Accessibility options are the same as the KKK, apparently
are something else. No clue where that analogy is goingI think accessibility options are a dog whistle for communism like how he’s describing right wing fascist symbolism
Oh okay. Its funny how the damgerous dog whistles for communism are objectively good things that increase how many peoole can enjoy things
Can we just go back to when they would admit they’re whiny babies with poor impulse control who have to use the easier options because they’re there?
I miss those days. It was still bullshit drivel from the spawn of Golgotha, but at least it was upfront.
“Given the chance, gamers will optimize all the fun out of a game”
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yeah, no one says Doom is easy because it has an easy mode. You can still brag about beating it on nightmare difficulty.
I wonder if the guy behind dark souls feels some regret spawning an entire generation of G*mers insufferable about difficulty in their games.
"Oh yeah Saint Miyazaki? Git gud :smuglord: "
Word. ER has a ton of features to make the game easier for folks who want them. Hell, i’m one of those features, i’ve got my summon sign down to help with bosses all the time.
Being summoned to help strangers with bosses is my favorite part of souls games
Being summoned to help strangers at the start of a dungeon I completed months ago and don’t remember my way to the boss through all its twists and turns… that’s a little less fun.
Please stop summoning me to the Subterranean Shunning Grounds I will only make you Even More Lost.
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That’s just nonsense, though. Nothing about how the game is made prevents modifying the difficulty. There are mods that make the game easier, there’s nothing inherent to any fromsoft game that prevents the addition of an easy mode.
It doesn’t matter how it’s “balanced” because it’s a purely subjective thing, everyone has different abilities and the difficulty can never be perfectly tuned around each individual.
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It wouldn’t screw up the gameplay. It might make it less rewarding, but to who? The people who choose to play on an easier difficulty because of their abilities? Probably not.
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The way that this discussion always comes down to souls games, and they always get brought up in discussions about difficult and acessibility, highlights exactly what you’re talking about. You’re supposed to lose a whole lot of times before you win, and I think a lot of people who use souls games as an example of an “unfair” game either don’t understand that or refuse to understand that.
Plus, like. Summoning. You can summon two players to back you up. You might still die a lot, but if you’re able to use the game inputs, the controller, you can most likely beat the game with allies to help you out. I think a lot of folks think souls games are single player. Maybe because that’s how streamers play them? Idk.
Also, it’s never Sekiro that get’s brought up, with Sekiro having no Jolly Cooperation and likely being the most challenging of the Souls games.
Plus, like. Summoning. You can summon two players to back you up. You might still die a lot, but if you’re able to use the game inputs, the controller, you can most likely beat the game with allies to help you out.
This so much, plus I think a lot of people underestimate just how good getting summoned is
When playing as a summon in another player’s game you lose nothing when you die but you still get souls/runes from any enemies who die, that’s huge
You can just sit at the bonfire in your game where it’s safe and keep helping other players, getting more souls/runes with no risk of losing anything and maybe even learning the attack patterns of the enemies and the layout of the level along the way
I think a lot of folks think souls games are single player. Maybe because that’s how streamers play them? Idk.
Exactly and it’s a real waste because the co-op is one of the best parts of the game
I think a lot of streamers have bought into the hype that the games are all about difficulty and engaging in the co-op will lessen the experience when I find the opposite is true
The idea that co-op trivializes the game is pretty harmful to the community too, most of the actual tough bosses in the base game of Elden Ring are clearly designed with co-op in mind (Godfrey slamming the entire arena) and in some cases arguably get harder in co-op (Melania and the Fire Giant)
Also, it’s never Sekiro that get’s brought up, with Sekiro having no Jolly Cooperation and likely being the most challenging of the Souls games.
Yeah Armored Core too
I love Armored Core 6 but I only beat the real final boss due to pure dumb luck after like 50 tries and I don’t think I’ll ever beat it again, can’t even get an F or D ranking in the mission replay because I can’t beat it again
Also, it’s never Sekiro that get’s brought up, with Sekiro having no Jolly Cooperation and likely being the most challenging of the Souls games.
There’s a reason it’s the only Fromsoft soulslike I haven’t beat. I’ve been stuck on one of the fights with the main antagonist with the lightning sword for months. And Sekiro doesn’t have a normal leveling system, so you can’t just grind and over level to get past.
The problem with this idea is that it assumes everyone has the exact same capabilities. The game might be completely off the table for some players and I think that would be a real shame because it’s an excellent game.
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Our goal involves creating a compelling progression path for all of our players. There’s a lot of content at launch with even more coming via live service, and we’ll continuously adjust our progression mechanics to give players a sense of accomplishment as they explore all of Battlefront 2
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Our goal involves creating a compelling progression path for all of our players. There’s a lot of content at launch with even more coming via live service, and we’ll continuously adjust our progression mechanics to give players a sense of accomplishment as they explore all of Battlefront 2
That was about paid dlcs.
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There already is an easy mode, it’s called leveling up, summoning co-op, and getting better gear.
You’re not just asking to make the game easier, you’re saying you don’t want to spend any time or effort to make that happen. The game is based around spending time and effort to overcome challenges. You do not want to engage with the games core mechanics and that’s fine, but don’t blame the game. I say this without judgment, just watch a playthrough and then explore the world with cheat engine.
Imagine being unironically pro-grinding.
It’s the nature of the game. Elden ring has fail-forward levelling. Eith you beat the boss, or you accumulate xp beating your head against the boss until you win. And a lot of it is about building knowledge - learning enemy attack patterns, figuring out which weapons and spells work against which enemies
What i get from most complaints about Souls games is people don’t actually want to play souls games. Maybe they think they do, but there seems to e a misunderstanding of what the core gameplay of souls games is and how they work. Like people look at them and think that if it weren’t for the inaccessible combat then souls games could be played like Skyrim or Mass Effect. And that’s not the case. There are very very few, very austere quests. There’s almost no dialogue. Character development, such as there is, is mostly implied.
Combat is pretty much the whole game. If you weren’t being seriously challeneged by the enemies you could beat the game in, idk, two hours maybe if you knew where to go? You need to beat two bosses, then one boss, then one boss, then the game is over.
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No one says that. I played through Elden Ring, I died a lot, I loved it. I thought it was generally fair and rewarding. I still think it should have a difficulty option because that’s not going to be everybody’s experience and it wouldn’t affect mine or yours if it did have it as an option.
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Cheat engine to the rescue!
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Balance exists as a dynamic relation between the game and the player, it’s not a static, immutable quality incased within the game.
Homie I just want to explore the world and take in the scenery
Just playing for exploration. Pesky pests are in my way. Get out!
I really love that balance in fromsoft games. I love the level of tuning they do to make it feel like a fair challenge versus frustrating and cheap. I also feel that that balance is what gives the games its atmosphere and moment to moment appeal, because it forces you to consider your next step, to consider the risk/reward of going a little further vs turning back etc.
I could see how difficulty modes could cause problems or at least tons of work if they were trying to tune that balance for each difficulty. But, I’m all for accessbility options and modes. If there’s an easy or accessibility option thats allows more people to play and enjoy souls without detracting from the standard experience that i enjoy then that sounds good to me.
Some Fromsoft fans sound like fucking cult members I swear to god. Like somehow adjusting the difficulty of the game takes away from the purity of the experience or some shit or take away from the satisfaction of progression. Ohh no it’ll break the delicate balance oh god.
Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It’s a video game, relax.
I can’t even talk to my friends about Fromsoft games because of shit like this, no “git gud” isn’t a valid response to criticism made in good faith.
Long time fromsoft player and the git gud bullshit annoys the hell out of me.
It’s just elitist, gatekeeping garbage. And this is coming from someone who puts my summon sign down regularly to help people.
For games built with and to some degree around cooperative gameplay, people aren’t very good at being helpful to each other in discussions about the games.
That’s why I don’t participate in any of the online communities and just play with no headset. I’ll help people defeat bosses because I have a great time doing it. Outside of that I find the community kinda off putting.
Edited to add - not all folks in the fromsoft communities are elitist, some are actually very kind, but there’s just enough weird elitism that I find it to be unpleasant.
Yeah same, I think it’s just that the most vocal people are assholes
Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It’s a video game, relax.
I think this might be the disconnect. If you just vibed with the scenary there isn’t much to the games. You could run through the whole game in a few hours. I think Elden Ring only has four or five required boss fights and afaik every other fight is optional and you could run past all the enemies if you want to.
Much of the game - story, characters, and lore - only comes out if you spend a lot of time getting your ass kicked. Most of the game’s background comes from random item drops you’d most likely miss if you got through every fight on the first try. There’s a lot of information tied up in how enemies fight - similar enemies from different factions have subtly different equipment and weild different spells. Spell mechanics tie in to story stuff.
The other thing is - it’s not easy to make the game easier. Most of the fighting relies on learning enemy movesets and timing. If you make the enemies deal %5 of their normal damage you’re still not going to win if you can’t figure out when you have openings to land hits. You’ll end up being knocked down, staggered, afflicted with statuses, and all the rest of it. You could slow down the attack animations, but they’d look goofy af and become even harder to read.
As much as people scoff these games are carefully crafted works of art. There is wiggle room to make them “easier”, but only so much due to the nature of the gameplay.
Additionally, the Elden Ring does have many mechanics - coop especially, to make it much more approachable to players who have struggled with previous entries in the series. I rarely seem people who complain about people who complain about the difficulty of the game discuss or engage with these systems.
Finally, i think there’s a serious disconnect in the nature of the dark souls gameplay loop. You’re supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you’re paying attention you’re figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don’t enjoy that you likely won’t have fun with the game.
I think a great deal of bad faith has accumulated - many people complaining about “git gud” don’t seem to actually be interested in the game, only using it as a whipping boy for complaints about games gatekeeping difficulty. But dark souls and elden ring are generally the only games in the vast sea of available games discussed in this manner. It’s these particular games that are essentially their own niche genre that peopke continue to be mad about over a decade after Dark Souls, despite each subsequent game having more features to make the games accessible to more people.
I am a Souls fan and I agree with most of everything you say. I am also the type who plays games on the hard difficulty settings and installs mods to make it even harder. I like being challenged and forced to learn and adapt and find new ways to use the mechanics provided by the game in order to succeed. When I was younger and had more spare time I did SL1 challenge runs in the Souls games, in DS3 I got some 3/4 through all the bosses before I got a job and just didn’t have the time and energy to perfect boss patterns anymore. It was very fun, my favorite bit was fighting the dope pope and changing gear during his phase switch. I found short rolls more favorable in his 1st phase as they landed me in perfect position for a punish after baiting his jumping lunge combo and long rolls more reliable during the 2nd to not get caught by the double.
However, my take on this particular subject is that I am a radical difficulty anarchist and people should be allowed to enjoy single player games in whatever ways they deem personally fun, even if it goes against the intended experience and core ideas of the game. If there was an option that allowed you to just iddqd your way through Fromsoft games or any other game where difficulty is part of the core game design, then I uncritically support their freedom to pick it and find fun in the game in their own way, even if it’s just vibing and taking in the scenery without engaging with the intended process. The only truly wrong way to play a single player game is if you are not having fun.
I have played other games where hardship is an intended part of the experience yet they provide difficulty settings that let you fuck all that noise and just brute-force your way through the game if you so desire. They have a description that explains you will not get the intended experience the game was meant to convey, but they empower you to disregard it and engage the game on your own terms. I don’t think the soulslike niche is in any way different or above such features and I fully support a god mode toggle that says “Hey, we worked hard to create a finely balanced gameplay loop that encourages learning from your mistakes and mastering the mechanics. We strongly believe you will get the most out of our game by giving it a chance and persevering, but if you truly do not care about that turn this on to enable chill vibes mode”.
God mode is the only option I can easily puzzle out working for people who are unable to use existing mechanics.
Like if the character takes reduced damage but the player cannot dodge, parry, maintain stamina while blocking, or otherwise avoid or mitigate attacks, they’re going to spend most of their time knocked down or staggered.
Increasing player damage would be redundant as most weapons can already be made to do enormous amounts of damage to enemies and bosses using existing systems.
You could increase xp gain I guess but you can already grind out xp relatively quickly.
The game already has auto-targetting, auto-aiming attacks, plenty of aoes of various kinds.
I don’t often see people specifying what accomodations they need to play the game. Like people who ask for a generic “difficulty mode” are treating it like an fps game or arpg game where you can fiddle with player health and damage numbers and make the game relatively straightforward. Idk how you can apply that kind of trivially easy “difficulty mode”, just applying some modifiers to damage and defense numbers, to all of the things going on in souls games - poise, status effects, spacing, dodging, parry, target priority, punishing attacks.
That’s the part where I think a real disconnect has crept in. Like with DnD you can give the player’s +10 to all roll and they mostly can’t lose. With fps games you can simply make the player not die when they lose all their health, and have enemies shoot infrequently and miss a lot. With soulslikes enemies deal damage to whatever they hit during their attack animation. Their aim doesn’t work the same way it does in an fps - they start the animation and if you’re in the way during the animation you take damage. There isn’t really rng the way you’d get it in D&D. Under the same conditions every action has the same result.
Giving players more ammo like you do in lower difficulties on fps and tps games doesn’t translate as the player already roughly has control over their resources through levelling up, managing flashs, and consumables. And all your resources are restocked whenever you die or reach the next checkpoint. And then on top of that ER has several mechanics to keep you topped off while exploring, and if you run low you can almost always return to the last checkpoint to top off and start that segment over.
Giving people “more powerful” weapons “earlier” doesn’t fit bc you have access to almost all weapon types at the start of the game through different classes, merchants, and drops. And there aren’t really more or less powerful weapons, rather weapons determine your moveset and playstyle with most players picking something that feels good to them. As all weapons can be levelled up and most can have their special abilities changed there isn’t any clear equivalent to giving someone the rocket launcher a few levels early.
When people say they want an “easy mode” I don’t understand what they want. They game is “easy” if you accept that going through the same areas over and over until you win is the core gameplay loop and you make use of all the tools you have.
Like if you’re R/G colorblind, or need visual cues for audio due to impaired hearing, I get that. But in the context of a souls game what do people mean by easy? It’s not an fps or arpg where enemies are just a bundle of hp that you click on until they die. If you have god mode you can ignore all game mechanics and click the enemy until they die. But short of god mode no amount of fiddling with stats is going to get someone past Malekith or Radhann.
Maybe some kind of time-dilation thing where you can slow the game down dramatically?
There’s a saying “a game for everyone is a game for no one” and I think at some point the souls hater crowd needs to sit down and chew on the idea that soulslike games have specific features that make them different from other genres of games and that the “story mode” or easy mode or whatever that can be relatively easily implemented in to crpgs, arpgs, fps, or tps games cannot easily be translated to souls games due to differences in core gameplay mechanics.
The best analogy I can come up with would be sim games. You can set all the conditions to optimal and make enemy jets fly in a straight, level line, you can turn off damage to your aircraft and fuel, but at some point the player does need to know how to fly the simulated aircraft. And if they cannot do that they should consider other genres than simulation.
Maybe I’m just overthinking this. I’m trying to work this out from "how do you make the game “easier” and still have a souls game. Maybe the folks who want an “easy” mode don’t care and just want to toodle around in god mode in a game that would otherwise be totally unenjoyable for them.
The idea that any player should be able to play any game however they want, though; hard disagree. Single player games are not sandboxes. God mode is fine, but like, idk, i see the idea a lot that players should be able to use whatever weapons or skills or whatever they want and everything should be equally, uniformly viable for all gameplay. Lots of talk about “power fantasy” and “there’s no wrong way to play”. That’s not a good attitude to approach games with. Do whatever you want within the limits of the engine, but if you’re trying to play the game in ways it was not made to be played then you’re making a decision to do so. I’m seeing this a lot with Helldivers, with people complaining that the game requires them to take a variety of weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies instead of taking whatever they think looks cool and having every weapon be equally effective in every situation. And there’s also a great many players refusing to learn basic game systems and complaining that the game is too hard because they don’t understand how to use those systems.
When a person selects a game to play they should be ready to invest a certain amount of time learning the game’s rules and systems, and they should engage with the game in good faith. That means accepting the goals of the game - fps games are about shooting things, arpgs are about character builds and clicking monsters, puzzle games are about solving puzzles, simulation games are about simulating systems, platformers are about jumping between platforms - and engaging with the games on those terms.
Elden ring isn’t a walking simulator, it’s not a ttrpg adapted in to a crpg, it’s not a conventional arpg, it’s not a zelda game or a metroidvania. Soulslike games are their own thing. If you want to vibe and enjoy the scenary, just walk around and look at things, you’re asking the devs to give you options to play an entirely different genre and style of game. All the scenery and vibes are in a soulslike game to give substance and flavor to the core of fighting from one bonfire to the next bonfire. Putting in options to completely ignore that and just wander around isn’t a mode to make it easier to play dark souls, it"s a mode for not playing dark souls. “I want to be able to engage with the combat in a way that is within the limits of my abilities” is reasonable. “I want to play a walking simulator and i want options to make ds or er a walking simulator” is unreasonable. If someone feels they cannot enjoy the game they should not buy it, and instead find a game in a genre they enjoy.
I do think you are overthinking it a little and worrying too much about the Souls experience vs what some people who could potentially derive some form of enjoyment from the series that you and I might not be able to grok actually want. Dodge iframes, parry windows, poise, stamina, stagger, status effects, all of these are mathematical variables inside the game that can be easily controlled on the fly with global difficulty modifiers. More iframes to dodges makes one able to avoid attacks with less precision on their read and timing. Longer recovery times between enemy patterns can allow for greedy hits that would otherwise get punished which also means more damage on the enemy, less time it is alive and less time for you to make mistakes. Less stamina drain from attacks combined with more forgiving regen can make it easier to simply stand with your guard up and endure. Less incoming damage and more poise means that you can make more favorable trades of blows. Flasks with more shots and more healing mean that you can make more mistakes or trades between fires. All of these things add up to allow for more mistakes, less precision, less grind, less risk for more reward, less mastery. They can make the difference between dying 20+ times between bonfires and dying 3 times, which for some people takes the game from unplayable frustration to fun dark fantasy romp.
As you said yourself, you can use the systems to deal disgusting amounts of damage, or become disgustingly tanky and laugh in the face of your enemies, as a friend of mine did after getting real tired of some of Elden Ring’s shit, but it requires mastery of the systems and the patience to achieve it. I know all the ways to make it easier. Some people don’t want to deal with that noise. A difficulty modifier that allows them to mess with the numbers on the fly achieves the same effect in a way that is more in line with the amount of effort they are willing to invest in the game. And an “I really don’t want to deal with this shit” godmode toggle covers the edge cases that maybe mathematics alone is not able to overcome. It’s anathema to the game’s design and intended way of engaging with it, yes, but literally just let people have fun in wrong and bad ways, in a singleplayer game it’s not hurting anything other than their own experience. They may not want Souls but they might be on board with something Souls can made into via easy to implement difficulty options.
I don’t think that any game should be designed from the ground-up with the notion that it can be played in any way you wish. If all weapons and skills are equally viable then there are no decisions to make and nothing ultimately matters. Power fantasies where you can do anything and be anyone and use whatever you wish are a bad design paradigm that leads to shallow and empty games. Absolutely agreed on this one. Ideally, games should have a clear idea of who they are aimed at and be built around delivering that experience rather than being an identity-less one size fits all product that is made to maximize mass appeal. Hell, most of the games I enjoy are niche products. I also completely agree with you that multiplayer games should be approached in good faith and that you should be expected to learn the basic systems of the game and hone them. If I am playing Helldivers and I am matched with someone who repeatedly shows that they are unwilling to engage with the game and respect its fundamentals, then I want to kick them from my squad. Especially if we are playing on the higher difficulties and they are complaining about game balance being supposedly bad rather than putting in the effort to learn the fundamentals and improve their gameplay before tackling harder difficulties.
I also don’t think any developer should be expected to carefully tailor and curate every difficulty setting to the point that they are essentially making several different games either. That is indeed unreasonable. Keep it to easily tweaked variables and cheat code equivalents and if that isn’t enough, then, yes, people should just find a different game to play. Make it clear what is the setting for the “proper” experience and be transparent about the scope and limitations of adjusting the difficulty. Ideally, every game should offer a demo that allows you to see what you are getting into and if the available scope of experience customization is enough to cover your needs.
What I believe is that how individuals choose to engage with singleplayer games is entirely up to them and I respect the fact that they might look for different types of experiences than I do. If these individuals can be provided with more choices to tweak their experience to their liking, that require low development effort and are put in after the game is designed around its intended gameplay loop and experience, then just do it and let them have their fun in peace however wrong it might be. Let people give themselves 99 flasks that heal them to full and and reduce the damage they take while increasing their own and boosting their stamina regen and even godmode themselves and play Ruined Medieval Dark Fantasy Walking Simulator instead of Elden Ring, idgaf, it’s their money and their time. Hopefully they will one day think “maybe I should try the actual intended experience” and play the real Souls but if they don’t want to that’s also fine.
In conclusion my stance on difficulty in singleplayer games is:
- make games with a clear intention and intended difficulty and experience
- give the people a big difficulty tab in the settings menu where they can tweak various easy to expose parameters to their liking as well as godmode/infinite consumables/whatever buttons that do what cheat codes used to in old games. You do not have to completely redesign the game from the ground up for easy mode and no one should seriously expect this from any developer, just offer a bunch of tweaks that may be cumulatively effective in making the game more approachable to some people who are put off by the default difficulty
- clearly point out what are the intended parameters and what kind of experience the game is meant to convey while making it clear that tweaking the values will detract from how the game as art is meant to be engaged with
- let people tweak the values to have their incomprehensible terrible fun if they so desire, idk maybe someone really likes sightseeing around the maps in Elden Ring for whatever reason, I think I remember a twitter post by someone who just really liked the world and wanted to walk around and vibe so it might just work for some folks and if it’s low hanging fruit development wise why not do it
Good post. You’ve given me things to think about. I hadn’t considered changing i-frames, flask charges, etc as those are mostly things that you can already do vs game systems.
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You’re supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you’re paying attention you’re figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don’t enjoy that you likely won’t have fun with the game.
Oh, it’s secretly a roguelike that’s why it sucks. That makes sense, thanks.
Sort of? It’s not really a roguelike because you keep your character when you die and at most you’ll lose the experience points you gained since the last checkpoint. Checkpoints are usually between 5-20 minutes apart, with the time between them really heavily dependent on player skill and game knowledge. On my first playthrough one section of maybe 200m took me several hours of fighting through it over and over again until I cleared it. This playthough took me five minutes bc I had much much better game knowledge and understood how all the systems worked. And I cleared it in five minutes using an archery build that isn’t really supported by the game, and I did a lot of screwing around.
Also this isn’t a secret it’s the absolute core of the entire genre. Almost all soulslike games pit you against a big gnarly boss at the absolute start of the game that will beat the crap out of you many times specifically as a tutorial on how the game loop works. That boss is there to kill you so you know that death isn’t a failure state or you “losing the game”, it’s just a normal part of gameplay. Ds1 has asylum demon, i don’t recall is dsii has one, dsiii has iyudex gundyr, sekiro has that guy in the field, elder ring has the grafted scion. They’re all there right from the start of the game to kill you so you learn that death is at most a temporary setback and a chance to regroup and test new ideas. It’s the first thing the genre tries to teach you.
From my experience, the only purpose of Fromsoft games is the difficulty, because the lore is boring. Could never connect with the combat, and the story was “dark fantasy, but maybe lovecraftian???”.
It’s really not difficult the way people think it is, especially Elden Ring. If you want to solo the game using a very specialized build, yeah. But you can also just pick stuff you like and guard counter or turtle or magic spam through the entire game while summoning friends and being summoned to help people. You can goof off, do sub-optimal builds, try wacky stuff, and fuck around a lot. If you don’t like your build re-specing in er is fairly straightforward. Idk, i think “souls games are difficult” has been built up to mythological levels to the point where people either don’t try to play Elden Ring at all, or try to play, get killed by the Tree Sentinel a few times, then throw their hands up in frustration without engaging with all the systems the game gives you right from the start.
ER really has been made much friendlier and more approachable and easier to get in to than prior games. Summoning is much easier and more reliable. Re-speccing is much easier and available from relatively early in the game. Any time you’re stuck at a boss you can go somewhere else and try something else.
But yeah, the combat is 99.9% of the game, so if you don’t groove with it then it’s not the game for you.
As for the lore - what I really like about the Dark Souls story is that it’s very much about persevering in the face of adversity. It’s Absurdist to it’s core, and the story and game mechanics are deeply tied together. The Dark Souls world is trapped in stasis. Gwyn and his heirs, fearing the age of dark, keep linking the fire over and over again to re-boot the age of fire. And the result is that every cycle is the same, but worse. The world gets thinner and thinner. Time and space break down dragging disparate places together until they’re all stacked atop the kiln of the first flame. As long as this miserable cycle persists there’s no future for the workld and no hope. The misery will go on forever, the world will become more and more hollow until nothing is left but the thinnest shell and the faintest ember.
This is directly reflected in gameplay. There is no way to lose Dark Souls. The game has no fail condition. As long as you keep trying, keep bashing your head against a cruel world that hates you without seeing you, you cannot fail. Your enemies are hollow, their humanity scooped out by overwhelming despair and indifference. They fight you out of a cold, reflexive hatred of your stubbornness and determination to press on long after there’s any reason to do so. This is the core of Existentialism and Absurdism; choosing to live, grow, and change after recognizing that there’s no meaning in the world.
The multiplayer reflects this, too. As Miyazaki said, the cooperative summoning was inspired by a situation where strangers were helping each other get their cars un-stuck in a bad snow. They were strangers, owing each other nothing, never seeing each other again, but they chose to cooperate and aid each other in that moment.
The pvp reflects this. People will invade your world to try to harm you, but some people will leap to your aid. There’s predatory violence, but also virtuous defenders. No matter how desolate and empty the world feels there are always people nearby who will lend you a hand in even the worst circumstances.
The way you learn about the story also ties in to these themes. When you first travel through the world it seems like a miserable, empty wasteland. It’s only by exploring and gathering relics and rubbish from the past that you can slowly piece together what happened. You’re not a great hero. The age of heroes was long ago, and you’re an archeologist exploring it’s wreckage. You learn about their hopes and dreams, and their inevitable fall and failure. You take up their rusted arms, polish them until they shine anew. You clean the dust from crests and sigils that long ago lost all meaning and carry them with renewed purpose. You come to empathize with gods and monsters that proved to be pathetically mortal in the end.
And you just keep going. You keep going after you get burned by the pot throwers just outside firelink, when you get crushed by the charred and burned out shells of Gwyn’s silver knights, when you’re invaded by sadistic killers, when you finally drag your poisoned body to the bottom of blight town and the top of the gargloy’s belfry. You keep going through the death traps of Sen’s fortress. You keep going when you encounter the city of the gods and it’s false pretense of glory. You just keep going, through all the adversity and setbacks, because you want to keep going.
You can give up at any time. You can turn the game off. You can grow frustrated and bored. That’s when the player goes hollow. There’s no way to lose the game, except to turn it off.
And I connect with that very deeply because that has been my entire life. I have very severe, untreatable depression that has made more of my life miserable than not. The only reason I keep going is that I choose to keep going. Absurdism and Existentialism are the core of my ethos; there is no meaning accept what you yourself create.
Dark Souls is a deeply, achingly humanistic game. It says, very plainly, that to exist is to suffer. And it also says that there is always hope, always comradery, always beauty, amidst that suffering. The conclusion of the story, the “good ending” in Dark Souls III, isn’t restoring the bourgeis status quo or installing a monarchy or defeating the minority and communist coded enemies. It’s holding hands with someone who is just as scared and uncertain as you are and accepting your mortality. Two strangers watching the last rays of the last sunset, wondering what will happen next.
Elden Ring doesn’t hit nearly as hard, but there’s still a good story about the reckless pursuit of power, the horrors of war, agency in the face of systemic oppression, racism and intersectionality. I could go on for hours, but i need to wrap this up and hit enter.
I can see this series is very important for you, almost therapeutic in a way. I see your points very clearly, and I 100% get why there’s people into Dark Souls, and people into Dark Souls. It’s just not a series i can jive with, personally. When the movement and combat don’t feel good, which as you mentioned is basically the game on its face, yeah, i’m going to walk away. My comment was obviously not meant to be serious, but a deflection from the usual culture surrounding the series.
Totes fair!
I might give it another fair shot in the future, but having tried DS2, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, i’m not 100% sure it’ll stick the landing for me.
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Thank you for pushing me on this. I’ve been wrestling with it all night, and I think in the last analysis I’m just afraid of change. Dark Souls has been one of the most important works of art in my life. The grim, determined, brutal optimism of the series kept me alive in the throes of utmost depression, gave me an experience of struggling with adversity that translated to the worst parts of my struggle to survive severe mental illness. I’m afraid that there’s something delicate about it, and if it changes too much it’ll break. But you’re right - That’s inside me, and my inflexibility. I should find more compassion for others, as well as more faith in the Fromsoft team to be better than they are and strive to overcome their own limits and setbacks. f
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Celeste has an assist mode, which uh I simply did not use Idk. I tortured myself with its twitch platforming and felt I overcame it, but I don’t even think assist players are losing out on much.
One of the other things Gamers™ need to accept is that the designer’s word is not necessarily law. As far back as the Game Genie, people will use whatever they can to experience a game and that’s fine honestly. People also want different things from games. It’s like the author is dead.
Just FYI, the “author is dead” thing is about interpreting a text directly according to what is actually there, without concerning yourself with what the “Author” may or may not have intended. When you talk about altering a text, by example, modding it or using a Game Genie, this is actually something quite different, because you are actually creating a new text that would then require different interpretations from the reader
I selected the Game Genie because it’s not capable of adding stuff and it takes a lot more codework than normos would do to change the game considerably. But U Rite, modding especially is more like fanfiction, analagously.
Video games are actually interesting wrt the conception of authorship, because it’s even harder to assign a unitary Author to them. Hundreds of people have input on the finished product. Thousands if you count people like QA and beta testers.
Most g*mers just reduce it to whoever the director is
Especially funny in this case because GRRM wrote most of the lore
Accordingg to an interview i read he only provided some broad sketches early on in the game’s development.
A lot of games are also based on long community traditions of modification too. Popular games like League of Legends and Dota2 for instance are based on a mod called Dota Allstars which is itself an amalgamation of other popular Warcraft 3 mods along with solicited direct incorporation of player suggestions then of course the base game of warcraft itself is a rip off of warhammer and it goes on. The ability to modify these games is often an encouraged and developer supported core feature of the games.
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I’m not saying that modifying a text is bad, just that it is different from the original
I think the assist mode in Celeste is fantastic, especially since it doesn’t disable any achievements AFAIK.
Me playing Workers and Resources, which allows you to just turn mechanics on and off mid-game (not all of them): No, I must plan my construction site’s logistics perfectly! (also why would I give a shit about how other people play the game?)
(also, why do these hard game lovers not like the same hard games I like :( )
I’ve tried to get into Workers and Resources like 3 times now but every time I get about halfway through the tutorials before I realize I’ve just been clicking the buttons it told me to and haven’t actually been learning anything. Then I look at how many more tutorials I need to fully comprehend before I can even start playing the game proper, and my brain just kind of shuts down.
I’m not a pro by any means, but I can probably help a little bit if you want. The basics are pretty simple (barring a couple of mechanics absent from the tutorials), mostly made more complex by a lack of a ctrl-z function and how finnicky building/terrain placement is. And certain things aren’t explained (like the ratio of production buildings/vehicles, or that most of your buildings are running at under max capacity until “mid game”, or that some factory connections don’t need forklifts).
I’ve been interested in the game for years and it only just clicked for me
I got workers and resources last week and it’s soooo good
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Not really, it’s largely affectionate. I think the worst thing is probably the secret police.
That’s cool.
This whole thing is a nothingburger with the right cheat codes, but because modern gamingTM can’t have cheat codes for some reason, we’re stuck with these pointless arguments. It’s simple:
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Make the game as hard or easy as you want.
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Add a million cheat codes that gamers can use to customize how they want their personal game experience to be.
The main difference between god mode cheat code and a no-death option is that there’s an understanding that if you enter in cheat codes, the game might go off the rails with sequence breaking or even softlocking, which can be overcome be inputting even more cheat codes like level warping.
Yeah, I don’t care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I’ll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I’ll make a hard mode, you don’t know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don’t really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of “give the enemies more HP and damage”, and “I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10” isn’t a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that’s obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can’t demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!
I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we’re still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it’s going slow, people got mad about “ludonarrative dissonance” which wasn’t even that fancy of a term, like “ludo”'s Latin but “narrative” and “dissonance” are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about “artistic vision”, but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.
If you’re looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your “vision”… then games just aren’t the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what’s the “right” and “wrong” way to experience a game - it’s significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.
And besides - your game probably isn’t some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it’s some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you’re a AA developer and if you don’t release this one on time you’re going bankrupt) is going to be. You’re going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn’t really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you’re not Valve and you don’t have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going “damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I’m just not having a good time here” and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn’t necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn’t in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.
100% agree. AAA games continue to ape Oscar bait Hollywood films. Like, don’t you think it’s weird how all this time, there isn’t a genre of comedic games? Comedies are a massive film genre, but I bet you despite the thousands upon thousands of games developed per year, you probably couldn’t even name 100 comedic games. Not games that have funny one-liners or funny characters, but games developed from the ground up to be comedic like how a comedy is written and directed as a comedy. And perhaps the worst part of it is that due to its interactivity, games are actually well-suited for comedy, especially physical comedy. Ludonarrative dissonance can be better resolved through lampshading in a comedic game. But because physical comedy is considered low-brow, AAA games have to chase after “emotional moments” that frankly rarely deliver. This is either done through completely noninteractive cutscenes (ie a film within a game) or something like HL2 where all the gravitas of the scene is completely undermined by the player bunnyhopping and hitting NPCs with the crowbar.
Mods make it really obvious games have massive comedic potential and are at their best when there’s a degree of levity. Skyrim mods that turn swords into dildos and dragons into flying Thomas the Tank Engine far more embody the spirit of gaming than anything else.
Comedy games makes sense, but the average game in that genre would either be Leisure Suit Larry or High On Life. I’d rather neither
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I blame achievements and multiplayer being considered the “real experience.”
Achievements turn what used to be just self-imposed restrictions and goals into an external thing acknowledged by the game. Before, something like a pacifist run or no potions run was just something that you did for fun as a challenge. But once achievements became something explicitly acknowledged by the game, there’s the question of legitimate achievements and illegitimate achievements (achievements that you got because you entered in cheat code which made getting them much easier). The easiest way to solve this is to just not have cheat codes, which leads to stigmatization as cheat codes are no longer part of a typical gaming experience.
Multiplayer just made people try to judge singleplayer game with multiplayer criteria, so people think entering in a cheat code is the same as running an aimbot. It’s also the reason why people obsess over balance even in singleplayer games where balance isn’t even that important. Weapon A being better than Weapon B literally doesn’t matter if the game acknowledges that Weapon A is better than Weapon B, the least clumsy way being through lore. There was a time when singleplayer was the authentic experience and multiplayer was just something tacked on. Now, it’s the complete opposite.
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Under communism, all video games will be required to include an option to launch Gamers in to the sun
I really wish more games had higher difficulty options, but that doesn’t mean I want everyone to suffer the way I do. Accessibility is good!
I’ve been cooking this take and Im gunna say it:
THE NEXT FROMSOFT SOULS GAME SHOULD HAVE AN EASY MODE
Argument: several Castlevania games had difficulty options. The NES ones did not, but Bloodlines on the MD had two characters sort of represent different difficulties, and you could increase your starting lives. Nobody says Bloodlines is easy.
Castlevania Chronicles on the Playstation has literal difficulty selection, actually a littany of options and modes. Nobody says Chronicles is easy.
Dork Soles is as close as you can get to 3D Castlevania. There’s a throughline between fighting axe knights in Castlevania 1 and fighting silver knights in Dark Souls 1. Dork Soles doesn’t have the platforming focus because that shit’s unplayable, but the games have a very similar spirit. So put Easy or an Assist mode in Dork Soles IV.
This position is unassailable and any attempt to disagree will prove nothing other than that you are a nerd and a g*mer
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And yet he is not good at games. He is a nerd.
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Yes very true thank you for saying
Imagine acknowledging different perspectives! Gamers could never!
People here will probably disagree with me but hear me out.
Easy mode is not Accessibility. It is a shitty way to carter for accessibility, the only thing the devs do is change some numbers in the code and voiala the game now has accessibility?
The best example that I can think of good accessibility is with Nier Replicant and Nier Automata. In Replicant you have options to play with only one hand and customize the controls to your liking and in Automata on easy mode you can equip chips with different abilities like auto aim, auto dodge, auto attack, auto shoot and they take up space so you can’t equip every chip + DMG UP/Heal/HP Up etc. So people can customize their experience and make the game do things that they can’t or don’t want to do while playing and focus only on what they find rewarding.
Another point: I don’t think that every game is for everyone and the artist shouldn’t bend his vision to accommodate to the audience. If Myazaki doesn’t think there should be an easy mode in her games fine, but what her games should have is a proper accessibility mode. To compare with cinema: movies shouldn’t be dumbed down to a wider audience understand it, but all movies need subtitles and descriptive audio.
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
