Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for !videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
Some people are saying DS is free. I agree with them, but also there are issues.
For example, early players who are struggling should go down into the catacombs, because they can unlock The Rite of Kindling, allowing you to get even more estus at a bonfire if you’re having a hard time. However, almost every guide will say not to do this, and I agree. It’s at the bottom of a giant pit with enemies that are more annoying than you’ll have faced before. If you get a divine weapon than it’s probably fine though, but getting back out will still not be trivial.
Dark Souls is all about giving players options, and giving them the tools to deal with problems. The issue is you need to pay attention to the world and read. The problem with the example above is the necromancers revive enemies, unless they’re killed by a divine weapon. This isn’t obvious though, and it also isn’t obvious where you might find a divine weapon, or where to unlock the ability to upgrade a weapon down the divine path.
There are just too few signposts to guide new players who are getting frustrated. There’s plenty for people enjoying their time, reading, and exploring. For the people who are slamming their head into a wall on a boss trying to brute force it, like most games would require you to do, there’s not enough to guide them out of this tactic.
I’ve played many Soulslikes, and found pretty much all of them fun…EXCEPT for the ones by FromSoftware. All others branch out into a lot of exploration, they just don’t put 8 paths square at the beginning of the game and then slap you down for 5 of them.