Oceiros and Gundyr Down

 Well, I just killed the two knights and the caster up on the roof in front of Oceiros' room, popped an ember, and summoned Hawkwood, and Oceiros went down a lot easier.

Summoning allies does help a lot, giving you more time to recover (especially as a ranged character) but it doesn't make the fight a pushover. I managed to get Gundyr mk. 2 down on the same ember, but when I went to the twin princes, Sirris of the Sunless Realm did a great job tanking for me for a good while, but when I got into phase 2, I was on my own, and things didn't work out so much.

Still, I've gotten all the items out of the Untended Graves (though I might not even give the Firekeeper the eyes, as I'm planning on going Usurp the Flame).

I think I am very cautious about finite resources, like embers, though I suppose I can always get one by helping another player take down a boss - I'm not really used to the online mode here. The first Dark Souls was tough because humanity was a resource that could be lost like souls, and you needed to restore your humanity at a bonfire, so having more than one didn't really help if you left your souls and such in the boss room.

Personally, I really prefer Bloodborne's treatment of Insight, where you just accumulate it over the course of the game and there's no "mode shift" that determines if you can summon allies. I certainly prefer the Embers over DS1's Humanity, but it does still create this thing where after you kill a boss the penalty for dying is rougher.

I know there are diehards who really want these Souls games to be as brutally difficult as possible, but while I enjoy them, I actually think it would be nice if they were a little more forgiving and thus allow a broader audience to enjoy them.

Accessibility seems to be the topic of conversation in a lot of gaming circles. I've always understood accessibility from a point of view of just making the game playable at all to as many people as possible. For example, creating systems that label things that would normally be just color-coded so that colorblind people can play.

When it comes to difficulty, I'm sort of of two minds.

Naturally, difficulty modes have been a part of games for ages - essentially, once arcade games were not the primary form of video game (and thus perversely incentivized to make the game hard so that kids would stick more quarters into the machine,) video games began to evolve a lot as a medium.

In some ways, I think Dark Souls and its ilk is not so much a new, unheard-of level of difficulty, but more of a return to the difficulty of early Mario games (and, actually, a lot of more modern platformers.)

I do think there is a bit of a promise that RPGs make in the video game medium that you can always grind a bit to make a boss or area easier. Ideally, you never want to feel obligated to do that, but you can.

And I think that applies to the Souls games to an extent, but there are very steep slopes of diminishing returns - not only does leveling up only raise a single stat by one, but the rate at which the cost of leveling goes up, as well as the diminishing returns on scaling with stats, does make it either less of an advantage, or demand a truly absurd amount of leveling.

I love the atmosphere and lore of Souls games, and I think that the rhythm of combat does feel very good (I will say that's one of the things that is a little less fun about playing a caster, though now that I have my Moonlight Greatsword, I think I might be doing more melee combat). And I can imagine how dialing down the difficulty might allow players to ignore those rhythms more - if you don't worry about taking a hit, you might just avoid dodging and let your blows land to take out foes and soak the damage you take.

Still, I would love to see someone take this genre and put the same love and care into its design and feel, but make a game that more players are likely to beat.

Anyway, after my one attempt on the Twin Princes (and no, it turns out you can't target Lothric on Lorian's back with your spells) I've gone to Archdragon Peak, getting ready to fight the Ancient Wyvern, which was a lot harder than I expected it to be on my last playthrough, so we'll see how it is this time.