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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, so Dark Souls is trail and error?
That doesn’t sound fun at all.
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.