Jfswift said:
The same argument could be made for Dark Souls really. An easy mode could be as simple as buffing the player a bit. I'll be honest though, I think Dark Souls is a bad example for this thread. Alot of the initial difficulty is due to an insufficient tutorial and bad level design (namely the fire link shrine and undead burg) I'll bring this up later though in another thread or article since I'm going off topic here.
After playing a fair amount of Dark Souls, I've come to the conclusion that the game is not, in fact, hard. Winning any fight in the game is a trivial affair assuming you have some idea of what sort of tactic is useful on the particular monster you're facing. The catch is, if you do not know this information, a fight is all but impossible to win. When you couple that with the possible significant loss on death, the game's true character is revealed: it is actually just unfair.
Simply put, the game's only mechanism for teaching the player is failure. There is little actual skill involved in the game as success simply requires application of memorized patterns of inputs and the game is surprisingly forgiving when it comes to timing of such things. What people point to as difficulty in the game I'd explain as simply that the game is really quite
terrible at explaining
anything.
It is, more or less, the same problem the Witcher 2 had upon release. The player was thrown into a world with almost no information about what was necessary to succeed in any given situation. Once the player discovers how the game is meant to be played, the perceived difficulty disappears. The odd thing is that this was seen as a failure in the case of the Witcher while Dark Souls gets a pass because it was
intentional. Strange that the line between broken and brilliant is defined by intent.
