For real, I’ve got shit to do. Old-school boss fights requiring a ridiculous degree of flawless repetition was an expression of hardware limitations at the time, not a fun feature to get nostalgic about. People can spend their time as they wish, but for my money the artificially ramped-up difficulty for its own sake is a cancer on game design, not something to develop a sense of elitism about.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate a challenge. I used to love difficult games. I grew up in the NES era when difficulty was the only thing that kept games from being completed in 30 minutes.
But life moves on and we get busy. If I get 2-3 hours in a week to game it’s a miracle. I am not going to spend that time grinding a boss for hours.
But other difficult games may be fine. Specifically, rogelikes. Slay the Spire and Dead Cells are games that can be very difficult, but the games are designed to be taken on in short chunks with an entire run taking under an hour, whereas Souls-Like games expect a lot more time commitment.
I really enjoyed the Respawn Jedi games. They’re Souls-likes with difficulty sliders that should appease anyone.
I play both of these and loved em. I also poured 50 hours into beating cuphead. Difficulty isn’t a problem if the depth of the game is a pool instead of a sea.
I think Hades/Hades did it great. Brutally difficult at first, but with an optional mode to make it easier each time you die, and full runs taking about 30 minutes.
And making failure a part of the story that allows you to maintain progression despite dying is also neat.
The only thing I’d really like to see changed is making an optional twist on God Mode where every time you lose it gets easier, but every time you win it gets harder.
The Souls games actually do have difficulty settings; they’re just a bit esoteric. I think of it like the Mario games: almost anyone can “beat” a Mario, but there are secrets and collectibles all over those games that are only pursued by players who want more of a challenge. It’s the same game, but the player is opting to increase difficulty.
Souls games start at a higher skill floor than the average Mario, but you can unlock tools to make the game easier if you choose. There’s co-op summons, overpowered weapons and equipment, places to easily farm huge numbers of levels. Plus plenty of cheesy strategies for most of the toughest bosses. It’s all optional in-game choices you can make to tweak the difficulty to your taste without the devs putting in a menu slider that just gives every enemy double-HP or something. And they’ve gotten better at implementing these tools every time they’ve iterated. The few people who dunked on Elden Ring often criticized how easy it was relative to earlier FromSoft games. It’s not inherently easier, there are just many more ways to scale down the challenge if you want.
Not the original commenter but I do feel the same. I dislike souls games. Although I did enjoy sekiro and made it to the stupid lightning samurai guy.
The problem with souls-like games for me is the combat doesn’t feel good for the challenge and I believe you can see this in high tier players lazily dodging attacks.
The game isn’t about skill and strategy. It’s timing and flat experience to kill some bosses you just gotta fight them 600 times and learn the attacks patterns which to me feels mentally exhausting and frustrating. It’s like a glorified DDR game with swords. I have to do the right combos to win, some strategies exist sure but at the end of the day it’s DDR.
The big argument everyone has is “mechanics vs numbers” thinking mechanics is the true skill side but mechanics isn’t just what you do with a controller, it’s also what the game allows you to do.
Too many games equate difficulty with time sink. I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both. Souls games don’t offer that, they’re peg legged
I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both
That’s how every DS game except Sekiro works. There’s absolutely broken PvE builds for each game you can discover. There’s people who challenge themselves by coming up with builds capable of 1-hitting every boss in the game.
People come up with all sorts of broken or just extremely novel builds for PvP too, “bad numbers, no mechanical skill, but the enemy isn’t ready for what you’re about to do to them” is a perfectly effective strategy.
That usually requires you to play the game in a traditional way first to learn/acquire that information and/or bang your skull repeatedly against a boss that feels like bullshit because you failed to dodge one single ability. It’s just not my schtick.
That usually requires you to play the game in a traditional way first
Not really, I guess the first boss of DS3 requires you to beat traditionally, but after that everything opens up and you have access to various levels of cheese. Information like what boss is weak to what type of weapon and where to find such weapons requires exploration, looking for clues, and sometimes just trying different things. A lot of players don’t change their approach at all, just bang their head into a brick wall for 4 hours, and conclude the problem is the game, not their unwillingness to try alternatives.
That’s also the third game. I tried Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 and they both felt pretty much roll, jump and smack em with a stick.
I’m thinking Nioh, Bloodborne, Sekiro, stuff like that.
I also think the genre itself has become sort of weird where people will describe everything from Shovel Knight to Titan Souls to Jedi Fallen Order as soulslike which is insane in my opinion. I guess because you fight bosses in them or roll in some of them? I dunno. It has somehow absorbed all hack and slash, boss rush, metroidvania games to be labeled “soulslike”. Which is insane to me.
DS1 is like that though; the asylum demon has you run away and return with a better weapon and tactics to teach you this. The first boss, the demon on the bridge, you can choose to fight on a narrow ledge where it’s easy to roll off, while getting shot by archers, or you can climb the little tower to deal with the archers and the demon conveniently is standing directly below a ramp you can jump off of.
The gargoyles seem unfair as your probably bladed weapon just bounces off their rock doing little damage, but if you leave and come back when you have more levels or a big hammer (conveniently located outside the other bell), you can often kill the first one before the second gets into the arena.
Thank you, now I think I’ll have to try sekiro. For Elden Ring there is a way out of the “learn timings” chore: go hard into defence, and there will only be a couple of boss strikes that can take you down, or go into insane damage increase and just evaporate everything (counter points to this: neither is to my liking and also neither is going to happen on first play-through for most people), but that is supposed to be the “best as of now” iteration. Need to see what was before it
I think they’d benefit taking a note from the witcher but not as linear.
For instance spirit/ghost creatures have them be susceptible to salt, silver, iron, holy water and a specific wood like holly. None are required to kill it, some have advantages over others or affect certain spirits more.
Maybe then I could be sneaky and have rare wood arrows with silver tips and eliminate from afar, I could be full rogue and sneak attack with blessed iron daggers, or just a big man with a plain sword and brute force my way through.
I think if you slapped Hatsune Miku on a dark souls screen and have her dancing going “jump!, roll!, duck!” People would realize it’s not as much of a skill game as they thought.
Personally, I gave up at the first fight in Bloodborne (I have 40 min of gameplay). Never touched a souls game ever again.
For real, I’ve got shit to do. Old-school boss fights requiring a ridiculous degree of flawless repetition was an expression of hardware limitations at the time, not a fun feature to get nostalgic about. People can spend their time as they wish, but for my money the artificially ramped-up difficulty for its own sake is a cancer on game design, not something to develop a sense of elitism about.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate a challenge. I used to love difficult games. I grew up in the NES era when difficulty was the only thing that kept games from being completed in 30 minutes.
But life moves on and we get busy. If I get 2-3 hours in a week to game it’s a miracle. I am not going to spend that time grinding a boss for hours.
But other difficult games may be fine. Specifically, rogelikes. Slay the Spire and Dead Cells are games that can be very difficult, but the games are designed to be taken on in short chunks with an entire run taking under an hour, whereas Souls-Like games expect a lot more time commitment.
I really enjoyed the Respawn Jedi games. They’re Souls-likes with difficulty sliders that should appease anyone.
I play both of these and loved em. I also poured 50 hours into beating cuphead. Difficulty isn’t a problem if the depth of the game is a pool instead of a sea.
I think Hades/Hades did it great. Brutally difficult at first, but with an optional mode to make it easier each time you die, and full runs taking about 30 minutes.
And making failure a part of the story that allows you to maintain progression despite dying is also neat.
The only thing I’d really like to see changed is making an optional twist on God Mode where every time you lose it gets easier, but every time you win it gets harder.
Souls have pretty hard bosses… but mostly, they are just optional content. Main story isn’t that difficult in my experience.
The Souls games actually do have difficulty settings; they’re just a bit esoteric. I think of it like the Mario games: almost anyone can “beat” a Mario, but there are secrets and collectibles all over those games that are only pursued by players who want more of a challenge. It’s the same game, but the player is opting to increase difficulty.
Souls games start at a higher skill floor than the average Mario, but you can unlock tools to make the game easier if you choose. There’s co-op summons, overpowered weapons and equipment, places to easily farm huge numbers of levels. Plus plenty of cheesy strategies for most of the toughest bosses. It’s all optional in-game choices you can make to tweak the difficulty to your taste without the devs putting in a menu slider that just gives every enemy double-HP or something. And they’ve gotten better at implementing these tools every time they’ve iterated. The few people who dunked on Elden Ring often criticized how easy it was relative to earlier FromSoft games. It’s not inherently easier, there are just many more ways to scale down the challenge if you want.
Not the original commenter but I do feel the same. I dislike souls games. Although I did enjoy sekiro and made it to the stupid lightning samurai guy.
The problem with souls-like games for me is the combat doesn’t feel good for the challenge and I believe you can see this in high tier players lazily dodging attacks.
The game isn’t about skill and strategy. It’s timing and flat experience to kill some bosses you just gotta fight them 600 times and learn the attacks patterns which to me feels mentally exhausting and frustrating. It’s like a glorified DDR game with swords. I have to do the right combos to win, some strategies exist sure but at the end of the day it’s DDR.
The big argument everyone has is “mechanics vs numbers” thinking mechanics is the true skill side but mechanics isn’t just what you do with a controller, it’s also what the game allows you to do.
Too many games equate difficulty with time sink. I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both. Souls games don’t offer that, they’re peg legged
That’s how every DS game except Sekiro works. There’s absolutely broken PvE builds for each game you can discover. There’s people who challenge themselves by coming up with builds capable of 1-hitting every boss in the game.
People come up with all sorts of broken or just extremely novel builds for PvP too, “bad numbers, no mechanical skill, but the enemy isn’t ready for what you’re about to do to them” is a perfectly effective strategy.
That usually requires you to play the game in a traditional way first to learn/acquire that information and/or bang your skull repeatedly against a boss that feels like bullshit because you failed to dodge one single ability. It’s just not my schtick.
Not really, I guess the first boss of DS3 requires you to beat traditionally, but after that everything opens up and you have access to various levels of cheese. Information like what boss is weak to what type of weapon and where to find such weapons requires exploration, looking for clues, and sometimes just trying different things. A lot of players don’t change their approach at all, just bang their head into a brick wall for 4 hours, and conclude the problem is the game, not their unwillingness to try alternatives.
That’s also the third game. I tried Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 and they both felt pretty much roll, jump and smack em with a stick.
I’m thinking Nioh, Bloodborne, Sekiro, stuff like that.
I also think the genre itself has become sort of weird where people will describe everything from Shovel Knight to Titan Souls to Jedi Fallen Order as soulslike which is insane in my opinion. I guess because you fight bosses in them or roll in some of them? I dunno. It has somehow absorbed all hack and slash, boss rush, metroidvania games to be labeled “soulslike”. Which is insane to me.
DS1 is like that though; the asylum demon has you run away and return with a better weapon and tactics to teach you this. The first boss, the demon on the bridge, you can choose to fight on a narrow ledge where it’s easy to roll off, while getting shot by archers, or you can climb the little tower to deal with the archers and the demon conveniently is standing directly below a ramp you can jump off of.
The gargoyles seem unfair as your probably bladed weapon just bounces off their rock doing little damage, but if you leave and come back when you have more levels or a big hammer (conveniently located outside the other bell), you can often kill the first one before the second gets into the arena.
Thank you, now I think I’ll have to try sekiro. For Elden Ring there is a way out of the “learn timings” chore: go hard into defence, and there will only be a couple of boss strikes that can take you down, or go into insane damage increase and just evaporate everything (counter points to this: neither is to my liking and also neither is going to happen on first play-through for most people), but that is supposed to be the “best as of now” iteration. Need to see what was before it
I think they’d benefit taking a note from the witcher but not as linear.
For instance spirit/ghost creatures have them be susceptible to salt, silver, iron, holy water and a specific wood like holly. None are required to kill it, some have advantages over others or affect certain spirits more.
Maybe then I could be sneaky and have rare wood arrows with silver tips and eliminate from afar, I could be full rogue and sneak attack with blessed iron daggers, or just a big man with a plain sword and brute force my way through.
I think if you slapped Hatsune Miku on a dark souls screen and have her dancing going “jump!, roll!, duck!” People would realize it’s not as much of a skill game as they thought.
I heard this being the case. Its very good game design.