I came across this video on YouTube last week, in which HPRshredder defends the second half of Dark Souls (after obtaining the Lordvessel). Most people say that the second half of the game is a clear drop-off compared to the first half, but HPRshredder argues that most of the second half is actually pretty good, and that many of the things that people hate about the second half are actually in the first half.

Many of HPRshredder's points are actually quite valid. I mean, some of it is pedantic nitpicks about defining "second half", but you know, it's not wrong. However, I feel like he missed the biggest complaint that people have against the back half of Dark Souls. Specifically, after the player obtains the Lordvessel, the player is able to teleport to many bonfires. The ability to teleport eliminated the need for From Software to maintain the tight, interconnected world design through the entirety of Dark Souls' campaign. Instead, the areas where the player must obtain the final 4 Lords' Souls are more linear dungeon crawls that are disconnected from the rest of the map. In fact, in all of these instances, the player cannot even walk out of the boss arenas, and must teleport out.

Of all the people who I talk to about Dark Souls, this is the primary complaint that they levy against the later parts of Dark Souls. Aside from Izalith and the Bed of Chaos (and sometimes the Tomb of the Giants), people rarely have specific complaints with the levels or boss fights in the later stages of Dark Souls. Mostly, people just believe that the world design suffers from the lack of interconnected paths between these final levels.

Many of the criticisms of the 4 Lords' areas in Dark Souls could have been mitigated, or headed-off entirely, with a little bit of extra creative level and world design. If these areas could retain the interconnectedness that people love so much about the rest of the game, then maybe that would have created more memorable moments that might make players think back more fondly of these areas?

Defeating Ornstein and Smough, and obtaining the Lordvessel, is widely regarded as the peak of Dark Souls.

Now that Dark Souls is supposedly over (pending the inevitable DLC for Dark Souls III), it's time to wonder what new games From Software and Hidetaka Miyazaki might decide to make. Will they continue to make Souls-like games (ala Bloodborne)? Will they go back to older IPs like Armored Core or King's Field? All indications seem to point towards the company going back towards making mech games along the lines of Armored Core (though it may be a new IP).

I've played some of the Armored Core games, and I actually really liked some of the PS1 / PS2 - era games. But I would actually much rather see the company try their hand at something different. I'd like to see this company (under Miyazaki's direction) take a stab at a genuine horror game.

Miyazaki has said that Dark Souls is likely over. So what's next for his company?

They've already played around with some horror concepts in some of the Souls games. Levels like the Tower of Latria and Valley of Defilement in Demon's Souls had genuinely frightening atmospheres. The Dark Souls games also had their share of some horror-inspired levels. Sen's Fotress and Tomb of the Giants have the pacing of a horror level. And of course, Bloodborne was a whole game inspired by Gothic horror and Lovecraft.

Granted, these games were all hack-and-slash action games, rather than genuine horror games, but ...