games

Yeah same, I think it's just that the most vocal people are assholes

God mode is the only option I can easily puzzle out working for people who are unable to use existing mechanics.

Like if the character takes reduced damage but the player cannot dodge, parry, maintain stamina while blocking, or otherwise avoid or mitigate attacks, they're going to spend most of their time knocked down or staggered.

Increasing player damage would be redundant as most weapons can already be made to do enormous amounts of damage to enemies and bosses using existing systems.

You could increase xp gain I guess but you can already grind out xp relatively quickly.

The game already has auto-targetting, auto-aiming attacks, plenty of aoes of various kinds.

I don't often see people specifying what accomodations they need to play the game. Like people who ask for a generic "difficulty mode" are treating it like an fps game or arpg game where you can fiddle with player health and damage numbers and make the game relatively straightforward. Idk how you can apply that kind of trivially easy "difficulty mode", just applying some modifiers to damage and defense numbers, to all of the things going on in souls games - poise, status effects, spacing, dodging, parry, target priority, punishing attacks.

That's the part where I think a real disconnect has crept in. Like with DnD you can give the player's +10 to all roll and they mostly can't lose. With fps games you can simply make the player not die when they lose all their health, and have enemies shoot infrequently and miss a lot. With soulslikes enemies deal damage to whatever they hit during their attack animation. Their aim doesn't work the same way it does in an fps - they start the animation and if you're in the way during the animation you take damage. There isn't really rng the way you'd get it in D&D. Under the same conditions every action has the same result.

Giving players more ammo like you do in lower difficulties on fps and tps games doesn't translate as the player already roughly has control over their resources through levelling up, managing flashs, and consumables. And all your resources are restocked whenever you die or reach the next checkpoint. And then on top of that ER has several mechanics to keep you topped off while exploring, and if you run low you can almost always return to the last checkpoint to top off and start that segment over.

Giving people "more powerful" weapons "earlier" doesn't fit bc you have access to almost all weapon types at the start of the game through different classes, merchants, and drops. And there aren't really more or less powerful weapons, rather weapons determine your moveset and playstyle with most players picking something that feels good to them. As all weapons can be levelled up and most can have their special abilities changed there isn't any clear equivalent to giving someone the rocket launcher a few levels early.

When people say they want an "easy mode" I don't understand what they want. They game is "easy" if you accept that going through the same areas over and over until you win is the core gameplay loop and you make use of all the tools you have.

Like if you're R/G colorblind, or need visual cues for audio due to impaired hearing, I get that. But in the context of a souls game what do people mean by easy? It's not an fps or arpg where enemies are just a bundle of hp that you click on until they die. If you have god mode you can ignore all game mechanics and click the enemy until they die. But short of god mode no amount of fiddling with stats is going to get someone past Malekith or Radhann.

Maybe some kind of time-dilation thing where you can slow the game down dramatically?

There's a saying "a game for everyone is a game for no one" and I think at some point the souls hater crowd needs to sit down and chew on the idea that soulslike games have specific features that make them different from other genres of games and that the "story mode" or easy mode or whatever that can be relatively easily implemented in to crpgs, arpgs, fps, or tps games cannot easily be translated to souls games due to differences in core gameplay mechanics.

The best analogy I can come up with would be sim games. You can set all the conditions to optimal and make enemy jets fly in a straight, level line, you can turn off damage to your aircraft and fuel, but at some point the player does need to know how to fly the simulated aircraft. And if they cannot do that they should consider other genres than simulation.

Maybe I'm just overthinking this. I'm trying to work this out from "how do you make the game "easier" and still have a souls game. Maybe the folks who want an "easy" mode don't care and just want to toodle around in god mode in a game that would otherwise be totally unenjoyable for them.

The idea that any player should be able to play any game however they want, though; hard disagree. Single player games are not sandboxes. God mode is fine, but like, idk, i see the idea a lot that players should be able to use whatever weapons or skills or whatever they want and everything should be equally, uniformly viable for all gameplay. Lots of talk about "power fantasy" and "there's no wrong way to play". That's not a good attitude to approach games with. Do whatever you want within the limits of the engine, but if you're trying to play the game in ways it was not made to be played then you're making a decision to do so. I'm seeing this a lot with Helldivers, with people complaining that the game requires them to take a variety of weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies instead of taking whatever they think looks cool and having every weapon be equally effective in every situation. And there's also a great many players refusing to learn basic game systems and complaining that the game is too hard because they don't understand how to use those systems.

When a person selects a game to play they should be ready to invest a certain amount of time learning the game's rules and systems, and they should engage with the game in good faith. That means accepting the goals of the game - fps games are about shooting things, arpgs are about character builds and clicking monsters, puzzle games are about solving puzzles, simulation games are about simulating systems, platformers are about jumping between platforms - and engaging with the games on those terms.

Elden ring isn't a walking simulator, it's not a ttrpg adapted in to a crpg, it's not a conventional arpg, it's not a zelda game or a metroidvania. Soulslike games are their own thing. If you want to vibe and enjoy the scenary, just walk around and look at things, you're asking the devs to give you options to play an entirely different genre and style of game. All the scenery and vibes are in a soulslike game to give substance and flavor to the core of fighting from one bonfire to the next bonfire. Putting in options to completely ignore that and just wander around isn't a mode to make it easier to play dark souls, it"s a mode for not playing dark souls. "I want to be able to engage with the combat in a way that is within the limits of my abilities" is reasonable. "I want to play a walking simulator and i want options to make ds or er a walking simulator" is unreasonable. If someone feels they cannot enjoy the game they should not buy it, and instead find a game in a genre they enjoy.

Sort of? It's not really a roguelike because you keep your character when you die and at most you'll lose the experience points you gained since the last checkpoint. Checkpoints are usually between 5-20 minutes apart, with the time between them really heavily dependent on player skill and game knowledge. On my first playthrough one section of maybe 200m took me several hours of fighting through it over and over again until I cleared it. This playthough took me five minutes bc I had much much better game knowledge and understood how all the systems worked. And I cleared it in five minutes using an archery build that isn't really supported by the game, and I did a lot of screwing around.

Also this isn't a secret it's the absolute core of the entire genre. Almost all soulslike games pit you against a big gnarly boss at the absolute start of the game that will beat the crap out of you many times specifically as a tutorial on how the game loop works. That boss is there to kill you so you know that death isn't a failure state or you "losing the game", it's just a normal part of gameplay. Ds1 has asylum demon, i don't recall is dsii has one, dsiii has iyudex gundyr, sekiro has that guy in the field, elder ring has the grafted scion. They're all there right from the start of the game to kill you so you learn that death is at most a temporary setback and a chance to regroup and test new ideas. It's the first thing the genre tries to teach you.

It's really not difficult the way people think it is, especially Elden Ring. If you want to solo the game using a very specialized build, yeah. But you can also just pick stuff you like and guard counter or turtle or magic spam through the entire game while summoning friends and being summoned to help people. You can goof off, do sub-optimal builds, try wacky stuff, and fuck around a lot. If you don't like your build re-specing in er is fairly straightforward. Idk, i think "souls games are difficult" has been built up to mythological levels to the point where people either don't try to play Elden Ring at all, or try to play, get killed by the Tree Sentinel a few times, then throw their hands up in frustration without engaging with all the systems the game gives you right from the start.

ER really has been made much friendlier and more approachable and easier to get in to than prior games. Summoning is much easier and more reliable. Re-speccing is much easier and available from relatively early in the game. Any time you're stuck at a boss you can go somewhere else and try something else.

But yeah, the combat is 99.9% of the game, so if you don't groove with it then it's not the game for you.

As for the lore - what I really like about the Dark Souls story is that it's very much about persevering in the face of adversity. It's Absurdist to it's core, and the story and game mechanics are deeply tied together. The Dark Souls world is trapped in stasis. Gwyn and his heirs, fearing the age of dark, keep linking the fire over and over again to re-boot the age of fire. And the result is that every cycle is the same, but worse. The world gets thinner and thinner. Time and space break down dragging disparate places together until they're all stacked atop the kiln of the first flame. As long as this miserable cycle persists there's no future for the workld and no hope. The misery will go on forever, the world will become more and more hollow until nothing is left but the thinnest shell and the faintest ember.

This is directly reflected in gameplay. There is no way to lose Dark Souls. The game has no fail condition. As long as you keep trying, keep bashing your head against a cruel world that hates you without seeing you, you cannot fail. Your enemies are hollow, their humanity scooped out by overwhelming despair and indifference. They fight you out of a cold, reflexive hatred of your stubbornness and determination to press on long after there's any reason to do so. This is the core of Existentialism and Absurdism; choosing to live, grow, and change after recognizing that there's no meaning in the world.

The multiplayer reflects this, too. As Miyazaki said, the cooperative summoning was inspired by a situation where strangers were helping each other get their cars un-stuck in a bad snow. They were strangers, owing each other nothing, never seeing each other again, but they chose to cooperate and aid each other in that moment.

The pvp reflects this. People will invade your world to try to harm you, but some people will leap to your aid. There's predatory violence, but also virtuous defenders. No matter how desolate and empty the world feels there are always people nearby who will lend you a hand in even the worst circumstances.

The way you learn about the story also ties in to these themes. When you first travel through the world it seems like a miserable, empty wasteland. It's only by exploring and gathering relics and rubbish from the past that you can slowly piece together what happened. You're not a great hero. The age of heroes was long ago, and you're an archeologist exploring it's wreckage. You learn about their hopes and dreams, and their inevitable fall and failure. You take up their rusted arms, polish them until they shine anew. You clean the dust from crests and sigils that long ago lost all meaning and carry them with renewed purpose. You come to empathize with gods and monsters that proved to be pathetically mortal in the end.

And you just keep going. You keep going after you get burned by the pot throwers just outside firelink, when you get crushed by the charred and burned out shells of Gwyn's silver knights, when you're invaded by sadistic killers, when you finally drag your poisoned body to the bottom of blight town and the top of the gargloy's belfry. You keep going through the death traps of Sen's fortress. You keep going when you encounter the city of the gods and it's false pretense of glory. You just keep going, through all the adversity and setbacks, because you want to keep going.

You can give up at any time. You can turn the game off. You can grow frustrated and bored. That's when the player goes hollow. There's no way to lose the game, except to turn it off.

And I connect with that very deeply because that has been my entire life. I have very severe, untreatable depression that has made more of my life miserable than not. The only reason I keep going is that I choose to keep going. Absurdism and Existentialism are the core of my ethos; there is no meaning accept what you yourself create.

Dark Souls is a deeply, achingly humanistic game. It says, very plainly, that to exist is to suffer. And it also says that there is always hope, always comradery, always beauty, amidst that suffering. The conclusion of the story, the "good ending" in Dark Souls III, isn't restoring the bourgeis status quo or installing a monarchy or defeating the minority and communist coded enemies. It's holding hands with someone who is just as scared and uncertain as you are and accepting your mortality. Two strangers watching the last rays of the last sunset, wondering what will happen next.

Elden Ring doesn't hit nearly as hard, but there's still a good story about the reckless pursuit of power, the horrors of war, agency in the face of systemic oppression, racism and intersectionality. I could go on for hours, but i need to wrap this up and hit enter.