My understanding of Dark Souls is that the flow of time is not really, er...linear? Insofar as characters from different times and places pop in and out of existence as you go along your quest, which is also kind of handwavey for the player connecting with other players to go through areas and see characters or defeat bosses which they may have already defeated or interacted with. Like, I don't know that the player's tromping around of Anor Londo is really meant to represent what Anor Londo would look like hundreds of years after its fall or whatever...buuut I guess I don't know that it isn't, either. Also, on a side-note, I'm pretty sure the Warriors of Sunlight do not worship Gwyn but rather the disgraced and forgotten son (who, officially, actually turned out to be...someone else from Dark Souls 3, despite the fact that Dark Souls III would necessarily have to take place even later than the events of Dark Souls 1, so never mind Solaire and how old he might've been). I know people also liked to read into the placement of corpses of certain characters (e.g. Lautrec after you defeat him in his own world) and also how they like, instantly become ancient petrified corpses that seem like they must've always been there despite the fact that they weren't just moments ago, as if this also plays into the non-linear flow of time rather than the fact that making custom corpses for each important character would be wasted dev effort on a game where a hundred stationary dragon butts were copy and pasted in an otherwise empty giant lava pit. Maybe all that nonsense was actually a real thing deliberately designed that way, but I don't care: characters are what draw me to stories, but the motley crew of mostly passive and background-y characters a fully compelling world and story do not exactly make.
The combination of jankiness and unfairness is a big part of the fun...but then again, one of my favorite things in DS1 PvP was invading someone and being faced with a team of three or four because they'd summoned gold and white spirits and had set themselves up specifically to murder invaders like me (and kept using the Dried Finger in order to draw more invaders in rather than suffer the usual ten or maybe fifteen minute invasion pause that would normally happen after you were invaded). The ensuing back alley knife fight to survive that ambush and take out the host using any means I could despite the long odds made it worth all the while. Or on the other extreme end of the spectrum, invading someone, realizing they're basically helpless, and just playing with them by trying to land a successful grab-and-kiss animation with the Dark Hand heavy attack before White Crystalling out... It doesn't even do any damage, it's just cute and funny. I suppose it does steal a Humanity if they've got any, but I usually dropped them a Soul of a Great Hero or something while I was doing an emote before leaving anyways.
Yeah, I think I disabled my network adapter every time I played Dark Souls 2. I hated the movement in the game too much and just wanted it to be over with, getting randomly ganked by other players wasn't going to make it any better. Now I've been using simplewall for like five or six years on all of my personal Windows devices, which makes application and service white/blacklisting via Windows' built-in filtering only take like literally three or four seconds, so it would be super easy to just turn off Dark Souls' internet connectivity. Windows' default firewall controls are super tedious to deal with on an application-by-application basis, I'll never go back to it for my own devices when I just want most programs to automatically have their connectivity blocked (which simplewall enables you to do with a whitelist & notify system - you start up a program for the first time, simplewall automatically pops you a notification asking whether or not you want to add it to the whitelist, click yes or no, it'll remember your choice and not prompt you the next time, done...go into the UI and checkmark the box next to it if you change your mind; if for some reason you don't hit yes or no, it defaults to no, so everything is automatically blocked when you run it for the first time).