I had given DS1 a try on PC back when I saw the game played by PewDiePie (jesus this was ages ago) and didn't really get the game at all; keyboard controls prior to PTD edition probably didn't help either lol
My first real venture into soulslikes was Bloodborne and it went horribly to say the least. I killed the Cleric Beast and Gascoigne the first evening I tried the game and put down the game afterwards but it was just too much for me. I was scared, didn't know what I was doing, and it was just waay to hard for me.
Took me a couple of years to get back to it and give it another shot. One of my all-time favourite games today.
How about you guys?
A fair point. Difficulty settings can be done in a way that doesn't detract from the experience and even the challenge.
System Shock 1 had a multidimensional difficulty system and something like that could work for a soulslike as well. You could make timings looser, give the player more health relative to enemies, reduce or even remove the death penalty, disable invasions, or turn off some of the harder boss attacks.
Of course the game will display how you set it at the end so only those who set everything to maximum get to really brag about it. They can even claim that people who play on easy (= not everything maxed) didn't really finish the game. Meanwhile the rest of us get to experience the game at a manageable difficulty. Even those who turned it into a glorified walking simulator.
Perhaps we can gate a stupidly difficult secret boss behind the hardest settings for those who think that bragging about your settings is too abstract. They get to battle Kahooma, Maelstrom of Neverending Torment, and her single-frame windows of opportunity. It'll probably take about two months until someone beats her with a Guitar Hero controller.
More variety in play styles could also help, although they do make balancing a lot harder. You don't want to ship your will-shatteringly hard soulslike only to find out a week later that most bosses can be trivialized by creatively using the Beartrap Bow to interrupt their attack animations. (I seem to remember that Dark Souls 2 actually did ship with massively overpowered lightning magic or something.) So some care needs to be taken.
In the end I'm just happy that there are some soulslikes that are approachable for players like me. There's definitely something to the genre, even if a fair amount of that something puts most soulslikes out of reach of many players.
That sounds awesome. Modular difficulty settings that allow for tweaking individual parts of difficulty of a game are the right step forward. Shadow of the Tomb Raider implemented this really well wherein they allowed to tweak enemy aggressiveness, the amount of hints you receive, the difficulty of the puzzles etc. If you prefer a more chill puzzle-focus experience, the game allowed for it.
You could do the same in soulslikes just like you mentioned it with System Shock. Lock some achievements behind specific difficulties like Horizon, Uncharted, or God of War does it and you're golden.
Balancing is an issue for sure. But patching games is the norm nowadays anyways, so that's not much of an issue, I feel like.
Of course! Having games be approachable right out of the game is awesome, they're just few and far between. I think more could be done to accommodate every swathe of player.