Namco Denies Dark Souls Difficulty Comment

[hazabaza1]

People who say it should have an easy mode just watch:

I watched ten minutes of that moron completely fail to grasp the issue at all. I mean he didn't even understand the basic principle of why Dark Souls is difficult let alone how people can want a divergent experience. It was just "me like hard game, not me should like hard game too"

I don't think insults are necessary.
And it makes fine sense to me. I disagree with some points but generally I think he gets it down pretty well.

 

[Rainboq]

What there could be is some easier starting dungeons that then curve up to the normal difficulty that let them loose in the preexisting locations. There, problem solved, game is still as difficult, and now more accessible.

That would give you the opportunity to level up much more before the difficult content, making the difficult areas easier. Changing the difficulty curve in a game like this isn't that easy. Making anything easier in Dark Souls has the chance of undermining the delicate balance of difficulty/reward that it does so well, which is practically the point of this game.

They could simply change the xp drops and the leveling progression in those early dungeons.

 

[taciturnCandid]

Just only allow achievements in the normal mode. Not to that but limit the kind of cosmetic things you can have and maybe not give as many of weapons.


But some of us just aren't that great at games and wouldn't mind to be able to play them through at least once. I tried demon souls and I ended up selling it. I just wasn't able to have fun.

Maybe you have that privilege of being able to practice at a game in order to play it, but some of us don't have the time and patience. Gaming is just a fun activity that I do. I don't plan to dedicate hours of my life just getting a little better so that way i can get a little further in the game.

Gaming to me is a form of escape from stress and depression. If I play through a game and I really like it, then I will sometimes play on a higher difficulty. Though I don't do that as often. i thought dark souls looked cool, but I realized that i would never be able to finish it.

If you want the pride of beating a difficult game, why not beat it on a high difficulty level? Why do you have to restrict the amount of people who want to play your game just because of your pride?

I mean look at ninja gaiden black and 2. They both added modes for people who weren't that great. Did it take away from the holy cow this is extremely difficult factor? No. Because there were difficulties that still gave you that.

Adding an easier mode doesn't take away from the pride that you beat it on a hard mode. I don't understand why people think that.

Think about it this way. If they make an easier mode and more people can play it, then more people will buy it. That subsidizes the development of a new game. If your game is so challenging that only a select few can beat it, then less people will want to play it and it won't do as well. So less encouragement to make more of it.

I mean, you don't have to make it child like easy. In ninja Gaiden 2, acolyte still cause you to die if you screwed up. It was difficult, but not to the point of throw your controller difficult.

 

[Burst6]

/snip

I'm not going to reply to all of that, but i do have some things to say.

Ninja gaiden and dark souls are two different games.

There's nothing to ninja gaiden that you need to really know. It's a game designed to have flashy linear combat. There are lots of enemies to hack and slash through with fancy moves and it's relatively cinematic and straightforward. It's difficulty came from its fast paced combat.

Dark souls on the other hand hides everything from you. That's where the difficulty comes from. The combat isn't that hard or fast paced. Dying isn't that much of a punishment because
1) every place has shortcuts
2) even if they don't it's not that hard to sprint through the enemy lines without being hit and 3) souls and humanity are easily farmable so it doesn't matter that much if you lose them

Really there isn't that much punishment or difficulty in dark souls. There's not even that much trial and error as people say. It's not hard because the monsters attack quickly or they have a lot of health, its hard because it hides everything for you and expects you to figure it out. Here's an easy mode for you. Go look up hints on one of the wikis or GameFAQs. Everything in dark souls has a trick.

When i see people complaining about dying and having to fight monsters over again i get confused. I almost never have to do that. Most of the time i open a shortcut and just sprint past the enemies, which puts me in front of the boss in half a minute. Entire major bosses are skippable if you know the secrets.

Making it easy will make it crap. The combat isn't that exciting so without the constant fear of getting 2-shot you realize that it's slow, unimpressive, and spammy. Ninja Gaiden had cool flashy combos. Mario has its own simplistic charm. Dark Souls has tight but boring game play. Without the difficulty you just the game will degrade into beating all of your enemies by spamming your basic attack, which is boring. If From really did want an easy mode they would have to greatly overhaul the combat to make it more flashy and combo oriented, which will hurt the main game.


And then there's the nightmare of incorporating easy difficulty into the online system. Other than buying twice as many servers so the easy mode players can only play against each other only i don't see a good solution.

They could simply change the xp drops and the leveling progression in those early dungeons.

No they really can't. In the game lvl doesn't matter that much. Gear is everything. They already give you great gear early on too, if you know where to look.

 

[Therumancer]

My basic opinion is that Dark Souls and it's spiritual predeccesor (Demon's Souls) is fine at the current level of difficulty. There are lots of games out there that are intentionally accessible and "introductory" level for that kind of gamer, true hardcore gamers should be allowed to have their titles as well, and it's not like there are a lot of them out there that are developed on this level.

The problem with adding easier modes to these games is that it defeats the purpose, and the prestige of playing them successfully, when everyone can get and display the acheivements, being able to show that you did specific things loses a lot of it's meaning.

I also tend to look at things like "Ninja Gaiden" which followed this trend and pretty much wound up losing it's soul in the process.


Now, perhaps in contridiction to the above I *do* think the game could stand to have it's controls and response/handling tightened up, and the magic system expanded. To be honest I think a lot of the alleged "difficulty" of the game simply comes from the game not doing
what you tell it to, even if your stats should permit it. In many cases I've died in these games because I suddenly couldn't do something that I had previously done about a hundred times. Also to be fair, as a result a lot of people are getting through the game by patiently working to set up glitches and such, specifically because it's nearly impossible to do what your supposed to do in some cases due to the game's handling. When it comes to magic, I'm a guy called "Therumancer" and as you might guess I like to play mages, I find it utterly irksome that these games so far have required a huge focus on melee, making magic both difficult to use AND a finite resource, especially in "Dark Souls" where you can't even get a mana regen ring. I understand the reasons for it to an extent, but I find it annoying. Personally I think beefing up the accessibility of magic, and the relative power (increase accuracy and the speed at which some projectives travel) would not be a bad thing.

 

[Warachia]

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If you don't strive to make your game accessible to players, and present players with new ideas, and challenges to overcome, you have failed as a game creator, if you make a game like Dark Souls and deliberatly make it so hard that most people don't want to play it, and choose not to add in an easier difficulty, you are simply making a game for yourself, the way you want it, not a game for any cutsomer.

For some reason, people think Dark Souls is well designed, it's not, the biggest fact comes from the terrible hit detection, things that will kill you when they shouldn't (I died once from jumping down 2 feet onto a lower platform, but the game decided that it was an instant kill zone and I couldn't walk there) and atrocious dungeons, like the tomb of the giants, where you can't see anything 3 feet away, or the pvp forest, no warning it's going to be pvp, no route to bypass it if you don't like pvp, no way to skip it, the only thing you can do is disconnect from the internet, and then you still have some ghosts who attack you and you can't attack back without being cursed.

An argument that was brought up is you can always grind or get better equipment, no you can't, because Dark Souls limits you to the places you can go before beating Ornstein an Smough, one of the shittiest cheapest bosses ever. All the places that have what you need to upgrade equipment are out of reach, all of the monsters in the area don't provide you with enough souls, the only ones that come close are the giant statues and you need to be using a very specific weapon to kill them, otherwise they heal themselves.

I mentioned The twins as being a terrible boss, and that is mostly due to the terrible hit detection I mentioned, firstly they can combo you to death, when you are stun-locked by one you can't move to avoid the other, and when one dies the other gains his powers, if it's smough, he gains an invisible AOE attack to every attack he does, you can't see it leading to you dodging, but not far enough, and you get hit and die, if Ornstein is left he becomes huge, an if you are a melee character you are screwed, you run in trying to kill him, but he'll just jump up in the air, land and shock you, and I've seen him do only this attack for the entire fight, you can't hit him and escape in time.

Lastly, there's the abyss, but what happens if you enter the abyss before getting the item you need to survive? You die, naturally, what happens if you try to leave to get the item? You can't, because the game locks you into the entrance to the abyss and forces you to kill yourself, permanently cheating you out of all of those souls you have collected.

Now I went off on several tangents, various difficulty modes with characters being carried over between modes would not only make dark souls more accessible, it would allow people to overlook these problems in favour of the game world they are presented with and the normally fun gameplay. There are even several ways to make the game better without compromising the game, on easy mode, enemies drop more souls and you don't lose souls when you die, Bosses don't have AOE attacks, where there are two bosses, now you only fight them one at a time, things like this would still make the game tricky, but would reduce the frustration, and would increase the replay value, because I'm more likely to play a game again if I'm having fun.

EDIT: Sorry joshuaayt, should be fixed now.

 

[Something Amyss]

But they're NOT removing the difficulty.

My point being more about the appeal to the games being solely in the difficulty, you're arguing a pretty semantic difference.

 

[Something Amyss]

If you don't strive to make your game accessible to players, and present players with new ideas, and challenges to overcome, you have failed as a game creator, if you make a game like Dark Souls and deliberatly make it so hard that most people don't want to play it, and choose not to add in an easier difficulty, you are simply making a game for yourself, the way you want it, not a game for any cutsomer.

They ARE making it for customers. A specific niche of customers who like to play brokenly hard games.

there is such a thing as a niche game. This is clearly intended to be one. Not every game is for every person. DS is not for me. I don't know about you. But really, who cares?

 

[thejackyl]

I'm in the minority here where I don't really care either way. As long as FromSoft still balances the standard difficulty correctly (Current patch in both Demon's and Dark Souls is pretty good pvp aside), I don't see why Easy mode is such a big deal.

Yes, it cheapens the experience for them, but if you play on normal, you get the same experience. I love the difficulty, and I will not play the next game on easy when I get it (I'll probably wait a few months like I did with Dark Souls).

I can still remember when I beat Sif and the Gaping Dragon for the first time. I literally jumped up, hands raised, and said woohoo, quietly since it was like 2am.

 

[Warachia]

If you don't strive to make your game accessible to players, and present players with new ideas, and challenges to overcome, you have failed as a game creator, if you make a game like Dark Souls and deliberatly make it so hard that most people don't want to play it, and choose not to add in an easier difficulty, you are simply making a game for yourself, the way you want it, not a game for any cutsomer.

They ARE making it for customers. A specific niche of customers who like to play brokenly hard games.

there is such a thing as a niche game. This is clearly intended to be one. Not every game is for every person. DS is not for me. I don't know about you. But really, who cares?

Bullshit, you can't make comments defending the game and trying to argue in it's favour and then say "who cares?"

Hiding behind "Niche" game also doesn't work here, I've explained before that it is technically inept, and for some reason people think that saying it's a "Niche" game stops it from being a bad game with terrible levels, and it's all part of the challenge, in that case you can't argue with people like that because they'll deliberately look away from the massive problems with the game and just declare them intentional, no matter how stupid or anti-fun they are.

 

[ShaqLevick]

Well, I have the perfect solution to the problem of Easy Mode, just set a super easy mode that wasn't able to go on-line. This way the "Hardcore" type still get to have access to the actual game, and the so called "Noobs" can still have the satisfaction of finishing their $60 investment before putting it away forever.

 

[sonofliber]

so the only answer for not wanting an OPTIONAL difficulty is : "but then we cant brag that we beat DS, cause theres an easy difficulty (news flash you still can)"

 

[Warachia]

If you don't strive to make your game accessible to players, and present players with new ideas, and challenges to overcome, you have failed as a game creator, if you make a game like Dark Souls and deliberatly make it so hard that most people don't want to play it, and choose not to add in an easier difficulty, you are simply making a game for yourself, the way you want it, not a game for any cutsomer.

If you are trying to make a game/book/movie/music for *everyone* you might as well stop, because you have/will fail hard "as a creator".
You CAN'T make a product for everyone and trying to do so will often produce a heap of undesirable sludge that nobody really likes.

The best thing you can do if you aren't working for McBigPublisher and are yet again trying to "grab the Call of Duty/World of Warcraft audience" is make a game you'd want to play and you can put your heart into to the best of your abilities, potentially also targetting a certain market but nothing else.

I'm gonna spare myself commenting on you whining for half a page about Dark Souls though

Sorry, but this argument is also BS, movies, books, and games are entirely separate mediums, and I NEVER said to make the game for everyone, that was you putting words in my mouth, I said you should make your game accessible to your audience, which is COMPLETELY separate.

I understand wanting to target a certain audience, but targeting that audience is no good if you have a lot of terrible implementation, and that's why I made my first post explaining how an easy mode can make up for the implementation.

 

[Master_Fubar23]

I agree dark souls can be challenging but it does have real some bullshit moments. Like area with the red dragon. There is no warning what so ever that your ass is going to get lit up. At least with traps you have a warning IF you're paying attention. Another one is how the camera is set up. Trying to see around a corner is easy and great in amnesia but in dark souls going down a small corridor that doesn?t allow you to turn the camera only to get attacked once you enter the room at the end by a monster that you had no chance of knowing or seeing was there because it was hugging the wall to your left or right is bullshit. Besides those annoyances I love dark souls and haven't had an issue with the difficultly. Also some people are talking about dark souls as if it?s a single player game but it?s not. You are always connected to the servers if you have internet so you can summon other players to help you or in some cases they will hunt you. So having a different difficultly would break the game since everyone and everything in the game is connected to an extent.

 

[Prof.Beany]

You want an easy mode? Go on the internet for 5 minutes and bring up a wiki.
Seriously, its a game about trial and error, the giant crushing enemies are almost always trivial to take down once you know their attack patterns and have a grasp of the basic mechanics. The only difficulty here really is your own ability to be patient.

Theres also this misconception that death in DS is a failure state, when really the only failure state is giving up. Death is part of the whole experience, its not a game over, its a point at which you have to meditate on what just happened and adjust your approach to the situation accordingly, its not that the enemies have ridiculous HP or Damage, its that you haven't yet learned their attack patterns and how to dodge them.

What would an easy mode do? Reduce HP and attack power on enemies?
Congratulations you're now playing the single most boring RPG ever made. Barely any story to follow (its not given to you straight up anyway, theres a whole bunch of text lore) stupidly easy encounters and an incredibly short game.

Deny it all you want, but difficulty IS the core of Dark Souls and an easy mode would make the game bland and uninteresting. If you dont enjoy the kind of trial and error gameplay than simply dont pick it up, the developers dont have to appeal to everyone and the game WILL suffer if an easy mode is added in.

 

[Denamic]

Yeah without the constant omnipresent fear of something several times your height suddenly crushing you beneath it's mighty boot for having the audacity to smack it's pitiful minions about the game would be a lot less satisfying.

Well... yes.
Your comment, though obviously sardonic, is entirely correct.
The ever present fear of imminent death is integral to the Souls experience.
The punishing nature of the games is what makes it feel so good when you succeed.
It's a different kind of rewarding feeling than the ye olde skinners box mechanics provide.
The games makes you feel good about yourself.