I really enjoyed the game, but hit a difficulty spike that just totally stalled the experience for me. No fault of the game but I just couldn’t figure out if I wasn’t leveled enough or lacked the skill. I’m willing to admit my reaction times aren’t what they use to be.
I’ll give it mad points for helping make turned based combat finally click for me. It was never my bag, but this one really worked for me.
What difficulty setting were you playing on? I think Story mode post nerfs should be manageable even if you get hit a lot - at least as far as main story goes.
If you want to give it another shot, invest in HP and Defense, bring a healer and build Maelle as a tank with Egide to give yourself a lot of margins and sort of grind out encounters safely. There aren’t many DPS checks - if any.
Late game you can stack so much damage on Maelle that she one-shots everything, if you like.
Its a great game and worth trying to finish. Now as far as the optional superboss… Yeah, that’s another story.
I was shocked to learn that Maelle can one-shot that superboss as well. I would not have beat him otherwise: I spent literally weeks pounding my head against the wall, trying to beat him more conventionally.
I couldn’t beat it “fairly” either, but approaching it as a puzzle fight where you’re trying to figure out how to deal with its bullshit is also kind of fun. I ended up stunlocking it, which in itself you can do in several different ways. The game has a lot of fun things you can do with builds.
I really enjoyed using Lune as my main damage character. I did this somewhat out of necessity in my first play-through – because I didn’t beat the final Gestral tournament battle with Maelle – after discovering the power of the combination of Elemental Trick with a high critical rate and Elemental Genesis and did it from the start because I enjoyed it in my second play-through.
Lune was by far my favourite to use mechanically, the stains system just made for such fun planning of rotations. There is a lot of fun with various weapon combos too, like the Potierim support build that applies Greater Slow. I personally used her as AP and buff battery with Typhoon giving everyone max AP and refreshing greater versions of all buffs every turn. And then I used Braselim with Storm Caller and Lightning Dance to farm a tier 3 Gradient every turn.
The Genesis build is AP efficient but once you have 9 every turn it gets outdamaged by Lightning Dance (single target) and Hell (AoE). Though you wouldn’t guess so going by the astronomically poor and unclear skill descriptions.
I didn’t get Medalum either but honestly you don’t need it. The one shot builds only need it pre Cheater to start in Virtuoso, after that you can just Last Chance anyway.
I self-inflicted some pain like that for me as well.
I got close to the end of Act 2 and my friend said that the difficulty was too easy and I was breezing pass everything and to switch it to Expert. Well guess what. I didn’t level, upgrade or put my Pictos in a way to deal with it. So most of my boss fights turned from a close-win into 45 minutes of me dying a lot. Like, I’d be one-shotted so often.
I then took some time and then cashed in some Lumina for stories and then actually put some strats in and went through the skill tree. I think it was worthwhile in the end but it totally changed the experience for me.
Another possible option if you’re on PC is using the mod that makes dodge/parry window bigger or smaller. I haven’t used it but I know people who have and it can really change your enjoyment of the game.
If anyone hits a wall at about the midpoint of the game, I found a really good place to grind. Right after you get Monocco, there is an area you can go to called Frozen Hearts. If you immediately go and start to explore, you’ll soon realize this is a late game area that you are massively under leveled for.
HOWEVER, the first enemy you see is a Danseuses, and if you start the battle you’ll fight 3 of them. It will take a little bit, but they only have like 3 different attack patterns, after a few tries you should be able to learn them and parry/dodge them consistently. Once you have that down, you’ll be able to beat them without getting hit and they give a MASSIVE amount of exp. Then just head over to the nearby flag, heal up, and do it again. I stayed there for about hour fighting them repeatedly and bumped everyone up by like 10 levels.
The tricky part is memorizing their attack patterns consistently, I died a lot until I got it down. But the flag is really close by, so you can just keep throwing yourself at them until you do. Don’t bother trying to fight any of the other battles in this area, all the other ones have enemies that will outheal any damage you can do.
There’s a quest danseus in the area that will allow you to practice without penalty, unfortunately it’s a bit high up in the area so getting to it without knowing how to defeat the danseuses would be pretty tricky.
This often happens to me in RPGs because I’m missing some combat mechanic or fundamental.
It’s made me want to design better optional tutorials for those games to help people discover certain strategies. Eg;
“Hey, you have many different tuning macguffins on this character, but it means their stats aren’t built to any one strength. For an example, try using 8 yellow macguffins to build them for taunting/defense so they can use their self-heal unique, and build up stun on enemies each time they’re attacked.”
Those things feel so witty to discover, but many RPGs now build up and prioritize so many systems it’s understandable people aren’t quickly attuned to them. What often gets me is thinking I’m not making the right decisions mid-combat, when my menu decisions around equipment/abilities are completely wrong.
No fault of the game but I just couldn’t figure out if I wasn’t leveled enough or lacked the skill.
Even the hardest boss in the game can be killed with one shot on normal difficulty with a correct build and the right turn order.
I say that because while learning how to parry and dodge are important, pictos and equipment can more than make up for inabilities in the middle-to-late game.
Overall, pictos are arguably the most important thing in the game.
I wound up playing the game through twice, once on normal difficulty and then again on story difficulty (I just really enjoyed the game and wanted to 100% it and had missed a couple of the only missable achievements).
Don’t feel bad playing it in a lower difficulty level, and then try to learn when to parry attacks. There are often visual and audio cues.
A lot of the difficulty when playing the game as intended (at normal difficulty) is learning the pattern of when to press the parry button. You can learn this more easily on story mode because it’s more forgiving. Counterattacks are very powerful throughout the game, and only happen if you learn how to parry.
Maelle being powerful also has a lot to do with the weapon she wields. If you didn’t beat the last Gestral arena fight with Maelle, you might want to restart the game and do that, because that weapon will carry you all the way through the regular end game (though you might need a better weapon to 100% the game).
You can beat the main story using Lune’s abilities for your main damage pretty easily. The one-two punch that I found very useful (after building around it) was using “Elemental Trick” followed by “Elemental Genesis”. With Elemental Trick, you can produce 4 stains in a single attack if you get your critical rate up. One easy way to make critical high is to use the Critical Burn picto and make sure to keep around a burn on one of the enemies to attack with Elemental Trick. Once you have the stains you need (4 critical hits, one of each element), Elemental Genesis can one-shot a lot of enemies throughout the game. It’s great because it’s a multi-hit attack and a multi-enemy attack. It works very well before you can do over 9999 damage in a single hit.
There are mods and cheats for this game already—and they even run on Linux. I turn 50 next month: though I’m still playing, I don’t have as much time for gaming as I used to and my reflexes aren’t what they were. I haven’t entirely removed the challenge with mods, but I feel no shame in tweaking this game to go easier on me and chew up less of my time as punishment for failure. I wish they had these as accessibility options built-in, but I’m fine with hacking it.
Anybody telling me I should “git gud” can pound sand: I’m already good at a bunch of things that get me a paycheck. I play games so I can relax and be terrible at something for fun. I’m certainly not playing for bragging rights.
I think this game is not for you then.Harfd games are hard so that you can feelproufd of yourself after completing something hardet than you though you could. You may not complete the story but if you “git gud” you may actually enjoy it more.
Some games are not meant to be relaxing. Why would you even play a hard game if you want something easy?
If you’re not able to commit to learning new strategies and using game mechanics to adapt to a game’s difficulty, and experience it as the developers intended, maybe it’s not for you. You can always watch a lore video or let’s play by other gamers to get the story if that’s the goal. This is Dark Souls 2 all over again, and I will personally say as someone who initially hated it, then gave it another chance; When you persist and triumph through grit, the game leaves a lasting impression and sense of accomplishment that you cheat yourself out of with a difficulty slider. That’s my favorite game in the series now, which is a deeply unpopular opinion, unsurprisingly.
This debate pops up every now and then and my opinion remains the same, there are plenty of games that aren’t meant to be a challenge to choose from. Part of games that are built to be a challenge is being able to reflect on how far you grew in the process, and people hate to hear it but ‘git gud’ is a real thing for those who believe things worth doing are hard.
In my opinion, the game is not particularly difficult. That is, if you’ve played through the original Hollow Knight. Which most people haven’t. In fact, it looks to me like a lot of people jumping on the hype don’t have too much experience with metroidvanias and soulslikes.
It’s a sequel, so intended to be played after the original. Why do we care what people who haven’t played the first game think?
It’s difficult for me and I like it. I played Hollow Knight but didn’t finish it because it was too frustrating late game. Silksong to me is not frustrating because difficulty is mainly in figuring out how to pass the challenge, not doing reflexes which I don’t have. Most of the things I heard people complain about are solved by not rushing around with failing strategy but by thinking what the game recently suggested you to do for this particular encounter.
I actually think bringing in Hollow Knight experience aka “I already know everything” might be the reason why some people are frustrated. Like I heard a person who claimed to get all the achievements in HK complain that the second phase of one boss is terrible because they spent a hundred tries to dodge all the projectiles while you can just stand at the corner of the arena where non of them will hit you and use the tools this game gives you to win the fight.
Sigh this shit again, if it’s the creators decision to have a game with finely tuned hard difficulty, so be it, that’s the creators creative decision and it should be respected
Respect is a weird word. It seems to have 2 nearly opposite meanings (kind of like literally):
Deep admiration for someone or something for their abilities, qualities, or achievements
Due regard for the feelings, wishes, or rights of others
So the first one implies that respect must be earned. The second implies that everyone must be respected by default (their due regard), thus respect is unearned.
To a degree I guess as the audiences own experiences will determine there own interpretation of the work, but in this situation I don’t think someone’s own experiences is going to impact too much the fact that silksong is hard as nails at points
My biggest complaint is the sheer lack of rewards when I finish a fight. Give me any currency.
I have spent so much of this game broke, unable to buy the things I need to advance any side plots.
I’m currently stuck on the fight for the Music in the top left of the citadel. The double boss at the end is brutal. But because no enemy in that fight drops monster parts, I have to quit to grinding it to go grind more materials to build equipment, despite having slain 20+ enemies each run.
I’m about 10 hours into silksong and it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. But the majority of the boss fights seem… cheap?
Like, their difficulty doesn’t come from their various attacks, or their environment. Instead, it usually comes from the fact that they do double damage, or the fact that they spam the same two attacks over and over way too quickly, or the fact that they can do the same add summon three times in a row and make what was a controllable situation practically impossible
Now, I’ve 112% the OG hollow knight and beaten true radiance, so I’m not against difficult boss fights. In fact I relish the feeling of learning their moves and patterns after every single death
But when the moves are “ram into wall. Then ram into wall again” it becomes incredibly annoying
A high difficulty is not inherently good game design. Making a game more approachable through lower difficulty settings with additional checkpoints doesn’t make it worse for people who like a challenge. It just makes it enjoyable to more people.
Claiming it’s down to “artistic vision” just feels dishonest. You could claim Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you… but why? How is it a bad thing if more people can enjoy something?
Cup Head is a great example. It’s a fantastic game with an art style that younger kids love. But it’s too difficult for most kids, which doesn’t make the game better, it just locks them out from a game they’d otherwise love.
Is it not fair for the game developers’ artistic vision to not be accessible to all? Accessibility is nice, expands the potential audience, but if it compromises my artistic vision and I’m ok with giving up reach and money to preserve it, that doesn’t make my game bad or my vision invalid.
It would be ridiculous to call up the bar or the ama and complain to them that becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not accessible to all.
One last addition, adding control remapping, color options, and text to speech are true accessibility. Easy mode is fake accessibility
Easy mode is not fake accessibility. Celeste has the correct idea in allowing players adjust the difficulty for accessibility purposes. Not everyone has the same reaction speed, same cognitive abilities, same eyesight. There are people who can only use one hand and that automatically makes reacting to attacks many times harder, should they be excluded from being able to enjoy the game because they are not physically capable enough for the boss fights? And boss fights are probably 5% of the game anyway!
Runbacks are a lame attempt at artificially increasing difficulty. I’ll happily die on that hill. I love difficult games, but there is a fine line between frustration and difficult.
Elden Ring (at least all the bits I played through) and Sekiro absolutely nailed it. None of the run backs were particularly egregious, and it let me really focus on experimenting and learning to feel out the difficult fights. Celeste is another good example. I have dropped hours on some of the later levels trying to master them, but never once got frustrated.
Hollow Knight I never finished because I got stuck on a boss and the runback was just way too long and annoying. I loved everything else about the game and want to finish it eventually.
Edit: I think they have their place as “mods” that you could enable to increase difficulty, and i’d actually probably enjoy it that way. Just designing the game around them is where i draw the line.
To be fair, From has like many games to learn from that while Cherry only has HK. I’ll never forget the sheer pain of the Frigid Outskirts from Dark Souls 2.
To me it feels like “if you don’t survive the journey, you’re too weak for the boss itself” it brings me down and makes me calmer until I reach the boss.
I like them because it forces you to try to salvage a fight instead of just conceding after a bad start. The time spent getting to the boss is investment you don’t want to waste.
I think this is really just an issue of the tools and abilities not being inherently linked to the related bosses.
FYI quickhop attacking is faster than ground combos and you can weave in the trio dagger throws when you are dodging away from close attacks. Also your attack will negate enemy attacks weapon hitbox(but you still have to dodge bodily contact). The poison tool upgrade is overbalanced and makes a lot of fights a joke.
And all music should be under three minutes long. Every book should have page numbers. Photographers should have familiar subjects. Paintings should have a full explanation by the artist telling you exactly what they meant to communicate. /s
If the game isn’t for you, just move along. There are tons of games out there.
are you aware of the meaning of the word “setting” in this context?
Just in case I can explain:
It means you can switch something from one behaviour or effect to another, basically giving you a choice of how something should work. So, adding a difficulty setting changes nothing about your experience of the game.
do you need more words to explain this simple thing?
I can try to use simple language and shorter sentences if you require it?
I think it’s a great game for veterans who like challenges like myself.
But I have to call out team Cherry for their interviews: They said they wanted anyone to be able to pick up this as their first Hollow Knight game and just start playing… Sorry, but, bullshit. the difficulty ramp is too quick, double damage comes out to early and the boss fights get more challenging quickly. See the weaver for instance, a fight I’d place around the difficulty of Grimm, but there’s double damage and you probably only have 5 health.
Also they mentioned part of the game’s difficulty was due to Hornet’s competence and utility… Ghost is canonically a better fighter than Hornet, so by that logic they should have made the game easier (yes I’m being silly about this part).
ign.com
Gorące