Dark Souls really doesn't need grinding. It needs thoughtful use of available resources sometimes, but rarely grinding, unless grinding will allow you to better use an available resource. That's not clearing an area 30 times, though. That should be maybe a half hour to net yourself a few extra souls. Bear in mind there are people who beat these games regularly at level 1 as a sport. Now I can't do that, I'm not that good, nor do I know the systems well enough. But still, it does sort of prove the point that skill and thoughtful character craft are 99% of it. Leveling nets very small gains.
Anyway, we could debate a lot of this and without point, but I really do think Dark Souls difficulty is overblown. Certainly far from intractable. Most people who play Dark Souls can play it successfully. Its predecessor and sequel were also big hits because most people who played them could play them successfully. And I only am beating on that point a bit because I can't really see LotF as delivering on the premise of Dark Souls since the premise doesn't seem to be there. Largely linear, a closed environment, no worthwhile story, a static lead, and no appreciable difficulty? So doesn't that basically just make it an action RPG that decided to borrow some fundamental mechanical design from another game? I mean Dark Souls did do its own thing in those areas to some degree, and those mechanical elements were important, but not really any more so than any other game. All games have control setups and basic design principles. This just appears to be a hack and slash action RPG without any of the stuff that made Dark Souls amazing. Which doesn't mean it's worthless or not fun, just that I really don't think you can call this a similar premise. It's similar gameplay, but so are a thousand other mindless action RPGs. I was interested because of the Dark Souls comparisons at first, thinking that a different spin on that could be kinda cool, but in the end this doesn't seem very similar.
