"I mean, how many medieval RPGs do people want to play?…"

Well, personally, I could play RPGs in a medival setting forever. I doubt I'll ever tire of it.

Especially in the US, people were shocked that you could die in the tutorial.

I hope PB won't take ques from the U.S. feed-me-with-a-spoon-and-reward-me-NOW mentality that we have here. People worldwide, more than not, want games to be challenging and purposefully NOT easy - particularly RPGs type games.

Considering the wild popularity of the just-released Dark Souls (and it's sobering level of difficulting) I think the pendulum is at last swinging away from make-it-easy-and-instantly-gratifying and heading back in the other direction of 80s style challening. I hope Dark Souls will be a commercial success as well as a critical one to keep this momentum going.

I'm currently replaying Gothic 1 which is quite challenging and ridiculously interesting. Playing it again after all these years is great because while I have some idea of the game from having played it over a decade ago, I've also forgotten quite a lot about it making it interesting to play all over again.

In G1 I constantly die. I constantly don't have enough skill points. I constantly don't have enough money (ore) to buy things I NEED. I frequently have to reload to earlier saves because a choice I made earlier on had an outcome I don't want. And I love it.