I wonder if the guy behind dark souls feels some regret spawning an entire generation of G*mers insufferable about difficulty in their games.
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That's just nonsense, though. Nothing about how the game is made prevents modifying the difficulty. There are mods that make the game easier, there's nothing inherent to any fromsoft game that prevents the addition of an easy mode.
It doesn't matter how it's "balanced" because it's a purely subjective thing, everyone has different abilities and the difficulty can never be perfectly tuned around each individual.
I really love that balance in fromsoft games. I love the level of tuning they do to make it feel like a fair challenge versus frustrating and cheap. I also feel that that balance is what gives the games its atmosphere and moment to moment appeal, because it forces you to consider your next step, to consider the risk/reward of going a little further vs turning back etc.
I could see how difficulty modes could cause problems or at least tons of work if they were trying to tune that balance for each difficulty. But, I'm all for accessbility options and modes. If there's an easy or accessibility option thats allows more people to play and enjoy souls without detracting from the standard experience that i enjoy then that sounds good to me.
Can we just go back to when they would admit they're whiny babies with poor impulse control who have to use the easier options because they're there?
I miss those days. It was still bullshit drivel from the spawn of Golgotha, but at least it was upfront.
"Given the chance, gamers will optimize all the fun out of a game"
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yeah, no one says Doom is easy because it has an easy mode. You can still brag about beating it on nightmare difficulty.
Some Fromsoft fans sound like fucking cult members I swear to god. Like somehow adjusting the difficulty of the game takes away from the purity of the experience or some shit or take away from the satisfaction of progression. Ohh no it'll break the delicate balance oh god.
Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It's a video game, relax.
I can't even talk to my friends about Fromsoft games because of shit like this, no "git gud" isn't a valid response to criticism made in good faith.
Long time fromsoft player and the git gud bullshit annoys the hell out of me.
It's just elitist, gatekeeping garbage. And this is coming from someone who puts my summon sign down regularly to help people.
For games built with and to some degree around cooperative gameplay, people aren't very good at being helpful to each other in discussions about the games.
That's why I don't participate in any of the online communities and just play with no headset. I'll help people defeat bosses because I have a great time doing it. Outside of that I find the community kinda off putting.
Edited to add - not all folks in the fromsoft communities are elitist, some are actually very kind, but there's just enough weird elitism that I find it to be unpleasant.
Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It's a video game, relax.
I think this might be the disconnect. If you just vibed with the scenary there isn't much to the games. You could run through the whole game in a few hours. I think Elden Ring only has four or five required boss fights and afaik every other fight is optional and you could run past all the enemies if you want to.
Much of the game - story, characters, and lore - only comes out if you spend a lot of time getting your ass kicked. Most of the game's background comes from random item drops you'd most likely miss if you got through every fight on the first try. There's a lot of information tied up in how enemies fight - similar enemies from different factions have subtly different equipment and weild different spells. Spell mechanics tie in to story stuff.
The other thing is - it's not easy to make the game easier. Most of the fighting relies on learning enemy movesets and timing. If you make the enemies deal %5 of their normal damage you're still not going to win if you can't figure out when you have openings to land hits. You'll end up being knocked down, staggered, afflicted with statuses, and all the rest of it. You could slow down the attack animations, but they'd look goofy af and become even harder to read.
As much as people scoff these games are carefully crafted works of art. There is wiggle room to make them "easier", but only so much due to the nature of the gameplay.
Additionally, the Elden Ring does have many mechanics - coop especially, to make it much more approachable to players who have struggled with previous entries in the series. I rarely seem people who complain about people who complain about the difficulty of the game discuss or engage with these systems.
Finally, i think there's a serious disconnect in the nature of the dark souls gameplay loop. You're supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you're paying attention you're figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don't enjoy that you likely won't have fun with the game.
I think a great deal of bad faith has accumulated - many people complaining about "git gud" don't seem to actually be interested in the game, only using it as a whipping boy for complaints about games gatekeeping difficulty. But dark souls and elden ring are generally the only games in the vast sea of available games discussed in this manner. It's these particular games that are essentially their own niche genre that peopke continue to be mad about over a decade after Dark Souls, despite each subsequent game having more features to make the games accessible to more people.
You're supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you're paying attention you're figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don't enjoy that you likely won't have fun with the game.
Oh, it's secretly a roguelike that's why it sucks. That makes sense, thanks.
I am a Souls fan and I agree with most of everything you say. I am also the type who plays games on the hard difficulty settings and installs mods to make it even harder. I like being challenged and forced to learn and adapt and find new ways to use the mechanics provided by the game in order to succeed. When I was younger and had more spare time I did SL1 challenge runs in the Souls games, in DS3 I got some 3/4 through all the bosses before I got a job and just didn't have the time and energy to perfect boss patterns anymore. It was very fun, my favorite bit was fighting the dope pope and changing gear during his phase switch. I found short rolls more favorable in his 1st phase as they landed me in perfect position for a punish after baiting his jumping lunge combo and long rolls more reliable during the 2nd to not get caught by the double.
However, my take on this particular subject is that I am a radical difficulty anarchist and people should be allowed to enjoy single player games in whatever ways they deem personally fun, even if it goes against the intended experience and core ideas of the game. If there was an option that allowed you to just iddqd your way through Fromsoft games or any other game where difficulty is part of the core game design, then I uncritically support their freedom to pick it and find fun in the game in their own way, even if it's just vibing and taking in the scenery without engaging with the intended process. The only truly wrong way to play a single player game is if you are not having fun.
I have played other games where hardship is an intended part of the experience yet they provide difficulty settings that let you fuck all that noise and just brute-force your way through the game if you so desire. They have a description that explains you will not get the intended experience the game was meant to convey, but they empower you to disregard it and engage the game on your own terms. I don't think the soulslike niche is in any way different or above such features and I fully support a god mode toggle that says "Hey, we worked hard to create a finely balanced gameplay loop that encourages learning from your mistakes and mastering the mechanics. We strongly believe you will get the most out of our game by giving it a chance and persevering, but if you truly do not care about that turn this on to enable chill vibes mode".
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Celeste has an assist mode, which uh I simply did not use Idk. I tortured myself with its twitch platforming and felt I overcame it, but I don't even think assist players are losing out on much.
One of the other things Gamers™ need to accept is that the designer's word is not necessarily law. As far back as the Game Genie, people will use whatever they can to experience a game and that's fine honestly. People also want different things from games. It's like the author is dead.
Just FYI, the "author is dead" thing is about interpreting a text directly according to what is actually there, without concerning yourself with what the "Author" may or may not have intended. When you talk about altering a text, by example, modding it or using a Game Genie, this is actually something quite different, because you are actually creating a new text that would then require different interpretations from the reader
I think the assist mode in Celeste is fantastic, especially since it doesn't disable any achievements AFAIK.
That's cool.
Me playing Workers and Resources, which allows you to just turn mechanics on and off mid-game (not all of them): No, I must plan my construction site's logistics perfectly! (also why would I give a shit about how other people play the game?)
(also, why do these hard game lovers not like the same hard games I like :( )
I've tried to get into Workers and Resources like 3 times now but every time I get about halfway through the tutorials before I realize I've just been clicking the buttons it told me to and haven't actually been learning anything. Then I look at how many more tutorials I need to fully comprehend before I can even start playing the game proper, and my brain just kind of shuts down.
I'm not a pro by any means, but I can probably help a little bit if you want. The basics are pretty simple (barring a couple of mechanics absent from the tutorials), mostly made more complex by a lack of a ctrl-z function and how finnicky building/terrain placement is. And certain things aren't explained (like the ratio of production buildings/vehicles, or that most of your buildings are running at under max capacity until "mid game", or that some factory connections don't need forklifts).
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I got workers and resources last week and it’s soooo good
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Not really, it's largely affectionate. I think the worst thing is probably the secret police.
Under communism, all video games will be required to include an option to launch Gamers in to the sun
You control the buttons you press. That should be the end of every discussion like this. I hate gamers so much and that includes a lot of you here.
This whole thing is a nothingburger with the right cheat codes, but because modern gamingTM can't have cheat codes for some reason, we're stuck with these pointless arguments. It's simple:
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Make the game as hard or easy as you want.
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Add a million cheat codes that gamers can use to customize how they want their personal game experience to be.
The main difference between god mode cheat code and a no-death option is that there's an understanding that if you enter in cheat codes, the game might go off the rails with sequence breaking or even softlocking, which can be overcome be inputting even more cheat codes like level warping.
Yeah, I don't care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I'll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I'll make a hard mode, you don't know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don't really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of "give the enemies more HP and damage", and "I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10" isn't a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that's obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can't demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!
I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we're still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it's going slow, people got mad about "ludonarrative dissonance" which wasn't even that fancy of a term, like "ludo"'s Latin but "narrative" and "dissonance" are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about "artistic vision", but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.
If you're looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your "vision"... then games just aren't the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what's the "right" and "wrong" way to experience a game - it's significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.
And besides - your game probably isn't some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it's some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you're a AA developer and if you don't release this one on time you're going bankrupt) is going to be. You're going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn't really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you're not Valve and you don't have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going "damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I'm just not having a good time here" and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn't necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn't in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.
100% agree. AAA games continue to ape Oscar bait Hollywood films. Like, don't you think it's weird how all this time, there isn't a genre of comedic games? Comedies are a massive film genre, but I bet you despite the thousands upon thousands of games developed per year, you probably couldn't even name 100 comedic games. Not games that have funny one-liners or funny characters, but games developed from the ground up to be comedic like how a comedy is written and directed as a comedy. And perhaps the worst part of it is that due to its interactivity, games are actually well-suited for comedy, especially physical comedy. Ludonarrative dissonance can be better resolved through lampshading in a comedic game. But because physical comedy is considered low-brow, AAA games have to chase after "emotional moments" that frankly rarely deliver. This is either done through completely noninteractive cutscenes (ie a film within a game) or something like HL2 where all the gravitas of the scene is completely undermined by the player bunnyhopping and hitting NPCs with the crowbar.
Mods make it really obvious games have massive comedic potential and are at their best when there's a degree of levity. Skyrim mods that turn swords into dildos and dragons into flying Thomas the Tank Engine far more embody the spirit of gaming than anything else.
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I blame achievements and multiplayer being considered the "real experience."
Achievements turn what used to be just self-imposed restrictions and goals into an external thing acknowledged by the game. Before, something like a pacifist run or no potions run was just something that you did for fun as a challenge. But once achievements became something explicitly acknowledged by the game, there's the question of legitimate achievements and illegitimate achievements (achievements that you got because you entered in cheat code which made getting them much easier). The easiest way to solve this is to just not have cheat codes, which leads to stigmatization as cheat codes are no longer part of a typical gaming experience.
Multiplayer just made people try to judge singleplayer game with multiplayer criteria, so people think entering in a cheat code is the same as running an aimbot. It's also the reason why people obsess over balance even in singleplayer games where balance isn't even that important. Weapon A being better than Weapon B literally doesn't matter if the game acknowledges that Weapon A is better than Weapon B, the least clumsy way being through lore. There was a time when singleplayer was the authentic experience and multiplayer was just something tacked on. Now, it's the complete opposite.
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I really wish more games had higher difficulty options, but that doesn't mean I want everyone to suffer the way I do. Accessibility is good!
People here will probably disagree with me but hear me out.
Easy mode is not Accessibility. It is a shitty way to carter for accessibility, the only thing the devs do is change some numbers in the code and voiala the game now has accessibility?
The best example that I can think of good accessibility is with Nier Replicant and Nier Automata. In Replicant you have options to play with only one hand and customize the controls to your liking and in Automata on easy mode you can equip chips with different abilities like auto aim, auto dodge, auto attack, auto shoot and they take up space so you can't equip every chip + DMG UP/Heal/HP Up etc. So people can customize their experience and make the game do things that they can't or don't want to do while playing and focus only on what they find rewarding.
Another point: I don't think that every game is for everyone and the artist shouldn't bend his vision to accommodate to the audience. If Myazaki doesn't think there should be an easy mode in her games fine, but what her games should have is a proper accessibility mode. To compare with cinema: movies shouldn't be dumbed down to a wider audience understand it, but all movies need subtitles and descriptive audio.
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I've been cooking this take and Im gunna say it:
THE NEXT FROMSOFT SOULS GAME SHOULD HAVE AN EASY MODE
Argument: several Castlevania games had difficulty options. The NES ones did not, but Bloodlines on the MD had two characters sort of represent different difficulties, and you could increase your starting lives. Nobody says Bloodlines is easy.
Castlevania Chronicles on the Playstation has literal difficulty selection, actually a littany of options and modes. Nobody says Chronicles is easy.
Dork Soles is as close as you can get to 3D Castlevania. There's a throughline between fighting axe knights in Castlevania 1 and fighting silver knights in Dark Souls 1. Dork Soles doesn't have the platforming focus because that shit's unplayable, but the games have a very similar spirit. So put Easy or an Assist mode in Dork Soles IV.
This position is unassailable and any attempt to disagree will prove nothing other than that you are a nerd and a g*mer
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And yet he is not good at games. He is a nerd.
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Yes very true thank you for saying
Imagine acknowledging different perspectives! Gamers could never!
are something else. No clue where that analogy is going