this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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dark souls would still benefit from difficulty settings
The difficulty settings are your stats. Literally.
Depending on your build and your personal skill level the game becomes easy or hard. The souls games are notoriously difficult because people don't have the attention span to learn boss patterns and want to kill every other enemy they see. The game punishes arrogance and forces you to figure out the mechanics yourself.
Once you get a hang of it the games become really easy. Not even joking. I have a harder time playing Space Marine 2 than I do Dark Souls.
sure but you won't know that as a new player unless you go outside the actual game for info.
You should! The game desperately wants you to! That's why stuff like the messaging system was created, to incentivize the player to player share of information. Yeah, all the messages left these days are going to be trolling, unfortunately, but there's still plenty of videos and info from the era it was released on the internet.
There's absolutely no shame in looking something up when you get stuck and can't progress further, or asking a friend where to go next. That's FromSoftware's intent.
but that's not interesting to me. i want immersion. that's also why their multiplayer aspect seems like such a weird idea.
Then they might not be the games for you. Immersion is probably the last thing I'd really think of for Souls. They're very much a series of videogames that feel like videogames, especially when you realize how many of the assets and animations get re-used from game to game.
that's... the most concise way to explain it i've ever seen, and something that has never clicked for me until now. it's always looked to me like this lore-heavy dark RPG and i've never been able to square the gameplay with the feeling. hearing that it was never supposed to gel at all and it's all just background noise makes a lot of sense, and made all the remaining curiosity i had for the series disappear.
now if only other games could stop getting infected by the fromsoft bug...
The game provides everything you need to know that though.
If one hit takes most of your health away, then clearly you need more health. So buff your health stat.
Still learning and need to survive better? Wear armour.
Casting magic? Maybe you need more Mana.
Maybe as a person who's been playing games my whole life I have a cognitive dissonance or something when it comes to people not understanding game mechanics.
Here's a good video that helps me understand a bit better.
But like... You can literally see what each stat buffs and by how much each time you sit at a bonfire to level up.
The game doesn't hold your hand but it's not difficult to understand enough to play the game.
ah, so it's king's quest style progression. i played enough of that in the 90s.
I mean, that's RPGs for you. Level up, buy equipment, wear armour and cast spells.
Any part of the equation is the solution. Just depends on how you want to play. The story is what you make of it along the way.
with king's quest progression i meant that the game is designed around players getting stuck, possibly without them knowing.
RPGs center around the story and the role you play, and the mechanics are built to aid that. you play for the story. in most RPGs, failure still progresses the story because failure is interesting. getting stuck is not interesting. having the mechanics without a story to reinforce would just be going through the motions.
someone else said that the fromsoft games are made to feel like videogames, and that resonated with me. that explained the disconnect i see in the mechanics and the world.
I think you have a bad impression of how souls games work and I'm not sure how to address that.
Did you ever play Rogue or Thief back in the day? Maybe the Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Cuphead or Balatro? Loss is part of the game but it still progresses the story. You're never "stuck" as you say. Dying, making mistakes and retrying is part of the game.
Old RPGs that just gave you nothing sucked because they were directionless. Which is not a word I would ever use to describe a souls game. Sure, they're difficult but there's certainly a flow to them. I think a lot of people get hung up on the mechanics of the games and drop them immediately.
As you said, RPGs are centred around the story and role you play, mechanics are built to aid that. Once you get into a souls game, that is made abundantly clear. They just don't hand it to you in the first 30 seconds and they expect you to be able to figure some things out as you play because the game does a good job at that.
And yes, fromsoft/soulsborne games most definitely feel like a videogame and they should. This Harkins to the story elements where you play as a literal nobody, worthless undying but you somehow ascend to godhood despite the odds and it breaks the world over and over again. We, the player, are the god. But the characters don't know this. It's unfathomable to them that something greater than they, exists. To us it's a videogame but to the characters it's the end of the world. Over and over and over again. No matter how insurmountable the odds, we get infinite chances to topple pantheons and change everything.
thief sticks out to me in that list. all the others are run-based with metaprogression (except the original rogue of course) which means there is never a time where you get stuck. you die, you restart, you get an entirely new experience. thief is not only linear and slow, it is almost entirely devoid of combat and encourages savescumming because that was the style at the time. by thief 3 that was mitigated.
souls games, in contrast, are not run-based, heavy on combat, and not liberal with the opportunity to save. in addition there's the retrieval mechanic which means that when you fail, your only option is to redo the run that you just failed but with higher difficulty.
and with "plays like a video game", my main gripe is the dissonance between the world and what you do. the story is interesting, but it's like the game itself doesn't care about it. the developers do, and the player is supposed to, but the game doesn't.
Oh, so Dark Souls is trail and error?
That doesn't sound fun at all.
Are there any video games that don't involve some level of trial and error? I suppose respawn mechanics should be removed from all games then?
I guess what I'm saying is that the souls games reward experience. The more you learn, the easier it becomes. More akin to a roguelike in learning curve than a puzzle game.
The barrier for entry may seem high but I genuinely think after an hour of playing you'll quickly get the hang of it and be just fine.
some of the highest-rated games of all time have no trial and error. Disco Elysium springs to mind because i'm currently playing through it.
Some games not having trial and error doesn't invalidate my point though. At a fundamental level videogames reward knowledge of mechanics the further you progress. One mechanic may work well in one game and horribly in another.
I'm certain the more you play Disco Elysium the better you get at the game. Same applies for any game. Not being able to grasp a repeated mechanic in a game doesn't make it a bad game either. It just means it isn't a game for you.
it's hard to get better at a story.
i don't know if it's your intention but i take umbrage with the choice of the word "grasp". it implies that the issue is one of skill rather than interest. i do agree that it is not for me, but the reason for that is not the game itself. as i said, explicit settings for difficulty would not hurt the experience of playing the game for anyone, but people are reacting as though it would.
So what, I have to dive in deep just to get the correct stats to have the difficulty that I want?
How about my old retired dad, is he not allowed to play dark souls because he doesn't have the same reflexes he did 40 years ago? Because it would otherwise invalidate your sense of pride for being able to beat it?
Dark Souls should have a story mode difficulty. Every game should.
Claiming it shouldn't is selfish.
People beat the games blindfolded. People beat them one handed and without dodging or leveling up.
There's no need to dive deep either. The souls games have to be some of the best thought out games I've played in a long time. Progression makes sense as you play. If an enemy is too tough just walk away and come back later.
Stats scale pretty simply with the game and you can play as you want. Dark souls doesn't need a story mode and not every game does either.
If you want to make the argument for accessibility, fine. But asking for the bar to be lowered because you can't or won't learn the mechanics of a game is wild to me. It's like asking the devs of Overcooked to make the dishes cook themselves because it gets hard to play.
A sense of entitlement to features in a creative work not made by you is the real selfishness.
It is only a creative work if it can be enjoyed. Otherwise it are just bits on a harddrive.
Aye. Unpopular but...that's a reason I haven't touched any of those yet. Fucking respawn. Stop wasting my time. We had that enough back in the days when there only was 1 game a month (if at all). But they must exclude us with not having a difficulty setting. Cheating also doesn't help in this case.
I tried to pay DS1 about 6 times now, hated it every single time. Played ER, fucking loved it. DS1 is just horrible game design.
Setting aside the graphics, the map/open world, and magic becoming mana based rather than vancian, they really feel like the same gameplay to me. I think the bosses were actually easier in DS1. Honestly. Fighting the final boss, or say that capybara demon, really felt more like I was being a badass, learning the mechanics and being better than the boss, than the utterly annoying final few bosses in ER, where it was all about getting my stats high enough.
That's because Elden Ring is Dark Souls for noobs. You just weren't able to git gud. It's okay. Not everyone can. Saying a game that literally spawned an entire genre has "horrible design" is pretty ridiculous though, don't you think?
It has a lot going for it that is really good, but the way the game is laid out and the controls and the menus and several other things that fall under design are pretty horrible. Definitely not unique, Metal Gear for the MSX spawned a lot of different content and arguably a genre, but it's annoying to play, same with the first Assassin's Creed, and I'm sure if we looked plenty more.