Yeah I really need to shut that part of my brain off. Whenever I select anything other than Easy I can hear my 15 year old friends from back when I was in high school calling me a little bitch for putting it on the easy mode.
I think the thing I like seeing most in games is a move to rename "easy" to something like story mode, or to make clear that it's specifically for people to focus on the story, etc. The steps I hate, and I don't care if they're send-ups to previous games in the series, are things like Wolfenstein putting a baby bonnet and pacifier on the easy mode character. That's actively shitty.
I remember since middle school pissing fellow dudes off when they teased me about playing on easy with some version of the retort, "I don't have anything to prove to you or myself, especially not in a game where I'm trying to have fun." and they'd more or less tumble into a version of "but you have to fight and be strong and . . . and . . . man things!" as a response.
My game, my fun, fuck anyone else. I've always been admittedly, way to good at that. Even to my detriment.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
Yeah I really need to shut that part of my brain off. Whenever I select anything other than Easy I can hear my 15 year old friends from back when I was in high school calling me a little bitch for putting it on the easy mode.
I think the thing I like seeing most in games is a move to rename "easy" to something like story mode, or to make clear that it's specifically for people to focus on the story, etc. The steps I hate, and I don't care if they're send-ups to previous games in the series, are things like Wolfenstein putting a baby bonnet and pacifier on the easy mode character. That's actively shitty.
I remember since middle school pissing fellow dudes off when they teased me about playing on easy with some version of the retort, "I don't have anything to prove to you or myself, especially not in a game where I'm trying to have fun." and they'd more or less tumble into a version of "but you have to fight and be strong and . . . and . . . man things!" as a response.
My game, my fun, fuck anyone else. I've always been admittedly, way to good at that. Even to my detriment.
Nothing wrong with a difficulty for people who are just wanting to experience the story of a game. Personally I always go after the all the trophies in a game and very few developers do not tie at least one trophy to the highest difficulty. God of War was a notable exception recently, although I did still play on the hardest difficulty for every trophy but 3.
Gamertag: KL Retribution
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I am playing Last of Us 2 on Medium. I am regretting this because the game is a bit too easy - as I can solve any encounter with explosives/molotovs with ease - but it’s nice playing for two hours knowing I will make substantial progress every time.
Honestly, people should get over being elitist about difficulty. Lots of people play games and difficulty names that mock people playing easy, also mock those with disabilities who literally can’t play anything harder than that.
But Very Hard and above modes tend to delve into more 'tedious, annoying, and non-fun' to me. So I get it.
This especially is true for some RPGs like many Atlus games where the modes above Hard are just +Grinding/Tedium rather than challenge. Or things like the harder Fire Emblem difficulties that jump from Hard to blatantly cheating and unfair.
I like it when harder difficulties teach you to play with more complex strategies and systems that you just ignore on normal mode. I don't like it when large parts of the toolkit become completely worthless on the harder difficulties, or when cheesing the game super hard is the best way to proceed on harder modes. It's definitely a fine line to walk.
It's also sometimes a mixed bag. The combat on Hard in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne was the best and really forced you to fully learn the battle system. Not only do you take more damage, but enemy AI skyrockets and they aggressively go for your weaknesses once they hit them once and know them.
But it also increases the money cost of everything x3 which adds in a shitload of extra grinding.
Count me in as another person who plays on easy. I'm in it for the story and generally in a story the protagonist doesn't die repeatedly at the same point in some kind of Indiana Jones meets Groundhog Day loop. Uncharted's easy mode is just enough to be fun and not boring.
I generally do normal, then switch to easy for a new game+, for that really overpowered feeling.
Especially for a RPG where you’re basically a living god second time around.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I like it when harder difficulties teach you to play with more complex strategies and systems that you just ignore on normal mode. I don't like it when large parts of the toolkit become completely worthless on the harder difficulties, or when cheesing the game super hard is the best way to proceed on harder modes. It's definitely a fine line to walk.
I am curious how this will work out in Last of Us 2. The game works really well when you have a tool kit that lets you approach the situation dynamically or with good planning. Harder difficulties that make resources more rare might heavily affect this and actually have a negative effect on how interesting/dynamic the combat is.
Yeah I really need to shut that part of my brain off. Whenever I select anything other than Easy I can hear my 15 year old friends from back when I was in high school calling me a little bitch for putting it on the easy mode.
I played Wolfenstein The New Colossus on Easy based on a recommendation and it was perfect. I just ran around thoughtlessly killing Nazis with a fire ax. It was awesome. It sounds like, in many ways, the game was WORSE on harder difficulties because the mechanics just weren't that tight. On the other hand, I played Jedi Fallen Order on the second hardest difficulty and I loved the challenge. When I fucked up, 99 times out of 100 it was my fault, so I had to learn the execution.
"Difficulty" is a fucking meaningless metric because it's going to mean completely different things from game to game, both within and outside of genres. Play the game so you have the most fun. That's it. Don't listen to some stupid voice in your head telling you that you're doing it wrong. You can't do it wrong!
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I think there was a big thing about "difficulty" that started coming up when Dark Souls somehow went from indie niche RPG by a small Japanese studio to what it is now. I thought internet arguments about difficulty were largely semantics until I saw the blood letting about if Dark Souls should have an easy or more accessible difficulty level.
KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Yeah, those fights get very nasty, especially from the side that insists that the games are meant to be hard, without giving any thought to anyone with a disability that might enjoy the game if only they could X. And while yes, a person should totally be able to make the game they want, it's not unusual for even game designers with blind spots to be more informed and change the tack of their game. It's all part of that "know better, do better" thing.
This is, of course, not in any way claiming that harder difficulties are bad. I just know they aren't for me, and I get why others don't like them either. As but one example, several of the last posts have talked about how harder difficulties in games, when done well, can demand you learn and use their systems better. There are those players that don't want to invest themselves in the systems, just the story, and the systems are just the way to get there (or that just want the surface level strategy that easier difficulties can commonly deliver).
As an example, my wife played BioShock on easy because while she generally hates first person anything (motion sickness), she also really wanted to dig into the story of the game, and the mind-fuckyness of it all. That's what she liked, and combat was really just a way to get to the endpoint. I think that's a good thing.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I understand the argument about authors intent and such, considering that those games are balanced around that being the only difficulty as well. I just don't know how much I agree with this idea that it shouldn't have any options whatsover and require - for some players - just sheer brute force to get past certain sections.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
I think it’s fine to make a game that you have to meet on its own terms, e.g., Dark Souls asks you to execute on its systems in order to succeed, but also like... it has multiplayer and adding a second person to a boss makes things sooo much easier. The systems are what they are, but there are still ways to mitigate difficulty. It’s just not in a menu on the title screen.
GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
But I’m of two minds about the whole thing. I LOVE Bloodborne, it is one of my favorite games, and I can see where folks are coming from about putting difficulty sliders into it, because the game is what it is.
On the other hand, I empathize with wanting to be able to engage with a game but then can’t because of something about the way it’s made. And like I said, I’ve played games on “easier” difficulties that I think are better games BECAUSE of that option.
I generally play games on normal because I figure that's the intended experience. But I also plat every game I play and that frequently requires playing through on higher difficulties as well. And it's become apparent as I do so that most devs don't really put much effort into making their games work well on them.
Surprisingly (given how much care they put into everything else), I've found Naughty Dog to be one of the first for this. When playing on Crushing difficulty, there are a number of places in the Uncharted games where whether you survive or not is entirely RNG rather than dependent on any player skill. Checkpoints where you will die before you can even move and just have to hope that the enemies miss next time.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I understand the argument about authors intent and such, considering that those games are balanced around that being the only difficulty as well. I just don't know how much I agree with this idea that it shouldn't have any options whatsover and require - for some players - just sheer brute force to get past certain sections.
I think it’s fine to make a game that you have to meet on its own terms, e.g., Dark Souls asks you to execute on its systems in order to succeed, but also like... it has multiplayer and adding a second person to a boss makes things sooo much easier. The systems are what they are, but there are still ways to mitigate difficulty. It’s just not in a menu on the title screen.
Yeah, I think my one issue with any of it is that even if the system has ways to make it easier (secondary players, summonable NPCs, strong spells, just flat out grinding, etc) that largely puts an undue burden on disabled folks to "come to the level of the game" as it were, and that's largely what society as a whole does: insist that they do the work of coming to the table. And while I fully get wanting a game to be a certain way (and apparently the Dark Souls director had mentioned that he didn't intend for difficulty so much as that's what was born from their efforts), I also think it's on developers to remember than even on "normal" as a game, not every player is coming in at the same physical capability. Which then can turn normal into hard, hard into impossible, etc.
It's really the only thing I think the Souls-like could use, but I think I'd want it to be a system itself, just . . . worked in to the game. Like those games that would ask if you wanted to turn down the difficulty, but instead of asking, just do it, until you start getting better and then bump it up half a step. It'd take a lot more doing, but I like to picture a game that almost teases you along with things being a bit easier and then, visual cue, something changes, a message appears, etc and it's just a bit less easy. Until you get to that sweet spot where the game is just annoying enough to keep playing. Like, colorblind options and stuff should be in a menu, yes, but difficulty in such games could really improve by being more malleable.
Edit: the easiest way I can explain in simple terms what I mean is if Skyrim's difficulty slider wasn't seen, but if you survived X amount of encounters with no health lost, no items used, no real effort given, it'd bump up the difficulty a slot just, inside the game, automatically. And then if you start really taking some damage/die/reload saves from dying, the game logs it and turns the game difficulty down, again automatically.
Kalnaur on
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
The accessibility options in the Last of Us 2 are staggering. There is a mode that makes all terrain blue, character models red and interactable options yellow. If you're worried about missing things or finding collectibles, it's an utter godsend for being able to actually find things. Likewise their difficulty sliders are really granular and well thought out. It's remarkable how far the game goes to aid play experiences.
I understand the argument about authors intent and such, considering that those games are balanced around that being the only difficulty as well. I just don't know how much I agree with this idea that it shouldn't have any options whatsover and require - for some players - just sheer brute force to get past certain sections.
I think it’s fine to make a game that you have to meet on its own terms, e.g., Dark Souls asks you to execute on its systems in order to succeed, but also like... it has multiplayer and adding a second person to a boss makes things sooo much easier. The systems are what they are, but there are still ways to mitigate difficulty. It’s just not in a menu on the title screen.
Yeah, I think my one issue with any of it is that even if the system has ways to make it easier (secondary players, summonable NPCs, strong spells, just flat out grinding, etc) that largely puts an undue burden on disabled folks to "come to the level of the game" as it were, and that's largely what society as a whole does: insist that they do the work of coming to the table. And while I fully get wanting a game to be a certain way (and apparently the Dark Souls director had mentioned that he didn't intend for difficulty so much as that's what was born from their efforts), I also think it's on developers to remember than even on "normal" as a game, not every player is coming in at the same physical capability. Which then can turn normal into hard, hard into impossible, etc.
It's really the only thing I think the Souls-like could use, but I think I'd want it to be a system itself, just . . . worked in to the game. Like those games that would ask if you wanted to turn down the difficulty, but instead of asking, just do it, until you start getting better and then bump it up half a step. It'd take a lot more doing, but I like to picture a game that almost teases you along with things being a bit easier and then, visual cue, something changes, a message appears, etc and it's just a bit less easy. Until you get to that sweet spot where the game is just annoying enough to keep playing. Like, colorblind options and stuff should be in a menu, yes, but difficulty in such games could really improve by being more malleable.
Edit: the easiest way I can explain in simple terms what I mean is if Skyrim's difficulty slider wasn't seen, but if you survived X amount of encounters with no health lost, no items used, no real effort given, it'd bump up the difficulty a slot just, inside the game, automatically. And then if you start really taking some damage/die/reload saves from dying, the game logs it and turns the game difficulty down, again automatically.
Yeah, what bugs me about Dark Souls aids is that they completely defeat the arguments of people saying that the game is an experience that was meant to be a certain difficulty and blah blah. How is the difficulty of playing a caster who summons for every single boss similar to a naked dagger fighter player? If such a WILD difference in the experience is intended... why not the ring of Please God, Just Let Off My Throat For a While that buffs you or debuffs the enemies? People think it's more appropriate for online strangers to fight the game in your place than for the game to become explicitly easier from a menu choice. How does that make ANY SENSE???
"You see, Dark Souls is a fallen world and the player is a lone, weak force meant to stand little chance and be mercilessly cut down by hoards of relentless foes. However, those foes are also stupid and it's totally within the lore of the world to stand out of their attack triggers and pelt them with fireballs. And also, there is a huge legion of helpful phantoms, so really, the player didn't need to show up or do anything in particular to light the fires or put them out or whatever."
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
They even tried to troll that in later games, with people from special PVP factions that can turn on you and kill you if they wanted/or you were a faction opposed to them.
In fairness difficulty levels can be tricky in multiplayer environments, they tend to fragment the playerbase. Having difficulty adjustments be outside the menu and even multiplayer-sensitive is mostly preferable to dividing players up into different solo difficulties.
And then there's something like Sekiro with an actual, fairly inflexible difficulty.
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
@Kalnaur I admit I really don’t know much about the issues with gaming for the disabled, but I definitely want games to be as accessible as possible. A game like Bloodborne just oozes atmosphere and style and I would want everyone to experience that, just so I could gush about it with them!
I don’t really have answers but I’m generally of the opinion that the more people who are able to play a game, the better. And I think your skyrim example is an interesting one in that it’s something that I think could work really well in a souls style game. And under-the-hood assessment of relative difficulty is a super cool feature.
@Kalnaur I admit I really don’t know much about the issues with gaming for the disabled, but I definitely want games to be as accessible as possible. A game like Bloodborne just oozes atmosphere and style and I would want everyone to experience that, just so I could gush about it with them!
I don’t really have answers but I’m generally of the opinion that the more people who are able to play a game, the better. And I think your skyrim example is an interesting one in that it’s something that I think could work really well in a souls style game. And under-the-hood assessment of relative difficulty is a super cool feature.
I think that, paired with an intro section like most Soulsborne games have, but one where you'd be asked sideways leaning questions like those that feature at the beginning of many Kingdom Hearts games. It'd just fix the algorithm for a playthrough at a certain level, by which I mean that certain answers to certain questions would relax the algorithm (allowing for more mistakes, being more gentle with the difficulty increase) while others would make for sharp and swift changes and punishment. It could even be something more simple, like how hard you struggled with the enemies in the opening area sets the speed of difficulty increase/decrease for the entire game, no questions needed. Just a simple calibration using how well you can play that intro area. The difficulty would, in this example, still increase and decrease over time, your ability to deal with the first area would simple determine by what amount difficulty increases or decreases at a jump.
Which would, in effect, allow for a Souls-like that started out as hard as you can handle, more or less. Like, even more challenging for those that want their metaphorical balls busted. And if they make the interactions and impact on settings opaque enough, it would be hard to game the system into letting you by easy.
But this is all theory-crafting and past here, probably best left for the Souls thread.
And now for something completely different, I really need to get back to my unfinished games on my PS4. FFVII Remake, Bloodborne, FFXV, and . . . crap there was one other one that I can't remember. It's just hard to play games on it with a 3 year old around. At least the kinds of games I like to play on the PS4, that is.
I make art things! deviantART:Kalnaur ::: Origin: Kalnaur ::: UPlay: Kalnaur
As long as we're on the topic: one of the main reasons I avoid games that require you to "git gud" is because I have 3 kids and get maybe 1 to 2 hours of gaming (if I sacrifice cleaning up the house and some sleep) a day Monday through Friday. Some days it's much less so there might be a good week gap between me playing the game. So if it takes time to get better to even progress in the story I just avoid them all together. I just don't have that kind of time anymore.
It's why I simply avoid all battlegrounds games and FPS shooters. I like coop and story driven games that let me escape.
I do wish I could get further in Bloodborne. I love the Gothic style a whole lot.
I don't have kids, but I understand where you're coming from. For me, my 'git gud' grind days are over, I have actual shit to do and I want to enjoy games, not have them part of the grind. /get off my lawn
I generally play games on normal because I figure that's the intended experience. But I also plat every game I play and that frequently requires playing through on higher difficulties as well. And it's become apparent as I do so that most devs don't really put much effort into making their games work well on them.
Surprisingly (given how much care they put into everything else), I've found Naughty Dog to be one of the first for this. When playing on Crushing difficulty, there are a number of places in the Uncharted games where whether you survive or not is entirely RNG rather than dependent on any player skill. Checkpoints where you will die before you can even move and just have to hope that the enemies miss next time.
Bungie: “We turn it up to Heroic. That’s one more.”
Interviewer: “Why don’t you take Heroic, and call that Normal? And then that’s the new recommended setting.”
*pause*
Bungie: “But this goes up to Heroic.”
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht
I generally play games on normal because I figure that's the intended experience. But I also plat every game I play and that frequently requires playing through on higher difficulties as well. And it's become apparent as I do so that most devs don't really put much effort into making their games work well on them.
Surprisingly (given how much care they put into everything else), I've found Naughty Dog to be one of the first for this. When playing on Crushing difficulty, there are a number of places in the Uncharted games where whether you survive or not is entirely RNG rather than dependent on any player skill. Checkpoints where you will die before you can even move and just have to hope that the enemies miss next time.
Bungie: “We turn it up to Heroic. That’s one more.”
Interviewer: “Why don’t you take Heroic, and call that Normal? And then that’s the new recommended setting.”
*pause*
Bungie: “But this goes up to Heroic.”
Bungie: "It’s such a fine line between Heroic, and uh…"
Interviewer: "Legendary."
Bungie: "Yeah, and Legendary."
Is this where I say that the Uncharted games do absolutely nothing for me? I buy them and the whole time I struggle to get any sort of enjoyment out of it.
Which is a damn shame because I see the appeal. But I guess I just don't vibe with it. Ah well.
My guess is that if I would just suck it up and play on the easiest difficulty I'd enjoy it more. And the combat was my least favorite part of it.
I've mentioned it before, but I've always found them to be "very pretty versions of other games except they're not as good." Since the start on PS3--especially the original, where you can tell Uncharted is one of a dozen games trying to be Gears of War (or at least trying to capture that extremely tight-fitting cover-to-cover third person shooter) and awkwardly failing, or trying to be Tomb Raider and not being as good.
They turned into beautiful games, especially once they moved to PS4. Extremely high graphical polish for open-world exploration titles. But the actual gameplay is all done better in other games, and if you're not deeply invested in the lore, everyone kind of feels like generic versions of other protagonists.
It's kind of ironic that the Tomb Raider reboot was widely described as "an Uncharted clone."
As long as we're on the topic: one of the main reasons I avoid games that require you to "git gud" is because I have 3 kids and get maybe 1 to 2 hours of gaming (if I sacrifice cleaning up the house and some sleep) a day Monday through Friday. Some days it's much less so there might be a good week gap between me playing the game. So if it takes time to get better to even progress in the story I just avoid them all together. I just don't have that kind of time anymore.
It's why I simply avoid all battlegrounds games and FPS shooters. I like coop and story driven games that let me escape.
I do wish I could get further in Bloodborne. I love the Gothic style a whole lot.
As someone who is a huge soulsborne fan, I get where you are coming from. I think it From was a bigger company, with bigger budgets, they could probably work out a system for their games to have an actual explore mode where you just take in the scenery and atmosphere. Maybe just disable enemy AI or something. I will say, though, that if you take the difficulty out of the games, they do not really offer much else then the scenery and atmosphere. It's a shame that Bloodborne will probably never make it to PC because I am pretty sure you can just give yourself infinite health on the other games so you can just roll on through them.
Yeah, I like hacky slashy games and dig the atmosphere of souls games, but I just don't have time to die to a boss a dozen times anymore.
Hollow Knight was a heartbreaker for me. I wanted to love it and did for a while, but the unnecessary bullshit in the game (save points waaaaay too far from difficult bosses, the ease of dying before getting to your corpse and losing all your money, the asinine map system) shooed me away.
If Bloodborne had an easy mode, I would buy it in a heartbeat. The lore and setting and atmosphere seem fantastic.
It does not. So I’ll continue to pass on it.
The thing is that if I like a game, I’ll often replay it on high settings. I beat Alien: Isolations nightmare mode. I’ve beaten Horizon: Zero Dawn’s highest setting, including the DLC, without doing NG+. If there was an easy mode for Bloodborne and I liked the game, I’d probably put in the work to get good and beat the intended difficulty setting.
But From Software is pretty adamant about not wanting my money.
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
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Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
Bloodborne has online coop which allowed me to beat a lot of bosses I wouldn’t have otherwise. Sekiro on the other hand has no coop so I’ve avoided it. Online coop really helps me get through souls games, though I solo’d Dark Souls 2 as they let you grind out areas so enemies eventually disappear unless you use an item to reset them. One of the reasons DS2 is my fav souls game, unfortunately they haven’t used that mechanic in any souls games since
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I think the thing I like seeing most in games is a move to rename "easy" to something like story mode, or to make clear that it's specifically for people to focus on the story, etc. The steps I hate, and I don't care if they're send-ups to previous games in the series, are things like Wolfenstein putting a baby bonnet and pacifier on the easy mode character. That's actively shitty.
I remember since middle school pissing fellow dudes off when they teased me about playing on easy with some version of the retort, "I don't have anything to prove to you or myself, especially not in a game where I'm trying to have fun." and they'd more or less tumble into a version of "but you have to fight and be strong and . . . and . . . man things!" as a response.
My game, my fun, fuck anyone else. I've always been admittedly, way to good at that. Even to my detriment.
Nothing wrong with a difficulty for people who are just wanting to experience the story of a game. Personally I always go after the all the trophies in a game and very few developers do not tie at least one trophy to the highest difficulty. God of War was a notable exception recently, although I did still play on the hardest difficulty for every trophy but 3.
PSN:Furlion
Honestly, people should get over being elitist about difficulty. Lots of people play games and difficulty names that mock people playing easy, also mock those with disabilities who literally can’t play anything harder than that.
But Very Hard and above modes tend to delve into more 'tedious, annoying, and non-fun' to me. So I get it.
This especially is true for some RPGs like many Atlus games where the modes above Hard are just +Grinding/Tedium rather than challenge. Or things like the harder Fire Emblem difficulties that jump from Hard to blatantly cheating and unfair.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
But it also increases the money cost of everything x3 which adds in a shitload of extra grinding.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
I generally do normal, then switch to easy for a new game+, for that really overpowered feeling.
Especially for a RPG where you’re basically a living god second time around.
I am curious how this will work out in Last of Us 2. The game works really well when you have a tool kit that lets you approach the situation dynamically or with good planning. Harder difficulties that make resources more rare might heavily affect this and actually have a negative effect on how interesting/dynamic the combat is.
I played Wolfenstein The New Colossus on Easy based on a recommendation and it was perfect. I just ran around thoughtlessly killing Nazis with a fire ax. It was awesome. It sounds like, in many ways, the game was WORSE on harder difficulties because the mechanics just weren't that tight. On the other hand, I played Jedi Fallen Order on the second hardest difficulty and I loved the challenge. When I fucked up, 99 times out of 100 it was my fault, so I had to learn the execution.
"Difficulty" is a fucking meaningless metric because it's going to mean completely different things from game to game, both within and outside of genres. Play the game so you have the most fun. That's it. Don't listen to some stupid voice in your head telling you that you're doing it wrong. You can't do it wrong!
This is, of course, not in any way claiming that harder difficulties are bad. I just know they aren't for me, and I get why others don't like them either. As but one example, several of the last posts have talked about how harder difficulties in games, when done well, can demand you learn and use their systems better. There are those players that don't want to invest themselves in the systems, just the story, and the systems are just the way to get there (or that just want the surface level strategy that easier difficulties can commonly deliver).
As an example, my wife played BioShock on easy because while she generally hates first person anything (motion sickness), she also really wanted to dig into the story of the game, and the mind-fuckyness of it all. That's what she liked, and combat was really just a way to get to the endpoint. I think that's a good thing.
On the other hand, I empathize with wanting to be able to engage with a game but then can’t because of something about the way it’s made. And like I said, I’ve played games on “easier” difficulties that I think are better games BECAUSE of that option.
Did you try Grounded?
Surprisingly (given how much care they put into everything else), I've found Naughty Dog to be one of the first for this. When playing on Crushing difficulty, there are a number of places in the Uncharted games where whether you survive or not is entirely RNG rather than dependent on any player skill. Checkpoints where you will die before you can even move and just have to hope that the enemies miss next time.
No.
I don’t hate myself that much.
Yeah, I think my one issue with any of it is that even if the system has ways to make it easier (secondary players, summonable NPCs, strong spells, just flat out grinding, etc) that largely puts an undue burden on disabled folks to "come to the level of the game" as it were, and that's largely what society as a whole does: insist that they do the work of coming to the table. And while I fully get wanting a game to be a certain way (and apparently the Dark Souls director had mentioned that he didn't intend for difficulty so much as that's what was born from their efforts), I also think it's on developers to remember than even on "normal" as a game, not every player is coming in at the same physical capability. Which then can turn normal into hard, hard into impossible, etc.
It's really the only thing I think the Souls-like could use, but I think I'd want it to be a system itself, just . . . worked in to the game. Like those games that would ask if you wanted to turn down the difficulty, but instead of asking, just do it, until you start getting better and then bump it up half a step. It'd take a lot more doing, but I like to picture a game that almost teases you along with things being a bit easier and then, visual cue, something changes, a message appears, etc and it's just a bit less easy. Until you get to that sweet spot where the game is just annoying enough to keep playing. Like, colorblind options and stuff should be in a menu, yes, but difficulty in such games could really improve by being more malleable.
Edit: the easiest way I can explain in simple terms what I mean is if Skyrim's difficulty slider wasn't seen, but if you survived X amount of encounters with no health lost, no items used, no real effort given, it'd bump up the difficulty a slot just, inside the game, automatically. And then if you start really taking some damage/die/reload saves from dying, the game logs it and turns the game difficulty down, again automatically.
There are even color blind options!
Yeah, what bugs me about Dark Souls aids is that they completely defeat the arguments of people saying that the game is an experience that was meant to be a certain difficulty and blah blah. How is the difficulty of playing a caster who summons for every single boss similar to a naked dagger fighter player? If such a WILD difference in the experience is intended... why not the ring of Please God, Just Let Off My Throat For a While that buffs you or debuffs the enemies? People think it's more appropriate for online strangers to fight the game in your place than for the game to become explicitly easier from a menu choice. How does that make ANY SENSE???
"You see, Dark Souls is a fallen world and the player is a lone, weak force meant to stand little chance and be mercilessly cut down by hoards of relentless foes. However, those foes are also stupid and it's totally within the lore of the world to stand out of their attack triggers and pelt them with fireballs. And also, there is a huge legion of helpful phantoms, so really, the player didn't need to show up or do anything in particular to light the fires or put them out or whatever."
And then there's something like Sekiro with an actual, fairly inflexible difficulty.
I don’t really have answers but I’m generally of the opinion that the more people who are able to play a game, the better. And I think your skyrim example is an interesting one in that it’s something that I think could work really well in a souls style game. And under-the-hood assessment of relative difficulty is a super cool feature.
I think that, paired with an intro section like most Soulsborne games have, but one where you'd be asked sideways leaning questions like those that feature at the beginning of many Kingdom Hearts games. It'd just fix the algorithm for a playthrough at a certain level, by which I mean that certain answers to certain questions would relax the algorithm (allowing for more mistakes, being more gentle with the difficulty increase) while others would make for sharp and swift changes and punishment. It could even be something more simple, like how hard you struggled with the enemies in the opening area sets the speed of difficulty increase/decrease for the entire game, no questions needed. Just a simple calibration using how well you can play that intro area. The difficulty would, in this example, still increase and decrease over time, your ability to deal with the first area would simple determine by what amount difficulty increases or decreases at a jump.
Which would, in effect, allow for a Souls-like that started out as hard as you can handle, more or less. Like, even more challenging for those that want their metaphorical balls busted. And if they make the interactions and impact on settings opaque enough, it would be hard to game the system into letting you by easy.
But this is all theory-crafting and past here, probably best left for the Souls thread.
And now for something completely different, I really need to get back to my unfinished games on my PS4. FFVII Remake, Bloodborne, FFXV, and . . . crap there was one other one that I can't remember. It's just hard to play games on it with a 3 year old around. At least the kinds of games I like to play on the PS4, that is.
It's why I simply avoid all battlegrounds games and FPS shooters. I like coop and story driven games that let me escape.
I do wish I could get further in Bloodborne. I love the Gothic style a whole lot.
Bungie: “We turn it up to Heroic. That’s one more.”
Interviewer: “Why don’t you take Heroic, and call that Normal? And then that’s the new recommended setting.”
*pause*
Bungie: “But this goes up to Heroic.”
Bungie: "It’s such a fine line between Heroic, and uh…"
Interviewer: "Legendary."
Bungie: "Yeah, and Legendary."
Steam | XBL
I've mentioned it before, but I've always found them to be "very pretty versions of other games except they're not as good." Since the start on PS3--especially the original, where you can tell Uncharted is one of a dozen games trying to be Gears of War (or at least trying to capture that extremely tight-fitting cover-to-cover third person shooter) and awkwardly failing, or trying to be Tomb Raider and not being as good.
They turned into beautiful games, especially once they moved to PS4. Extremely high graphical polish for open-world exploration titles. But the actual gameplay is all done better in other games, and if you're not deeply invested in the lore, everyone kind of feels like generic versions of other protagonists.
It's kind of ironic that the Tomb Raider reboot was widely described as "an Uncharted clone."
As someone who is a huge soulsborne fan, I get where you are coming from. I think it From was a bigger company, with bigger budgets, they could probably work out a system for their games to have an actual explore mode where you just take in the scenery and atmosphere. Maybe just disable enemy AI or something. I will say, though, that if you take the difficulty out of the games, they do not really offer much else then the scenery and atmosphere. It's a shame that Bloodborne will probably never make it to PC because I am pretty sure you can just give yourself infinite health on the other games so you can just roll on through them.
PSN:Furlion
Hollow Knight was a heartbreaker for me. I wanted to love it and did for a while, but the unnecessary bullshit in the game (save points waaaaay too far from difficult bosses, the ease of dying before getting to your corpse and losing all your money, the asinine map system) shooed me away.
If Bloodborne had an easy mode, I would buy it in a heartbeat. The lore and setting and atmosphere seem fantastic.
It does not. So I’ll continue to pass on it.
The thing is that if I like a game, I’ll often replay it on high settings. I beat Alien: Isolations nightmare mode. I’ve beaten Horizon: Zero Dawn’s highest setting, including the DLC, without doing NG+. If there was an easy mode for Bloodborne and I liked the game, I’d probably put in the work to get good and beat the intended difficulty setting.
But From Software is pretty adamant about not wanting my money.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/11/16/mitigated
Don't worry, we're coming back to Crash Bandicoot.
It isn't out, so no one can know that.