Anyone who has played Dark Souls knows the incredible satisfaction with which the world fits together. However, the genius in Dark Souls’ level design was not the geometric compression, but was how it passively lead the character through the world. In the game, explicit directions are almost never given, however much of the world’s aesthetics are designed to subtly inform the player where next to go. This allowed the game a well crafted difficulty curve while never having to curtail the user’s sense of freedom or joy of exploration. In Dark Souls 2, all of this genius is replaced using cheap, artificial difficulty.

After the first few zones in DaS2, it is clear to most players that the world of Drangleic is in no way interconnected. The game has four fingers that you must progress along to unlock a fifth finger. Since each of the fingers is feasibly accessible at the beginning of the game, a way to force the player into another finger is required. If not the player would be completely over levelled during the last few fingers. In DaS the only real roadblock between zones was the occasional key, and one poorly explained aspect of the curse mechanic. Compare this to DaS2 where in addition to the requiring a supersized keyring, a collection of arbitrary stops are put in place. The inclusion of Pharros Lockstones and Fragrant Branches of Yore were two of the largest mistakes made by From’s B-Team.

When I entered the Door of Pharros on my first run through of DaS2 I was a member of the Rat covenant. This causes the monsters to ignore you, allowing you to rush the optional boss Royal Rat Authority if you needed more evidence against the B-Team having an original idea for this game. Let’s not dwell on the mechanical clusterfuck of this zone and focus on the Lockstones. A friend I know plays DaS games offline at all times, as he hates the multiplayer component of the game. If he were to enter this zone and waste Lockstones on any of the numerous contraptions, he would lock himself out of the many other Lockstones in the game that have something worthwhile behind them as the only unlimited source of Lockstones is the PvP reward from the Rat King or using an easily missable exploit within the Royal Rat Authority boss fight. In DaS, there are almost no instances of locking out content like this. There is a reasonable amount of hidden content, but where the hidden content of DaS is a joy to discover, visibly locked out content like the Pharros Contraptions are just frustrating. No one wants to feel like they are missing out.

This extends to the use of Fragrant Branches of Yore. The occasional key hunt in DaS was annoying enough, but tolerable due to rarity, and the keys are never hard to find. Branches are in the game for the reason glanced at earlier, to salvage the difficulty curve of the game. By locking out content like the Shaded Woods or the Ruin Sentinels, it permits the devs to scale the difficulty behind those barriers to better match where the player should be. You would think a game decidedly more linear than it’s predecessor wouldn’t have such a problematic difficulty curve, and yet DaS still managed to have a much smoother difficulty curve. Fatboy Slim not withstanding of course.

Look no further than the mechanic wherein monsters stop spawning after being killed a certain number of times to discover how little the devs knew about crafting a competent difficulty curve. In lieu of balancing the bonfire to bonfire gameplay, they just tossed a bonfire whenever they felt and crammed the interim with however many enemies fit; see Shrine of Amana or No Man’s Wharf. There are very few encounters in the game that feel organic, as it’s just a matter of inching forward until you pull the next group or farming the harder zones until they just spawn fewer monsters. It harkens back to earlier this year when I was playing some Mario game on my WiiU and after failing a certain section a few times the game asked if I wanted to have it done for me. I can’t have been the only one mildly offended by this, as a large portion of the enjoyment in games is overcoming obstacles presented to us. If the game is willing to do all the hard work and just show me the progression as I lean back into my chair, I might as well start-up Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes.

As a quick side note, what is with all th e bottomless pits in DaS2? I swear the zones are just littered with them. It was the first warning sign when I started playing the game. The difficulty in Heide’s Tower doesn’t initially stem from the large knights, who can be easily circled to death, but from the fact that the entire zone is this walkway floating in a bottomless pit. The only noticeable part of the skybox, the titular Tower of Flame, isn’t even accessible. When announced that the game was a “massive AAA release” they should’ve mentioned that meant they were dragging the industry’s sight-seeing world design along.

All told, I enjoyed DaS2. The polished variety of combat helped overshadow the lackluster environment design, however the fact that it’s named Dark Souls 2 means it was willing to place itself next to Dark Souls for comparison, and for that it only pales. The artificial roadblocks in conjunction with a world design that can only hope to ape the original results in inorganic game design that shuffles between peering at genius through a fence and rubbing itself in day old dog shit. With Miyazaki once again at the reigns of environment design, we can truly hope for bonafide follow-up to Dark Souls.