>>81811499NTA but it different in the both the sense that 1. the level of difficult in mainstream games in general at time was really low and most games didn't require much skill invest and also held your hand, 2. the Souls formula was still new to most people at large so dealing with enemies and exploration was tougher
For point #1 Dark Soul most direct "competitor" in terms of other action-RPGs at the time was fucking Skyrim, which should tell you the state of the industry at the time
For point #2 at the time DkS1 was most people's for Souls games, so they weren't used to what was being asked of them, and compared to modern time FS hadn't yet tweaked and reformat their formula yet; A good example of how everyone in chat was hyping up Artorias to be the 2nd hardest boss in the game, and Mori shitted on him in 2 attempts, back in 2012 he was hard as nail, but in comparsion to enemies found in ER he's arguably not even difficult enough to be a random MOB
