I think Kojima gets it. For a lot of players, esp. on the more cinematic games, the story is the main driver and the action is how it progresses. The games I’ve played that were ordeals are often the ones I’ve given up on. It’s the ones you can start on story mode with, enjoy the narrative and then re-play at the harder levels that I’ve stuck with.
Personally I don’t like replaying games, so this wouldn’t work for me. Generally, story-driven games are easy, so it’s rarely an issue.
If you don’t enjoy a game, there are countless others to play. Not saying this as a ‘fuck off, this isn’t for you’. But genuinely - there are so many games, and no single game should be for everyone. It’s perfectly normal that we all have our own unique preferences.
There are a few games that I’ve dropped due to their gameplay, but wanted to finish the story. So I watched playthroughs of them. Was it at all an issue for me? Absolutely not. Do I wish the game fit my preferences better? Uhh, I guess? But then it would have been ruined for everyone else, so it doesn’t really make sense.
I watched the playthrough of Death Stranding, as it got too depressing for me about halfway through. Totally get it. I paid a lot for it though, so felt kinda bummed that I’d dropped that cash and coulnd’t muster the energy to play it to the end.
On the other hand, I’ve got over 2,000 hours in on No Man’s Sky, (I’m playing in creative mode now and having a blast building cool bases in breathtaking locations) which I got on sale through GOG for 10 bucks, so I suppose it balances out.
The one that I’ve come to a complete stop in is The Talos Principle, and I love it but just can’t seem to finish it. Has been as frustrating to finish as Firmanent, which was built for VR so playing it in 2D leaves a lot to be desired - there’s a ton of items that require exact placement and it’s hard as hell to see how to manipulate then w/o the 3D… Oyyyy.
I think he’s entirely right for the kind of game he usually makes.
I also think not having difficulty settings is the right approach for souls games, it would destroy the vision.
Different people are looking for different things. Sometimes, the same person is looking for different things. I play story games on difficulties I don’t struggle on, more gameplay-focused games I like making hard and struggling with them.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
I mean, presumably because it’d compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn’t mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.
I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn’t conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It’s not about their vision being intact or not; it’s about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Like I love the Kingdom Hearts series and was able to play it and fall in love with them as a kid on normal and sometimes beginner difficulty. As an adult I play critical because it makes me engage with all of the mechanics of the game. But I would have unlikely got to the point of being able to play at that level if I couldn’t work my way up through Normal > Proud > Critical.
The same admiration you have to grinding on a single playthrough to overcome an intended challenge can still be obtained through multiple playthroughs of increasing difficulty.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
You’re missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn’t work with the game’s structure, wouldn’t be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.
You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
[CITATION NEEDED]
It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.
Let’s take Elden Ring as an example: how do you scale poise? Is the player harder to stagger? Are enemies easier to stagger? How about status effects? Can you trigger hemorrhage with less hits on low difficulty? Dodge frames? Parry timing?
That’s just off the top head, there’s tons more mechanics I’ve never even touched in there.
Combat systems (which is 95% of what difficulty affects) can get so much more complicated than just HP/Armor. And that makes scaling more them just percentages of damage in/damage out.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it’s a gross injustice to blame lazy devs for not implementating a system that probably takes weeks if not months to create and balance.
Sure, a complex difficulty system that the user can tweak is nicer to have. But making the player take more hits to kill is pretty simple and could be argued as an accessibility feature.
How exactly is that an accessibility feature…? No seriously I sound like I’m being shitty (and that’s because in a small way I am, this conversation is deeply personally insulting) but I’m really curious why this is being considered accessibility when what we’re doing, the actual push for accessibility in gaming, is all things like allowing people to access the games not coddling people to where they have to have their own special extra-easy game modes.
Things like support for 3rd party controllers, key rebinding, compatibility with external sound processing equipment, video setting adjustment (remove particle effects or other visual noise, colorblind modes, onscreen hilighting) are all the things we’re actually fighting for broad inclusion into videogames. Mandatory godmode isn’t, and it’s so dumb that it sounds like some kind of philosophical false-flag dreamed up by the conservatives to discredit the concept of disability accommodation in general…
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay.
Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Strawman me harder, zaddy!
No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.
It would also seem like bad business to leave it out of your niche game, unless the niche is specifically about the difficulty level. Why would you want to eliminate whole chunks of your already limited number of potential customers by only offering a very challenging difficulty?
I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.
How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.
I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.
Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.
It is neither lazy nor not fun.
Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.
“All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…
With difficulty options you will still get that, in fact you may get it better. Maybe for a specific game the difficulty needs to be lower or even higher for you to find that sweet spot.
This just is not true for souls like games. The difficulty is a core part of the experience, and lowering it would literally compromise the artistic vision
If difficulty is just hit points, higher difficulties are not really enjoyable. Adjusting hit points, items, weapon damage, etc. together to achieve good flow on every difficulty is not an easy task.
They don’t have to go all out. Shitty easier/harder difficulties that just multiply or divide values in a basic manner is better than nothing at all.
Devs should absolutely just focus on the difficulty specific experience they planned but nothing is stopping them from doing the bare minimum. And if you have good coding practices, it’s easy as fuck to implement with the difficulty menu itself likely to be the hardest part to implement after the fact.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
This is not a universal response. Some people like difficult games for many reasons. Overcoming a challenge can give me a taste of triumph absent from my day job.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details.
I suppose it’s not the game maker’s responsibility to stop people from ruining their own experiences. I’m pretty confident that some people would just easy-mode through dark souls and have a vastly diminished experience. “I don’t see the big deal. It’s just an action game”, they might say, because easy mode gave unlimited healing and no monster respawn. The difficulty (which is vastly overstated) is part of what makes it work. People remember Blight Town and Sen’s Fortress because of the ordeal. I can’t remember a single dungeon from Skyrim.
Furthermore, meta game options found in menus is not the only way to do difficulty options. Elden Ring, for example, is very generous with spirit summons.
No one is asking devs to remove hard mode. They are asking them to include an easy mode for people who can’t deal with hard mode. People with physical or mental barriers, people who don’t have time, or really any reason.
This is no different than inclusivity.
YOU might not remember anything that wasn’t challenging but that doesn’t mean it’s like that for others. I remember everything from Skyrim. I love Skyrim. I had fun with it so I remember it.
I don’t remember much from Elden ring cus I never made it. I struggled at it and couldn’t her anywhere.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
Elden ring opened the gate so wide that we got newcomers trashing on some gameplay features which have been a staples of those games since from software started making them. At some point gatekeeping ensure that you don’t alienate the players who played all your games and played a big part on your success. Cause the wider you want to open the gate and the more you have to move away from your vision. Imo not all games are meant for everyone and that’s fine.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
See, here’s the thing about Elden Ring (especially compared to older FromSoft games imo), you can do this right in the game. A boss kicking your ass? Walk away, go somewhere else and come back when you’ve leveled up more, maybe gotten some extra flasks for healing or upgraded your armor and weapons. Does Elden Ring do it well enough? That’s up for debate and I have some complaints in that department myself (the final boss of the DLC before the nerf is the only time that I’ve ever put down the controller and decided that beating a FromSoft boss simply wasn’t worth the effort - especially after looking at the wiki and seeing one attack that needs a frame perfect dodge to avoid being hit and another where they straight up said “we don’t know how you’re supposed to dodge this attack”), but it is built right into the game.
But after at a certain point, accessibility comes at compromising design integrity. Every piece of media doesn’t have to cater to everyone. I don’t see people complaining about Andy Warhol gatekeeping because colorblind people can’t see all his paintings. Or that Ozzy Osbourne didn’t make enough country music songs. But with games, it’s a different story. People complain constantly about games not catering to everybody. Bennett Foddy made an entire game to talk about this. It’s called Getting Over It, and it’s considered one of the hardest games of all time. If you’ve never seen it, I highly suggest reading his monologue at least, as I think it’s very relevant to any conversation about game difficulty, especially Souls games which are the most frequent subject of this discussion.
This game is an homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled ‘Sexy Hiking.’ The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.
In a certain way, Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It’s built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it’s one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it’s flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer, or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly, in danger of falling and losing everything.
Anyway, when you start Sexy Hiking, you’re standing next to a dead tree, which blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up. And there’s a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogames are fake; you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method or the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixelated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.
The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I’m not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing, and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I’d have an idea for a new obstacle, and I’d build it, test it, and it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault, as a player, rather than as the builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.
When you’re building a video game world, you’re building with ideas, and that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them, they begin to harden and set until they are immutable, like rock. At that point, you can’t change the world. Not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.
One of the things people love about Souls games is the challenge of it - not difficulty, as difficulty for the sake of difficulty is bad design (see my complaints above), but the challenge of learning how a boss moves like you’d learn the rhythm to a dance or a song. You’ll get pushback because Souls games cater to a specific audience who crave that kind of struggle. The story, music, and world of FromSoft games are great, but these gamers feel that without the obstacles to overcome, the games would be missing a core component of what makes them great, and that by removing it you would cheapen the experience for yourself. Like wanting to play a city builder but you don’t want to have to place any roads. At that point, why not just watch a playthrough on YouTube?
For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad or that they’re badly made, although a lot of them are - I mean that they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.
Over time, we’ve poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh, untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua France of tue digital age. You could build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.
Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash heap of creativity’s fountain. A landfill of everything we’ve ever thought of in it, grand, infinite, and unsorted.
…
Everything’s fresh for about six seconds, until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there’s years of persevering disappearing into the pile, out of style, out of sight.
In this context, it’s tempting to make friendly content that’s gentle, that lets you churn through it but not earn it. Why make something demanding, if it’s just gonna get piled up in the landfill, filed with the bland things?
When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that. They want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that’s not you, you’re an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.
Now I know, most likely you are watching this on YouTube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you. Like a baby bird being fed chewed up food. And that’s culture too.
But on the off chance that you are playing this, what I’m saying is trash is disposable, but it doesn’t have to be approachable. What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far. Feeling frustrated, it’s underrated.
An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice.
It feels like we’re closer now. Composer and climber, designer and user. You could have refused but you didn’t. There was something hidden in you that chose to continue.
It means a lot to me that you’ve come this far, endured this much, every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback you’ve forgiven me is a kingly gift that you’ve given me.
Have you ever thought about who you are in this? Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you his hand? Are you the top of his hammer? I think not - where your hand moves, the hammer may not follow, nor the man, nor the man’s hand. In this, you are his WILL. His intent. His embodied resolve in his uphill ascent.
Now, you’ve conquered the ice cliffs, the platforms, the church, the rectory, the living room, the factory, the playground, and the construction site, the granite rocks, and the lakeside. You’ve learned to hike. There’s no way left to go but up, and in a moment, I’ll shut up, but let me say, I’m glad you came.
I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far, I give it to you with all my love.
“If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them”
–Andrei Tarkovsky
I really don’t think that’s a productive use of “gatekeeping”.
Do you apply this to other mediums? There are books and movies that are difficult to follow, but no one demands that authors and publishers release a simpler edition. Video games seem to be an exception.
Accessibility like “let me remap the controls” or “give me subtitles” is a whole different beast from “let me be invulnerable”. Treating those as the same is strange to me.
I’m not particularly against difficulty options. I didn’t have the patience to finish Nine Sols without turning the difficulty down. I wouldnt have felt “gate kept” if I just had to put the game down without finishing it.
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison. Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
Almost all the time this is brought up it’s for single player games. Why do you care if I need a bit more health to get through it? How does that take anyone away from you? I assure you nothing will be lost by allowing people to play it with double the health, or without a arbitrary grinding mechanic that inflates the games length, or whatever really.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
They can play it (assuming they have the money to buy the software and hardware, but that’s a whole other accessibility problem). There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to 100% it. I don’t think it’s axiomatic that everyone should be able to 100% every game.
You’re right that it doesn’t really matter in single player games. I did once have an argument on this topic where the other person said they should be able to change the rules in multiplayer to suit their desires. They wanted more forgiving dodge windows, just for them, unilaterally. That can fuck off.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison.
Why not?
Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
There are let’s plays and wikis for games.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
In some cases, they are. It’s cliché now, but part of the story of dark souls is often cited repeatedly struggling against an uncaring, dying, world until you persevere. If you rip that out and make all the creatures docile, I don’t know if I would call it “dumbed down” but it would certainly be a substantial change. Sometimes the medium is the message. But, often, you are correct that it is not really the case.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
No one’s arguing against accessibility for controls. I’m not even against well done difficulty options. (The Bethesda style “we just give the enemies more health and damage” is a poorly done difficulty slider, in my view). I just think “I cannot hear so I need subtitles” and “I just want to win on the first try” don’t belong together.
Though, introspecting a little, I think what’s going on is maybe ableism or something like it. I don’t actually believe some of the people who say “this game is too hard. I want an easy mode” are disabled. I read them as just half-assing it. Like someone who wants to play pro soccer but doesn’t want to actually get in shape so run, so they want a smaller field. And, as you say, it doesn’t really matter what someone does in a single player game on their own time, but for some reason it irritates me when someone’s like “I’m just as disabled as that blind guy” when they’re perfectly capable, they just haven’t practiced. Something about “I’ve spent an hour on this task and I haven’t mastered it, I’m disabled” sits wrong with me.
Difficulty options still allow you to play them at their intended difficulty. Letting someone else play the game easier doesn’t stop you from playing it at a higher difficulty. In fact with options you could make it even harder for yourself than you would’ve done otherwise and feel even more rewarded when overcoming it.
Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.
The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!
This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.
I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.
Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.
If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.
Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.
I think it’s an age gap 9f when you started gaming. If you were a gamer back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you played because it was a challenge to overcome and that’s what you enjoyed.
You didn’t want to “play” a game. You wanted to “beat” a game. No one played Mike Tysons Punch Out for the story. It was a challenge that took many hours worth of attempts, trial and error, and skill to beat. You liked it and remembered it because it was hard.
Part of the reason they were hard back then was due to file size and lack of saving and such, so hard games took longer to be bored of and sold better, but those were the games that we got hooked on. The challenge. New gamers are hooked on the stories and the entertainment, which is all well and good. Just a different type of crack.
I started gaming in 1983. (with Pac-Man!) I played games then because I enjoyed the gameplay and only suffered through the difficulty of the NES era because was either that or you didn’t play at all. I prefer easier games now.
That said, I think the hardest thing I’ve done in the modern era is this level in Rayman Legends. I still can’t believe I actually had the patience to do it over and over until I beat it.
A lot of hobbies like gardening, sports, chess require effort, why is it necessary for video games to be easy?
Forcing some challenge gets you to engage with more things rather than taking the easy way out. It’s like bungee jumping (I’d assume), sometimes a push is necessary to experience something new.
Some of my favourite moments were trying Fire Emblem Ironmans, which initially made me go “this is stupid, I’ll regret this, I should reload”, only to change to “this is peak”
Options don’t stop you from having those moments in fact they make it more possible for you to find the difficulty for those moments. For you and everyone else.
I’m not sure there’s an agreed upon definition of “artificial difficulty”. The whole game is artificial so I’m not sure what “natural difficulty” would be.
Sports are games and have some degree of artificial difficulty. The size of the goal and ball, for example, is arbitrary (within the bounds of practicality. No moon sized basketballs, for example)
But that doesn’t really address what I was trying to get it. I feel like sometimes people online complain about “artificial difficulty” in video games, and it’s unclear what they actually want. I’ve seen it applied to everything from “The enemies hide around corners” to “you can’t quicksave”. I think it’s a kind of duckspeak thing that people say to just mean “i don’t like it” while making it sound less subjective.
A list of every single game with difficulty settings? Or just one example, such as Death Stranding, which was explicitly referenced in the original post?
If the main difficulty is intentional, then it’s not an artifical barrier, the easy mode is an artificial easener. How easy is easy enough? Some people can’t beat Clair Obscur on the story mode (presumably by not doing side content) In case of gardening, it’d be getting someone to garden for you, and just chilling with the results.
Let’s plays/walkthroughs exists, and only lock you out of interactivity. And interactivity doesn’t mean much if every option beats the game.
Case in point, if I see some post-game superboss with lore behind it, I just look up the thing online.
You’ll have to do a little more legwork to make that connect back to the idea it’s being used to support, which correct me if I’m mistaken is that every game needs to make all of its content easily received or it’s not valid art/less valuable/somehow problematic.
You don’t demand a guarantee that you’ll finish every book you’ll buy and you don’t hate every song you can’t dance to, why are games different? They’re different because you think of games as purely entertainment, and you don’t respect it as art. If you did, you would not be arguing that creators should conform to your personal preferences.
I’m not arguing that every game must cater to my casual needs. What I’m expanding upon the op is that art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it. Artists like game devs are free to make the kind of games they want, but it is a balance between making the game attractive and marketable and making something only the most purist will like. Concessions are to be made for the game to be accessible, as you will have to sell it to make a profit. All the examples are from commercial games that need a consumer base to buy it.
Some will criticize Elden ring for being a bit more easy and approachable (than previous DS), because they are used to the elitist view that games must be difficult to play. But on the other hand, all gamers that had fun playing their own way are valid. Some will like having a hard time, some will like having an easier path to progress.
In the end, if you make art you want for others to see it. If your game doesn’t sell because only hardcore players can progress, it could be seen as a failure for your art to be spread. It’s also certainly a business failure as well.
So as I said, it’s a balance and there is no right or wrong way to do it. People can still discuss what their preferences are, be it hard games or story mode for easy gameplay.
I’m not 12 anymore so I don’t have time to learn, memorize and train for some of the newer games. I can appreciate games that include an easy path for me, allowing me to experience their art. Unlike eg. the Dark Souls universe where I’ll never truly experience it because it’s too hard for me.
Devs are then free to take this feedback into consideration for their next game.
it is. but if the reason that you think something is poor is because you were not the target audience, you can come across as entitled and clueless. it is not like their games pretend to be easy games, it is clear from the start that that the challenge is part of the design
It’s like making music and experimenting with discordant harmonies and unusual rhythms. Art can be challenging, it can require engagement and time and study to fully experience. It can make people uncomfortable and it can appeal to only a small audience and still be good.
Is poor the word you’d use for art that fails to be amusing and charming? Because a lot of art is not trying to be amusing and charming.
Edit: I don’t care if people disagree, but at least have an answer. Not liking art because it wasn’t intended to be delightful and pleasing is not how to do art criticism.
Ah, I think there’s a bit of a disagreement here between what types of art are respectable and what types aren’t. For context, I subscribe to the definition of art that says “everything made with intent” is some form or other of art.
Suppose you go to a gallery. Would you consider handicap-hostile architecture, which is part of the exhibit itself, to be worth respecting as a art enthusiast? (Stairs required to be used in order to see a painting, specifically because the artist wants you tired from walking, not pushing a wheelchair, which they don’t like, when you look at it, for example.)
I could see it both ways, but I fall more on the side of accessibility. If an artist requires someone to use stairs to see their art, they are an asshole, regardless of how good their paintings actually are.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that I’d rather be having. Thank you! I’ll try to disagree at least interestingly.
I subscribe to the idea that art is the study of choice, and that’s fairly close to your definition of art, but the difference is that I’m not saying I can draw a circle around what is and isn’t art. Gun to my head, I’d probably define it as something like “anything done with aesthetic intent”, to exclude the act of intentionally kicking a puppy as performance art. We intend many things in life, many of which are also intentionally artless.
I think I see what you’re driving at with the bit about ramps. To hew to the heart of the matter as the metaphor applies to video games, I would still call that exhibit art - it would simply be limited in how successfully it achieved what it was attempting, which is a severe flaw. I would want to talk about how it could have better achieved its aims. The aim of such an art installation could have merit, if it was more intelligently done.
The reason I do not place the accessibility question from the metaphor on the same level as difficulty in video games is that completion of a game is, I would submit, something that the creator should only endeavour to guarantee if they believe completion of the game is part of the intended experience. I would caution against taking this as a maxim.
When media is highly interactive, as with games, it is a mistake to take it as an implicit assumption that that this media must be completable by a broad majority of participants. Booksellers do not make such guarantees, and books are far less interactive.
If we all raise our voices on behalf of accessibility proponents with the idea that games that are not as easily completed are of lesser value, or if we even become so strident that we say they are not even art, we are limiting the space of an art form that is still in its nascence. We are very permissive with other, older art forms (and they have all taken their lumps with highly prescriptive and proscriptive schools of thought, over the years). It would be like saying music with too many notes isn’t music, or that music isn’t good if I can’t personally dance to it. Those are preferences, not art critiques. We should be asking how the choices of a game developer serve or betray their creative aims. We won’t always get what we want out of every game, but at least we’ll have better conversations.
I like games that take a generous view of accessibility, and I respect that vision. Celeste is a masterpiece. I like games that take a stern view of difficulty also, when it serves their aesthetic vision in a meaningful way.
That last bit is easy to get wrong, and I respect people who struggle with the subject of difficulty in how it interacts with creative ideas, but I have less time for people who hate the music just because they can’t dance to it. That’s not always the point.
It’s like with any other art. Some of it is a simple pleasure, and some of it wants you to struggle. Some people read Gwenpool, some people read Cerebus.
This isn’t a very honest argument. If the only saving grace of the game was its difficulty, nobody would mind not being able to finish it.
Something is lost and gained with every substantive choice in game design. That’s what makes the choices interesting, and worth discussion.
Let’s play with that idea. Take one of my favourite games of all time, Morrowind. It’s hard to get through, maybe. Weird UI, weird bad combat. Those are flaws. But it also has a big fat 0 to 100 difficulty slider. Is that a flaw? I would argue no, because in that game the intended struggle is to engage with the world and the story on your own terms. The combat is all window dressing for the real struggle, which is with the story’s frustrating ambiguities.
In the case of Morrowind, some of the difficulty fails to serve the intended experience and some of it supports that vision wonderfully. It’s not a flawless game, but importantly I am discussing how the difficulty helped or hindered the creative vision. That is art criticism, and it’s a more interesting conversation than arguing over personal preferences.
Why are you pushing to deprive people of challenging games where they know everyone playing it is playing on the same level field? Even if it’s single player, a lot of games are a social experience.
Your point seems to be like not making an easy mode is being evil, yet you denounce players that specifically want games like that. It boggles my mind, there’s plenty games with all the freaking sliders you want, let us have our games.
Why would you want to denounce your audience this opportunity?
Yeah, that exactly, people who dislike hard games are not the audience of hard games and it’s weird for you to take issue with that. Full disclosure, I tend to cheese the fuck out of hard games with the tools they give me, I like to find the way to make the game “easy as fuck” via tools in the game instead of a slider, it creates the illusion that I’m smart and I like that.
I enjoyed expedition 33 and cyberpunk but they are a different experience than dark souls, no rest for the wicked, path of exile, last epoch… Sorry for the long post.
How does someone beating a game on “story” mode reduce your enjoyment of beating it on “nightmare”? I don’t get it. We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
(Assuming we’re talking about single player, obv.)
Even if the game is single player, some games are a social experience. You discuss in forums, with friends, about your experience, and when I want that kind of experience difficulty levels cheapen the social aspect of the single player game.
This is not new either, I remember talking to friends about how I beat the water temple in ocarina of time as a kid. Everyone who beta it had to go through beating it and it gave them something to talk about. It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode, it’s not the same shared experience.
I guess my answer is that no game is truly single player because humans are social creatures. And again, there are games catered to your interests so it’s not like either of us is suffering from a shortage of enjoyment.
It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode
What’s the difference between saying, “I beat that level” for a game with only one difficulty setting and saying, “I beat that level on hard mode” for a game with multiple difficulty settings?
Multiple difficulty settings never stopped people from talking or bragging about accomplishments in Doom.
It doesn’t feel the same. I enjoy knowing that when someone on the internet or on forums complains about X that my experience matches theirs without having to look for the difficulty they played on. It’s not really bragging rights, but knowing that everyone in the community is having the same shared experience, no need of tags or anything. It’s a social thing for me more than anything.
Then there’s the matter of Devs being able to fine tune things better if they don’t need to care about multiple patterns, progression levels, etc. I won’t get to those because while important, the point I wanted to make is that single difficulty games allows for a shared experience between players which facilitates more community. You can have it with different difficulties but that breeds elitism and fuck that, everyone on the same field and that’s it.
I mean it both ways btw, some games are easier and that’s how you are supposed to experience them, ex: Slimer Rancher
Every time there’s a multiple diff game I always search for the one devs “intended” originally because it’s the most fine-tuned and the expected experience (usually the one before the hardest diff), but I prefer not having to make that choice.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
This is all a very flimsy excuse for annoying gate keeping.
Pretending that difficulty tuning has to suffer if there is more than one difficulty is absurdly nonsensical.
Of all the parts of a game that take significant effort, this is not one.
Studios literally already tune their games for a specific difficulty firstly usually, and tune up or down from there.
You are just imagining that magically one difficulty means higher quality difficulty.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
This is such an absurd prick opinion that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Who in the fuck buys any media they don’t intend on being able to finish. What???
You think people are buying books they think they’ll want to stop reading half way? Movies they’ll want to walk out of?
How did you get so deluded you even thought you were making a cogent argument here.
We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.
Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?
Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?
A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality,
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them. They’re allowed to review it poorly if they’ve bought it, and they’re allowed to shit on it for not being to their liking just as you’re allowed to praise it.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.
If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience. You have no evidence for this. You just want it to be true to justify the gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
Using fancy verbal diarrhea to say exactly the same thing is not convincing.
You are absolutely gatekeeping as you want games not to have options because you think people should play the game how you want to play games.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
You absolutely are the selfish ones here. I mean look at that ridiculously bad faith summary of the comments here.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
They aren’t at all unreasonable for doing so. This specific excerpt from you is such nonsensical double speak, where you start by saying yes people can criticize, but finish by calling people selfish for not liking aspects you like.
Im sure youll try to weasel around that being what you’ve done, but thats what it is.
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience.
This is a bs weasel though, because many of the people are the intended audiences. These arent crazy mismatches, these are developers being stubborn and stuck up in bougie, high artsy, self important ways that a great deal of their playerbases don’t appreciate.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Its a silly, childish black and white view solely there so you can continue to be angry at people for being critical about the aspects of a game you gatekeep around.
Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is.
Why? This is you pretending to be for open conversation but not at all being… This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
Adding difficulty options does not cheapen the game, it widens its appeal and makes games far more fun for a larger amount of people without subtracting from the experience for others.
For instance, lets say you have a game that has painful backtracking that a large number of people complain about. Who does it harm to have a setting to skip the painful backtracking? Fucking nobody.
You can’t argue even for a second that this ruins the experience for those that say they do like the painful backtracking as this by no means would take away from their experiences, yet you would argue that people shouldn’t complain or ask that developers include that because you want to gatekeep experiences.
Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
This is a bullshit way of you insisting your (shitty) opinion is objective (where you think people shouldn’t complain about things you like) while pretending people stating their opinions are somehow doing exactly what you’re actually doing.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
In addition to this if you were to implement sliders for each one of those features separately (neverminding how you’d do something like level architecture) what you end up takes both additional developer time and may not be as good. The fine tunings don’t fit together as nicely; it’s the difference between a model kit you buy and assembly yourself vs. one that comes premade form the manufacturer. There are different tolerances here and I think you need to get some dev perspective on this at this point.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.”
Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but when the dev of the game itself says “naw” and the game is so popular it literally spawns its own subgenre with millions of adoring fans and you’re trying to armchair unnecessary solutions to things people don’t think are problems, I ask again who is being selfish. This game ain’t for you, dawg.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Miss me with that sales speak. Disgusting. We’re talking art here. Gross.
This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll? But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online and then actually playing them. I think I’m gonna go beat Dark Souls again while you mald.
FINAL EDIT: Cheat. Just cheat. We’ve already established elsewhere in this topic that I and many others DON’T actually care about the “sanctity” of the game, that’s a talking point people like you made up to throw around, mostly. Nobody cares. Get a cheat engine and double soul drops. Crank your stats. Enable one hit kills. Cheat. Don’t care, cheat.
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
If anything there is spicy then yes, definitely more difficult for some people to eat, and obviously they have spicy shit it’s a vietnamese restaurant. Restaurants don’t pay you to eat their food, but they also don’t take requests beyond relatively minor variations on their pre-selected menu. Quit expecting the world to revolve around you, put some effort into finding the developers that are doing what you want and patronize them instead of complaining about the existence of games that are not made for you.
And if you order something spicy then you get something spicy, yes, and if you complain that the restaurant serves things that are spicier than you enjoy you will be politely asked to leave. If you don’t like Dark Souls then don’t purchase and consume goddamned Dark Souls, simple as.
Easy games are fine. It can be a nice way to just plow through a good story. However, I’m absolute trash at games and beating Dark Souls was one of the best and most memorable gaming experiences I’ve ever had. (it took me well over 200 hrs because I am a garbage-person) Had the game been easier I don’t think it would have hit the same way.
That’s not to say every game has to be like that but it’s great when it works
Celeste is the perfect embodiment of that philosophy IMO. The whole story is an explicit metaphor for overcoming a great personal challenge. And the gameplay’s difficulty is what drives that point home and makes the game an all-time great.
I’ve seen a couple streamers with G4m3r Skillz breeze through Celeste, and the game didn’t leave them much of an impression. But it touches very deeply those who struggled through it because the struggle is the bond that ties the player to Madeline.
Other games it doesn’t really matter. Portal 2 is a great game even if the puzzles are quite easy, because the greatness lies in its writing, atmosphere and worldbuilding. There’s an Aperture miniseries just begging to be made - but a Dark Souls or Celeste cinematographic adaptation would miss the entire point.
With mods it’s an option and it definitely wouldn’t have hit the same way. The whole point of souls games is overcoming challenges with practice. Too many people avoid challenging themselves and it’s a real problem I’ve seen in many people. That’s why you see people who waste away at the same job and same level for years instead of taking chances and risks and pushing themselves to try something new. I’ve known people with budding talent in things like music that gave up because they weren’t instantly the best at it. Not everything in life will be easy, or instant, or convenient. Too many people either forget that or don’t realize it. Some things take hard work and practice and they are extremely rewarding when you put in the work.
Would you complain that a rubiks cube is too hard or a crossword puzzle or anything else that’s designed to challenge you?
Doing Fire Emblem soft Ironmans (not reloading when a unit permadies) made me love the series even more, it went from “ughhhh do I really have to move on without this guy? This sucks, what if I’m underpowered later” to “I lost 40 people and died for the first time at the penultimate map, this is a beautiful, sorrowful story”.
I now let a unit or two die even when playing for the first time, because it basically adds your own personal death scenes to the story. I will always pay respects to wolf boy who died to make that one final push happen, or respect the axe bro who went through his Kratos arc with a dead wife, kid and second dead wife.
Playing Final Fantasy Tactics as a kid basically made me refuse to allow any units to ever permadie because it took so much goddamn time to level them up and develop the jobs, and the thought of having to hire a new unit at level 1 to replace them is enough to drive a child insane.
Some of the newer FE games suck at that too, Three Houses in particular apparently.
Older games give you very good prepromotes in the midgame, and the 3DS games have the child recruits (it makes sense I swear) scale up to current story progress and scale off stats/skills of parents.
Oh, can totally relate to winning that final battle or overcoming that boss in a fight.
My best favorite was in Horizon: Zero Dawn when I worked out how to take down a Thunderjaw with just the bow and arrow. I’m too easily visually overwhelmed by fast motion and end up just mashing buttons in melee fights, so the long, tactical takedowns are the cat’s pyjamas for me.
(I’ve been told that I would love Skyrm based on my play style. Will have to check that out at some point.)
Right now I’m on an ultra hard playthrough using just the Banuk Powershot Adept bow, (which is a mean weapon) and if done in the right order, you can disassemble the machines you’re hunting, get all the parts off, kill it then make fat bank picking up the pieces.
The Souls games are easy. They’re just easy in a way that makes you a part of the game/world. You don’t just click a button in the menu. You earn it by paying attention. The point is, every player comes out satisfied of having accomplished something. Either they directly defeated a challenge through brute force or they looked around and founds it’s weakness, or got stronger to overcome it. It makes it earned.
Sure, story games the story is maintained with an easier difficulty and that’s fine. However, games where the act of playing forms the story are made worse by this. I’m all for difficulty modes in games where it makes sense, but a lot of people would turn down the difficulty in a Souls game and end up with a boring experience, because they didn’t actually try to meet it at its level.
Just like paintings, there’s a place for slop that just looks pretty and things that engage you. If you go into a museum and complain that an artist challenged you, that’s on you, not them.
whatever part of your brain that’s supposed to make you feel satisfied or accomplished when you beat a hard game isn’t present for me, the only thing I got out of finishing dark souls was relief that that annoying game was over and I could finally get my friend to shut the fuck up and stop telling me I just didn’t like it because I hadn’t finished it.
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it. And before you say “I don’t have time to learn all that!” There are guides, and if you don’t have time for that either, do you even want to play the game? It doesn’t have much of a story, if you skip learning, fighting skills, optimizing, what are you even enjoying?
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it.
Do you hear yourself? Like, actually hear yourself? Those things are not easy to do. It’s great that you enjoy the game and want more people to try it if they’ve gotten discouraged but don’t call it easy when the caveat is doing all of that. Needing to do all of that is precisely why it’s difficult.
I do hear myself. It is easy to know that stuff, it might be annoying for some, but it’s certainly easy. I can get all that info in 30 seconds tops. You don’t need to do all of this but knowledge lowers the skill barrier by an absurd amount; I know that because I’m bad as fuck and beat the games because I search (in-game) for cheese strats, but if something annoys me a 30s google search usually gets me an optimised cheese strat. I enjoy playing like this.
I don’t really want more people to play it or whatever, if you don’t enjoy it don’t force yourself please, games are for entertainment in the end.
They’re specifically designed to have easy options for almost every fight. There are very few bosses where you actually need skill, and they’re mostly optional. If you’re paying attention, it’s normally pretty easy to find a pretty easy option to defeat most bosses. Sometimes the game tells you this, like jumping down on the head of the demon at the start of DS1. Usually it doesn’t directly, but there will be hints if you’re reading everything and looking at your environment.
You don’t have to just “git gud” and dodge everything while fighting. That’s an option, but not the only one. Most people hear “Souls games are hard” and they think this is the only option, and they don’t look for more. If this is you, then you were mislead. The community has ruined the game for so many people by acting like there’s a huge skill barrier that you need to overcome, instead of the reality where the game just wants you to pay attention to the world/lore.
I think Kojima gets it. For a lot of players, esp. on the more cinematic games, the story is the main driver and the action is how it progresses. The games I’ve played that were ordeals are often the ones I’ve given up on. It’s the ones you can start on story mode with, enjoy the narrative and then re-play at the harder levels that I’ve stuck with.
Personally I don’t like replaying games, so this wouldn’t work for me. Generally, story-driven games are easy, so it’s rarely an issue.
If you don’t enjoy a game, there are countless others to play. Not saying this as a ‘fuck off, this isn’t for you’. But genuinely - there are so many games, and no single game should be for everyone. It’s perfectly normal that we all have our own unique preferences.
There are a few games that I’ve dropped due to their gameplay, but wanted to finish the story. So I watched playthroughs of them. Was it at all an issue for me? Absolutely not. Do I wish the game fit my preferences better? Uhh, I guess? But then it would have been ruined for everyone else, so it doesn’t really make sense.
I watched the playthrough of Death Stranding, as it got too depressing for me about halfway through. Totally get it. I paid a lot for it though, so felt kinda bummed that I’d dropped that cash and coulnd’t muster the energy to play it to the end.
On the other hand, I’ve got over 2,000 hours in on No Man’s Sky, (I’m playing in creative mode now and having a blast building cool bases in breathtaking locations) which I got on sale through GOG for 10 bucks, so I suppose it balances out.
The one that I’ve come to a complete stop in is The Talos Principle, and I love it but just can’t seem to finish it. Has been as frustrating to finish as Firmanent, which was built for VR so playing it in 2D leaves a lot to be desired - there’s a ton of items that require exact placement and it’s hard as hell to see how to manipulate then w/o the 3D… Oyyyy.
I think he’s entirely right for the kind of game he usually makes.
I also think not having difficulty settings is the right approach for souls games, it would destroy the vision.
Different people are looking for different things. Sometimes, the same person is looking for different things. I play story games on difficulties I don’t struggle on, more gameplay-focused games I like making hard and struggling with them.
I just hate backtracking in general.
Any game that makes me watch a long cutscene after dying can go to hell and stay there.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
I enjoyed difficult games a lot more back before I got a job.
Exactly. I’ll play Dark Souls if they pay me.
I mean, presumably because it’d compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn’t mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.
How can it compromise their vision if their vision is still intact with a “normal” difficulty?
I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn’t conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It’s not about their vision being intact or not; it’s about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Like I love the Kingdom Hearts series and was able to play it and fall in love with them as a kid on normal and sometimes beginner difficulty. As an adult I play critical because it makes me engage with all of the mechanics of the game. But I would have unlikely got to the point of being able to play at that level if I couldn’t work my way up through Normal > Proud > Critical.
The same admiration you have to grinding on a single playthrough to overcome an intended challenge can still be obtained through multiple playthroughs of increasing difficulty.
You’re missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.
Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn’t work with the game’s structure, wouldn’t be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.
Sounds like a skill issue.
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You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
Adding a difficulty slider is easy, doesn’t take much time, doesn’t change much about the experience, and allows more people to enjoy your media.
So leaving it out is lazy game development.
Niche audiences is fine, gatekeeping isn’t.
This way undermines the effort required for developers, and will drastically vary from game to game.
[CITATION NEEDED]
It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.
Depends on how it’s implemented. Just give the player more/unlimited HP or armour would be easy.
Let’s take Elden Ring as an example: how do you scale poise? Is the player harder to stagger? Are enemies easier to stagger? How about status effects? Can you trigger hemorrhage with less hits on low difficulty? Dodge frames? Parry timing?
That’s just off the top head, there’s tons more mechanics I’ve never even touched in there.
Combat systems (which is 95% of what difficulty affects) can get so much more complicated than just HP/Armor. And that makes scaling more them just percentages of damage in/damage out.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it’s a gross injustice to blame lazy devs for not implementating a system that probably takes weeks if not months to create and balance.
Sure, a complex difficulty system that the user can tweak is nicer to have. But making the player take more hits to kill is pretty simple and could be argued as an accessibility feature.
How exactly is that an accessibility feature…? No seriously I sound like I’m being shitty (and that’s because in a small way I am, this conversation is deeply personally insulting) but I’m really curious why this is being considered accessibility when what we’re doing, the actual push for accessibility in gaming, is all things like allowing people to access the games not coddling people to where they have to have their own special extra-easy game modes.
Things like support for 3rd party controllers, key rebinding, compatibility with external sound processing equipment, video setting adjustment (remove particle effects or other visual noise, colorblind modes, onscreen hilighting) are all the things we’re actually fighting for broad inclusion into videogames. Mandatory godmode isn’t, and it’s so dumb that it sounds like some kind of philosophical false-flag dreamed up by the conservatives to discredit the concept of disability accommodation in general…
“Game designers should include cheats” is a take
Yes
All of them did before, so why not?
No, they didn’t?
And should be the bare minimum of a game
My citation is myself as amateur game developer.
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is balancing at most.
Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Strawman me harder, zaddy!
No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.
Yeah… Okay.
It would also seem like bad business to leave it out of your niche game, unless the niche is specifically about the difficulty level. Why would you want to eliminate whole chunks of your already limited number of potential customers by only offering a very challenging difficulty?
I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.
How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.
I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.
Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.
It is neither lazy nor not fun.
Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.
How do you do, fellow game designers.
“All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…
Mastering a game and falling into a good flow is unwinding for me. Something easy doesn’t release any tension nor give me accomplishment-dopamine.
And not everything needs to be made for the widest possible audience.
With difficulty options you will still get that, in fact you may get it better. Maybe for a specific game the difficulty needs to be lower or even higher for you to find that sweet spot.
This just is not true for souls like games. The difficulty is a core part of the experience, and lowering it would literally compromise the artistic vision
If difficulty is just hit points, higher difficulties are not really enjoyable. Adjusting hit points, items, weapon damage, etc. together to achieve good flow on every difficulty is not an easy task.
They don’t have to go all out. Shitty easier/harder difficulties that just multiply or divide values in a basic manner is better than nothing at all.
Devs should absolutely just focus on the difficulty specific experience they planned but nothing is stopping them from doing the bare minimum. And if you have good coding practices, it’s easy as fuck to implement with the difficulty menu itself likely to be the hardest part to implement after the fact.
Yes, that is what higher difficulties are for. Why does that preclude lower difficulties?
I don’t have the time to get into any sort of flow these days.
This is not a universal response. Some people like difficult games for many reasons. Overcoming a challenge can give me a taste of triumph absent from my day job.
Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details.
I suppose it’s not the game maker’s responsibility to stop people from ruining their own experiences. I’m pretty confident that some people would just easy-mode through dark souls and have a vastly diminished experience. “I don’t see the big deal. It’s just an action game”, they might say, because easy mode gave unlimited healing and no monster respawn. The difficulty (which is vastly overstated) is part of what makes it work. People remember Blight Town and Sen’s Fortress because of the ordeal. I can’t remember a single dungeon from Skyrim.
Furthermore, meta game options found in menus is not the only way to do difficulty options. Elden Ring, for example, is very generous with spirit summons.
No one is asking devs to remove hard mode. They are asking them to include an easy mode for people who can’t deal with hard mode. People with physical or mental barriers, people who don’t have time, or really any reason.
This is no different than inclusivity.
YOU might not remember anything that wasn’t challenging but that doesn’t mean it’s like that for others. I remember everything from Skyrim. I love Skyrim. I had fun with it so I remember it.
I don’t remember much from Elden ring cus I never made it. I struggled at it and couldn’t her anywhere.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
Gate keeping sucks. Let everyone in.
Elden ring opened the gate so wide that we got newcomers trashing on some gameplay features which have been a staples of those games since from software started making them. At some point gatekeeping ensure that you don’t alienate the players who played all your games and played a big part on your success. Cause the wider you want to open the gate and the more you have to move away from your vision. Imo not all games are meant for everyone and that’s fine.
See, here’s the thing about Elden Ring (especially compared to older FromSoft games imo), you can do this right in the game. A boss kicking your ass? Walk away, go somewhere else and come back when you’ve leveled up more, maybe gotten some extra flasks for healing or upgraded your armor and weapons. Does Elden Ring do it well enough? That’s up for debate and I have some complaints in that department myself (the final boss of the DLC before the nerf is the only time that I’ve ever put down the controller and decided that beating a FromSoft boss simply wasn’t worth the effort - especially after looking at the wiki and seeing one attack that needs a frame perfect dodge to avoid being hit and another where they straight up said “we don’t know how you’re supposed to dodge this attack”), but it is built right into the game.
But after at a certain point, accessibility comes at compromising design integrity. Every piece of media doesn’t have to cater to everyone. I don’t see people complaining about Andy Warhol gatekeeping because colorblind people can’t see all his paintings. Or that Ozzy Osbourne didn’t make enough country music songs. But with games, it’s a different story. People complain constantly about games not catering to everybody. Bennett Foddy made an entire game to talk about this. It’s called Getting Over It, and it’s considered one of the hardest games of all time. If you’ve never seen it, I highly suggest reading his monologue at least, as I think it’s very relevant to any conversation about game difficulty, especially Souls games which are the most frequent subject of this discussion.
One of the things people love about Souls games is the challenge of it - not difficulty, as difficulty for the sake of difficulty is bad design (see my complaints above), but the challenge of learning how a boss moves like you’d learn the rhythm to a dance or a song. You’ll get pushback because Souls games cater to a specific audience who crave that kind of struggle. The story, music, and world of FromSoft games are great, but these gamers feel that without the obstacles to overcome, the games would be missing a core component of what makes them great, and that by removing it you would cheapen the experience for yourself. Like wanting to play a city builder but you don’t want to have to place any roads. At that point, why not just watch a playthrough on YouTube?
…
“If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them” –Andrei Tarkovsky
I really don’t think that’s a productive use of “gatekeeping”.
Do you apply this to other mediums? There are books and movies that are difficult to follow, but no one demands that authors and publishers release a simpler edition. Video games seem to be an exception.
Accessibility like “let me remap the controls” or “give me subtitles” is a whole different beast from “let me be invulnerable”. Treating those as the same is strange to me.
I’m not particularly against difficulty options. I didn’t have the patience to finish Nine Sols without turning the difficulty down. I wouldnt have felt “gate kept” if I just had to put the game down without finishing it.
How is it not gatekeeping?
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison. Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
Almost all the time this is brought up it’s for single player games. Why do you care if I need a bit more health to get through it? How does that take anyone away from you? I assure you nothing will be lost by allowing people to play it with double the health, or without a arbitrary grinding mechanic that inflates the games length, or whatever really.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
They can play it (assuming they have the money to buy the software and hardware, but that’s a whole other accessibility problem). There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to 100% it. I don’t think it’s axiomatic that everyone should be able to 100% every game.
You’re right that it doesn’t really matter in single player games. I did once have an argument on this topic where the other person said they should be able to change the rules in multiplayer to suit their desires. They wanted more forgiving dodge windows, just for them, unilaterally. That can fuck off.
Why not?
There are let’s plays and wikis for games.
In some cases, they are. It’s cliché now, but part of the story of dark souls is often cited repeatedly struggling against an uncaring, dying, world until you persevere. If you rip that out and make all the creatures docile, I don’t know if I would call it “dumbed down” but it would certainly be a substantial change. Sometimes the medium is the message. But, often, you are correct that it is not really the case.
No one’s arguing against accessibility for controls. I’m not even against well done difficulty options. (The Bethesda style “we just give the enemies more health and damage” is a poorly done difficulty slider, in my view). I just think “I cannot hear so I need subtitles” and “I just want to win on the first try” don’t belong together.
Though, introspecting a little, I think what’s going on is maybe ableism or something like it. I don’t actually believe some of the people who say “this game is too hard. I want an easy mode” are disabled. I read them as just half-assing it. Like someone who wants to play pro soccer but doesn’t want to actually get in shape so run, so they want a smaller field. And, as you say, it doesn’t really matter what someone does in a single player game on their own time, but for some reason it irritates me when someone’s like “I’m just as disabled as that blind guy” when they’re perfectly capable, they just haven’t practiced. Something about “I’ve spent an hour on this task and I haven’t mastered it, I’m disabled” sits wrong with me.
Difficulty options still allow you to play them at their intended difficulty. Letting someone else play the game easier doesn’t stop you from playing it at a higher difficulty. In fact with options you could make it even harder for yourself than you would’ve done otherwise and feel even more rewarded when overcoming it.
Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.
The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!
This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.
I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.
Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.
If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.
Disagree
Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.
I think it’s an age gap 9f when you started gaming. If you were a gamer back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you played because it was a challenge to overcome and that’s what you enjoyed.
You didn’t want to “play” a game. You wanted to “beat” a game. No one played Mike Tysons Punch Out for the story. It was a challenge that took many hours worth of attempts, trial and error, and skill to beat. You liked it and remembered it because it was hard.
Part of the reason they were hard back then was due to file size and lack of saving and such, so hard games took longer to be bored of and sold better, but those were the games that we got hooked on. The challenge. New gamers are hooked on the stories and the entertainment, which is all well and good. Just a different type of crack.
It’s also a holdover from arcades. Arcade games were difficult because they wanted people to spend another quarter.
I started gaming in 1983. (with Pac-Man!) I played games then because I enjoyed the gameplay and only suffered through the difficulty of the NES era because was either that or you didn’t play at all. I prefer easier games now.
That said, I think the hardest thing I’ve done in the modern era is this level in Rayman Legends. I still can’t believe I actually had the patience to do it over and over until I beat it.
A lot of hobbies like gardening, sports, chess require effort, why is it necessary for video games to be easy?
Forcing some challenge gets you to engage with more things rather than taking the easy way out. It’s like bungee jumping (I’d assume), sometimes a push is necessary to experience something new.
Some of my favourite moments were trying Fire Emblem Ironmans, which initially made me go “this is stupid, I’ll regret this, I should reload”, only to change to “this is peak”
Options don’t stop you from having those moments in fact they make it more possible for you to find the difficulty for those moments. For you and everyone else.
The problem is with artificially enforced barriers.
Nothing about the difficulty level of From Software games is artificially enforced. Like the exact opposite, really.
I’m not sure there’s an agreed upon definition of “artificial difficulty”. The whole game is artificial so I’m not sure what “natural difficulty” would be.
That is the point, games are artificial.
Gardening, and sports aren’t. They have natural difficulty. Because they are in the natural world.
Sports are games and have some degree of artificial difficulty. The size of the goal and ball, for example, is arbitrary (within the bounds of practicality. No moon sized basketballs, for example)
But that doesn’t really address what I was trying to get it. I feel like sometimes people online complain about “artificial difficulty” in video games, and it’s unclear what they actually want. I’ve seen it applied to everything from “The enemies hide around corners” to “you can’t quicksave”. I think it’s a kind of duckspeak thing that people say to just mean “i don’t like it” while making it sound less subjective.
Many, many developers have figured this out already.
Can you share?
A list of every single game with difficulty settings? Or just one example, such as Death Stranding, which was explicitly referenced in the original post?
Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. I was asking what you mean by artificial difficulty.
Sometimes people use that phrase and they might mean anything from “you can’t quick save” to “if you don’t take a healer you can’t heal”
If the main difficulty is intentional, then it’s not an artifical barrier, the easy mode is an artificial easener. How easy is easy enough? Some people can’t beat Clair Obscur on the story mode (presumably by not doing side content) In case of gardening, it’d be getting someone to garden for you, and just chilling with the results.
Let’s plays/walkthroughs exists, and only lock you out of interactivity. And interactivity doesn’t mean much if every option beats the game.
Case in point, if I see some post-game superboss with lore behind it, I just look up the thing online.
My point is that it’s inherently artificial.
If you think that gameplay is just meaningless busywork in between cutscenes then sure.
But I am of the opinion that games are not movies just because they are on a screen. They are much closer to tactile or kinetic sculptures.
Gameplay isn’t meaningless busywork.
Tedious and boring gameplay, shrouded under the name “difficulty” is.
If you have to replay the same section over and over, that is the real meaningless busywork.
Because it’s their philosophy and they can do what they want. If the game is too difficult, then don’t play. Some of us enjoy difficult games.
Exactly, games are art. I don’t go around telling artists not to make things I don’t enjoy. I just buy other art.
Art can’t be art without an observer.
If someone is unable to get to the art, then that “art” is useless to them and might as well not exist.
To them, even a derivative of this art is more worth more than no art at all.
I made a drawing yesterday, and I will not show anyone.
It’s not art? It doesn’t exist? Would you rather play peek-a-boo right now?
It’s art to you, not us as we haven’t seen it.
You’ll have to do a little more legwork to make that connect back to the idea it’s being used to support, which correct me if I’m mistaken is that every game needs to make all of its content easily received or it’s not valid art/less valuable/somehow problematic.
You don’t demand a guarantee that you’ll finish every book you’ll buy and you don’t hate every song you can’t dance to, why are games different? They’re different because you think of games as purely entertainment, and you don’t respect it as art. If you did, you would not be arguing that creators should conform to your personal preferences.
I’m not arguing that every game must cater to my casual needs. What I’m expanding upon the op is that art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it. Artists like game devs are free to make the kind of games they want, but it is a balance between making the game attractive and marketable and making something only the most purist will like. Concessions are to be made for the game to be accessible, as you will have to sell it to make a profit. All the examples are from commercial games that need a consumer base to buy it.
Some will criticize Elden ring for being a bit more easy and approachable (than previous DS), because they are used to the elitist view that games must be difficult to play. But on the other hand, all gamers that had fun playing their own way are valid. Some will like having a hard time, some will like having an easier path to progress.
In the end, if you make art you want for others to see it. If your game doesn’t sell because only hardcore players can progress, it could be seen as a failure for your art to be spread. It’s also certainly a business failure as well.
So as I said, it’s a balance and there is no right or wrong way to do it. People can still discuss what their preferences are, be it hard games or story mode for easy gameplay.
I’m not 12 anymore so I don’t have time to learn, memorize and train for some of the newer games. I can appreciate games that include an easy path for me, allowing me to experience their art. Unlike eg. the Dark Souls universe where I’ll never truly experience it because it’s too hard for me.
Devs are then free to take this feedback into consideration for their next game.
Then it should be perfectly valid to criticize poor art.
it is. but if the reason that you think something is poor is because you were not the target audience, you can come across as entitled and clueless. it is not like their games pretend to be easy games, it is clear from the start that that the challenge is part of the design
It’s like placing a statue at the top of a flight of stairs.
It’s like making music and experimenting with discordant harmonies and unusual rhythms. Art can be challenging, it can require engagement and time and study to fully experience. It can make people uncomfortable and it can appeal to only a small audience and still be good.
No it isn’t
Is poor the word you’d use for art that fails to be amusing and charming? Because a lot of art is not trying to be amusing and charming.
Edit: I don’t care if people disagree, but at least have an answer. Not liking art because it wasn’t intended to be delightful and pleasing is not how to do art criticism.
Ah, I think there’s a bit of a disagreement here between what types of art are respectable and what types aren’t. For context, I subscribe to the definition of art that says “everything made with intent” is some form or other of art.
Suppose you go to a gallery. Would you consider handicap-hostile architecture, which is part of the exhibit itself, to be worth respecting as a art enthusiast? (Stairs required to be used in order to see a painting, specifically because the artist wants you tired from walking, not pushing a wheelchair, which they don’t like, when you look at it, for example.)
I could see it both ways, but I fall more on the side of accessibility. If an artist requires someone to use stairs to see their art, they are an asshole, regardless of how good their paintings actually are.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that I’d rather be having. Thank you! I’ll try to disagree at least interestingly.
I subscribe to the idea that art is the study of choice, and that’s fairly close to your definition of art, but the difference is that I’m not saying I can draw a circle around what is and isn’t art. Gun to my head, I’d probably define it as something like “anything done with aesthetic intent”, to exclude the act of intentionally kicking a puppy as performance art. We intend many things in life, many of which are also intentionally artless.
I think I see what you’re driving at with the bit about ramps. To hew to the heart of the matter as the metaphor applies to video games, I would still call that exhibit art - it would simply be limited in how successfully it achieved what it was attempting, which is a severe flaw. I would want to talk about how it could have better achieved its aims. The aim of such an art installation could have merit, if it was more intelligently done.
The reason I do not place the accessibility question from the metaphor on the same level as difficulty in video games is that completion of a game is, I would submit, something that the creator should only endeavour to guarantee if they believe completion of the game is part of the intended experience. I would caution against taking this as a maxim.
When media is highly interactive, as with games, it is a mistake to take it as an implicit assumption that that this media must be completable by a broad majority of participants. Booksellers do not make such guarantees, and books are far less interactive.
If we all raise our voices on behalf of accessibility proponents with the idea that games that are not as easily completed are of lesser value, or if we even become so strident that we say they are not even art, we are limiting the space of an art form that is still in its nascence. We are very permissive with other, older art forms (and they have all taken their lumps with highly prescriptive and proscriptive schools of thought, over the years). It would be like saying music with too many notes isn’t music, or that music isn’t good if I can’t personally dance to it. Those are preferences, not art critiques. We should be asking how the choices of a game developer serve or betray their creative aims. We won’t always get what we want out of every game, but at least we’ll have better conversations.
I like games that take a generous view of accessibility, and I respect that vision. Celeste is a masterpiece. I like games that take a stern view of difficulty also, when it serves their aesthetic vision in a meaningful way.
That last bit is easy to get wrong, and I respect people who struggle with the subject of difficulty in how it interacts with creative ideas, but I have less time for people who hate the music just because they can’t dance to it. That’s not always the point.
I wouldn’t say a difficult game is poor art, it just challenging and may be more than the user wanted.
This is part of why reviewing a game’s difficulty and it’s play options are critical.
I mostly play sandbox games because the online ones come with the constant strife and challenge which is the antithesis of what I want.
Will really enjoy a well thought out puzzle game however…
My introduction to that was Myst, way back in the early 90’s and my main love are games of that nature.
It’s like with any other art. Some of it is a simple pleasure, and some of it wants you to struggle. Some people read Gwenpool, some people read Cerebus.
Then crank up the difficulty setting. Why feel the need to exclude others?
You specifically should be excluded
You should go back to reddit
The place where you’re not allowed to upvote Luigi memes? Lol no thanks
Are you claiming the only saving grace of those games is the difficulty?
If not, then why not allow people to enjoy the other parts of the game?
Their philosophy sucks. They lose nothing by adding more options.
This isn’t a very honest argument. If the only saving grace of the game was its difficulty, nobody would mind not being able to finish it.
Something is lost and gained with every substantive choice in game design. That’s what makes the choices interesting, and worth discussion.
Let’s play with that idea. Take one of my favourite games of all time, Morrowind. It’s hard to get through, maybe. Weird UI, weird bad combat. Those are flaws. But it also has a big fat 0 to 100 difficulty slider. Is that a flaw? I would argue no, because in that game the intended struggle is to engage with the world and the story on your own terms. The combat is all window dressing for the real struggle, which is with the story’s frustrating ambiguities.
In the case of Morrowind, some of the difficulty fails to serve the intended experience and some of it supports that vision wonderfully. It’s not a flawless game, but importantly I am discussing how the difficulty helped or hindered the creative vision. That is art criticism, and it’s a more interesting conversation than arguing over personal preferences.
Why are you pushing to deprive people of challenging games where they know everyone playing it is playing on the same level field? Even if it’s single player, a lot of games are a social experience.
Your point seems to be like not making an easy mode is being evil, yet you denounce players that specifically want games like that. It boggles my mind, there’s plenty games with all the freaking sliders you want, let us have our games.
Yeah, that exactly, people who dislike hard games are not the audience of hard games and it’s weird for you to take issue with that. Full disclosure, I tend to cheese the fuck out of hard games with the tools they give me, I like to find the way to make the game “easy as fuck” via tools in the game instead of a slider, it creates the illusion that I’m smart and I like that.
I enjoyed expedition 33 and cyberpunk but they are a different experience than dark souls, no rest for the wicked, path of exile, last epoch… Sorry for the long post.
How does someone beating a game on “story” mode reduce your enjoyment of beating it on “nightmare”? I don’t get it. We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
(Assuming we’re talking about single player, obv.)
Even if the game is single player, some games are a social experience. You discuss in forums, with friends, about your experience, and when I want that kind of experience difficulty levels cheapen the social aspect of the single player game.
This is not new either, I remember talking to friends about how I beat the water temple in ocarina of time as a kid. Everyone who beta it had to go through beating it and it gave them something to talk about. It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode, it’s not the same shared experience.
I guess my answer is that no game is truly single player because humans are social creatures. And again, there are games catered to your interests so it’s not like either of us is suffering from a shortage of enjoyment.
What’s the difference between saying, “I beat that level” for a game with only one difficulty setting and saying, “I beat that level on hard mode” for a game with multiple difficulty settings?
Multiple difficulty settings never stopped people from talking or bragging about accomplishments in Doom.
It doesn’t feel the same. I enjoy knowing that when someone on the internet or on forums complains about X that my experience matches theirs without having to look for the difficulty they played on. It’s not really bragging rights, but knowing that everyone in the community is having the same shared experience, no need of tags or anything. It’s a social thing for me more than anything.
Then there’s the matter of Devs being able to fine tune things better if they don’t need to care about multiple patterns, progression levels, etc. I won’t get to those because while important, the point I wanted to make is that single difficulty games allows for a shared experience between players which facilitates more community. You can have it with different difficulties but that breeds elitism and fuck that, everyone on the same field and that’s it.
I mean it both ways btw, some games are easier and that’s how you are supposed to experience them, ex: Slimer Rancher
Every time there’s a multiple diff game I always search for the one devs “intended” originally because it’s the most fine-tuned and the expected experience (usually the one before the hardest diff), but I prefer not having to make that choice.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
This is all a very flimsy excuse for annoying gate keeping.
Pretending that difficulty tuning has to suffer if there is more than one difficulty is absurdly nonsensical.
Of all the parts of a game that take significant effort, this is not one.
Studios literally already tune their games for a specific difficulty firstly usually, and tune up or down from there.
You are just imagining that magically one difficulty means higher quality difficulty.
This is such an absurd prick opinion that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Who in the fuck buys any media they don’t intend on being able to finish. What???
You think people are buying books they think they’ll want to stop reading half way? Movies they’ll want to walk out of?
How did you get so deluded you even thought you were making a cogent argument here.
Jesus Christ.
This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.
Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?
Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?
A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them. They’re allowed to review it poorly if they’ve bought it, and they’re allowed to shit on it for not being to their liking just as you’re allowed to praise it.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.
If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience. You have no evidence for this. You just want it to be true to justify the gatekeeping.
Using fancy verbal diarrhea to say exactly the same thing is not convincing.
You are absolutely gatekeeping as you want games not to have options because you think people should play the game how you want to play games.
You absolutely are the selfish ones here. I mean look at that ridiculously bad faith summary of the comments here.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
They aren’t at all unreasonable for doing so. This specific excerpt from you is such nonsensical double speak, where you start by saying yes people can criticize, but finish by calling people selfish for not liking aspects you like.
Im sure youll try to weasel around that being what you’ve done, but thats what it is.
This is a bs weasel though, because many of the people are the intended audiences. These arent crazy mismatches, these are developers being stubborn and stuck up in bougie, high artsy, self important ways that a great deal of their playerbases don’t appreciate.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Its a silly, childish black and white view solely there so you can continue to be angry at people for being critical about the aspects of a game you gatekeep around.
Why? This is you pretending to be for open conversation but not at all being… This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
Adding difficulty options does not cheapen the game, it widens its appeal and makes games far more fun for a larger amount of people without subtracting from the experience for others.
For instance, lets say you have a game that has painful backtracking that a large number of people complain about. Who does it harm to have a setting to skip the painful backtracking? Fucking nobody.
You can’t argue even for a second that this ruins the experience for those that say they do like the painful backtracking as this by no means would take away from their experiences, yet you would argue that people shouldn’t complain or ask that developers include that because you want to gatekeep experiences.
This is a bullshit way of you insisting your (shitty) opinion is objective (where you think people shouldn’t complain about things you like) while pretending people stating their opinions are somehow doing exactly what you’re actually doing.
Insufferable.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
In addition to this if you were to implement sliders for each one of those features separately (neverminding how you’d do something like level architecture) what you end up takes both additional developer time and may not be as good. The fine tunings don’t fit together as nicely; it’s the difference between a model kit you buy and assembly yourself vs. one that comes premade form the manufacturer. There are different tolerances here and I think you need to get some dev perspective on this at this point.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.” Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but when the dev of the game itself says “naw” and the game is so popular it literally spawns its own subgenre with millions of adoring fans and you’re trying to armchair unnecessary solutions to things people don’t think are problems, I ask again who is being selfish. This game ain’t for you, dawg.
Miss me with that sales speak. Disgusting. We’re talking art here. Gross.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll? But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online and then actually playing them. I think I’m gonna go beat Dark Souls again while you mald.
FINAL EDIT: Cheat. Just cheat. We’ve already established elsewhere in this topic that I and many others DON’T actually care about the “sanctity” of the game, that’s a talking point people like you made up to throw around, mostly. Nobody cares. Get a cheat engine and double soul drops. Crank your stats. Enable one hit kills. Cheat. Don’t care, cheat.
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
Does the Vietnamese restaurant make the food more difficult to eat for certain customers?
Are the video game companies paying me to “play” their games?
“I’m allergic to wheat and they don’t carry gluten-free bread for the banh mi!”
Yeah bud, the world be like that sometimes. Eat somewhere else.
If anything there is spicy then yes, definitely more difficult for some people to eat, and obviously they have spicy shit it’s a vietnamese restaurant. Restaurants don’t pay you to eat their food, but they also don’t take requests beyond relatively minor variations on their pre-selected menu. Quit expecting the world to revolve around you, put some effort into finding the developers that are doing what you want and patronize them instead of complaining about the existence of games that are not made for you.
They will literally ask you how spicy you want it
And if you order something spicy then you get something spicy, yes, and if you complain that the restaurant serves things that are spicier than you enjoy you will be politely asked to leave. If you don’t like Dark Souls then don’t purchase and consume goddamned Dark Souls, simple as.
Also Kojima:
https://www.ign.com/articles/hideo-kojima-made-significant-changes-to-death-stranding-2-because-playtesters-thought-it-was-too-good
Easy games are fine. It can be a nice way to just plow through a good story. However, I’m absolute trash at games and beating Dark Souls was one of the best and most memorable gaming experiences I’ve ever had. (it took me well over 200 hrs because I am a garbage-person) Had the game been easier I don’t think it would have hit the same way.
That’s not to say every game has to be like that but it’s great when it works
Celeste is the perfect embodiment of that philosophy IMO. The whole story is an explicit metaphor for overcoming a great personal challenge. And the gameplay’s difficulty is what drives that point home and makes the game an all-time great.
I’ve seen a couple streamers with G4m3r Skillz breeze through Celeste, and the game didn’t leave them much of an impression. But it touches very deeply those who struggled through it because the struggle is the bond that ties the player to Madeline.
Other games it doesn’t really matter. Portal 2 is a great game even if the puzzles are quite easy, because the greatness lies in its writing, atmosphere and worldbuilding. There’s an Aperture miniseries just begging to be made - but a Dark Souls or Celeste cinematographic adaptation would miss the entire point.
Apparently I need to check Celeste out. Thanks
It’s fantastic
It’s an amazing platformer!
You might also like „Journey of the broken Circle“.
You don’t know, because there was no option. That is the point we are trying to make.
With mods it’s an option and it definitely wouldn’t have hit the same way. The whole point of souls games is overcoming challenges with practice. Too many people avoid challenging themselves and it’s a real problem I’ve seen in many people. That’s why you see people who waste away at the same job and same level for years instead of taking chances and risks and pushing themselves to try something new. I’ve known people with budding talent in things like music that gave up because they weren’t instantly the best at it. Not everything in life will be easy, or instant, or convenient. Too many people either forget that or don’t realize it. Some things take hard work and practice and they are extremely rewarding when you put in the work.
Would you complain that a rubiks cube is too hard or a crossword puzzle or anything else that’s designed to challenge you?
Doing Fire Emblem soft Ironmans (not reloading when a unit permadies) made me love the series even more, it went from “ughhhh do I really have to move on without this guy? This sucks, what if I’m underpowered later” to “I lost 40 people and died for the first time at the penultimate map, this is a beautiful, sorrowful story”.
I now let a unit or two die even when playing for the first time, because it basically adds your own personal death scenes to the story. I will always pay respects to wolf boy who died to make that one final push happen, or respect the axe bro who went through his Kratos arc with a dead wife, kid and second dead wife.
Playing Final Fantasy Tactics as a kid basically made me refuse to allow any units to ever permadie because it took so much goddamn time to level them up and develop the jobs, and the thought of having to hire a new unit at level 1 to replace them is enough to drive a child insane.
To this day, I just can’t deal with it.
Some of the newer FE games suck at that too, Three Houses in particular apparently.
Older games give you very good prepromotes in the midgame, and the 3DS games have the child recruits (it makes sense I swear) scale up to current story progress and scale off stats/skills of parents.
Oh, can totally relate to winning that final battle or overcoming that boss in a fight.
My best favorite was in Horizon: Zero Dawn when I worked out how to take down a Thunderjaw with just the bow and arrow. I’m too easily visually overwhelmed by fast motion and end up just mashing buttons in melee fights, so the long, tactical takedowns are the cat’s pyjamas for me.
(I’ve been told that I would love Skyrm based on my play style. Will have to check that out at some point.)
Right now I’m on an ultra hard playthrough using just the Banuk Powershot Adept bow, (which is a mean weapon) and if done in the right order, you can disassemble the machines you’re hunting, get all the parts off, kill it then make fat bank picking up the pieces.
Those players aren’t forced to buy those games.
And you wouldn’t be forced to play on a lower difficulty
The Souls games are easy. They’re just easy in a way that makes you a part of the game/world. You don’t just click a button in the menu. You earn it by paying attention. The point is, every player comes out satisfied of having accomplished something. Either they directly defeated a challenge through brute force or they looked around and founds it’s weakness, or got stronger to overcome it. It makes it earned.
Sure, story games the story is maintained with an easier difficulty and that’s fine. However, games where the act of playing forms the story are made worse by this. I’m all for difficulty modes in games where it makes sense, but a lot of people would turn down the difficulty in a Souls game and end up with a boring experience, because they didn’t actually try to meet it at its level.
Just like paintings, there’s a place for slop that just looks pretty and things that engage you. If you go into a museum and complain that an artist challenged you, that’s on you, not them.
whatever part of your brain that’s supposed to make you feel satisfied or accomplished when you beat a hard game isn’t present for me, the only thing I got out of finishing dark souls was relief that that annoying game was over and I could finally get my friend to shut the fuck up and stop telling me I just didn’t like it because I hadn’t finished it.
To you, maybe.
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it. And before you say “I don’t have time to learn all that!” There are guides, and if you don’t have time for that either, do you even want to play the game? It doesn’t have much of a story, if you skip learning, fighting skills, optimizing, what are you even enjoying?
Do you hear yourself? Like, actually hear yourself? Those things are not easy to do. It’s great that you enjoy the game and want more people to try it if they’ve gotten discouraged but don’t call it easy when the caveat is doing all of that. Needing to do all of that is precisely why it’s difficult.
I do hear myself. It is easy to know that stuff, it might be annoying for some, but it’s certainly easy. I can get all that info in 30 seconds tops. You don’t need to do all of this but knowledge lowers the skill barrier by an absurd amount; I know that because I’m bad as fuck and beat the games because I search (in-game) for cheese strats, but if something annoys me a 30s google search usually gets me an optimised cheese strat. I enjoy playing like this.
I don’t really want more people to play it or whatever, if you don’t enjoy it don’t force yourself please, games are for entertainment in the end.
It’s easy for you but it’s not an easy game. That is not the normal experience.
They’re specifically designed to have easy options for almost every fight. There are very few bosses where you actually need skill, and they’re mostly optional. If you’re paying attention, it’s normally pretty easy to find a pretty easy option to defeat most bosses. Sometimes the game tells you this, like jumping down on the head of the demon at the start of DS1. Usually it doesn’t directly, but there will be hints if you’re reading everything and looking at your environment.
You don’t have to just “git gud” and dodge everything while fighting. That’s an option, but not the only one. Most people hear “Souls games are hard” and they think this is the only option, and they don’t look for more. If this is you, then you were mislead. The community has ruined the game for so many people by acting like there’s a huge skill barrier that you need to overcome, instead of the reality where the game just wants you to pay attention to the world/lore.
Thank you for this post. It opened my mind to giving a souls game a try.
Sekiro was the one that made the genre click for me after trying and failing to get into DS and Bloodborne.
It is still my favorite game of all time, and now I really enjoy the other From Software games.
Sadly, not available for any of my devices. A reason to get myself an Xbox, I guess.
Maybe but tomonobu itagaki Fucks.
I just read his wiki, and uh yeah. Unfortunately he was a bit of a sex pest.