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

[CaitSeith]

PS: I find hilarious that you say "there is no gatekeeping" and then you end your post with "if you don't see things my way, shut up and go somewhere else".

I don't think Gatekeeping means what you think it means.

Certainly not. By your interpretation it wouldn't be gatekeeping unless someone came to my house and unplugged my console or PC the moment I started the game; or appeared behind me and took away my smartphone whenever I tried to see a Dark Souls meme on it.

Seeing how we'll probably never agree in that, I won't mention the gatekeeping if you don't do either.

 

[CritialGaming]

PS: I find hilarious that you say "there is no gatekeeping" and then you end your post with "if you don't see things my way, shut up and go somewhere else".

I don't think Gatekeeping means what you think it means.

Certainly not. By your interpretation it wouldn't be gatekeeping unless someone came to my house and unplugged my console or PC the moment I started the game; or appeared behind me and took away my smartphone whenever I tried to see a Dark Souls meme on it.

Seeing how we'll probably never agree in that, I won't mention the gatekeeping if you don't do either.

You got a deal! .

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

And nobody has yet to answer the following question either; what if someone likes Souls, finds it too hard, but dislikes the the easier but shitty playstyles (that Bloodborne ditched because they suck)?

Why did you just say two things that contradict each other?

What if someones likes Souls, but hates the thing that makes the Souls game a Souls game?

"You know I really like this game except for the part where I have to play it." says nobody.

The whole point of what makes a game good, is the game part of it. I got news for you, if you don't like the gameplay part of a game then you cannot possibly like the game.

It's like I said before, just because something's subject matter interests you does NOT mean you will automatically enjoy it. See people who think vampires are cool versus the Twilight films.

The crux of this entire thread is put thusly: Dark Souls is the game it is because of the oppressing difficulty. It doesn't hold your hand, it doesn't care about you or how you feel, it doesn't take it easy on you. By offering a completely different mode to the game, changes the experience the developers have crafted and shared with the world."

Part of the reason the Souls games have such a firm community on this is because they all know that they have all experienced the same struggles as everyone else. Everyone who loves a Souls game was once a screaming ball of rage at a boss they couldn't defeat. It's this shared frustration followed by the rush of triumph that has created this community in the first place. It unites people.

I know people like to say it's gatekeeping, but really it isn't. Ask for advice on any subreddit and you'll be given tons of advice on how to approach any given challenge or solve any given quest. Nobody is trying to keep people from anything, they want to help and they want you to succeed. They just want the core to remain the same of everyone, so everyone can share in that ultimate feeling of victory.

It's like a group of people on the other side of a obstacle course. All of them watch other people struggle to get across, and yet they scream tips and tricks, urging the people on and encouraging to get through the course. But people just cry and demand to be able to walk around the obstacles instead, and it just feels like those that want the easy way out are missing the point of overcoming the challenge in the first place.

Some have said, "Well easy mode will still be challenging for some people, you can't possibly know their skill level." Which to me is a slippery slope of bullshit. This argument fails to mean anything to me for two reasons.

1. You don't know that the person actually struggled to defeat the default setting and isn't just prone to giving up on anything easily. In which case there is no legitimate reason to give them an easy way out. They don't really need it, they just want it because how dare a bump in the road keep them from speeding through a parking lot.

2. What if the developer provided easy is still too hard? How easy should it be? Is there anyway to know? Wouldn't it be best to just make one setting the best you can and keep the experience clean. Sure some won't be able to do it, but at least the ones who can will have a better overall experience with it. And regardless of the difficulty there will always be people who can't do it.

Fact is, you cannot always plan a game for the lowest possible bar. Concessions have to be made, levels of challenges set, and some games just set their standard higher than others. If someone can't do it, that's fine. There are loads of other games to play, and challenges suitable to you. Go play those and don't complain that every game isn't catering to your level.

If Souls is about difficulty, why does it have built-in easy modes and cheese? I've played 2 Souls games and never once was a screaming ball of rage because, guess what, the games are not hard. The base game didn't provide the intended experience for me, I didn't experience the same struggles as others. The point is no 2 people will have the same experience and anything attempting to force the same experience to everyone will inherently fail because it's impossible. To answer #1, the Souls games already provide an easy way out, I guess that makes Dark Souls a contradiction/paradox itself. To answer #2, I already showed that the base difficulty already doesn't provide a challenge to some people. There is no way to perfectly make a game similarly challenging to everyone. Hell, Resident Evil 4's way of doing difficulty is easily superior to Souls and makes for a better baseline experience among players. Just like you say that there's no way to know how easy to make a game, there's also no way to know how easy/hard to make a base difficulty either.

I've said that about Witcher 3 because the gameplay was ass, then I rate it below a 5/10 and everyone bitches at me.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Either you like FromSoft games or you don't, but the game does NOT need to change because you say so.

I do not think anyone is using the words "need" or "must" when referring to the idea of introducing a difficulty slider. Rather the argument being presented by some critics is "It would be better with a difficulty slider, granting more people access to the game." and the backlash to that concept is "It would ruin the franchise! Artistic integrity! It would not be an earned victory! You don't deserve to play the game if you're not willing to suffer through it! git gud" and such.

Nobody has disagreed with the idea that every game need not appeal to everyone, but when you accept that then one needs to accept that there will be people it does not appeal. They will then express the reason why it does not appeal to them, because it behooves them to do so.

If the game is not supposed to appeal to everyone, that's fine, accept that people will have a negative opinion about the game when they review it. Understand that there will be suggestions these people make in order to make it more appealing to a greater number of people.

I genuinely don't understand the logic behind such a remark, then.

I don't like sports games, I don't like racing games (outside of crash team racing I guess).


You know what I don't do? I don't go to boards where these games are discussed and complain about them, asking they be altered to be more to my liking.

I just play the games I DO like and completely ignore sports and racing games. I figure that there's people who like them for the exact reasons I dislike them, and that I would be inconsiderate to suggest changes when that'd rob those people of the things they enjoy, just so that I can be satisfied.


That anyone would see a game that's clearly not their cup of tea and instead of just going away and playing something else decides to try and complain about it just makes absolutely no sense to me. Is it entitlement? Is there some perception that people have that they "should" be able to enjoy the game and if only it was easier that they would, whereas if it's a sports game they just see it as a fundamental dislike that they are more accepting of or what? Cause there is no such distinction in actuality and treating the two differently is arbitrary.

There's a vast gulf of space between "nothing about this genre of game appeals to me so I don't try and get it to conform to my taste" and "man, that looks really cool, too bad it's basically unplayable for me"

Like, everything about Bloodborne or Dark Souls appeals to my existential soul...except for potentially getting two shot by random trash mobs during the lengthy walk back to a boss fight for the 9th time in a row. And, for some reason, I'm apparently not allowed to mention that ever, not wish it wasn't so. Because "it's not for me". Regardless about how much I like the setting. Regardless of how much I like the atmosphere. Regardless of how much I like the disconnected storytelling, or themes, or music.

I'm not allowed to talk about it. Because it's not for me, and so my opinions are Bad and Wrong.

If you don't git gud, are you even a gamer?

Sure, most gamers are somewhere in the "average" skill level, especially with competitive games you can see it since the average person is gonna be completely destroyed by someone with even a little bit of proper practice.

It's less about getting good but more about I guess understanding the desire to do so and respecting games made to maximally reward it. It's more about your attitude regards getting good rather than whether you attain that level of skill or not.

Basically, you have to respect what a game like Sekiro is trying to go for, even if it's not for you, out of an understanding that it's trying to do something specific that ought to resonate with your gamer instincts of competitiveness and self-improvement.

I don't think anyone in this thread is telling people they suck too much at games to have opinions, or bring people's skill up at all for that matter. You don't have to get good and as long as you give something a real go and try to do your best nobody would say you're not a gamer lol.

When I am getting 2shot by a minor enemy on the way to a boss, the first thing that comes to my mind is that there's no way in hell I'll be able to beat the boss if I'm dying on the way there, so I postpone the boss fight until those minor enemies are completely figured out and cease being a threat. It's not about how good you are since that's literally a matter of time and nothing else. I may be more used to action games so I may figure them out in 20 minutes and not in 4 hours but you CAN definitely figure them out if you spend enough time. That's the beauty in these games. As long as you acknowledge that you can do anything as long as you practice enough nothing seems impossible or unplayable. The difference between "I can't do this" and "I can do this but it'll take a good hour or two" is next to nothing.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

There's a vast gulf of space between "nothing about this genre of game appeals to me so I don't try and get it to conform to my taste" and "man, that looks really cool, too bad it's basically unplayable for me"

Like, everything about Bloodborne or Dark Souls appeals to my existential soul...except for potentially getting two shot by random trash mobs during the lengthy walk back to a boss fight for the 9th time in a row. And, for some reason, I'm apparently not allowed to mention that ever, not wish it wasn't so. Because "it's not for me". Regardless about how much I like the setting. Regardless of how much I like the atmosphere. Regardless of how much I like the disconnected storytelling, or themes, or music.

I'm not allowed to talk about it. Because it's not for me, and so my opinions are Bad and Wrong.

If you don't git gud, are you even a gamer?

Sure, most gamers are somewhere in the "average" skill level, especially with competitive games you can see it since the average person is gonna be completely destroyed by someone with even a little bit of proper practice.

It's less about getting good but more about I guess understanding the desire to do so and respecting games made to maximally reward it. It's more about your attitude regards getting good rather than whether you attain that level of skill or not.

Basically, you have to respect what a game like Sekiro is trying to go for, even if it's not for you, out of an understanding that it's trying to do something specific that ought to resonate with your gamer instincts of competitiveness and self-improvement.

I don't think anyone in this thread is telling people they suck too much at games to have opinions, or bring people's skill up at all for that matter. You don't have to get good and as long as you give something a real go and try to do your best nobody would say you're not a gamer lol.

Dude wrote an article about how he loved Sekiro. Struggled all the way through it. Was jazzed all the way. Even wrote a bit about tips and tricks to help other players.

Decided to use a mod to slow down the final boss after running into a wall for a few hours giving it a real goal.

"Gamers" are calling for his job.

When I am getting 2shot by a minor enemy on the way to a boss, the first thing that comes to my mind is that there's no way in hell I'll be able to beat the boss if I'm dying on the way there, so I postpone the boss fight until those minor enemies are completely figured out and cease being a threat. It's not about how good you are since that's literally a matter of time and nothing else. I may be more used to action games so I may figure them out in 20 minutes and not in 4 hours but you CAN definitely figure them out if you spend enough time. That's the beauty in these games. As long as you acknowledge that you can do anything as long as you practice enough nothing seems impossible or unplayable. The difference between "I can't do this" and "I can do this but it'll take a good hour or two" is next to nothing.

Cleric Beast is a cake walk compared to the two werewolves on the bridge. And it's not that the trash mobs are difficult, necessarily, it's that one wrong step, one missed swing, one weapon snagged on an invisible piece of geometry and a brick ogre is stuffing your skull straight up your asshole. I had fun fighting Gascoigne. Took a half dozen tries for the actual fight. Had zero fun running the gauntlet getting to him after dying. Which, incidentally, I had to do more than 5 times. Give me an easy option that puts in more lanterns, I'd've definitely had more fun.
Because y'all never seem to realize that there's plenty of people out there for whom frustration is frustrating, not fun. You'll talk about the sheer elation you feel after defeating an enemy that's frustrated you for hours.

Got to tell you: I have never felt elated after succeeding at a frustrating thing in my entire goddamned life. It was a miserable pile of suck and the only happiness I'd feel was at the prospect of being able to do finally something else, goddamit.

But if I actually say that, I need to Git Gud and stop being a whiny snowflake trying to dictate how game developers make games and adding options makes games worse because, somehow, the only time options make games worse is when it's making a certain subsection of action games potentially easier in a completely optional way. Plus, if you turn on invisibility and god mode, which is the obvious definition of easy difficulty, and then you rush the story, you'll miss out on some story.

 

[Silvanus]

So you'll concede the point with CERTAIN types of food, but wont apply it to CERTAIN video games? How is it any different?

Just like there are certain types of food that are outliers in regards to cooking choices, why can't there be a game that also limits certain choices?

How are they any different...? Well, firstly, I'd like to point out that cookery and game design are quite a bit different. There's no reason at all to think that what holds true for one must hold true for the other. I apply quite a few things to one but not the other: parsley, for instance.

But, that aside, I'm not refusing to say that certain games might exist in which any deviation from the formula would result in ruin. In theory, I can see that that could happen. I've never encountered such a game, though; certainly not with the FromSoft games I've so far sunk hundreds of hours into.

And really Souls games HAVE easy modes already. Just because there isn't a giant sign on the main menu that says "easy" doesn't mean there isn't a way to play those games with easier styles.

They have certain ways to make playing them easier (and harder), yes. So... doesn't this mean that playing the game in differently challenging ways doesn't ruin the experience?

I really don't understand this insistence that FromSoft game's MUST appeal to more people, they must include other modes for more people for arbitrary reasons. I just don't get why people can't leave a game alone because it isn't compatible with their capability.

Nobody has yet to tell me what is wrong with this simple statement: "NOT EVERY GAME CAN APPEAL TO EVERY BODY! AND THAT'S OKAY."

Why would anybody tell you what's wrong with that statement?! I've not seen anybody argue against that!

You're talking about the "insistence that the game MUST appeal to more people"... insistence from who? It's not from me!

Either you like FromSoft games or you don't, but the game does NOT need to change because you say so.

But I didn't say so! I've never said that the game needs to change, and I don't believe it does!

My position is that it doesn't matter. I wouldn't use the mode; it doesn't affect me.

What I object to is the aggressive pushback. People are just offering suggestions, feedback etc, and it's being endlessly characterised as "demands" or claimed that it would somehow ruin the experience. I find the whole attitude patronising.