this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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Ok, hang on. I replied to this initially while annoyed, and blew past some of the key points. But I do actually want to talk about the whole "participating in the zeitgeist" thing.
A large part of the reasons Dark Souls doesn't have difficulties is to create that social element. Gonna stick with Elden Ring for my examples here, because I missed most of the online discussion around Sekiro. But from what I saw, the majority of the discussion online was about how hard certain bosses were, shared experiences like getting your ass kicked by Tree Sentinel, or Margit "putting your foolish ambitions to rest". If Elden Ring really did have an easy mode, that was easy enough for someone to beat the game without "learning the attack patterns of the monsters", and to keep up with the diehard playerbase while working 70+ hour work weeks, would they really have felt included in those conversations? Would they have been able to share the excitement at beating a boss that they struggled with for hours, without actually struggling for that time? There's an intentional design decision here. To quote Miyazaki from when Sekiro released:
If all you really wanted was to just... experience the art and story, and see the cool enemy designs, you could always watch a youtube let's play or something as well. The ultimate easy mode, with a defined length of how long it will take. But if you wanted to commiserate about tough challenges and the experience you went through, then you kinda need to actually have that experience.
I'll also add, that stuff doesn't go away. I was excited by the hype around Elden Ring too. It's what pushed me to start Dark Souls 1, and then play 2, 3, Sekiro, and finally Elden Ring. I missed the initial hype around all of those games, but that cultural stuff is still there. I built up a youtube playlist while playing each game and once I finished them I would catch up on Illusory Wall, Zullie the Witch, Vaati, and challenge runs and Lockout Bingos from the likes of Lil' Aggy or Ymfah. My friends were also excited to see me play the games. I may not have experienced the Anor Londo archers until years after they did, but it was still fun to talk to them about it, and they were excited to reminisce and replay the game alongside me.
I eventually did get to participate in the fun that was Shadow of the Erdtree releasing soon after I beat Elden Ring. And that was great, and special. It was fun to see that final boss get nerfed soon after I beat it, for example. I do feel sorry that you missed the moment of Sekiro releasing. But ultimately I don't think your anecdotal experience is more important than say, my friend who always picked easy and didn't realize how much he loved a tough challenge. Or any of the "Dark Souls saved my life" people, who might've picked easy if it was offered and not had that experience. Or the designers at From Software who worked hard to create something special and have the right to not offer a way to half-ass it and "fragment the user base".
Skill issue on FromSoft's part, and I say that as someone who has been a fan of their games longer than most people in this thread - more than a decade before even Demon's Souls. Their original talent was always in detailed, immersive world design. Their gameplay was unpolished and experimental, but that's something I liked about them. They got a smash hit with Demon's and Dark Souls and made a hard pivot towards iterating on that formula. They still embrace their roots as a studio focused on detailed world building, but they're trying to move more towards action and encounter design to cater to Souls fans. Where once they were highly experimental, now they seem afraid to try anything different.
A better studio could find a way for players to share that struggle and triumph while still allowing players of different skill levels to enjoy everything the game has to offer. That studio would be Supergiant with Hades' God Mode option, which slowly gives more damage resistance each time you die so the player still struggles and gets better until the handicap and their improving skill meet in the middle. In the context of Souls, this could be separate for each boss. Or another entirely different approach could be taken. The point is merely that there are ways for players of different skill levels to still share in the same struggles, FromSoft is just unwilling or incapable of finding them.
So as a longtime FromSoft fan, I think they're the ones who need to git gud.
Fair point! I actually love this suggestion, rethinking more ways to make the game easier without breaking the core experience.
I don't think From Soft is totally languishing in this department, the games include an increasing amount of ways to make the game easier, such as Elden Ring introducing summons, an open world you can tackle in any order (although this falls off post-Morgott, as does the game overall imo).
But you're right, I'd love to see them potentially dabble with things like dynamic difficulty to create something that simultaneously better challenges experienced veterans and eases the ride for newer players. Or at least something to keep bosses you missed in the open world format somewhat interesting when you find them later. I don't think they're done iterating here, and I expect them to continue to improve at accommodating more players, without violating their other design goals.
I also agree there's some worrying trends in the design, as From Soft struggles to find ways to challenge their most diehard fans. Malenia's waterfowl dance, for example, which requires odd specific movement to dodge that's impractical to learn organically. Or her moves where she simply cannot be staggered, breaking expectations in a confusing way. In general as well, the games have trended towards being faster and requiring more "reactionary" play, and I do miss the more methodical combat of DS1, when the game was much less twitchy and more about carefully planning your moves.
I'm not sure I agree that From Soft has stopped being experimental though, Sekiro was a complete departure right before Elden Ring, as was returning to Armored Core for the first time in a decade right after. Elden Ring also dabbles in an interesting blend of mechanics. Transitioning to an Open World is a massive and obvious one, but I'm also happy to see powerstancing back, interesting new weapon arts, the physick flask is a great new system, horseback combat on Torrent, and stuff like charged attacks and posture similar to Sekiro. Not perfect, by any means, I actually find the balancing of this wealth of mechanics and build options to be pretty shaky, but it's far from a boring +1 iteration that doesn't try anything.
I see why you'd say they're still experimenting - and they are within the confines of the souls formula. They definitely aren't making carbon copies of past games. But, compared to the crazy variety and wild mechanics in their back catalog, the souls formula is pretty narrow. They've got a card battler, an adventure game series, a co-op puzzle platformer, and more in their portfolio. Demon's Souls itself was a huge experiment: souls, messages, and invasions into a mostly single player experience were completely novel and even weird. Let's not forget about world tendency, (even if we want to).
FromSoft was always like that: a bunch of totally random ideas you'd never seen before with enough good, bad, and weird to go around. The changes they make today are comparatively tame. Imagine if the next soulslike game did away with the entire magic system and instead you craft your own spells from elements (Eternal Ring). Or if they did away with respawns and overhauled the entire leveling system in Bloodborne like they did when trying to give Shadow Tower its own identity separate from King's Field. They were wild, but that's what gave the world soulslikes in the first place.
I understand why they play it safe. Honestly, they don't have a choice. It comes with the budget. So I really don't begrudge them the lack of experimentation too much. But I do find it sad because it's our loss. They could do better, and who knows what other stuff they might have come up with if they were truly free to experiment the way they used to. What I really wish is for them and other devs to just make smaller games with smaller budgets. Still make the AAA games, just set aside a small amount to experiment with and try new things too. That way we keep learning, discovering, and innovating. We'd all have better games for it.
So, I was there, missing it. Though this doesn't apply to elden ring, as that came out after I changed my work life.
The conversation was not simply about the difficulty and moves. Like, most of the conversations happening around me were about the lore, what people thought was happening considering X, Y, and Z, etc. The time the difficulty, mechanics, etc., took the spotlight, was over in a week or so, and mostly relegated to people asking for help with one thing, or another, new found tactics, and speed run methods. So it, fairly rapidly, evened out. Even if you look at YT videos about those games, at least a similar amount are focused on the lore, as the mechanics, though those were initial chatter. They basically only came up in a a month or so as a broad statements of difficulty, or when some new trick was found, until it circulated. There was easily enough to have be an active part of those conversations. Much more than "Oh, you know my work schedule, don't have time".
That stuff doesn't go away online. However, in person, with the exception of hardcore fans, it definitely does fade away. Occasionally something will be brought up in a bout of nostalgia, or in comparison to something contemporary, but it does fade away.
You truly do not understand the ways in which I, and many others. enjoy things, if you think this is the same. This statement leads me to believe that many perspectives you do not hold are completely alien to you.
Your anecdotal experience is not worth more than mine either, and my suggestions do not force themselves upon you.
Let's clarify a little bit here, because I actually am curious. How much easier would you actually want the game to be? Howlongtobeat puts Sekiro's main story at 30 hours. Asking a friend who's very experienced at Sekiro and has played it dozens of times, he takes ~10 hours to beat it on a replay. So even if the game was dead easy, and had nothing to teach you, and you had no reason to explore or look around, you'd only save a maximum of 2/3rds of that time. More realistically, it would probably take 15 hours to complete if we factor in the exploration, even if the game was straightforward enough that you could kill each boss in only a few attempts.
So what would you have liked this easy mode to look like, in order to save you that time? And what value would you have gotten from that, in what amount of time, compared to setting aside 30 hours, or watching someone else play it?