@Tiwill44: Dark Souls uses clever level design to reward progress, short cuts and bonfires make progress to the more challenging boss fights quite fair and certainly not tedious.

@dmblum1799: so very true

@Raphy_Turtle: Where did I insult anyone? The pre-pubescent part? We were all there at one point my friend, its just that the Witcher 3 fan brigade are still there staring at some naked tits. I like the part where I don't insult anyone in particular and then you decide that you will stoop even beyond my cowardice level and launch a tirade of vulgarities and hurtful comments at me. This is all a bit much, I may have to take my leave from the intrawebs. Are you happy now?

@Raphy_Turtle: I stopped reading when you said the combat was fun and responsive and makes you feel badass. Do you mean the part where the mighty Gerald of Riverun can't step over an ankle high fence when he is in combat or gets the crap beaten out of him by a simple (but much more powerful) city guard for accidentally stealing a loaf of bread when you were actually attempting to select 'talk to NPC', but its GOTY worthy and well coded controls had you blowing out a candle or stealing said loaf of bread instead. I missed the whole fun and responsive combat when I played it, maybe they just forgot to put that part in the copy of the game that I unfortunately purchased.

@gotrekfabian: Try Uncharted on Brutal, you don't need Brutal for platinum but you do for 100% completion.

@Ryan_Som: I would have liked a trophy/achievement for F4 on a hard mode. I played it on Hard until level 20 and then Very Hard from 20 onwards, I found that perfect. At level 52 I can still one shot some mobs but most put up some sort of challenge. I switched it to Normal yesterday for a few minutes to see what it was like and at level 50 it was a complete yawn in terms of challenge. Hard till 20, then Very Hard was pretty good.

I don't really think that Demons Souls, Dark Souls, DS2 or Bloodborne were that 'difficult', they were challenging but not frustratingly so. Some found different bosses more challenging than others. Ormstein and Smough in DS were difficult for me at least but I also struggled for a while with Vicar Amelia in Bloodborne (others found her easy) but I beat both Bloodstarved Beast and Darkbeast Paarl on my first attempt (others found them difficult), actually Paarl ended with me on about 2% health lol. I'd like to see more games with a Dark Souls style of challenge, its a game where you learn and get rewarded, there is a path through the entire game that isn't too difficult if you don't button mash and hope (like most games).

@bobbobbert: slowly back away from the keyboard my friend

@vigariox: Care to enlighten me then because simply saying 'nah its great' doesn't really sell it. I have given you just a few specific examples of where the game fails. Its just absolutely over rated in almost every department.

The generic storyline with some completely convoluted additions thrown in like the 'ugliest man alive and the druid garbage', it was just average. The only part of the game that I enjoyed was The Bloody Baron questline and that was really down to some excellent voice acting from the Baron bringing his part to life, it certainly wasn't from the games horribly repetitive combat. Exploration? If you call follow the exclamation marks exploring then you need to understand what exploration means. Gathering? lol don't make me laugh, not sure why they planted fucking harvestable items everywhere when you only need to craft something once and you're done. I could go on and on about the mediocrity of this game.

@Maxxgold: lol what a load of BS, its fine on the PS4. 160+ hours and haven't had one single problem at all. You also said that you play it on PC and stated 'never purchase a game like this on a console', now you're here saying that 'the framerate stutters and plummets in battles on PS4', yet you play on a PC. Get your facts straight son.