Hey, look, I found one of those posts where it OK to be sexist.
Edit: Saying “Hey, look, I found one of those posts where it OK to be sexist,” in a room full of virtue signallers just to feel something.
le edit, the second: I guess based on the downvotes in the thread Lemmy.ml is refederated.
screenshot OP: “lol don’t Gamers get so heated when you talk about difficulty modes is soulslikes”
the Gamer in question: “I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO BE SEXIST FOR THIS!!!”
also i don’t think you know what virtue signaling means
…in a comment section where the OP’s gender hasn’t even been mentioned?
Or is it this old meme?
The “OP”, if you are referring to the screenshot, is presenting feminine, and talks about walking into a room full of men and doing something that they believe intentionally trolls men.
I think you missed the point. Many games have toxic communities that attack women and tell them they’re no good enough, along with much more unsavoury shit. Playing into that, you can get a very aggressive response and “feel something”. It’s less about trolling men and more the attacks many women get from elitist male gamers.
Do you think women aren’t allowed to talk about sexist gaming communities?
Technically you re right that’s sexist (if you gender swap the post that’s weird) but in reality I didn’t even noticed it and probably don’t care
remember, as a man on the internet you’re not allowed to have opinions on something, even if they’re formed by your own experiences and you clarify them as such. your opinions exist to be mocked and ridiculed for sport.
oh, but it’s also a real mystery why far right incel groups have seen a massive upsurge in membership, no way to logically connect the two.
Souls games just require patience, you can get better. It’s the stupidly complex games I have trouble with. Games like BG3 are like taking freshmen chemistry again. Too much effort trying to figure out whats going on.
This is extra funny because Elden Ring’s diverse player build options means that it has the most adjustable difficulty curve of any FromSoftware game. Holding up Elden Ring completion specifically as any kind of bar to surpass is laughably naive.
You must have misunderstood me. I’m saying Elden Ring SHOULD have an Easy Mode. Modern Souls games are designed to be accessible.
People who gatekeep FromSoftware difficulty have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the games are about
I think the point of the post is that one way or another, it’s a topic where everyone has an opinion and it can be exhausting to listen to the debate.
That’s the key. If you:
- summoned
- used spirit ashes
- used ashes of war
- used sorceries
- used incantations
- levelled up
- drank a flask
- opened the map
- used a weapon
- used a controller or a mouse/keyboard
- opened the menu
- used your hands
You didn’t beat the game.
I actually beat the game at level 1, no weapons, no items, controlling the character via brainwaves. And every time I died, I resetted the game.
Thank god I play with my butt cheeks. The different tones of my farts get interpreted as input. To attack I have to fart in G#.
I never understood the obsession with stupid difficult games at all. It’s like, let me bang my head on a coffee table for 3 hours trying to make 5 minutes of progress. No thanks
Edit: Wow, this blew up, quite a controversial take, and not a hint of irony from all the people commenting about how I don’t get it.
Edit 2: For what it’s worth, I have played Dark Souls 1 all the way through, some of Dark Souls 2, got to the end of Bloodborne, played about 3 hours of Elden Ring, and a bit of Lies of P. These games just aren’t for me. I played them bcz my friend loves them, and I was trying to make a soulslike bcz that seems to be all the rage right now.
I played it for 3 hours. Unless I’m missing something, it’s incredibly difficult.
Here’s 2 tips:
-
Level up Vigor. Health is how you make early game easier.
-
Skip bosses. There isn’t a hard linear progression path and different builds struggle with different parts of the game.
Did you spend that time trying to fight the Tree Sentinal (mounted knight boss) just in front of where you start? You don’t have to, and you shouldn’t unless you’re extremely skilled or masochistic. You can go around and find less dangerous enemies.
Depends on what you define as hard. Sometimes, simply dying a bunch doesn’t mean a game is hard, Armored Core 6 for example. Yeah you can die a bunch in Armored Core 6, but a particular level can become downright easy if you have the right build for it, especially since the game actually encourages you to change builds consistently, since after you die you are allowed to change your build for a level. Experimentation, changing tactics, etc, is fun.
Also Dwarf Fortress, dying is fun.
Also for me, “hard” games would be stuff that are boring and grindy. Because they are literally hard mentally to play and maintain focus on lol.
I’ve refused to play it cause I’m bad at video games and I don’t feel like playing something punishingly difficult cause that isn’t fun for me. This is the first time I’m hearing someone claim it’s not difficult
I mean, it’s a valid point. I won’t claim soulslikes are all easy and it’s easy to play them all the time - they definitely have a difficulty curve, and not everyone is comfortable with the kind of difficulty this genre has. But to claim they’re all so difficult as to be unplayable and it never changes is equally fallacious
I got 60 hours in, got bored when while the world design looks nice it just feels so empty to me. Like Disneyland with extreme proportions, not a real place. That killed the vibe of the story for me- which was the only reason I was even trying to play. It was difficult for me, but that’s because I don’t enjoy trying the same fight 10-20 times.
Agreed for the most part. That final DLC boss on release was pretty tough, even considering the other games. No orphan though. F that thing.
That final DLC boss on release was pretty tough
Yeah he was way overtuned. The last patch has nerfed him heavily though, and finally made the cross-slash attack dodgeable.
That was overtuned, I’ll give you that. Tho you still have to play through the other 99% of the game to get to it
On the flip side, I don’t understand why people like playing video games that just tell a story and pretty much spoon feed every victory to the player. It feels hollow and incredibly boring.
You know there’s a middle ground, right? There exist games that manage to balance difficulty in a way that gives players a consistent challenge that they’re just able to overcome. The best games have these things called “difficulty settings” that let you customize that challenge so that you can decide how hard you want it to be
It’s me, the target audience for “walking simulators.” Sometimes I just like experiencing stories that stick with me, be it as a movie, book or game. On the other hand, I can’t stand games that try to have a story but it’s just not a good story (or only good by video game standards).
On the flip side, I don’t understand why people like playing video games that just tell a story and pretty much spoon feed every victory to the player. It feels hollow and incredibly boring.
Do you feel that way about movies? Because what you’re essentially describing there is an interactive movie. Maybe they’re selling it as a game, but that’s because there’s no market for a product that calls itself an interactive movie.
I don’t expect a movie to have gameplay. I don’t expect a video game to be a movie.
If I want to watch a movie, I watch a movie. When I want to play a game, I want to actually play something. Not just sit back and watch.
This is my viewpoint as well.
From immediate memory I feel Mass Effect, and Ratchet and Clank, fit this category.
Both are still very fun despite the fact.
I will agree with that sentiment somewhat. I don’t play games on easy either, that’s boring. I don’t mind dying a few times to a boss. It’s the soul crushing difficulty of Souls games I don’t enjoy. 17 deaths in, and i still have barely cracked half health of some bosses. Not my cup of tea.
Maybe stop and think that it isn’t that difficult to everyone? I don’t want to sound elitist, but people have different level of skills at video games (or anything really).
Saying no games should be hard is like saying no books should be difficult to read. To take the book analogy further, at some point after reading a lot of books you want to read more and more complex books. To say we shouldn’t have difficult books would be a disservice to those who want them.
Both easy and hard games should exist. And everything in between. Not every game needs to be played by everyone, which I think really is the issue. People feeling left out or pressured into games that aren’t their play style.
Complaining that the game is too hard , or the opposite, that the player is too bad. Both of these are the wrong approach. The best approach is “I’m not the intended audience for this game”
But what if I want to play ER for the story that everyone keeps gushing about?
I’d recommend looking up guides to help griding up to level 150 and do a guided build. Then you can take on every boss pretty easily with 20min of practice.
See, there are many soulslike games that have attempted this; make the base game play normally, but also add invincibility options or low-difficulty modes for those who prefer it. BUT, those games don’t work, and utterly fail, because --TODO: INSERT BULLSHIT MADE UP REASON BEFORE POSTING–
Always someone in here who unironically comes in here with some weird elitist attitude assuming I haven’t played Souls games.
The draw of elder ring and soulsborne games in general is the challenge. Taking the time, failing, learning and getting good, finally beating that challenging boss, the thrill and rush of seeing the big “You Defeated” text across the screen is truly unmatched by most other games.
I also totally get not wanting to go through that. The low moments in the game can hit really hard on the motivation to play. Hitting a difficulty wall and just not having the ability to progress, dying a second time and losing a ton of souls/currency you were going to use to level up.
I’ve actually gotten to the point that I can stomach playing Soulslikes, I just don’t care to play them. My friend loves games like this, so I’ll once in a while give them a try. I played some of the classics, DS1, DS2, and Bloodborne with him. But by myself, I’m pretty meh about these games.
Totally understandable, not trying to say you need to play the genre if its not your cup ofntea, I’m just highlighting what draws people to these games.
Oh and beyond the “it’s a challenge to overcome” crowd, Soulsborne games also draw in the lore nerds too. There’s a lot of stories about the world and it’s inhabitants to discover though the flavor text on items and through the environmental storytelling.
It’s not for everyone, but there’s a subset of people who enjoy hitting their desk 10 hours straight just to beat a single boss. It’s very satisfying in the end, and often also repeating the fight perfectly just feels so damn good it’s worth the struggle.
It’s really not different than fighting hard battles with your other hobbies, learning that difficult technique or whatever
It feels like old 2-d shooters on NES. You’re just expected to memorize patterns in order to win. So you have to die a couple times to figure it out, but it’s just tedious to me. I enjoy things designed for you to figure out on the fly without requiring dying in your first try.
Sometime, I want to make a VR vs Action “Proof of Concept” game that shows how much modern game combat is memorization. The VR player can do as much extensive windup as he wants, essentially creating a new “attack animation” on each go, and the action player must desperately try to work out when to dodge for iframes or parry.
I spent like 3 days trying to beat Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls 1. One of the hardest bosses in the game from what I’m told. Just not my taste, but I played it bcz one of my friends loves it, and I was trying to make a soulslike game at one point.
I remember that fight. It was my first souls game and I went in blind and didn’t summon. Took me like a week straight of trying in-between studying for exams in the last year of uni.
I remember my partner and I had a friend over for a study party and I decided to take a quick break for a try. Somehow I beat them, and proceeded to scare the others when they heard my yelling. Great times.
100 % my favorite moment in my gaming experience.
For me it was great challenge. Sure it was not easy but it’s doable and the feeling of overcoming a fight you thought to be impossible gives a great feeling of growth and succes.
All difficult games should have an easy mode for accessibility.
Signed, a Dark Souls enjoyer.
Honestly… I disagree. What is accessibility? Every souls game has been beaten with dance pads, rock band drum kits and guitars. They’re also frequently beaten by people with serious disabilities using specialized controllers. Input speed is not an issue here, Souls has always been about carefully choosing your moves to manage the end lag and stamina cost of your actions. It’s about making the right move, not about moving quickly or pressing a lot of buttons at once.
IMHO, accessibility is frequently cited as an excuse for lower difficulties here, when in reality the difficulty isn’t a serious part of the barrier for disabled players. It could use better accessibility options, like configurable colourblind modes, audio indicators, more configurable text size, some kind of clear colour indicators on attacks for low vision, but difficulty? No.
There are also lots of good reasons not to add explicit difficulty options, which is y’know, why From Soft haven’t done it yet.
That’s a fair argument then, but… this is literally what accessibility means, whether or not you can “access” the thing.
If someone isn’t willing to invest the time or frustration into Souls, then fair enough, but that’s a matter of priorities/convenience, not a matter of accessibility.
Also, frankly, the difficulty of Souls for regular people is insanely overblown. Stuff like “Prepare to Die” is just a marketing gimmick, and the games have become substantially easier and more flexible over time. Like in Elden Ring, where you can leave bosses for later, and can frequently just bypass them entirely, experiment with an insane variety of builds, use effective ways to grind ridiculous amounts of souls, and just generally become ridiculously powerful. They’ve done essentially everything but creating an explicit “easy mode” to make the game playable for as many people as possible. If you want an easy mode, basically every souls game has builds or guides that function as that easy mode.
I see where you’re coming from, but when a game’s message is that meaning and purpose is born through hard work and struggling against impossible odds then that message is kinda undercut by a button that turns the struggle off, even if it’s there for a good reason.
I would say that the number of games where that message is core and is reliably reinforced through the gameplay is small.
Getting Over It, for example, would not need an ‘easy mode’, but the vast majority of games should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible - not by compromising the devs’ vision, but by simply allowing players the tools to handle the game at their own pace.
Granted, but I’d argue that dark souls and Elden ring, the typical subjects of this debate, are exactly that. There’s no way to add an easy mode without compromising the dev’s vision. And based on fromsoft’s reticence to add an easy mode, I think they agree.
I agree. It’s a good think FromSoft doesn’t make difficult games. They make challenging games. Their games can be trivialize by meeting it on its own terms. If you pay attention to what things are weak to, it’s often pretty easy. Also, you always have the option to level up and improve your situation. Outside of secondary content, everything is easy, but it wants to challenge you to see if you’re paying attention. The issue is this is abnormal for modern games, so it’s seen by some as being hard. Modern gamers expect to have their hands held, which I don’t think developers should always oblige if it weakens the intended experience.
For mechanically difficult games, definitely agree. Celeste is an example I usually bring up - it’s a platformer that can get pretty tough at times, especially in the after-story optional levels. But it also has one of the most flexible and useful accessibility modes I’ve ever seen. It allows you to adjust basically every aspect of the game a player might struggle with (game speed, additional jumps, timed mechanics, you name it). And the game itself is very good as well.
It’s one of the reasons I got my grandparents to transition from consoles to PC. I knew how to fiddle with PC games to make things easier on them.
Still, oftentimes I would end up sending an email of thanks to a dev of some sort, usually along the lines of “I know this isn’t your target audience, but thank you so much for putting in native controller support/UI scaling/story mode/etc in, being able to get this working for my grandparents is a big joy in their lives.”
It’s one of the reasons I got my grandparents to transition from consoles to PC.
The most unexpected sentence I expect I’ll run into today.
I recently noticed the accessibility settings in Brotato, which are a great example of this. In addition to the normal difficulty setting, in accessibility they give you access to sliders for enemy health/damage/speed and some toggles for other visual and difficulty features.
The only option I use is being able to restart a wave after a death rather than losing the whole run, and it’s kept me occasionally playing the game and enjoying what the devs have created.