What Makes A Difficult Game Good Or Bad?

[Jeroenr]

No, that's bullshit. I just showed you that there ARE plenty of signs that mimics use to telegraph their presence.

None of which will be familiar to the player the first time they encounter one.

It's not really the game's fault if the player hasn't learned what the signs mean yet because they haven't had any time to.

Yes, it is the game's fault because it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of opportunity. The player is not given an opportunity to learn the warning signs before they die.

The warning signs are useless anyway because after the first time I just stabbed every chest I saw before opening it.

So the net result is one bullshit death followed by a brief extra step to opening chests in future.

How do you expect the player to learn the intricacies of a foe they've never encountered before?

Do you expect the game to sit the player down in the first 5 hours and just flat out say "Hey watch out for mimics. They prey on adventurers by disguising themselves as storage chests. Here's how to tell the difference."

That's exactly the kind of over-tutorialized babysitting that the Souls game pride themselves on not having.

Exactly the way you probably did.
Fall for it the first time, die, get back to the chest(mimic), examine it, read the comments, and (try to) kill it.
And maybe lookup a thing or two on the internet about them.

But once you know how to deal with them, they are easy to kill.

Assuming you don't die again before you retreaf you dropt souls, It isn't even an expensive lesson either.

 

[Valkrex]

A lot of good points in this thread (got ninja'd on a lot of stuff I'd like to say) and Extra Credits did a pretty good video on this a while ago.