Is Dark Souls harder than Doom Eternal?

When it comes to sheer, controller-crushing difficulty, the Souls series still wears the crown for most hardcore gamers. Ever since Demon‘s Souls on PS3, FromSoftware‘s unique brand of strategic melee combat has tormented players with punishing level design, enigmatic game systems and boss encounters demanding perfect pattern recognition.

However, id Software‘s rebooted Doom series has staked its claim as a worthy challenger, especially 2016‘s Doom and its 2020 sequel Doom Eternal. Offering breakneck FPS gameplay throwing hordes of demons at you set to a heavy metal soundtrack, mastering Doom Eternal on higher difficulties represents one of the toughest tests for an experienced FPS fan.

So while Dark Souls may be the harder game overall for a new player, Doom Eternal asks more of veterans seeking to conquer its blistering Nightmare and Ultra-Nightmare modes. Let‘s break down why each game represents such an incredible and rewarding challenge.

The Sheer Brutality of Dark Souls

The Souls formula uniquely combines tense, strategic melee combat within intricately designed 3D levels. While each entry iterates in its own way, they universally demand patience, precision and perseverance from players. According to PSN trophy data, only around 35% of Dark Souls players defeated the final boss Gwyn compared to 63% completing Doom Eternal.

This starts right from the get go as around 45% of players fail to escape the tutorial area after dying repeatedly to basic enemies. The difficulty then continues ratcheting up exponentially, forcing you through a gauntlet testing every aspect of your skills. Let‘s break down what specifically pushes Dark Souls into one of gaming‘s ultimate endurance tests:

Enemies and Bosses That Punish the Smallest Mistakes

In Dark Souls, recklessly spamming attacks or mismanaging your stamina gauge against even basic enemies gets you killed quickly. You must carefully balance offense, defense and positioning in each encounter. Bosses then take this to the extreme, boasting complex movesets with combos and area attacks demanding perfect dodges and parries to overcome without heavy losses. These lengthy, multi-phase fights require zen-like focus over 10+ grueling minutes for victory.

Minimal Guidance and Unforgiving Game Systems

The Souls series is notorious for lacking hand holding and dropped players into the deep end to figure out intricacies around stats, upgrades and more through painful trial and error. While this elicits much fanfare from its passionate hardcore base, it adds an additional layer of difficulty. Survival depends on balancing health, stamina, encumbrance, equipment upgrades and more where one mismatch sees you fall. Even tiny missteps like attacking friendly NPCs can break questlines or lock you out of content.

Interconnected 3D Worlds Full of Death Traps

FromSoftware excels at intricately designed levels that double as environmental weapons against the player. The branching paths, shortcuts and hidden secrets enable impressive player agency. But it also provides infinite opportunities to get turned around, cornered and pushed off a ledge by enemies to an instant death. Simply navigating the world demands awareness and care where one lapse in judgement can undo hours of progress if you fail to reach your dropped souls/upgrade materials after dying.

Relentless Pressure That Never Lets Up

Dying resets all enemies in Souls games while constantly depleting your health bar until you restore humanity. This gives minimal chances to rest or recover, forcing you back into the fray quickly. Enemy placement is often designed to catch you off guard right as you enter an area or escape from a boss loss. Such pressure over the 30-60 hour campaign is utterly exhausting both physically and mentally. Only the most determined and resilient see the end credits.

Doom Eternal‘s Demonic FPS Mayhem

At first, Doom seems the polar opposite of Dark Souls – an ultra-fast paced FPS throwing relentless hordes at you backed by a metal soundtrack compared to tense melee battles in Gothic dungeons.

However, its carefully crafted combat loops provide a similar brand of intense focus and mastery for fulfilling success. According to devs id Software, Doom Eternal has a 6-8% Ultra Nightmare (permadeath) completion rate while Speedrun times require aimed precision.

The breakneck speed and abundance of threats means even brief lapses in judgement or reactions can still quickly cascade into death. Experts must perfectly juggle their resources and toolkit while processing infinite stimuli to come out on top especially at higher skill levels. Let‘s examine what elevates Doom Eternal as one of hardest FPS out there:

Overwhelming Demon Hordes in Arenas

Doom locks you in arenas filling up by the dozens with varied demons including: flying enemies, bulky frontliners, ranged casters etc. Each has unique abilities you must counter requiring constantly repositioning and choosing the right weapon mods. Fighting off these mobs while being shot at from all sides demands rapid situational analysis and reactions far beyond most shooters – it‘s almost like playing high-speed chess against an army of demons!

Weak Points and Combos For Maximum Damage

Mindlessly blasting away with your arsenal may get you through lower difficulties, but is suicide in Doom Eternal’s later levels. You need to analyze vulnerabilities of more complex demons to maximize your damage through exploding fuel tanks, breaking armor plates to expose flesh weak points and juggling enemies in the air with weapon combos. Monitoring all this in real time against the unrelenting horde pushes your multitasking to insane levels worthy of pro StarCraft players!

Resources Are Extremely Limited

Doom provides deliberately scarce resources especially health, armor and ammo to force you into harm’s way to chainsaw/glory kill demons for more. Reckless waste or poor chainsaw prioritization brings dire consequences later. Maximal efficiency and optimization separates the decent players from the untouchable gods able tap dance through the carnage unscathed on Ultra Nightmare.

Conclusion

In summary, while Dark Souls punishes the slightest mistake with instant death forcing players to slowly learn patterns through sheer grit over hours of playtime, Doom Eternal challenges speed and efficiency in processing infinite stimuli across mere seconds.

So Dark Souls may be deemed harder due to completion statistics, but mastering Doom Eternal Nightmare and Ultra Nightmare modes ultimately provides the stiffer test for seasoned FPS vets to push their mechanical skills to superhuman levels on par with professional gamers.

Either way, both represent iconic franchises beloved by the hardcore community that perfectly encapsulate their respective genres while elevating skill expression to an art form. Their sheer uncompromising difficulty produces profoundly satisfying moments of intense focus once you achieve victory.

So while the debate around Doom vs Souls may forever rage on, we can unanimously agree these two series produce some of the most challenging, viscerally enjoyable and rewarding game experiences across the medium!