Best to just keep a mustache-twirling villain one-dimensional. I actually came to hate it when writers bent over backwards to gives cartoon villains “motives”

The Night King doesn’t feel like a villain.  He’s more like a natural disaster, or Godzilla.  I like that he didn’t start explaining himself in a pleasant baritone.

I don’t expect games to be easy (though there’s nothing wrong with them being so) but I do expect them to be fun. If they can’t manage that (or if, like Kingdom Come, they go out of their way to be the opposite) then I’m not going to waste my time.

Exactly, so why bother limiting them in the first place.

There’s a difference between a game being challenging and a game being a chore. Forcing you to buy a potion just to save (I believe you can also save by finding a bonfire) is an arbitrary restriction.

“... is insane, but it’s too insane to ever be taken seriously ....”

Excalibur is a B-movie?

None of this fixes the main problem: That there are micro-transactions in a full-price game in the first place. That is not acceptable, no matter how ‘skippable’ it is.