Hahahaha wow! I doff my hat to you, that might be the most effort anyone has put into a reply on these forums. You're being a particularly good sport, too, given how much shit I've served you. I am going to attempt to be concise in reply. My back is out, there's no way I'm typing this much.
NOW. THAT SAID.
You are AWARE I could download a trainer for this fucking thing today, if I wanted to? You're aware I could just farm souls and dramatically outlevel content, trivializing most of it...not through skill, but through tolerance for tedium? Heck, it's even EASIER than Everquest in that respect, as I don't need to make sure things are inside a con range in order to profit from their death. If I had the patience of Job, I could just farm the easiest opponent in the game for weeks. The ability to make Dark Souls dramatically easier, even with the push of a button, already exists. Is your immersion destroyed? Do you hate the game now?
Anyway, cheers. Good discussion, you're a good sport. We don't agree, but I do hope whatever solution From comes up with for Dark Souls doesn't wreck it for you.
I don't think it's safe to say that at all. In sooth, neither you or I has anything even approaching reliable data on what might occur in terms of fanbase segmentation if From goes ahead and adds a difficulty slider to Dark Souls 2. The only people who MIGHT have that data are From themselves, who are the people talking about putting it in there in the first place.viranimus said:Wider assumes that the existing fanbase will remain. Given the outcry over it, it seems fairly safe to say that wont occur.
There's no "should", it's a question of "if". I've seen this translation from "hardcore minority to a wider audience" before, most particularly with Bioware and Bethesda, and it seems to have paid off for them just fine. Bioware later went on to shoot themselves in the ass, but that was through ineptitude, not the market they targeted.viranimus said:If a company willingly rejects their fanbase to "trade up" trying to reach a "larger audience" SHOULD they be rewarded for that type of loyalty to their customers?
Of course it's not. And you go on to make a poetic point here about striving and not having everything handled to us and a culture of entitlement, and I understand that. What I'm trying to make YOU understand in turn is that we are not all born with the same abilities. I made an analogy of my own, earlier in the thread, of a guy graduating from Medical School and making the assumption that everyone could be a doctor if they applied themselves, they just lack his gumption. My girlfriend could play Dark Souls for 1,000 years and never get anything but more frustrated. My friend with two young kids couldn't be assed to repeat the same boss 20 times just to figure out his pattern so he could stop getting one shot 4 seconds into the fight. They'd just put the game down and never touch it again. And this is to say nothing of those who are too old, or too sick, or just lack the reflexes or strategic mindset. When I say "difficulty is subjective" I mean that for those people, and easier game might represent the same challenge that the harder game does for us. That's what difficulty sliders are all about.viranimus said:While you are correct in this, as is life itself, everything is subjective. However, Just because someone finds it too difficult is not a reason to make it easier.
That's fair, I apologize.viranimus said:You personally do not care if a developer adds an extra feature to the game, so you think others who would are being unreasonable for doing so. So it does not matter WHAT justification they give, you dont see it as valid, because YOU dont care personally.
Well, I am going to need to disagree there. That might be the case with you, but if you do not see the reek of sneering peen waving in the attitude and commentary of, at the very least, a very vocal minority of the DS community then you haven't been paying attention. Gaming is absolutely stuffed to the margins with people who want to use their ability with video games as a salve for their insecurities, and never shut up about how "hardcore" they are, or stop scoffing at the inability of others to echo their achievements. There's a reason you see so much hostility in discussions like this, and it's because individuals like that have poisoned the dialogue.viranimus said:These are some of the reasons why the game exists, why the old school crowd gravitated and helped perpetuate the franchise. Its about personal pride, not sense of superiority.
They're not. Immersion is subjective. Whether or not a gun actually exists to be used is objective. If you want a COD analogy, it would be adding an optional brawler mode, and then arguing that the existence of the brawler mode destroyed your ability to feel immersed in the gun mode.viranimus said:Now, Im sorry, both analogies are dead on.
Now this is fair, and it's probably close to the argument I would give for why Dark Souls needs to be difficult in order to be rewarding. If someone told me they wanted to play through Dark Souls on God Mode, I'd say "Good lord, why?". Without the difficulty, it loses much of what makes it special.viranimus said:Knowing that makes it impossible to become fully immersed in the world because the threats the world present, even to those playing normal, no matter how hard it becomes you know that if the going gets rough you can make it easier on yourself with a simple reroll. Knowing that not only eliminates the immersion of being in that perilous world, it will actively alter not only your play style, but your experience in interacting with various NPCs. The ever present tension is gone. The ache when it feels like you are going to break your shield trigger button you are jamming it down so hard so as to not let it slip for a fraction of a second, Simply knowing that if you want all you have to do is speed run through easy mode to "learn" everything normal mode is going to throw at you so you can prepare accordingly instead of learning through trial and error. If people cannot accept that the difficulty IS a reason people choose to play this specific game and thus a rational argument against EM, there is no way that people playing for immersion in a world that IS broken specifically by the existence of an easy way out cannot be argued.
NOW. THAT SAID.
You are AWARE I could download a trainer for this fucking thing today, if I wanted to? You're aware I could just farm souls and dramatically outlevel content, trivializing most of it...not through skill, but through tolerance for tedium? Heck, it's even EASIER than Everquest in that respect, as I don't need to make sure things are inside a con range in order to profit from their death. If I had the patience of Job, I could just farm the easiest opponent in the game for weeks. The ability to make Dark Souls dramatically easier, even with the push of a button, already exists. Is your immersion destroyed? Do you hate the game now?
That's fine. But if you and I were having a debate, and I suddenly went off on a tangent about my precocious life as a gifted child and my whopping IQ, your eyes would roll right out of your head. It was a bizarre aside inserted at a suspicious junction.viranimus said:Look, pointing to advance placement in school is not a "flag" I have ever flown.
As a repeat of the the point made above...we don't know that. We actually have no idea how many people feel this way. At all. I can certainly speculate that few if any have put as much thought into it as you have. And that a good many of them DO want the difficulty to remain fixed specifically FOR the less than flattering reasons often implied. How many? Who can say. No one is ever going to pay a polling company money to find out.viranimus said:If it was just one or two people saying it, you might be right to dismiss them as self centered whining elitist crybabies who cant stand the idea of others having fun with the same toys. However we all know this isn't just one or two people.
Anyway, cheers. Good discussion, you're a good sport. We don't agree, but I do hope whatever solution From comes up with for Dark Souls doesn't wreck it for you.