this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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Do you know the amount of work it takes to balance things? Sure you can just make every weapon hit 10% harder, but is the game still fun? Playtesting is a huge part of game development, and just slapping something half-baked in will just make the game worse
No it's not. Everyone does it these days. You tune at the top level normal mode and add a attack, defense, and drop slider. Add an option for explicit directions on where to go. Done. People who want casual can tune down as needed and sweaties are just fine except for the gatekeeping.
I love from soft but they are a curmudgeon team who hasn't updated their engine to support even a consistent 60fps, just now caved to fast travel which was bitched about by the sweatiest, and still builds obtuse traps for new players to absolutely fuck themselves with no guidance. The only reason ER was as successful as it was because it softened up the series considerably.
You are kind of confusing difficulty for quality of life. Lack of quality of life / polish can also be super frustrating, but that's not because it's hard, that's because it's poorly designed and because of that, frustrating. A good difficult game will not do that.
And despite the conversation so far not being specifically about FromSoft, I do agree that their games feature many poor quality of life decisions. And yes, I've seen people try to justify those under the banner of "just get better bro". But if we're having a conversation about difficulty specifically, that's separate from quality of life.
Also, the fix you are suggesting and how easy it would be to implement is honestly, quite naive. And I highly disagree that "everyone does it these days.". If you're an indie game with a dedicated fan base that's an option. But just adding something like that when your game is being played by millions of both casual and hardcore players, that can effectively mean that giving that option will destroy the experience for a significant portion of them. Judging how difficult a game should be to be enjoyable before playing it is not easy. It's why game designers do that for you. Once the novelty of the game wears off and the game was played when it was too easy or too hard, they are just going to refund your game and rate it 1/10 because "it sucks", not being able to articulate why exactly.
Game designers should try to cater to as many playstyles and experience levels as possible. But just like point and click adventure isn't going to entice someone seeking a difficult experience, neither will a game from which it's enjoyment is derived from the higher difficulty appeal to someone looking to not sweat a little. Trying to go beyond that requires actual design changes or the game will fall flat. You're free to mod the game yourself and such to create that experience, but asking game developers to go above and beyond to make something enjoyable not within their design scope is not something they should reasonably have to do.