Let people make up their mind :
"Basically I think that most designers are overly concerned with what's come before when they sit down to write CRPG mechanics. When looking at mechanics that typically go into CRPGs, it's pretty hard to reverse-engineer a plan of intent. The conclusion I'm usually left with is that they wanted the system to "look like an RPG" on a UI screen. They have classes and stats and skills and skill/talent trees and a ton of derived stats when probably not all of that is necessary.
I believe that game designers, whether working in the RPG genre or otherwise, should establish what they want the player to be doing within the world. That is, they must ask themselves what they want the core activities of the player to be. Within those activities, the designer can find ways to allow growth over time in a variety of ways. How they want that growth to occur and what sort of choices they want to force the player to make -- that's what should drive the design of the advancement/RPG system.
Instead it usually seems like most designers sit down and say, "Well what are the ability scores going to be?"
RE: Moving units: Nobody cares enough about the advancement mechanics to make or break sales. Mass Effect and Oblivion both show that you can have extremely simple (from a player perspective) advancement mechanics and as long as people enjoy the core gameplay, the apparent simplicity/non-traditional nature of the mechanics doesn't matter. "
It's basically a wordier "other games all get it wrong" though, not much else.
No, because he gives a reason : that is to say, CRPG devs should ask themselves what gameplay the want before emulating aspects of other (C)RPGs. Personnally i don't see that as shocking.
But are these still trash options in a game whose core principle is difficulty ? I'm not sure.
What? The goal of the game is to kill everything; a weapon that sucks at killing stuff obviously is a trash choice.
Challenging yourself from beating DS with fist weapons is no different than challenging yourself to play as a diplomat in Fallout/Arcanum or going solo in Baldur's Gate.
I stand by my word : the basic principle of DS's gameplay is challenge, so those options are not really trash in this particular context.
What's more important, you talk about self-imposed challenges, not those resulting of bad game design. I can reassure you, you'll be able to only take the shittiest loot if you want challenge in PoE, or play the game solo. More seriously i find it strange that you would take DS as an example, a game that Sawyer liked and is a paragon of balance in terms of character development.
