You could've, you know, read my other posts in which I cover these things more in-depth. The respawns aren't frustrating, they are, like I said,
boring and just waste time you could spend killing the boss.
Not to mention that there are a few instances where you could just run past the mobs, like with Sif, so so much for that.
This is a valid criticism, and it comes down to the sometimes uneven quality of the Souls games.
When done properly, either simply running past enemies is not a viable tactic, or you can run past enemies but the trek from the bonfire to the boss is extremely short so the tedium of simply walking from point A to point B is negligible (Ornstein & Smough comes to mind). But there are some instances in the Souls series where its a fairly long trek from the bonfire to the boss while at the same time designed in a way that there's zero risk in just beelining to the boss.
Also, there is a thing called context, so you can't say that not respawning mobs is like not resetting the boss after each attempt, bosses are framed in such a way as to prevent exactly this sort of allegory. It's a false equivalency. If they wanted to force you to complete the entire run with limited resources and make it count, they could just make it so you can't replenish your resources by resting at a bonfire and it wouldn't respawn the mobs. The resources would be replenished by killing the bosses. That would be, of course, a lot more frustrating, but, as we've seen, people don't mind frustrations. It would require more thought to how the entire game is structured, how it tackles challenges and how it conveys information though. Now that I think about it, maybe that's the next step for action games after DS.
Ok this is a totally moronic suggestion. Let's actually think about how that would work. Since you can't replenish your potions until you beat the boss and since there's always the risk that the next boss will be incredibly challenging, the sensible choice would be to try and make it to the boss without using any potions, and because you're not using any potions on the way to the boss, you're going to keep dying repeatedly, slowly chipping away at the enemies along the way until there aren't any left. E.g. kill 5 enemies, die, walk back from the bonfire and proceed a little further this time, kill the next 5 enemies, die, walk back to where you died and proceed a bit further again, kill some more enemies, die again.........and keep doing this until you kill every single enemy along the way and finally reach the boss.
First of all, this is this far, far more tedious than how Dark Souls currently works, where the tedious process of walking back to the boss over and over again to the point of frustration only occurs for the really difficult bosses while the easier ones only require repeating the level maybe 2-3 times (in the case of DS2, I killed most bosses on my first try). In your system, you would have to do make your way from the bonfire to the boss several times for every single boss since you'll always want to make it there with the max number of potions in case it's a particularly difficult boss. Then there's the fact that pretty much all skill and tension is entirely eliminated because you can literally just brute force your way to the boss by just slowly chipping away at the enemies. In Dark Souls, when you make your way past a particularly difficult group of enemies, even if the next encounter is easy, it still feels tense and engaging because screwing up would mean having to repeat the difficult encounter. There's a certain weight and impact in your actions that would be gone with your idea, with the only action containing any meaningful consequence is whether or not you use an estus flask.
BTW. you know which game actually had this system? Motherfucking Bioshock 1, the game with quite possibly the worst save/respawn system ever conceived, to the point where even most casuals hated it because of how insultingly lenient it was towards poor play. In Bioshock 1, you would respawn at Vita chambers but any enemies killed or any damage done to enemies was permanent, so you could literally just keep bumrushing every single encounter without any consideration for playing intelligently or showing skillful play, because as long as you can output even some damage before dying, you're still making progress.
Anyways, let's move on to what happens once you reach the boss. Since your health potions don't replenish, you don't want to make the mistake of using any potions until you've fully mastered their attack patterns, which means doing several suicide runs until you have a proper idea on how to beat them, even against bosses which normally could be beaten on the first or second try. And what if you use up all your potions, come really close to beating the boss but just fall short. So whereas you were struggling even with a full of health potions, now you're suddenly faced with a sharp, seemingly insurmountable rise in challenge of trying to beat the boss with no potions. I've beaten Dark Souls about 4 times and even I don't think I can beat every single boss without using any potions. What chance is a first timer going to have? You know how you were criticizing the limited lives system in arcade games for being exploitative and archaic? Well the comparison to arcade games would be far more appropriate under your system because if the player screws and uses up all his health potions before beating one of the difficult bosses, it is effectively the same as losing all your lives and you might as well just restart the whole game.
What I meant with the trial and error thing (regarding exploration) is that there is no way to know which thing is where, so that means just randomly stumbling about (which you wouldn't know to do btw) hoping to find something you don't know even exists. I'm not saying the game should tell me where things are, the characters could've just remarked that they've heard rumours of a merchant somewhere in the Undead Berg, or even merchants in general.
Well, first of all, NPCs do drop hints about finding other characters and locations. For instance, Crestfallen gives a rough indication of where both Griggs and Laurentius can be found, who in turn direct you to Big Hat Logan and Quelana. I don't think anybody mentions the location of the Undead merchant but then again, he's not exactly difficult to find. Meanwhile, a lot of key NPCs like Andre or Frampt are featured in prominent locations where they're impossible to miss. Even if the Undead merchant was in a much more obscure location, I'm not sure why you feel it's necessary for the game to provide directions. It's not as if he's an essential NPC required for completing the game. Honestly, the more I read your posts, the more I get the impression that you're too dumb to be playing this game, but instead of acknowledging it, you come up with these twisted arguments where, through some bizarre leaps in logic, you somehow arrive at the conclusion that Dark Souls is a poorly designed game for casuals and that you're simply too hardcore for it.
I mean, you said Dark Souls is "trial and error" instead of "discovery through journey". How the fuck is this trial and error and not discovery through exploration? By this logic, coming across any item, character, or location without having prior knowledge of its presence there must be "trial and error".
The way they did it still works (depending on your definition of "works"), but it just smells of poor design rather than an intentionally kept information from you, and it's all because of the online marker systems and not a coherent thought process aimed at strengthening the atmosphere. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, as an example of Japanese productions, are games which show intentional design, DS is just a series of serendipities regarding the narrative.
You keep stubbornly insisting on this point in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
Dark Souls is one of the games that has had the most said and written about it. There are design docs and interviews from the developers explaining their thought process and design philosophy behind nearly everything in the game.
But despite all that, you keep insisting that From Software are a bunch of clueless amateurs who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it and that it just somehow worked out through sheer luck, all because it "smells" or "feels" that way to you. Yeah, you're fucking hopeless.
