I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.
My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.
right there with you. and there are SO MANY levers they could pull under the hood to tweak the difficulty without fundamentally changing the fights. Adjusting stuff like poise, estus flasks, flask consumption time, etc could all make the game easier for folks without changing the fights themselves too much.
And to be fair, most of these games would still be challenging at a lower difficulty. I expect that the late game bosses of Lies of P would remain difficult in the second difficulty setting (maybe not as much in the first setting, but for now we don’t know what to expect)
Absolutely amazing decision. Difficulty settings make games more accessible - period. And gating accessibility behind “artistic intent” and “vision” is just stupid. Sure, not every game has to meet everyone’s idea of a good time, but come on - it can’t be that hard, and it would only be a net positive for everyone.
Miyazaki wept. Edit: lol people love to complain about gatekeepers and then they gatekeep comment sections about difficulty. Its ok guys, youre safe. The video games cant hurt you.
Downvotes arent gatekeeping. It’s just people not agreeing with you or disliking your tone. Also bitching about downvotes tends to attract more downvotes for your efforts.
If downvotes aren’t gatekeeping, then neither is saying Dark Souls is perfect the way it is and doesn’t need to be changed. Ultimately, I think we’re all picking a side on this one, and dont want to hear what the other has to say. Voting me down is your way of saying “I don’t want to see this kind of thing.” It can’t be hand-waved away as simple disagreement. There is an echo chamber at work here, it is somewhat nasty and honestly disheartening. Like when I make a joke about Miyazaki not wanting this (it is a joke after all) and everyone piles on the dislike; that’s the community trying to send me a message. And yes, I know that calling out downvoters makes them pile on more; I am proud to spit in ya’lls face. The discourse around difficulty is toxic on both sides and I hate it. Can’t even make a joke without bringing out the Defenders of the Casual or whatever. Vote me down some more, its exactly what I expect.
Sometimes difficulty is inextricable from the art, and Dark Souls is a good example of that. When people say they want it easier they are missing the message. You SHOULD have to struggle to get what you want, you SHOULD have to pay attention to the game you’re playing instead of mindlessly hacking your way through only to forget bout it days later. If a game punishes impatience and hubris, you will be more immersed in an oppressive world, you will feel like a small part of a larger tragedy that transcends your typical hero fantasy. These are the things that make the game special, and Miyazaki and his team knew what they were doing. You are spitting on their vision and their talent when you say it should be different. Lies of P… I haven’t played it, and the devs can do whatever they feel is right to make the game they want to make.
But you know, Starry Night is fine and all but its too dark and depressing. They should put some more yellow in there, really make it more accessible to the masses.
See, assuming someone calling out your bitching has downvoted you is part of your problem. I didn’t downvote you before, now I have downvoted you because you sound whiny.
Accessibility options are good. Not everyone is a god gamer with the reflexes of a 14-year old hopped up on Adderall and Red Bull. Some people just want to enjoy the story and the atmosphere of a game and it should be normal for us to let them.
So much this! I love a challenging game but sometimes you just want to experience the game without the frustration, and lowering the difficulty for yourself has zero impact on people who prefer the original or higher difficulty
Black myth wukong would be so great with some difficulty options. I’m sure the rest of it story is great, but if I get stuck for a week on a boss I’m going to stop caring about that story.
It’s true I haven’t played the Elden Ring expansion, and I guess that’s the most difficult one now so it’s required to have played it to be able to parade around your gamer credentials? Whatever that’s supposed to mean? To me gaming is about enjoying a medium of culture, not a dick measuring contest. I’ve played Dark Souls, I’ve played Elden Ring. I’ve beaten Sister Friede, I’ve beaten Malenia.
Reading comprehension, even more challenging than dark souls nowadays eh? No idea what you’re even going on about now, but glad you got your nice rehearsed rant off your chest.
The main souls games have already gotten progressively more and more “””accessible”””, somewhat to the detriment of what originally made them appealing. Options are a mutually preferable alternative - people that enjoyed the original gameplay would still have their torture, or you can play on games journalist difficulty and have basically the same experience as watching someone else play on twitch.
There‘s a potential discussion to be had about how much of the Soulsborne/-like experience is about overcoming difficulty - and let’s be honest, the vast majority of people won‘t finetune difficulty but just go as easymode as possible - but on the other hand I strongly dislike elitism in games and in the end it should be on the player if they wanna potentially ruin their own experience or not, as such I agree with you.
Would Dark Souls have ever become the iconic game it is and FROM/Miyazaki the iconic devs they are with an easymode (in their games)? Hard to say.
I‘m always happy to see these options especially in indie games, which so often go crazy hard on difficulty towards the end (Celeste endgame for example).
Yeah, is a double edged sword. But if it makes more people to stick to the game rather than abandoning it, is nice.
My brother has Elden Ring for PS5 sitting on the shelf. The only serious playtime he’s had was a year ago when I visited him and made some character progress. Now, he keeps asking if I’ll play it again during my next visit. I always tell him, ‘No, I’m good-it’s a great game, but I’m coming over for peace and relaxation, not to get frustrated.
I usually start on easy mode and then steadily increase difficulty as I go. Nothing will make me refund a game faster than being 20 minutes in and dying 74 times in an impossible encounter. LoP is one of those games.
That’s kinda the point of Souls games though. The encounter isn’t impossible, and once your skills and attitude change, you get through it - even though the encounter itself didn’t change a bit.
I’m a perfect game sure, but most of these are far from perfect. They often don’t explain mechanics, rely heavily on changing Metas, RNG, pure chance, reflexes that some people just will not have no matter what their attitude or mindset is, and so on. Let’s have it, these games are FULL of jank.
At the end of the day, the “pros” don’t need to adjust their difficulty if they don’t want to. More options is never a bad thing.
Agreed, it’s a great idea. I don’t even think I would have been good at soulslike games when I was 14. I just don’t have the patience for those sorts of constant boss battles where it takes so many hits to kill the boss but you die in 1 or 2.
You hit the nail on the head. Soulslikes aren’t about difficulty, they’re about patience. And when school was the only thing I had to worry about I had patience. Now that I have to fight for 30 minutes of game time I don’t. Great decision by the devs!
Not everyone is a god gamer with the reflexes of a 14-year old hopped up on Adderall and Red Bull. Some people just want to enjoy the story and the atmosphere of a game and it should be normal for us to let them.
Not everyone just wants to enjoy the story. Some people want a challenge which requires the reflexes of a 14 year old hopped up on Adderall.
Why should every single game be changed to suit your specific play style?
Instead of demanding their games change, maybe you could just accept its okay some audiences have different likes than you and just play the ones that cater to your style?
I have to be honest here and say I don’t understand where you’re coming from at all.
Why should every single game be changed to suit your specific play style?
Literally nobody is asking for this. Accessibility options, not “permanently and irrevocably reduce the difficulty of all games”. The good thing about options is that they’re option-al. If you want the game to remain challenging, the presence of accessibility options does not affect you in the slightest. You can just ignore them and go on with your day, enjoying the game just as it was.
I have to be honest here and say I don’t understand where you’re coming from at all.
Thats okay! Thanks for asking. I’m coming from the place that video games are art.
If games are art, then I choose to support artists, even if they want to make weird or unconventional art. If an artist has a vision which clashes with my own I want them to be able to follow their vision that instead of always conforming to “general audiences”.
As to the rest of your comment I already said first thing accessibility options are good so I’m not sure what got miscomminicated there.
B. The game is a product that they want to sell to more people, adding difficulties sells more
Sure. Not not necessarily untrue.
I don’t see the issue either way
My stances is forced here. I support the artists.
Unfortunately, supporting artists means sometimes you have to disagree with the businessmen when the two groups disagree.
Selling microtransactions and skins and deluxe editions and pre-order exclusive content, etc, etc all “sells more” (or at least makes more money).
If the artists feel for whatever reason adding more difficulties is too much to manage or prevents them from making the experience they want to make, I have to take the side of the artist.
There’s always going to be an argument the product needs to change to make more money, that’s not the art I find super interesting.
Why care what audience it’s conforming to, you’ll either enjoy the game or you won’t?
Because I think of the people who make games as artists and it pisses me off to think of some guy in a suit pressing his fingers into the Mona Lisa and pestering Da Vinci to make her smile and show cleavage so it can sell more.
I get that a business needs to make money, but those should be decisions the artists are in the room for at least.
It’s difficult, but good. I’d advise trying to play with the default settings for a bit - you need to engage with the parry mechanic to have a chance, but if you don’t, you lose out on lots of fun. But if you can’t make it work, lowering the difficulty is definitely a good option!
I don’t think Sekiro is more forgiving necessarily, but it’s a very tight and precise game so it’s easier to catch onto the timing and feels satisfying to do, never like “I should have been able to hit that, my gun didn’t shoot :(“ I would say Elden Ring is a lot easier than Sekiro though.
Oh yeah I didn’t do a ton of parrying in Elden Ring, I just found it an easier game overall because you have so many options for weapons and play styles, and more opportunities to overlevel if you want to. In Elden Ring making use of things like bleed and rot or even just a big old bashing club can really turn things in your favour
In this one you can get away with blocking too. You take some damage but you have a short time to regain health by attacking right after. I think it makes it a little more forgiving when you are learning enemy moves and fine tuning your reaction.
I accidentally made the second half of the game harder for myself by not upgrading my armor. Oops. Ended up having to tinker with things for the last boss. But adjusting armor made the fight go from 2-3 hit KO’s to being able to actually take some hits. It was a lot of fun!
The difficulty is not a problem for me so much as the very slow movements. It takes like 2 seconds to swing a sword. Meanwhile the opponent is still attacking. Just can’t figure these games out, myself 😮💨
have you swung a melee weapon before in real life, like maybe a baseball bat? Does swinging the bat happen instantaneously, or do you have to wind up the swing for momentum? Would a bigger, heavier bat be faster or slower to swing?
Souls games have slow melee attacks compared to something like Devil May Cry, but the speed is intended to be more realistic compared to those kinds of speedy action games. Just apply real life logic to it, and it should make more sense. If the weapon you are using is too slow for you, find a smaller, lighter one that would be easier to swing in real life. If starting out as a regular dude and then becoming more powerful is not appealing to you, or if realistic fights are not exciting to you, then maybe the Souls games just aren’t your bag.
That is a really odd comparison because in real life, even 2 handed longswords are very fast and souls like games slow them down a lot. They are not meant for realism at all. A baseball bat is also not made for fighting but for putting as much force as possible into the ball and is very top heavy whereas a sword is balanced close to the guard and very quick, meant to outmanoeuvre the opponent
in souls, the 2-handed longswords that are a realistic size are realistically fast when you wield them in 2-handed mode. the ones that are slow are more anime sized.
baseball bat was not the best metaphor, i went with that because most people (including souls fans) haven’t swung an actual sword in their lives.
Every time I see someone say that most people haven’t swung a sword/ shot a gun/ been in a fight/ been in an accident, etc, I always wonder if I’m the one in the bubble or if they are.
I still disagree. I’ve done longsword fighting for multiple years and in the time a souls character does two hits with a bastard sword i probably do about 6 and that’s fine. Souls games are designed so that you can react to attacks and not for realism. A falchion in souls is about as fast as a longsword meant for 2 handed irl if not still a bit slower
interesting. I was watching some videos comparing the two yesterday, and honestly i came away still feeling like Souls combat speed is fairly realistic. This bloke makes fair points about the true practicality of a huge greatsword, and swings at a speed that is maybe two swings per second. A DS1 claymore has similar swing speed, particularly in two-handed mode. The DS1 Zweihander is right on that line between “realistically-sized” and “anime-size”, and I would agree that they make that thing look heavier than a real zwei.
On the flip side, the longsword is barely any faster than the claymore, so I could see that feeling unrealistic. I guess my brain just likes to rationalize that sort of thing away, like “yeah that seems slow but maybe I would fight carefully like that too if I was fighting multiple people that were actually trying to actually kill me”. Do you disagree with that? Do you feel like you would still swing a longsword at two or three swings a second if you were in a life-or-death fight?
Especially then. What souls gets realistic is the sizing up the enemy before clashing. Our flights usually were: pace back and forth together waiting for an opportunity/bait with an opportunity. Then execution of each person’s plan was over in a flash and either one landed a hit or you separated again, going back to pacing. But a plan of a person usually was not a single hit unless you were just probing for their reaction.
For example my favourite thing to do, was lowering the point of my sword (you usually start with tips touching uwu), baiting the opponent to attack the opposite side of were my tip was moving, the snapping the tip back up to hit the opponents incoming sword close to the handle, transferring a lot of kinetic energy into a fairly static part of their blade, thus moving their hands and influencing their whole arc such that their blade passes over me. Now i have to be very quick to attack them while repositioning into a new defensible line towards them to not get hit by their hit after recovery. This whole interaction would take about a second or less maybe.
Then there’s also the thing not really represented in souls at all which is driving your opponent through the hall. So if you attack and your opponent does only manage to block, you sometimes keep going to not give them the time to counter attack, and each swing carries you quite far which causes them to have to walk backwards very fast, to keep in blocking distance and not get into grapple range. This phrase usually has 3-4 hits a second and is quite tiring but being the one attacking usually is the winning move while the defending person has to get creative to get back into the attacking position.
I now realize that talking about sword fighting in English is quite tiring as i don’t know the terminology outside of German
And the opponents wait for 2 seconds after finishing their attacks. Soulslikes are all about learning the patterns and finding the opportunities to hit between dodges, not about mindlessly hack-n-slashing your way to victory.
And different weapons work for different people, I have some I’m absolutely useless with because I just can’t work with their movesets.
Honestly, this lawsuit is laughable. James Earl Jones himself allowed his voice to be used to train AI before his passing, and his family has given their blessing on this implementation in Fortnite.
Besides, it’s not like this Darth Vader AI is replacing any jobs; it’s a chat bot, capable of giving live responses to players across many live matches ongoing around the world. Unless it is feasible to hire a massive team of Darth Vader voice actors to be able to respond to player requests to “force choke me daddy Vader” live across hundreds of ongoing matches while staying completely in-character 24/7, their argument about Epic Games “replacing voice actors with AI” holds no water.
Honestly, if these versions have the complete up-to-date game printed on them that do not require servers to validate or update in order for me to play the game in the future, I do see the value in this. Doom the Dark Ages 85 megabytes news the other day was harrowing. Physical media hasn’t had the full game on it for a lot of games for quite a while now. If your disc doesn’t have the full game on it, then I don’t believe you own a physical copy of the game.
exactly! it’s a way to own a complete copy on disc, independent from the servers. I know there are other companies offering that specific thing, but more players in the space is a good thing imo
There is no evidence that Guillemot or Deraine were directly involved in sexual harassment or bullying at the company, they are being accused of complicity.
Which has been said from the very beginning. They didn’t do it themselves, but they knew of it and didn’t do jack to stop it.
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