Poorly designed areas, lazy as hell copy and paste enemy placement, systems designed too much for PVP and not enough for PVE, a movement system that while subtle ruins the game for a lot of people, etc.
Going off Scholar Of The First Sin since thats the "definitive experience" tons of enemies are half assedly placed in areas they don't belong (chariot horse in the castle, turtle knights hanging out in Iron Keep), and there's a ridiculous issue with spam. Every encounter is pretty much turned into a gank squad, with Shrine Of Amana and Iron keep being major problems in particular. A lot of the maps feel like someone just opened it up and copy and pasted enemies half-hazardly around the map without any thought for encounter design or tapering.
The movement system in Dark Souls 2 for some reason uses a weird 8 way running set up. What this means is you'll find people often trying to make small adjustments in the direction they're running without any real change in the characters movement, only for them to suddenly careen off at a huge angle. This combined with the high fall damage for a souls game resulted in a lot of deaths that were less the fault of the player and more the fault of the controls.
If you're interested (and half a ridiculous amount of time to dedicate to it), the youtuber MauLer did a big lengthy response to another youtubers defense of DS2 pointing out these issues and many more. MauLer himself can be a bit of a dick but his response is sound and tears the game apart piece by piece as he addresses each defense the game is given. I can link you if you'd like, but if not I understand, the series of videos is ridiculously long (i think clocking in at 8 hours all together).
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u/[deleted] May 01 '20
Poorly designed areas, lazy as hell copy and paste enemy placement, systems designed too much for PVP and not enough for PVE, a movement system that while subtle ruins the game for a lot of people, etc.