were doing onebros (Level 1 maximum), and we had a beast of a good time doing it. We even managed to min/max our characters in such a way that we were dominating invaders that came our way with dung pies and poisoned throwing knives.
In response to Fugsnarf
oh yes i understand. I love animal crossing as well. It really depends on the game and what you are aiming for. But i personally like diffiulty in combat focused games
In response to Ter13
I was thinking on making a sprite based demon souls, maybe when im done current project and team up with a good artist.

Yea bloodborn is comming soon. Its going to be awsome! Very rewwarding and excellent game design
When I played Dark Souls, my criticism was just how much you needed to look up on the internet to know where to go, what gear was worth upgrading, the hidden painting level, which bosses had tail cuts, where the soft caps for each stat was, where NPC invasions occurred.

Something about the game had me hooked even though it should have been really boring, farming the same 5 baldur knights over and over and over to level myself or buy the seal or Artorias.

I was addicted to the game both times that I played it, but the first time when I didn't look anything up, I felt it was too hard to even know which way to progress next and that the soul values associated with enemies must have just been randomly assigned, since it had no rhyme or reason to it.
That can be frustrating. The reason I enjoyed that aspect, however, was that it forced me to become a better player. After putting so much time into Dark Souls, I come into other action adventure games with a different sense of experience and style of play. It's honestly improved my ability to play games. That might be an easy way to turn off some players, though, and it's worth considering when designing your own game.
I like games that give you a variety of valid approaches to problem solving. I like a high-adrenaline challenge sometimes, but I prefer combat that can be approached and solved as a tactical puzzle. Honing one's reflexes is okay, but lateral thinking skills are less platform-dependent.
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