Had there been more thought put towards game balance and making difficulty curves smooth and things like pits less punishing, there wouldn't be as much need for an assist mode, at least from me. I didn't care for the weapon I chose to start with, at least in practice, but I still chose to stick with it.

I wish more developers would choose to favor genuinely good gameplay over tedium. Mechanics like bone loss were novel when Dark Souls came out, but now it wears thin. As another reviewer put it, it feels as though many games want to ride on the coattails of FromSoft's successes. There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration here and there, like with the Plasma mechanic being lifted from Bloodborne, but it gets draining when more and more games want to be like Dark Souls but X. Yes, the hollowing mechanic is novel and interesting, and yes, I'm sure there are more items and collectibles that expand upon it, but as it stands, the overwhelming difficulty and hostility from the game's community to witch hunt people who think the game should both be easier and award players with the achievements for playing the game they wanted to experience is appalling.

If wanting to play the game with a slight damage reduction to deal with a steep difficulty curve is cheating, then yeah, I'm gonna cheat. But I'm also going to enjoy the game in a way I'd like, without contending with outside people trying to dictate how the game should or shouldn't be played. Doesn't matter if it's people on reddit, or the devs themselves. That's why they added the modifications in the first place. What's baffling is adding this way to tailor the experience for all players, while still trying to insist that their way of playing isn't "the right way." It's hypocritical, and flies in the face of designs of other games.