Dark Souls 2 was made by a separate team and in many ways seems to completely misunderstand what made Dark Souls good. Dark Souls 3 also does to a certain extent (the level design was, in certain ways, more similar to Dark Souls 2 than 1, for example) but it is much more in line with the first game.
As for me personally (stepping out of any pretense of objectivity here) I just thought Dark Souls 2 felt somewhere between an elevated fangame and a soulless cash-grab. It seemed to think that Dark Souls was cool and popular because it was hard and you die a lot, so the best way to make a level in Dark Souls 2 is to make sure the player will die a lot and find the experience frustrating. I'm sure many of the fans of the original game will agree with me when I say that that is not why Dark Souls was cool and popular. Dark Souls was cool because every time you die, you know exactly why. You fucked up the timing, you didn't pay attention to what the environment was trying to convey to you, you didn't react fast enough, you made a mistake. The vast majority of the times I died in Dark Souls 2, until playing it for hundreds of hours and knowing all the ins and outs, I would just stare blankly at the screen and go, "Okay, yeah, I guess the game just wanted me to die. Fair enough."
If I want to play that kind of game, I'll play I Wanna Be The Guy. And don't get me wrong, I (being in the vast minority of people who live on this planet) like IWBTG and other unnecessarily, intentionally unfairly difficult games. But there's a place for them, and it's not in the Souls series.
Dark Souls 2 was made by a separate team and in many ways seems to completely misunderstand what made Dark Souls good. Dark Souls 3 also does to a certain extent (the level design was, in certain ways, more similar to Dark Souls 2 than 1, for example) but it is much more in line with the first game.
As for me personally (stepping out of any pretense of objectivity here) I just thought Dark Souls 2 felt somewhere between an elevated fangame and a soulless cash-grab. It seemed to think that Dark Souls was cool and popular because it was hard and you die a lot, so the best way to make a level in Dark Souls 2 is to make sure the player will die a lot and find the experience frustrating. I'm sure many of the fans of the original game will agree with me when I say that that is not why Dark Souls was cool and popular. Dark Souls was cool because every time you die, you know exactly why. You fucked up the timing, you didn't pay attention to what the environment was trying to convey to you, you didn't react fast enough, you made a mistake. The vast majority of the times I died in Dark Souls 2, until playing it for hundreds of hours and knowing all the ins and outs, I would just stare blankly at the screen and go, "Okay, yeah, I guess the game just wanted me to die. Fair enough."
If I want to play that kind of game, I'll play I Wanna Be The Guy. And don't get me wrong, I (being in the vast minority of people who live on this planet) like IWBTG and other unnecessarily, intentionally unfairly difficult games. But there's a place for them, and it's not in the Souls series.