Bloodborne actually gets pretty easy once you understand the parry timing. If you ever feel brave enough to give it a shot, just focus on learning that mechanic and you’ll do well.
I hope it’s clear which option is the original difficulty. I plan on playing it and honestly I’m worried how they’ll implement it. Difficulty settings are great but hard to pull off
There are only two ways a difficulty setting has ever been used, and only one would be good for a game like this.
Either the health and damage (and possibly speed) is going to be adjusted so easier difficulty means you take less damage and deal more, while harder difficulties turn enemies into sponges that absolutely destroy you in 1 or 2 hits.
Or they re-do every encounter, 3 times, adding, removing, or re-arranging the mobs so they are easier or more difficult by actually tweaking the challenge and not the just the “numbers.”
Almost every game chooses to do the former and not the latter because it’s cheap and easy to do. Takes literally no effort to adjust some numbers by a percentage. It actually takes some thought and planning and time to actually present different tiers of challenge, naturally.
Imagine if every boss took as long to kill as that one giant dragon in Elden Ring that doesn’t even move because it’s too big and would crash the game if it actually did even when you’re completely maxed out in every stat.
I want to appreciate the additions, but…this is also not a good way of doing it.
The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.
Maybe that’s navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that’s working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it’s that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they’re playing with an input delay.
That’s why the games I’ve liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.
I really wanted to like this game, paid for it and everything, but I just couldnt get in to it. I’m an avid fan of fromsoft’s stuff and have done them all several times, but with LoP i never felt like the combat clicked, and I strongly disliked most of the enemy designs. Not that fromsoft always has great enemy design either, but LoP just didnt vibe with me. I’ll have to revisit it some day though
The game doesn’t really explain this, but you get different dodge animations when you are using an extra light build. To me, this made the game feel more like bloodborne, which made the combat easier to read. Eventually, I ended up parrying everything instead of dodging, but I really like how the game plays in this state. YMMV
On one hand difficulty settings seem good because it gives players choices.
But on the other this genre is meant to challenge you. And for me if Dark Souls hadn’t been one difficulty only and hard was the way it is now I probably would have never beaten it on the hard difficulty. But I persevered and did something that felt great because of that design choice.
I hope he can make lies and then when his nose is big enough he can break it off and use it as a beating stick to fight off the bad guys or light torches in the deku tree
Works for me. I got stuck on the puppet king second phase and gave up. Not like rage quit, I just never went back to the game after like a dozen attempts, uninstalled it months later to free up space.
I love difficulty adjustments. Tuning a game to be right for every audience is impossible, better to let the end client have some control over fine tuning their experience.
Control is an excellent example of this for me. My GOTY when it came out, still an all time fav. I love the story and setting, but the combat is tedious after a while. In that case, lowering enemy health made the game less boring without being substantially easier, giving me the kind of experience I could enjoy.
Amen! There’s nothing I hate more than damage-sponge enemies. I love active dodging, blocking, and targeting weak spots, but NOBODY should survive multiple headshots just because they have a lot of HP.
I’m not sure if you’ve played directly on release but they did nerf the puppet king two weeks after release or so, he has way less HP than he used to when the game came out
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.
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