New hard game comes out. Idiot press wants easy mode.

[Xprimentyl]

Watching a video of a live concert I feel is a better analogy, the video being a similar-if-diminished way to experience a concert. Are you suggesting my VHS of Yanni: Live at the Acropolis shouldn?t exist and that the onus is on me to ?git gud? and physically attend if I want to hear the live version of ?The Rain Must Fall? with the badass violin solo?

Actually I don't think that is a fair comparison either. But if you wanna use music, the simple comparison would be the hearing your favorite song through a phone speaker, versus hearing it through a powerful surround sound system. The song doesn't change fundamentally but one experience is leagues different from the other and so is the enjoyment of said song.

If your analogy suits you better, it works fine as it also makes my point: if I want to hear my favorite song and an expensive stereo system or concert isn?t available to me, I?m perfectly happy listening to it through my phone; I?m actually glad that OPTION exists. By your logic, any diminished listening options shouldn?t exist since listening ?the way music is meant to be heard? should be the ONLY way. I?ve found dozens upon dozens of new songs and artists listening to Spotify through my phone, artists and songs I?ve enjoyed enough to invest in physical albums and attend concerts. See how that works? Diminished experiences led to my interest and investment in the fuller, ?real? experiences, something that would never happen if artists chose to restrict access to their music to live concerts.

 

[Kerg3927]

There?s a middle ground between not caring and acting like the game is so sacred that any changes to it are heresy.

Don?t mistake my frustration with the pearl clutching hysteria around an easy mode ruining Dark Souls forever with me losing my shit. Because that?s what it is, hysteria. Because I?m here to argue a point. Two actually. Accessibility isn?t bad. And Dark Souls fans need to get the fuck over themselves. And need to stop doing things like, I don?t know, assuming that people don?t actually care about more people getting into the game and thinking that it?s all somehow about pissing them off. Because they need to realize they?re not important enough to be worth pissing off.

I would argue that it already is accessible. We're not talking about building a ramp for disabled people in wheelchairs here. I think most people who want to beat the Souls games can do so in the way it is currently designed. But they have to be "prepared to die" like the game's slogan says, and then learn from repetition, overcome, and reap the corresponding rewards, like everybody else. That's how From designed it, and it's a great design, a very successful design. And if players don't want to do that, then these games are probably not for them, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of games out there that I don't like, and you don't hear me complaining about them. I just don't play them.

Ah yes, they didn?t have fun because they weren?t flagellating themselves long enough. Hey Kerg? I have faith that people know themselves enough to know what kind of difficulty will work for them. Why don?t you?

See above.

See...

Remove the obstacles, and you remove the corresponding rewards. That's how humans are wired. But we are also wired to take the quickest and most efficient path to achieve our goals. That can be a really bad combo when it comes to gaming. But it can be overcome by simply not giving players the option of a quick and easy path.

You think you're being kind by giving players an cheat/easy mode. You're not. You're hurting their experience. From knows this, and is one of the few developers brave enough to do what is best for the players.

WoW Classic comes out this summer, and I can't wait. I played WoW for like 6-7 years, and watched it gradually get destroyed by removing the meritocratic foundation of the game, piece by piece. Easy modes were implemented. Everything was dumbed down. LFD and LFR matchmaking tools were implemented, so not only did you not need to learn how to play the game to play it successfully, you didn't even need to know how to socialize anymore. What happened? People got bored and quit in droves, coming back only briefly for new expansions before quitting again. And now the current retail game is on life support and Activision Blizzard's stock has plummeted by 50% in six months, and stockholders are probably wondering what the fuck happened.

So no, I don't believe that players who ask for easy modes know what's best for themselves. They're just kids asking for candy, and a good parent doesn't give his kids all the candy they want. And I applaud the rare developer like From Software that sticks to what it knows is best for the players and best for its business model instead of caving in to everyone's demands.

 

[CritialGaming]

If your analogy suits you better, it works fine as it also makes my point: if I want to hear my favorite song and an expensive stereo system or concert isn?t available to me, I?m perfectly happy listening to it through my phone; I?m actually glad that OPTION exists. By your logic, any diminished listening options shouldn?t exist since listening ?the way music is meant to be heard? should be the ONLY way. I?ve found dozens upon dozens of new songs and artists listening to Spotify through my phone, artists and songs I?ve enjoyed enough to invest in physical albums and attend concerts. See how that works? Diminished experiences led to my interest and investment in the fuller, ?real? experiences, something that would never happen if artists chose to restrict access to their music to live concerts.

But the key here is the art right? Look at it this way. If you design a game and give it to the player you want them to experience that you have designed for them. FromSoft designs for a specific experience, they have a game that they want people to play.

Critique is fine and fair, and you can say the game is too hard for you. But ultimately the artist, or game designers, in these cases had an experience in mind and they delivered that experience. Sure it might be too hard for some, but that challenge is part of what they've designed for you. Changing the way the game works to skew the difficulty balance one way or another fundamentally changes the experience they've brought before you.

You can not like that experience, you can fail at that experience. Yet for better or worse, the experience is what they've truly intended you to see. And changing that difficulty changes the experience for the player into something they didn't want.

 

[skywolfblue]

...I?m actually glad that OPTION exists. By your logic, any diminished listening options shouldn?t exist since listening ?the way music is meant to be heard? should be the ONLY way. I?ve found dozens upon dozens of new songs and artists listening to Spotify through my phone, artists and songs I?ve enjoyed enough to invest in physical albums and attend concerts. See how that works? Diminished experiences led to my interest and investment in the fuller, ?real? experiences, something that would never happen if artists chose to restrict access to their music to live concerts.

That is also my take on this topic.

For me more options = more accessibility = good thing.

Playing Halo on Legendary with all skulls on is a different experience then playing it on easy mode. Both exist within the same game. The former is not diminished by the latter existing.

If the souls games added an easy mode, that would not diminish those who want a challenge. The people who want the challenge would still get the authentic experience, and all the punishment and rewards that come with it.

WoW Classic comes out this summer, and I can't wait. I played WoW for like 6-7 years, and watched it gradually get destroyed by removing the meritocratic foundation of the game, piece by piece. Easy modes were implemented. Everything was dumbed down. LFD and LFR matchmaking tools were implemented, so not only did you not need to learn how to play the game to play it successfully, you didn't even need to know how to socialize anymore. What happened? People got bored and quit in droves, coming back only briefly for new expansions before quitting again. And now the current retail game is on life support and Activision Blizzard's stock has plummeted by 50% in six months, and stockholders are probably wondering what the fuck happened.

Apples and Oranges.

WoW got dumbed down because people asked blizzard to make the hard modes easier.
There was a time where:
Easy = Accessible, LFD, Normal Mode Dungeons.
Hard = Challenging, Required a cohesive group, Heroic Dungeons and Raids.

Burning Crusade was tough as nails, but it also had an "easy" mode in the form of normal dungeons. The Heroics were not diminished by the existence of that easy mode. But as time went on more and more people pressured for the hard modes to be made easy. Hard mode ceased to become hard.

People who are asking for an easy mode for Dark Souls are not asking for the challenge of hard mode to be diminished. Hard mode should stay authentic.

 

[CritialGaming]

Apples and Oranges.

WoW got dumbed down because people asked blizzard to make the hard modes easier.
There was a time where:
Easy = Accessible, LFD, Normal Mode Dungeons.
Hard = Challenging, Required a cohesive group, Heroic Dungeons and Raids.

Burning Crusade was tough as nails, but it also had an "easy" mode in the form of normal dungeons. The Heroics were not diminished by the existence of that easy mode. But as time went on more and more people pressured for the hard modes to be made easy. Hard mode ceased to become hard.

People who are asking for an easy mode for Dark Souls are not asking for the challenge of hard mode to be diminished. Hard mode should stay authentic.

Again I have to disagree with you. Yes you could stick to the "easy" content in The Burning Crusade but in doing so you would miss out on the largest portion of what WoW has to offer. Not just in terms of loot, but also in terms of the raiding experience.

IMO people often stick to easy modes because that's where they are comfortable. But they miss out on a TON of gaming experiences by not at least TRYING the challenging stuff.

Now WoW is suffering because they made "easy" the default. And the lack of effort to do the content makes that content meaningless and people just leave the game because of boredom. Easy might be accessible but it isn't as interesting and ultimately isn't as entertaining. Maybe if WoW made only a few things easier, group finding, or raiding, or rep grind, or any number of things. But they didn't, they made ALL of it easier and in so doing they removed the value behind all of it.

Those of us that played Vanilla and TBC all can remember standing in a major city and seeing someone run by wearing high tiered armor and going, "Whoa! One day I wanna get that stuff!". That feel came because we all KNEW what that player had done to get that stuff, we knew the incredible challenges that rewarded that gear. But that doesn't exist in WoW anymore, it hasn't been there in a long time and every time a new expansion comes out people go back hoping that this expansion would recapture that and it never does.

 

[Xprimentyl]

(Damn it, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in?)

If your analogy suits you better, it works fine as it also makes my point: if I want to hear my favorite song and an expensive stereo system or concert isn?t available to me, I?m perfectly happy listening to it through my phone; I?m actually glad that OPTION exists. By your logic, any diminished listening options shouldn?t exist since listening ?the way music is meant to be heard? should be the ONLY way. I?ve found dozens upon dozens of new songs and artists listening to Spotify through my phone, artists and songs I?ve enjoyed enough to invest in physical albums and attend concerts. See how that works? Diminished experiences led to my interest and investment in the fuller, ?real? experiences, something that would never happen if artists chose to restrict access to their music to live concerts.

But the key here is the art right? Look at it this way. If you design a game and give it to the player you want them to experience that you have designed for them. FromSoft designs for a specific experience, they have a game that they want people to play.

Critique is fine and fair, and you can say the game is too hard for you. But ultimately the artist, or game designers, in these cases had an experience in mind and they delivered that experience. Sure it might be too hard for some, but that challenge is part of what they've designed for you. Changing the way the game works to skew the difficulty balance one way or another fundamentally changes the experience they've brought before you.

You can not like that experience, you can fail at that experience. Yet for better or worse, the experience is what they've truly intended you to see. And changing that difficulty changes the experience for the player into something they didn't want.

I?m just going to say it: in the numerous threads we?ve had on this exact same subject, I?ve never once heard a minimally convincing argument for intentionally and deliberately not including an easy mode. NOT. ONCE.

If you or anyone truly believes the appeal of a Souls experience hangs ?Souly? on its difficulty, I can assure you, YOU. ARE. WRONG. If punishing difficulty was FROM?s sole intention, welp, they fucked up and accidentally made a really rich and beautiful series which accidentally offers more to be appreciated than the occasional sense of accomplishment felt after bitter frustration. Maybe they?ll get it right next time and make a Mike Tyson?s Punch-Out clone where you just fight one boss after another with none of that pesky lore spread out across beautiful environments to explore.

If you or anyone truly believes additional game modes (?additional? meaning ?more,? not ?less? and certainly not ?irrevocably, game-breakingly different,?) I can assure you, YOU. ARE. WRONG. I?ll even give you a little here; let?s say a lesser difficulty did fundamentally break what you?d deem to be the quintessential Dark Souls experience; how does the OPTION for that lesser difficulty affect YOUR experience? It?s the question none of the anti-choicers have addressed directly because there?s no rational or logical response!

I like a medium rare stake, seasoned to perfection; the existence of A1 Sauce is not an affront to the meat-eating experience for me or anyone else and if that guy over there wants to pay $60 for the same steak as me and [in my opinion] ruin it with steak sauce, I?d have to be dead, dismembered, my fleshy chunks fed through a wood chipper and the pulpy remains smeared into the words ?I literally do not care? on a neglected outhouse to care less. Why anyone of you feel this passionately exclusionary over videogames, essentially TOYS, is mind-boggling.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

You're repeating yourself. You keep insisting over and over again that there is only one proper way to play Dark Souls and that anyone who takes it slightly easier is cheating themselves out of a good experience. Despite the fact there's a point where if you slam your head against a brick wall over and over again and it goes on for far too long and you just can't do it, it stops being fun. I know a friend who really wants to get into Dark Souls, but she can't even beat Iudex Gundyr. For her, an easy mode would still be quite challenging and therefore rewarding.

But we still seem to be stuck on the paranoid conspiracy theory that if there's an easy mode, the game as a whole will suffer. Because apparently, people think if From puts in an easy mode, they have to make the game as a whole easier. And once a-gain, you have no faith in the people that play Dark Souls. There are plenty of games out there, RE2 comes to mind, that offer to lower the difficulty in a section where a player is struggling. Plenty of players just...turn it down and keep trying. And others take it. That's all it is. That's all an easy mode would be.

I'm getting a real sense of Schrodinger's Dark Souls fan from you. Dark Souls fans apparently love the difficulty of a game so much that they seek it out for the difficulty but they would immediately drop down to easy the second they were given the chance.

You know, I'm reminded of something an education professor told me once. An insecure alpha constantly feels the need to assert dominance. A secure alpha freely exposes his back to the rest of the pack because he knows his dominance is so firmly established that nothing will come of it. Maybe this whole time I was like the secure alpha while other Dark Souls fans were insecure ones. I know for a fact I'd just ignore the easy mode, whereas apparently, we need to protect other Dark Souls fans from the horrors of a less challenging experience that they wouldn't have the willpower to resist it. Maybe that's why so many of them are so loud at about how hard Dark Souls is and how good they are at it while I just don't bring it up. Security.

 

[CritialGaming]

(Damn it, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in?)

If your analogy suits you better, it works fine as it also makes my point: if I want to hear my favorite song and an expensive stereo system or concert isn?t available to me, I?m perfectly happy listening to it through my phone; I?m actually glad that OPTION exists. By your logic, any diminished listening options shouldn?t exist since listening ?the way music is meant to be heard? should be the ONLY way. I?ve found dozens upon dozens of new songs and artists listening to Spotify through my phone, artists and songs I?ve enjoyed enough to invest in physical albums and attend concerts. See how that works? Diminished experiences led to my interest and investment in the fuller, ?real? experiences, something that would never happen if artists chose to restrict access to their music to live concerts.

But the key here is the art right? Look at it this way. If you design a game and give it to the player you want them to experience that you have designed for them. FromSoft designs for a specific experience, they have a game that they want people to play.

Critique is fine and fair, and you can say the game is too hard for you. But ultimately the artist, or game designers, in these cases had an experience in mind and they delivered that experience. Sure it might be too hard for some, but that challenge is part of what they've designed for you. Changing the way the game works to skew the difficulty balance one way or another fundamentally changes the experience they've brought before you.

You can not like that experience, you can fail at that experience. Yet for better or worse, the experience is what they've truly intended you to see. And changing that difficulty changes the experience for the player into something they didn't want.

I?m just going to say it: in the numerous threads we?ve had on this exact same subject, I?ve never once heard a minimally convincing argument for intentionally and deliberately not including an easy mode. NOT. ONCE.

If you or anyone truly believes the appeal of a Souls experience hangs ?Souly? on its difficulty, I can assure you, YOU. ARE. WRONG. If punishing difficulty was FROM?s sole intention, welp, they fucked up and accidentally made a really rich and beautiful series which accidentally offers more to be appreciated than the occasional sense of accomplishment felt after bitter frustration. Maybe they?ll get it right next time and make a Mike Tyson?s Punch-Out clone where you just fight one boss after another with none of that pesky lore spread out across beautiful environments to explore.

If you or anyone truly believes additional game modes (?additional? meaning ?more,? not ?less? and certainly not ?irrevocably, game-breakingly different,?) I can assure you, YOU. ARE. WRONG. I?ll even give you a little here; let?s say a lesser difficulty did fundamentally break what you?d deem to be the quintessential Dark Souls experience; how does the OPTION for that lesser difficulty affect YOUR experience? It?s the question none of the anti-choicers have addressed directly because there?s no rational or logical response!

I like a medium rare stake, seasoned to perfection; the existence of A1 Sauce is not an affront to the meat-eating experience for me or anyone else and if that guy over there wants to pay $60 for the same steak as me and [in my opinion] ruin it with steak sauce, I?d have to be dead, dismembered, my fleshy chunks fed through a wood chipper and the pulpy remains smeared into the words ?I literally do not care? on a neglected outhouse to care less. Why anyone of you feel this passionately exclusionary over videogames, essentially TOYS, is mind-boggling.

First I thought we were talking about a NEED for easy mode not whether or not a FromSoft games has one. You're argument hinges on the idea of an option, not if the game actually NEEDS an easy option.

Is the game broken without this easy option. Obviously not.

Does it NEED an easy mode? Absolutely not.

Should it have one? Eh, I don't think so. Options affect people's decisions and not always for the good of their experience. See my Wow example above. Things are lost which I understand would be the player's choice, but why even give them the option of having a worse experience?

If I gave you the option of buying tickets to a concert for the same price. Either front row or nosebleeds for the same price, would someone gain anything from having the inferior experience? I guess the option to do either is nice, but if you didn't give them the option and just forced them to the front row, would they hate it? Would their fun be ruined? I would argue by offering the person the nosebleeds they would hear fine, but miss out on catching a pick form the guitar player, or having the lead singer point at them and directly interact with them. The base experience is the same but they miss out on those extras.

Your steak metaphor is interesting, because in high end steak houses, they do NOT offer sauce options. They don't want to give you a 100 dollar steak and have you fuck with it even if it is your "choice", because the Chef has an experience they are trying to provide you and they know their craft better than you do. The same thing applies to FromSoft. They are providing a specific experience for a reason and they clearly know game design better than the vast majority of players, especially those who would call foul about not having easy options.

These games haven't been this successful on accident. FromSoft knows what they are doing, they've proven it time and time again at this point.

 

[CritialGaming]

Snip

You're repeating yourself. You keep insisting over and over again that there is only one proper way to play Dark Souls and that anyone who takes it slightly easier is cheating themselves out of a good experience. Despite the fact there's a point where if you slam your head against a brick wall over and over again and it goes on for far too long and you just can't do it, it stops being fun. I know a friend who really wants to get into Dark Souls, but she can't even beat Iudex Gundyr. For her, an easy mode would still be quite challenging and therefore rewarding.

You've brought up your friend I think in the last time this discussion happened. Why would see start with Dark Souls 3 if she wants to "get into" Dark Souls? Not that I'm saying the first game is easier or anything. But Dark Souls 3 definitely expects you to have previous Souls experience that the other DS games didn't. For example the first giant in DS2 is a far easier encounter than Gundyr.

I mean it just seems like an odd place to start. It's like starting at the back of the book and reading towards chapter 1. You could do it, but if you are trying to get into the world and story, you'd be lost right?

Also I'd wonder what your friend's previous gaming experiences are like. Because if she is a big Mario fan or really into FPS games. Then maybe Dark Souls wouldn't be a starting point for her in terms of third person action games, but if she played other games like Breath of the Wild, or Darksiders, God of War, etc first. She might have more luck jumping into DS with other experiences under her belt. There is skill to games after all and being a Street Fighter pro, doesn't mean you are gonna be good at Starcraft.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

But what's wrong with a game turning you off to it? Have you beaten every game you have ever played? Have you never started playing something and just shook you head saying, "This aint my jam."? Does that mean the game is wrong for what it is?

I akin it to the plethora of pvp games that are the hottest thing right now. There is no easy mode with those games, everyone is out to win against you and they'll hold nothing back to beat you. If they get the drop on you to stab you in the back they will take it (the implied cheese you mentioned above), they aren't going to tap you on the shoulder and challenge you to honorable combat because they know that they wont get this drop on everyone else and if they can take out someone simply, they'll do it because there is plenty of difficulty left with the rest of the players against them.

Why do you think these Battle Royal's got so popular? Getting number #1 is insanely difficult and impossible to do consistently. Yet people can't stop playing them because that rush of winning is akin to beating a souls game.

The biggest thing that Fortnite and Soulsborne games have in comment is, everyone can play them but not everyone will win right away but sticking to it, learning, adapting, overcoming, and eventually you can do it. Though you're probably more likely to beat a Souls game that get a first place rank in a BR game honestly.

A game shouldn't turn you off because it's overly difficult but because you just don't enjoy the core game (your exact Jim Sterling video you linked to). You're not going to get your kid into baseball by having them hit against a major leaguer throwing 90+mph just like you're not going to start playing chess against a master.

The biggest thing Souls and battle royale games have in common isn't that they're hard, it's the cheese factor. Battle royale shooters allow you to do stuff like camping and cheap shit making you feel like you did good but you really didn't. I got tons of clan matches of shooters on my Youtube (Phoenixmgs) but not a single battle royale game because I played a round or two of that over 10 years ago and never touched it after because it was only camping. Battle royale was called stealth deathmatch in MGO, it even had the circle closing off the map and everything. That's why people like battle royale games so much, they can camp around getting a couple kills and feel like they did good vs getting yelled at by their own team doing that in game mode with an actual objective. Going say 3-1 in a battle royale game is much better looking than going 3-1 in say a COD Domination match. Battle royale gives the illusion that they're good to a lot of players.

 

[CritialGaming]

But what's wrong with a game turning you off to it? Have you beaten every game you have ever played? Have you never started playing something and just shook you head saying, "This aint my jam."? Does that mean the game is wrong for what it is?

I akin it to the plethora of pvp games that are the hottest thing right now. There is no easy mode with those games, everyone is out to win against you and they'll hold nothing back to beat you. If they get the drop on you to stab you in the back they will take it (the implied cheese you mentioned above), they aren't going to tap you on the shoulder and challenge you to honorable combat because they know that they wont get this drop on everyone else and if they can take out someone simply, they'll do it because there is plenty of difficulty left with the rest of the players against them.

Why do you think these Battle Royal's got so popular? Getting number #1 is insanely difficult and impossible to do consistently. Yet people can't stop playing them because that rush of winning is akin to beating a souls game.

The biggest thing that Fortnite and Soulsborne games have in comment is, everyone can play them but not everyone will win right away but sticking to it, learning, adapting, overcoming, and eventually you can do it. Though you're probably more likely to beat a Souls game that get a first place rank in a BR game honestly.

A game shouldn't turn you off because it's overly difficult but because you just don't enjoy the core game (your exact Jim Sterling video you linked to). You're not going to get your kid into baseball by having them hit against a major leaguer throwing 90+mph just like you're not going to start playing chess against a master.

The biggest thing Souls and battle royale games have in common isn't that they're hard, it's the cheese factor. Battle royale shooters allow you to do stuff like camping and cheap shit making you feel like you did good but you really didn't. I got tons of clan matches of shooters on my Youtube (Phoenixmgs) but not a single battle royale game because I played a round or two of that over 10 years ago and never touched it after because it was only camping. Battle royale was called stealth deathmatch in MGO, it even had the circle closing off the map and everything. That's why people like battle royale games so much, they can camp around getting a couple kills and feel like they did good vs getting yelled at by their own team doing that in game mode with an actual objective. Going say 3-1 in a battle royale game is much better looking than going 3-1 in say a COD Domination match. Battle royale gives the illusion that they're good to a lot of players.

Then why to people like Dota and LoL so much if the success is based solely on cheese?

 

[Kerg3927]

Apples and Oranges.

WoW got dumbed down because people asked blizzard to make the hard modes easier.
There was a time where:
Easy = Accessible, LFD, Normal Mode Dungeons.
Hard = Challenging, Required a cohesive group, Heroic Dungeons and Raids.

Burning Crusade was tough as nails, but it also had an "easy" mode in the form of normal dungeons. The Heroics were not diminished by the existence of that easy mode. But as time went on more and more people pressured for the hard modes to be made easy. Hard mode ceased to become hard.

People who are asking for an easy mode for Dark Souls are not asking for the challenge of hard mode to be diminished. Hard mode should stay authentic.

Point taken. But I still think it is a good general example of the players demanding things, the developer gradually giving in and giving it to them, and then the players rewarding the company by getting bored and quitting. And the point I was trying to make is that the players don't always know what's best for them. They can and will take a shit in their own sandbox.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

You're repeating yourself. You keep insisting over and over again that there is only one proper way to play Dark Souls and that anyone who takes it slightly easier is cheating themselves out of a good experience. Despite the fact there's a point where if you slam your head against a brick wall over and over again and it goes on for far too long and you just can't do it, it stops being fun. I know a friend who really wants to get into Dark Souls, but she can't even beat Iudex Gundyr. For her, an easy mode would still be quite challenging and therefore rewarding.

You've brought up your friend I think in the last time this discussion happened. Why would see start with Dark Souls 3 if she wants to "get into" Dark Souls? Not that I'm saying the first game is easier or anything. But Dark Souls 3 definitely expects you to have previous Souls experience that the other DS games didn't. For example the first giant in DS2 is a far easier encounter than Gundyr.

I mean it just seems like an odd place to start. It's like starting at the back of the book and reading towards chapter 1. You could do it, but if you are trying to get into the world and story, you'd be lost right?

Also I'd wonder what your friend's previous gaming experiences are like. Because if she is a big Mario fan or really into FPS games. Then maybe Dark Souls wouldn't be a starting point for her in terms of third person action games, but if she played other games like Breath of the Wild, or Darksiders, God of War, etc first. She might have more luck jumping into DS with other experiences under her belt. There is skill to games after all and being a Street Fighter pro, doesn't mean you are gonna be good at Starcraft.

Humble Bundle.

 

[Kerg3927]

You're repeating yourself. You keep insisting over and over again that there is only one proper way to play Dark Souls and that anyone who takes it slightly easier is cheating themselves out of a good experience. Despite the fact there's a point where if you slam your head against a brick wall over and over again and it goes on for far too long and you just can't do it, it stops being fun. I know a friend who really wants to get into Dark Souls, but she can't even beat Iudex Gundyr. For her, an easy mode would still be quite challenging and therefore rewarding.

Is this person young? If so, maybe she will be able to beat it when she grows up a little. If not, then I'd be willing to bet that she hasn't put much effort into it, and you should encourage her to keep trying and give her some tips.

My nephew just turned 11. I know he's too young for the Souls games right now. And I don't feel bad for him at all, because there are tons of other games that he can play that are designed for his skill level. But in a few years, I think he'll be ready to give those types of games a try, and when he does, I will encourage him to not give up.

But we still seem to be stuck on the paranoid conspiracy theory that if there's an easy mode, the game as a whole will suffer. Because apparently, people think if From puts in an easy mode, they have to make the game as a whole easier. And once a-gain, you have no faith in the people that play Dark Souls. There are plenty of games out there, RE2 comes to mind, that offer to lower the difficulty in a section where a player is struggling. Plenty of players just...turn it down and keep trying. And others take it. That's all it is. That's all an easy mode would be.

I'm willing to bet that they would have felt better about themselves if they had kept at it a while longer and not turned the difficulty down.

I'm getting a real sense of Schrodinger's Dark Souls fan from you. Dark Souls fans apparently love the difficulty of a game so much that they seek it out for the difficulty but they would immediately drop down to easy the second they were given the chance.

Nah, in 5 playthroughs I've never even summoned another player to help me. I always wanted to beat the bosses on my own, even if it took 50 attempts.

You know, I'm reminded of something an education professor told me once. An insecure alpha constantly feels the need to assert dominance. A secure alpha freely exposes his back to the rest of the pack because he knows his dominance is so firmly established that nothing will come of it. Maybe this whole time I was like the secure alpha while other Dark Souls fans were insecure ones. I know for a fact I'd just ignore the easy mode, whereas apparently, we need to protect other Dark Souls fans from the horrors of a less challenging experience that they wouldn't have the willpower to resist it. Maybe that's why so many of them are so loud at about how hard Dark Souls is and how good they are at it while I just don't bring it up. Security.

Sure there are insecure people like that out there. But I've never said I was good at Dark Souls, either, so you could probably put me in the "secure" category as well. And don't think the Souls games are necessarily all that hard, with the exception of a handful of bosses, most of which are optional. It's more about determination, repetition, and learning from your mistakes.

As I've said, a big part of my motivation is to help others. And I think a lot of that goes back to my days as a raid leader in WoW, where I saw a lot of players who started out awful, with no self-confidence, but stuck with it and became really good, confident players. I went through the same thing. I've seen the benefits of people persevering, overcoming adversity, and building self-confidence. And here's where you will probably say that it's just a video game, but adversity is adversity. Building self-confidence is valuable no matter the source. And people miss out on that if they turn down the difficulty every time they face adversity, and simply remove the adversity.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I disagree. I don't think people are really all that different actually. I think most of them can beat the game as intended without using a cheat/easy mode. And when they do, I think their experience will be similar to everyone else who has completed the games as intended, and I'd love for them to experience that.

---

And that's kind of the whole point. Figuring it out, through repetition. I doubt that any of those people who made the "no hit" videos made it through Undead Burg the first time without dying, and that's the newbie zone. Those videos were made after hundreds of hours of repetition, memorizing the move sets of every enemy. But if you introduce a cheat/easy mode, people won't have to figure it out anymore. They'll just be able to muscle through everything, and then they'll wonder why the game is so boring.

---

What if every game had cheat codes built in? Press this button to walk through walls. Press this button to become invulnerable. Press this button to have all maxed out weapons and armor. Press this button to skip any boss you want. You'd probably think that would be great. I disagree. And From Software thankfully disagrees.

And that's because we understand that it's not about getting to the destination... it's about overcoming the obstacles to get there. Remove the obstacles, and you remove the corresponding rewards. That's how humans are wired. But we are also wired to take the quickest and most efficient path to achieve our goals. That can be a really bad combo when it comes to gaming. But it can be overcome by simply not giving players the option of a quick and easy path.

If you're a fat person who struggles with his weight and has a bad sweet tooth, would it be good to always have cake available? I mean, more options are always good, right? What about a recovering crack addict? Should he always carry some crack with him, just to keep his options open? Your "more options are always better" hypothesis is provably wrong.

Again, luckily From Software understands this and doesn't listen to people like you who don't know what the hell they are talking about.

People are mainly different with regards to experience as I think with enough practice time everyone can probably reach similar skill levels. There's quite a few people that pick up any game and it's there first in the series and even genre. Bayonetta was the first spectacle fighter I ever played and it wouldn't be very welcoming if the game assumed I was a master of the genre. But you can of course watch other people play games and see how differently skilled everyone is.

But Souls only has one thing to figure out plus the game requires no honing of skills so once you do that, it's a pretty empty afterward. Again, you're over-exaggerating what Souls is. I heard all that stuff about Souls where every action must be calculated, you must manage stamina, every enemy attack must be analyzed, etc. Nope, you just dodge the slowest enemies in action games (no need to analyze attacks), mash R1 until out of stamina, move back for a few seconds and repeat until dead. Or you can just hold block if you want it even easier. The only enemies that are occasionally tough are the boss, so you just have to memorize those enemies and that's it. That's why it seems like I hate on Souls is because I wanted it to be everything I heard but it wasn't anything like that at all. Now, Sekiro is literally everything Souls tried to be. You do actually have to learn enemy movesets, the combat is actually more "deliberate" even though it's far faster paced because you have to be far more careful when pressing attack with regard to your character's animation.

The third section someone else already got to.

The biggest thing Souls and battle royale games have in common isn't that they're hard, it's the cheese factor. Battle royale shooters allow you to do stuff like camping and cheap shit making you feel like you did good but you really didn't. I got tons of clan matches of shooters on my Youtube (Phoenixmgs) but not a single battle royale game because I played a round or two of that over 10 years ago and never touched it after because it was only camping. Battle royale was called stealth deathmatch in MGO, it even had the circle closing off the map and everything. That's why people like battle royale games so much, they can camp around getting a couple kills and feel like they did good vs getting yelled at by their own team doing that in game mode with an actual objective. Going say 3-1 in a battle royale game is much better looking than going 3-1 in say a COD Domination match. Battle royale gives the illusion that they're good to a lot of players.

Then why to people like Dota and LoL so much if the success is based solely on cheese?

DOTA and LOL aren't battle royale games, they're MOBAs.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I'm pretty sure you accusing her of not putting effort end would end with her slapping the shit out of you. And she's 23.

No offense, not every gamer gives a shit. Some people just want to sit back and have a rewarding experience and for them that puts their difficulty at their own level. Some people say RE2 is best played on its hardest difficulty, but I felt plenty challenged just playing it at normal.

Well glad to see that Dark Souls players can handle fighting the urge to make things easier for themselves and therefore an easy mode wouldn't be some horrible burden on them.

Ok. I'm going to go back and recount what you've said about Dark Souls in this thread. You've said it was a "test of gamer mantle." You said that people who want an easy mode "think mainly, they just don't like successful people who feel pride in their accomplishments, even video game accomplishments, and so they want to take them down a notch and take their source of pride away from them out of pure jealousy." You said that adding an easy mode "would destroy the entire souls-like sub-genre." So...yeah.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Reading this topic, I think the issue here seems to be that by adding an easier mode people who play in that mode will be left with the misunderstanding that they actually really played sekiro, and not the hypothetical gimped, easy to play version of sekiro which is not actually sekiro at all (as is indicated by actual sekiro not having a difficulty setting).


I don't think you can extract difficulty from a game and say that this one thing isn't part of the game and if you change it everything else will stay the same. No, that's incorrect. It's equally a part of a game as is the story and music and graphics.


When people are saying they want an easy mode they are just admitting to not liking one of sekiro's components. It's really nothing more than someone claiming they don't like this character in an rpg so they should be removed or they don't like this gun in a shooter so it shouldn't exist. It shouldn't be treated any different than those types of claims.


If games are fundamentally experiences, anything that affects one's experience is a crucial component of a game. We've been used to thinking of difficulty as a dial and that the experience is more or less the same and all that changes when you change difficulty is that you die less or you have to grind more but that's really not all that difficulty accomplishes.

By dying a lot you are forced to explore the mechanics of the game more deeply. You are forced to learn to utilize systems you'd otherwise ignore (parrying which was ignored in DS by a lot of people is integral in sekiro for instance, that's on purpose, and that's a good thing!). I think it is only if you do all that that you can actually claim you fully experienced the game. I think a game that incentivizes you doing that is amazing because that way you'll have the richest experience it can offer and won't sabotage yourself through lack of motivation. There's nothing worse than an action game that can be beat by the very first tactic you use when you start the game. That's just a boring and bad game. The more stuff it makes you learn to utilize the deeper the experience and Sekrio's difficulty is the conduit through which this process is achieved.


I think people calling others lazy do so from this perspective because they see so many players who hardly use half the systems in easier games and then when a game that forces you to understand how to use everything in your disposal comes along all of a sudden people complain.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Reading this topic, I think the issue here seems to be that by adding an easier mode people who play in that mode will be left with the misunderstanding that they actually really played sekiro, and not the hypothetical gimped, easy to play version of sekiro which is not actually sekiro at all (as is indicated by actual sekiro not having a difficulty setting).

Shockingly, other people playing an "inferior" version of a single player game I also play continues to not diminish my play experience.

But if they like it, who am I to judge? Good for them.

 

[Kyrian007]

Reading this topic, I think the issue here seems to be that by adding an easier mode people who play in that mode will be left with the misunderstanding that they actually really played sekiro, and not the hypothetical gimped, easy to play version of sekiro which is not actually sekiro at all (as is indicated by actual sekiro not having a difficulty setting).


I don't think you can extract difficulty from a game and say that this one thing isn't part of the game and if you change it everything else will stay the same. No, that's incorrect. It's equally a part of a game as is the story and music and graphics.


When people are saying they want an easy mode they are just admitting to not liking one of sekiro's components. It's really nothing more than someone claiming they don't like this character in an rpg so they should be removed or they don't like this gun in a shooter so it shouldn't exist. It shouldn't be treated any different than those types of claims.


If games are fundamentally experiences, anything that affects one's experience is a crucial component of a game. We've been used to thinking of difficulty as a dial and that the experience is more or less the same and all that changes when you change difficulty is that you die less or you have to grind more but that's really not all that difficulty accomplishes.

By dying a lot you are forced to explore the mechanics of the game more deeply. You are forced to learn to utilize systems you'd otherwise ignore (parrying which was ignored in DS by a lot of people is integral in sekiro for instance, that's on purpose, and that's a good thing!). I think people calling others lazy do so from this perspective because they see so many players who hardly use half the systems in easier games and then when a game that forces you to understand how to use everything in your disposal comes along all of a sudden people complain.

I think everyone gets that. What people on the other side of the argument are pointing out is how early in that the argument falls apart entirely. Its right about here

I think the issue here seems to be that by adding an easier mode people who play in that mode will be left with the misunderstanding that they actually really played sekiro, and not the hypothetical gimped, easy to play version of sekiro which is not actually sekiro at all (as is indicated by actual sekiro not having a difficulty setting).

I think what many of us are saying is if someone plays that "gimped" easy mode... it shouldn't make any difference to someone who did. It shouldn't diminish their enjoyment of the game at all... because it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect that "normal" in any way. If anything they should be happy that someone else enjoys the same game they do. The fact that it does matter to some says more about them being gatekeeper entitled elitists than it does about the easy mode player.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

But Souls only has one thing to figure out plus the game requires no honing of skills so once you do that, it's a pretty empty afterward. Again, you're over-exaggerating what Souls is. I heard all that stuff about Souls where every action must be calculated, you must manage stamina, every enemy attack must be analyzed, etc. Nope, you just dodge the slowest enemies in action games (no need to analyze attacks), mash R1 until out of stamina, move back for a few seconds and repeat until dead. Or you can just hold block if you want it even easier. The only enemies that are occasionally tough are the boss, so you just have to memorize those enemies and that's it. That's why it seems like I hate on Souls is because I wanted it to be everything I heard but it wasn't anything like that at all. Now, Sekiro is literally everything Souls tried to be. You do actually have to learn enemy movesets, the combat is actually more "deliberate" even though it's far faster paced because you have to be far more careful when pressing attack with regard to your character's animation.

Seriously, the level of pretentiousness in the Souls fandom is extraordinary. It's Monster Hunter with a Gothic aesthetic, and Monster Hunter does just freaking fine with its multiple difficulty modes. The main difference seems to be that you can't grind for levels in MonHun, and Souls is an asshole when you die.

Of course, with levels not being a thing and weapons/gear being easy to specifically acquire, MonHun is superior in the "experiment to find what works for you" aspect.