10 Ways Dark Souls Made All Video Games WORSE

Whether you regard it as a good thing or a bad thing, the perceived difficulty of games in general has changed.

Before the rise of Dark Souls, the hardest games we could play would be those occasional NES and ZX Spectrum titles that popped up as bonuses in those Best Of The 1980s compilations - archaic and flat-out disrespectful games from a time where designers hadn’t fully understood the nuances of how to create for consoles, not arcade machines.

Games - particularly AAA games - had been getting easier (both in general, and thanks to contemporary quality of life updates thanks to advances in both technology and design), and so every game that followed Dark Souls would appear not just easy, but insultingly simple by direct comparison.

Now, almost ten years on, action games have tried to up their general difficulty level (with some going so far as to make “hard” the recommended difficulty level for “people who play action games”), often trying to emulate the Dark Souls style of difficulty through artificial means (removing the HUD, one-hit-kills, and so forth).

Playing on normal difficulty is now, for Dark Souls veterans, just too easy to enjoy... even passively.