I consider the weapon system part of the combat. I guess the leveling system is its own mechanic, but it’s super shallow compared to many other games (eg: path of exile, or even Baldur’s gâte)

Some people wouldn’t be happy with a difficulty slider. Some people would use the slider to make themselves unhappy. Either by turning it too high due to hubris, or too low from lack of confidence. The unified difficulty of the souls games for many people is a plus, and creates a sense of shared struggle they enjoy.

And as I said elsewhere, I really don’t think meta game options are the only way to do difficulty.

What did you mean by

The problem is with artificially enforced barriers

Then?

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”

What are the rest of the mechanics? It’s almost all combat and exploration (that leads to more combat). There’s no, like, base building or grand strategy or romance plots.

That said, I don’t think you can please everyone. I found the games enjoyable as they are.

Can you share?

Dark Souls is a great game, but dying to some of the lower level enemies because they kept hit stunning me isn’t fun or cool in the slightest.

Why is this happening? Get some armor. Or a big shield. Or a bow or spells. Or just, like, run past them. None of that requires lightning reflexes.

Sometimes people are like “I want to play this game and not engage with any of its systems” and I’m just like why.

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’s capitalism for you. The owners get all the profits. The people doing the actual labor get a salary, which is as low as possible.

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.

This should be a climate crime and the management responsible forced to pick up trash or some other appropriate punishment

There’s that bit in Baldur’s gate 2 where some NPCs decide they can take you on, die, and then reload the game.

People don’t think about things. And when they do, they don’t care. They’re tired. And some of them are kind of stupid.

Like, imagine you’d only had two hours of sleep. Imagine that’s your peak cognitive health. That’s the best you ever get. That’s a lot of people. They’re not going to think a lot of deep thoughts.

It’s hard to break into the mainstream when the mainstream is increasingly owned by rich assholes. They have a lot of influence over culture. Not total control , but enough that many people who might have found punk instead brain rot through their day in Spotify or tiktok or whatever.

How new is your computer?

I found Pop!_OS worked out of the box fine on my new desktop.

Mint had problems, but worked fine on my older computers.

Back up any important software (like, on a separate drive or online). Get a couple flash drives. Try out mint, popos, bazzite. They’re all free so it doesn’t matter that much if you don’t like one.

I don’t recommend trying to dual boot on one drive because windows is a rude room mate.

I think it would be pretty funny if jesus did return and cast all these rich assholes into the lake of fire. Because they fucking deserve it.

Innate spell resistance is hot.

Still mad about

I remember when I played ff10 thinking “Rikku is kind of hot”, and then reading she’s 15 in the fiction. 17 in the sequel where she’s even more naked. Nope. Why? Unnecessary. Just make her an adult!

At least ff7 Tifa is 20, which is still a little young. I didn’t have a big crush on her, but I did think her suplexing building sized monsters was hot.

may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.

I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.

Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.

Setting up a windows VM at my old job took like a few minutes, but I already had virtual box (I think that’s what I used)

And I needed to see some software running in a Windows box while editing the code that talked to it.

Depends on what you need to do. You could mount a folder to get files in or out, for some cases.

Have you used virtual machines before? Done software development?