I am not going to debate this since it is damn difficult to debate Good and Bad points of action combat. But one of the most important is reacticivity of the opponent. The opponent should react to YOUR actions. Dark Souls looks like a QTE where all you have to do (like in Gothic) is to learn the timing of your opponents and strike in intervals and use the shield for the rest.
They do this in Dark Souls.
- Enemies keep their guard up until you show a weakness, like dropping your shield or swinging up to attack.
- Many enemies will time their attacks to get in between your strikes.
- A few enemy types will circle behind you while one draws your attention and try to stab you in the back.
- Enemies have different weapon types and will switch them according to the situation (i.e. archers switching to melee).
- Ranged attackers will relentlessly pepper you with attacks, forcing you to constantly move or use a shield.
- Enemies will use shields and slowly advance on you if you use ranged weapons, trying to close distance as quickly as possible, or in some cases they will turtle in cover to force you to change tactics.
- Many melee enemies will throw you off guard by varying attack patterns and canceling their combo chains.
- Enemies (including bosses) will chase you mercilessly, and many are able to jump up ledges etc. to prevent the use of cheese tactics.
- Boss enemies will use powerful attacks that send you flying near ledges, to send you falling to your death.
- Bosses are aware of the fact that players can roll and dodge, and will time and lead their attacks to prevent you from dodge-spamming.
You see all this in the first 1-2 hours of gameplay and it does not get any less sophisticated.
Admittedly, this isn't so much good AI as it is smart encounter design and well thought out enemy composition and ability selection, but very few parts of Dark Souls let you just hack and slash your way through things, and I don't really care if the enemies aren't the most amazingly smart ever if the end result is a challenging game.
On top of that, you have plenty of complexity in character and equipment systems:
- Different weapon types don't just have different stats, they also have dramatically different speeds (pre-swing, attack, follow-through, recovery), different ranges, different attack directions, different combos, different blocking and parrying capabilities, different momentum, different amounts of character movement/commitment required, etc.
- Armor types influence your protection level, movement speed, attack speed, stamina recovery, and more.
- There are about a dozen core character stats, all of which have varying affects both on the "feel" of gameplay (movement speed, attack speed, dodge speed, special moves, and so on), and also which influence secondary attributes in varying ways as well.
That's not even getting into the magic system, which I admit I have not even touched yet. Definitely more interesting than Dark Messiah, though.
Combat in Dark Souls isn't really symmetrical so it can't be compared to Dark Messiah directly anyway. In Dark Messiah you have enemies with near-like ability sets and you fight only a handful of opponents at once. In Dark Souls you deal with much more varied types of enemies who have more specialized roles, and it's the specific composition of each encounter that tests your reflexes as well as your intelligence in prioritizing threats, using correct weapons and items, etc. It's not really fair to compare the two because they have different goals from each other.
Last, aside from the fact that you're basically just spouting uninformed BS, if your criteria for good action RPG combat is "enemies respond to what you do" then it's worth pointing out how extremely subjective that criteria is, especially as it's hard to really quantify or tell whether those are intelligent enemies or just their particular attack patterns and the limitations of the player character tricking you into thinking they are more reactive than they really are. I could just as easily say "predictable enemies with pre-defined attack patterns who don't react to the player" is my criteria for what makes good action RPG combat, and not only would it be just as subjective and therefore difficult to really quantify or qualify by any standard we agree upon, but we could even, depending on our own interpretations of games, come up with the exact same games as examples for completely opposite arguments.