Existing IPs, maybe. But the real point of this patent is to stifle innovation and preempt competition. No indie developer is going to dare enter this creative space anymore as they don’t have the resources to challenge Nintendo’s patent - even though I think this won’t hold up in court.
To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.
And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.
Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring. Hell, even Ninja Gaiden went away from boss runbacks starting from the second game, and that came out in 2008!
I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
Well, I was merely speaking in general, I didn’t actually buy Silksong! 😅 The combination of being prohibitively difficult and having tons of tricky platforming (I hate platforming) means I’m just doing like with Hollow Knight and staying away to save myself the frustration.
I’ll take a look at it, but like I said above I don’t let myself play FM anymore and this sounds equally dangerous. Do you need a PES install to play or is it fully standalone?
To each their own, but when I played through Blasphemous just recently it felt like the game had tons of design elements intended to either piss you off or deliberately waste your time or both.
An upside of SI tending to have very minor year-on-year upgrades between FM editions is that most people don’t buy it every year. It’s common to buy every two or three years, unless a momentous change is implemented. The sortitoutsi.net site has squad updates among its mods that let you play older games for longer.
Not that I want to be encouraging you to take it up, the game is literally like crack and I don’t let myself play it anymore.