You say it's pattern recognition as if there's some other way to make difficult boss fights. What other options are there? Every boss in every videogame as far as I can tell is about pattern recognition.
Unless someone writes an incredibly smart AI that can learn and create new moves as it goes, a developer is only going to be able to create so many different attacks. And to save the boss behaving incredibly weirdly, those attacks are probably going to be selected by some deterministic algorithm. Ergo pattern recognition!
No, I did not. I said it was simple and predictable pattern recognition.
Once AGAIN, monster hunter says hello, its BUILT off of pattern recognition, but it is far more complex and sophisticated. Dark souls enemies, have a small handful of moves, typically 3-4, often less, that they use over aqnd over again, they do not respond to differences in environment, they do not respond in differences in elevation,they dont even really respond to the player, beyond rotating to face them and dishing out their small arsenal of attacks, and they most certainly dont interact with each other. they are INCREDIBLY easy to exploit. By locking them into differences in elevation, hacking at their feet, or their head as they clumsily climb stairs and cant hit you, or say, by poking the big bad dragon in the tip of its tail 20 times with the starter spear until it DIES. See how long you can poke a Tigrex in the butt without it responding.
But thats what dark souls is its Kings field. Its predictable and heavily scripted, with fantastic atmosphere and world building. But the fact that it still punishes the player for failing doesnt make it a hard game, its not, its not any harder than its previous installments, in fact, its considerably easier and more forgiving than the rest of Kings field. Its just proof of how challenge has been completely removed from the mainstream products.
A single monster in Monster hunter has about as many moves, and more AI than every single boss in dark souls put together. Thats how simple and predictable dark souls is. The infamous red dragon on the bridge in dark souls is simply a patterned set peice.
Thats why you can kill it without it ever moving or responding to the player, by simply going under the bridge and poking its tail until it dies, or simply shooting its tail with arrows, until it dies. The red dragon practically HAS no AI, it responds to a single event, to which it does a canned arrea damage move, or it is activated and it flies around doing a pattern of attacks, across an area, without ever actually responding to the player themselves. Its simply a set peice set to perform a pattern. It performs the same pattern, the same way, every time, and the event for it to leave if the player doesnt kill it happens, the same way, every time.
Even the lowliest goofiest Bird Wyvern in Mh, makes the infamous red dragon from Dark souls bridge look like the highly scripted prop it actually is.
This will never happen in dark souls:
Things like this cant happen in a game as heavily scripted as dark souls. Its a much simpler, easier, game for combat mechanics, its literally rock paper scissors. Finding out where one should go, and when it is right for them to go there, is far more challenging than the actual combat in dark souls. Until the rename, and a reintroduction to an audience who has experienced 0 actual challenge and who thought it was a new IP, thats what the series was known for.