barbzilla said:
1: Wrong, there is nothing showing that an easy mode would require a major design change for the normal difficulty. Something as simple as scaling monster damage back is enough to make an "easy" mode. So once again I say this has NO effect on you at all.
While that would indeed make the game easier, it strains credulity to think that FROM would not also take mechanics into account when designing those enemies with lower damage. It's not as simple as you make it out to be. Maybe in some games, but not
Dark Souls.
2: Once again, we aren't marketing to the people who enjoy challenges here with an easy mode. This mode is not aimed at YOU. It is aimed at bringing more people over to fall in love with the game you say you love. I still fail to see how this is a bad thing. You say it will not provide the same experience, you say its a shitty action RPG. That means with something as simple as a change in damage, you say your beloved game is now shitty. It tells me how invested you actually are in the game itself. I found plenty of story there, sure you had to dig for it and pay attention. But after talking to everyone in the game there is a concurrent thread. You are reliving the actions of the past through your current actions. You get to learn about the downfall of the gods. Where were you during all of this? And, I've only been playing a week.
I know who the easy mode is made for. I won't be playing it regardless. That's not the point. Bringing more people to
Dark Souls is wonderful, I encourage it.
Any game can suck if you make the wrong changes to it, regardless of how much I love it's current state. While the setting is varied and rich, what really sets
Dark Souls apart from the heard is the way it utilizes it's difficult gameplay to achieve it's ends. Take that away and you take the heart out of the game and are left with something fairly unremarkable. You are talking about effectively gutting the game's content. Pointing out how shitty that would be doesn't mean I'm not a true believer.
3: I'm not playing dumb with you. I don't expect easy mode to be a "hardcore experience" as you put it. I expect it to be an introductory difficulty meant to make the game more accessible.
But you are still not addressing the fact that games which pursue a broader audience consistently "sell out" on the core experience.
Giving players a couple of more hits before they die so they can learn how to fight the enemies.
A significant change in the number of hits they take would make the mechanics you currently need to succeed irrelevant. The only thing that would change is that they won't
have to learn the game. But learning
is this game's content. So they won't experience the game's content, so the game will suck. It will be short and shitty compared to comparable products and they will feel robbed.
Just because you and I can play at a higher skill level, does not mean all gamers can. Some gamers utilize tactics and not reflex.
There are VERY few encounters in
Dark Souls that are really that demanding on the reflexes. Tactics and learning is exactly what players will miss when you upset the threshold of difficulty that keeps the mechanics relevant.
These players can actually be brilliant Dark Souls players, but the catch is if they don't have the initial reflexes to learn the enemies they won't make it very far before becoming frustrated with the game. You are still arguing under the false assumption that easy mode will require a change to the traditional mode, it would not.
Depends what you mean by "require". Strictly speaking, maybe not, but I estimate the chances of things turning out that way at about 95%, maybe higher. It almost certainly will require a change to the traditional mode, just as a practical measure. If not, it might be easier to literally make two different games. It's almost inconceivable that they could be designed in a vacuum. The closest thing is what you're talking about, basically the Bethesda route of just scaling everything uniformly without designing each enemy and encounter individually and making relevant, balanced mechanics. That doesn't work very well in
Skyrim and it's out of the question in
Dark Souls.
Once again all it would take to make an "EASY" mode would be to scale back the monster damage. Simple, elegant, and effective with no impact on the traditional players.
4: Here we are again assuming things. Can we stop with assumptions?
Critical thinking =/= "assumptions". You're the one making assertions about how easy things will be to design and how they will work and how things will be affected. You are making some pretty enormous and unfounded assumptions yourself.
By scaling back monster damage and giving new players an extra hit or two we are not totally destroying monster difficulty.
It will if they don't change the mechanics. Darkwraiths are trivial to me. If they had one hundred times more health or one hundred times more damage, they would be no less trivial. The health and damage of enemies are not arbitrary, they are balanced against the mechanics involved in defeating them. It's all about backstabs, parries, invincibility frames, taking advantage of stability/poise mechanics, weapon move-sets, etc. The only way allowing the player who mashes buttons to win makes the game easier is by making those mechanics irrelevant. In some other game, that might not be a big deal. But you wouldn't take the strategy out of Starcraft and you shouldn't take the learning out of
Dark Souls.
The bosses will still destroy new players until they learn how to dodge their attacks, when to block, and where to attack. I'm not going to continue barking up the same tree, but less damage + no change to traditional mode = what I envision as easy mode.
5: Once again I am in NG++ I don't think I am saying the game is too hard for me anymore. The game takes a different approach from most games and this is exactly why I think there should be an easy mode.
That approach is exactly what makes an easy mode inappropriate for this title in particular.
The game is brilliantly designed and I love it. I want everyone to experience it, but until they have the breakthrough I did they will never get the joy I do.
They will never have that breakthrough, that's what you're taking from them, that's why the game will suck. They will mash until they win and they will understandably conclude that this game sucks. Or, FROM Software will do serious work on the mechanics and encounters to account for their needs. At that point any talk about the normal experience remaining unchanged sounds pretty empty (I almost said 'hollow' heh).
What you are telling me right now is that you want there to be no easy mode because you enjoy having the bragging rights that you beat a game...
STRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN
a simple trivial game, that even you said many others consider easy... Bravo! I can see why it is such a bad idea to allow From Software to make more money off of an excellent game.
I want From to make money. And I want everyone to play
Dark Souls and experience it's rewards. I am not the elitist prick you want me to be. The people who find
Dark Souls easy learned how to
make it easy. That is to say, they experienced the game's content. I want everyone to have that experience. I don't want that experience to diminish.