I managed to turn my first playthrough into a bit of a clusterfuck by accidentally attacking Oswald of Carim (the guy you can go to for forgiveness whenever you attack anyone - except for himself, it turns out) and a couple of other NPCs, telling Dusk "no" when I met her, and so on. I also tend to play games in an obsessive-compulsive completionist fashion and hate to miss anything.
Yet I still find Vaarna_Aarne's complaint rather off-base, particularly the implications that permanently missable items are bad design unless a game is short and/or built around replayability:
I think missing stuff permanently is NOT fine, the game just doesn't have THAT much of a replay factor to me due to the effort needed to just gather items and powerlevel to your choice of level. I'd say the presentation would be just fine if things simply wouldn't be permanently missable and wouldn't have sequence-breakers.
Point is that it can be missed and not found later through further exploration. That is the only proper way to do it if you insist on having the game last longer than a number of hours you can count with one hand.
...and that C&C is the only thing that makes a game replayable:
Really, there is absolutely NO real C&C in Dark Souls, which is why it doesn't have that much replay value.
I mean, I can understand raging at, say, the tendency of old adventure games to screw you over much later on for missing/using some item from the first 10 minutes or games that are blatantly designed to sell guides by requiring you to engage in some arbitrary set of actions to obtain a cool item. And I can definitely empathize with the position that Dark Souls itself is a bit too unforgiving for certain classes when it comes to missing items - mainly, screwing yourself out of most of your early-game spells as a sorcerer. (I think Edward_R_Murrow is right on the money here about the problem being that spells are so closely linked to NPCs compared to other equipment.) But acting like permanently missable items are always poor design, checking a walkthrough before making any decision in a game because you're worried that you might miss something? It's been said already, but that's exactly the sort of reasoning Bethesda uses to justify allowing every character to do everything in its post-Morrowind games.
Short on time ATM, but there was a
decent thread about this topic earlier this year that hashed out the relevant arguments.
Regarding the second point, I'd say Dark Souls itself is a great example of how C&C is not the only thing that gives a game replay value. If a game has compelling enough gameplay people will want to replay it, regardless of whether that comes from C&C, a good combat system with well-designed encounters, a large open world to explore with hand-placed items/encounters, or any number of other things. The Thief series has no C&C to speak of (at most you've got the barebones faction system in Deadly Shadows), but they're still some of my most-replayed games because every element comes together in such an elegant manner.
Seriously, why do people defend bad design? Reminds me of Torment where you can only access Pharod if you are carrying junk in your pocket. Nobody who was careful with inventory management would save that shit.
It's been a while since I played it, but I'm pretty sure that there are at least two or three different ways to find out in-game that you need to do this, and there's junk all over the Hive for you to grab at a moment's notice (twenty or so pieces scattered about, IIRC). It's kind of an important part of the "find Pharod" quest; otherwise it would be as simple as talking to that zombie-sign as soon as you're outside the Mortuary and running left until you hit the trash warrens.
