I am a Souls fan and I agree with most of everything you say. I am also the type who plays games on the hard difficulty settings and installs mods to make it even harder. I like being challenged and forced to learn and adapt and find new ways to use the mechanics provided by the game in order to succeed. When I was younger and had more spare time I did SL1 challenge runs in the Souls games, in DS3 I got some 3/4 through all the bosses before I got a job and just didn't have the time and energy to perfect boss patterns anymore. It was very fun, my favorite bit was fighting the dope pope and changing gear during his phase switch. I found short rolls more favorable in his 1st phase as they landed me in perfect position for a punish after baiting his jumping lunge combo and long rolls more reliable during the 2nd to not get caught by the double.
However, my take on this particular subject is that I am a radical difficulty anarchist and people should be allowed to enjoy single player games in whatever ways they deem personally fun, even if it goes against the intended experience and core ideas of the game. If there was an option that allowed you to just iddqd your way through Fromsoft games or any other game where difficulty is part of the core game design, then I uncritically support their freedom to pick it and find fun in the game in their own way, even if it's just vibing and taking in the scenery without engaging with the intended process. The only truly wrong way to play a single player game is if you are not having fun.
I have played other games where hardship is an intended part of the experience yet they provide difficulty settings that let you fuck all that noise and just brute-force your way through the game if you so desire. They have a description that explains you will not get the intended experience the game was meant to convey, but they empower you to disregard it and engage the game on your own terms. I don't think the soulslike niche is in any way different or above such features and I fully support a god mode toggle that says "Hey, we worked hard to create a finely balanced gameplay loop that encourages learning from your mistakes and mastering the mechanics. We strongly believe you will get the most out of our game by giving it a chance and persevering, but if you truly do not care about that turn this on to enable chill vibes mode".
God mode is the only option I can easily puzzle out working for people who are unable to use existing mechanics.
Like if the character takes reduced damage but the player cannot dodge, parry, maintain stamina while blocking, or otherwise avoid or mitigate attacks, they're going to spend most of their time knocked down or staggered.
Increasing player damage would be redundant as most weapons can already be made to do enormous amounts of damage to enemies and bosses using existing systems.
You could increase xp gain I guess but you can already grind out xp relatively quickly.
The game already has auto-targetting, auto-aiming attacks, plenty of aoes of various kinds.
I don't often see people specifying what accomodations they need to play the game. Like people who ask for a generic "difficulty mode" are treating it like an fps game or arpg game where you can fiddle with player health and damage numbers and make the game relatively straightforward. Idk how you can apply that kind of trivially easy "difficulty mode", just applying some modifiers to damage and defense numbers, to all of the things going on in souls games - poise, status effects, spacing, dodging, parry, target priority, punishing attacks.
That's the part where I think a real disconnect has crept in. Like with DnD you can give the player's +10 to all roll and they mostly can't lose. With fps games you can simply make the player not die when they lose all their health, and have enemies shoot infrequently and miss a lot. With soulslikes enemies deal damage to whatever they hit during their attack animation. Their aim doesn't work the same way it does in an fps - they start the animation and if you're in the way during the animation you take damage. There isn't really rng the way you'd get it in D&D. Under the same conditions every action has the same result.
Giving players more ammo like you do in lower difficulties on fps and tps games doesn't translate as the player already roughly has control over their resources through levelling up, managing flashs, and consumables. And all your resources are restocked whenever you die or reach the next checkpoint. And then on top of that ER has several mechanics to keep you topped off while exploring, and if you run low you can almost always return to the last checkpoint to top off and start that segment over.
Giving people "more powerful" weapons "earlier" doesn't fit bc you have access to almost all weapon types at the start of the game through different classes, merchants, and drops. And there aren't really more or less powerful weapons, rather weapons determine your moveset and playstyle with most players picking something that feels good to them. As all weapons can be levelled up and most can have their special abilities changed there isn't any clear equivalent to giving someone the rocket launcher a few levels early.
When people say they want an "easy mode" I don't understand what they want. They game is "easy" if you accept that going through the same areas over and over until you win is the core gameplay loop and you make use of all the tools you have.
Like if you're R/G colorblind, or need visual cues for audio due to impaired hearing, I get that. But in the context of a souls game what do people mean by easy? It's not an fps or arpg where enemies are just a bundle of hp that you click on until they die. If you have god mode you can ignore all game mechanics and click the enemy until they die. But short of god mode no amount of fiddling with stats is going to get someone past Malekith or Radhann.
Maybe some kind of time-dilation thing where you can slow the game down dramatically?
There's a saying "a game for everyone is a game for no one" and I think at some point the souls hater crowd needs to sit down and chew on the idea that soulslike games have specific features that make them different from other genres of games and that the "story mode" or easy mode or whatever that can be relatively easily implemented in to crpgs, arpgs, fps, or tps games cannot easily be translated to souls games due to differences in core gameplay mechanics.
The best analogy I can come up with would be sim games. You can set all the conditions to optimal and make enemy jets fly in a straight, level line, you can turn off damage to your aircraft and fuel, but at some point the player does need to know how to fly the simulated aircraft. And if they cannot do that they should consider other genres than simulation.
Maybe I'm just overthinking this. I'm trying to work this out from "how do you make the game "easier" and still have a souls game. Maybe the folks who want an "easy" mode don't care and just want to toodle around in god mode in a game that would otherwise be totally unenjoyable for them.
The idea that any player should be able to play any game however they want, though; hard disagree. Single player games are not sandboxes. God mode is fine, but like, idk, i see the idea a lot that players should be able to use whatever weapons or skills or whatever they want and everything should be equally, uniformly viable for all gameplay. Lots of talk about "power fantasy" and "there's no wrong way to play". That's not a good attitude to approach games with. Do whatever you want within the limits of the engine, but if you're trying to play the game in ways it was not made to be played then you're making a decision to do so. I'm seeing this a lot with Helldivers, with people complaining that the game requires them to take a variety of weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies instead of taking whatever they think looks cool and having every weapon be equally effective in every situation. And there's also a great many players refusing to learn basic game systems and complaining that the game is too hard because they don't understand how to use those systems.
When a person selects a game to play they should be ready to invest a certain amount of time learning the game's rules and systems, and they should engage with the game in good faith. That means accepting the goals of the game - fps games are about shooting things, arpgs are about character builds and clicking monsters, puzzle games are about solving puzzles, simulation games are about simulating systems, platformers are about jumping between platforms - and engaging with the games on those terms.
Elden ring isn't a walking simulator, it's not a ttrpg adapted in to a crpg, it's not a conventional arpg, it's not a zelda game or a metroidvania. Soulslike games are their own thing. If you want to vibe and enjoy the scenary, just walk around and look at things, you're asking the devs to give you options to play an entirely different genre and style of game. All the scenery and vibes are in a soulslike game to give substance and flavor to the core of fighting from one bonfire to the next bonfire. Putting in options to completely ignore that and just wander around isn't a mode to make it easier to play dark souls, it"s a mode for not playing dark souls. "I want to be able to engage with the combat in a way that is within the limits of my abilities" is reasonable. "I want to play a walking simulator and i want options to make ds or er a walking simulator" is unreasonable. If someone feels they cannot enjoy the game they should not buy it, and instead find a game in a genre they enjoy.
I do think you are overthinking it a little and worrying too much about the Souls experience vs what some people who could potentially derive some form of enjoyment from the series that you and I might not be able to grok actually want. Dodge iframes, parry windows, poise, stamina, stagger, status effects, all of these are mathematical variables inside the game that can be easily controlled on the fly with global difficulty modifiers. More iframes to dodges makes one able to avoid attacks with less precision on their read and timing. Longer recovery times between enemy patterns can allow for greedy hits that would otherwise get punished which also means more damage on the enemy, less time it is alive and less time for you to make mistakes. Less stamina drain from attacks combined with more forgiving regen can make it easier to simply stand with your guard up and endure. Less incoming damage and more poise means that you can make more favorable trades of blows. Flasks with more shots and more healing mean that you can make more mistakes or trades between fires. All of these things add up to allow for more mistakes, less precision, less grind, less risk for more reward, less mastery. They can make the difference between dying 20+ times between bonfires and dying 3 times, which for some people takes the game from unplayable frustration to fun dark fantasy romp.
As you said yourself, you can use the systems to deal disgusting amounts of damage, or become disgustingly tanky and laugh in the face of your enemies, as a friend of mine did after getting real tired of some of Elden Ring's shit, but it requires mastery of the systems and the patience to achieve it. I know all the ways to make it easier. Some people don't want to deal with that noise. A difficulty modifier that allows them to mess with the numbers on the fly achieves the same effect in a way that is more in line with the amount of effort they are willing to invest in the game. And an "I really don't want to deal with this shit" godmode toggle covers the edge cases that maybe mathematics alone is not able to overcome. It's anathema to the game's design and intended way of engaging with it, yes, but literally just let people have fun in wrong and bad ways, in a singleplayer game it's not hurting anything other than their own experience. They may not want Souls but they might be on board with something Souls can made into via easy to implement difficulty options.
I don't think that any game should be designed from the ground-up with the notion that it can be played in any way you wish. If all weapons and skills are equally viable then there are no decisions to make and nothing ultimately matters. Power fantasies where you can do anything and be anyone and use whatever you wish are a bad design paradigm that leads to shallow and empty games. Absolutely agreed on this one. Ideally, games should have a clear idea of who they are aimed at and be built around delivering that experience rather than being an identity-less one size fits all product that is made to maximize mass appeal. Hell, most of the games I enjoy are niche products. I also completely agree with you that multiplayer games should be approached in good faith and that you should be expected to learn the basic systems of the game and hone them. If I am playing Helldivers and I am matched with someone who repeatedly shows that they are unwilling to engage with the game and respect its fundamentals, then I want to kick them from my squad. Especially if we are playing on the higher difficulties and they are complaining about game balance being supposedly bad rather than putting in the effort to learn the fundamentals and improve their gameplay before tackling harder difficulties.
I also don't think any developer should be expected to carefully tailor and curate every difficulty setting to the point that they are essentially making several different games either. That is indeed unreasonable. Keep it to easily tweaked variables and cheat code equivalents and if that isn't enough, then, yes, people should just find a different game to play. Make it clear what is the setting for the "proper" experience and be transparent about the scope and limitations of adjusting the difficulty. Ideally, every game should offer a demo that allows you to see what you are getting into and if the available scope of experience customization is enough to cover your needs.
What I believe is that how individuals choose to engage with singleplayer games is entirely up to them and I respect the fact that they might look for different types of experiences than I do. If these individuals can be provided with more choices to tweak their experience to their liking, that require low development effort and are put in after the game is designed around its intended gameplay loop and experience, then just do it and let them have their fun in peace however wrong it might be. Let people give themselves 99 flasks that heal them to full and and reduce the damage they take while increasing their own and boosting their stamina regen and even godmode themselves and play Ruined Medieval Dark Fantasy Walking Simulator instead of Elden Ring, idgaf, it's their money and their time. Hopefully they will one day think "maybe I should try the actual intended experience" and play the real Souls but if they don't want to that's also fine.
In conclusion my stance on difficulty in singleplayer games is:
make games with a clear intention and intended difficulty and experience
give the people a big difficulty tab in the settings menu where they can tweak various easy to expose parameters to their liking as well as godmode/infinite consumables/whatever buttons that do what cheat codes used to in old games. You do not have to completely redesign the game from the ground up for easy mode and no one should seriously expect this from any developer, just offer a bunch of tweaks that may be cumulatively effective in making the game more approachable to some people who are put off by the default difficulty
clearly point out what are the intended parameters and what kind of experience the game is meant to convey while making it clear that tweaking the values will detract from how the game as art is meant to be engaged with
let people tweak the values to have their incomprehensible terrible fun if they so desire, idk maybe someone really likes sightseeing around the maps in Elden Ring for whatever reason, I think I remember a twitter post by someone who just really liked the world and wanted to walk around and vibe so it might just work for some folks and if it's low hanging fruit development wise why not do it
Good post. You've given me things to think about. I hadn't considered changing i-frames, flask charges, etc as those are mostly things that you can already do vs game systems.
I am a Souls fan and I agree with most of everything you say. I am also the type who plays games on the hard difficulty settings and installs mods to make it even harder. I like being challenged and forced to learn and adapt and find new ways to use the mechanics provided by the game in order to succeed. When I was younger and had more spare time I did SL1 challenge runs in the Souls games, in DS3 I got some 3/4 through all the bosses before I got a job and just didn't have the time and energy to perfect boss patterns anymore. It was very fun, my favorite bit was fighting the dope pope and changing gear during his phase switch. I found short rolls more favorable in his 1st phase as they landed me in perfect position for a punish after baiting his jumping lunge combo and long rolls more reliable during the 2nd to not get caught by the double.
However, my take on this particular subject is that I am a radical difficulty anarchist and people should be allowed to enjoy single player games in whatever ways they deem personally fun, even if it goes against the intended experience and core ideas of the game. If there was an option that allowed you to just iddqd your way through Fromsoft games or any other game where difficulty is part of the core game design, then I uncritically support their freedom to pick it and find fun in the game in their own way, even if it's just vibing and taking in the scenery without engaging with the intended process. The only truly wrong way to play a single player game is if you are not having fun.
I have played other games where hardship is an intended part of the experience yet they provide difficulty settings that let you fuck all that noise and just brute-force your way through the game if you so desire. They have a description that explains you will not get the intended experience the game was meant to convey, but they empower you to disregard it and engage the game on your own terms. I don't think the soulslike niche is in any way different or above such features and I fully support a god mode toggle that says "Hey, we worked hard to create a finely balanced gameplay loop that encourages learning from your mistakes and mastering the mechanics. We strongly believe you will get the most out of our game by giving it a chance and persevering, but if you truly do not care about that turn this on to enable chill vibes mode".
God mode is the only option I can easily puzzle out working for people who are unable to use existing mechanics.
Like if the character takes reduced damage but the player cannot dodge, parry, maintain stamina while blocking, or otherwise avoid or mitigate attacks, they're going to spend most of their time knocked down or staggered.
Increasing player damage would be redundant as most weapons can already be made to do enormous amounts of damage to enemies and bosses using existing systems.
You could increase xp gain I guess but you can already grind out xp relatively quickly.
The game already has auto-targetting, auto-aiming attacks, plenty of aoes of various kinds.
I don't often see people specifying what accomodations they need to play the game. Like people who ask for a generic "difficulty mode" are treating it like an fps game or arpg game where you can fiddle with player health and damage numbers and make the game relatively straightforward. Idk how you can apply that kind of trivially easy "difficulty mode", just applying some modifiers to damage and defense numbers, to all of the things going on in souls games - poise, status effects, spacing, dodging, parry, target priority, punishing attacks.
That's the part where I think a real disconnect has crept in. Like with DnD you can give the player's +10 to all roll and they mostly can't lose. With fps games you can simply make the player not die when they lose all their health, and have enemies shoot infrequently and miss a lot. With soulslikes enemies deal damage to whatever they hit during their attack animation. Their aim doesn't work the same way it does in an fps - they start the animation and if you're in the way during the animation you take damage. There isn't really rng the way you'd get it in D&D. Under the same conditions every action has the same result.
Giving players more ammo like you do in lower difficulties on fps and tps games doesn't translate as the player already roughly has control over their resources through levelling up, managing flashs, and consumables. And all your resources are restocked whenever you die or reach the next checkpoint. And then on top of that ER has several mechanics to keep you topped off while exploring, and if you run low you can almost always return to the last checkpoint to top off and start that segment over.
Giving people "more powerful" weapons "earlier" doesn't fit bc you have access to almost all weapon types at the start of the game through different classes, merchants, and drops. And there aren't really more or less powerful weapons, rather weapons determine your moveset and playstyle with most players picking something that feels good to them. As all weapons can be levelled up and most can have their special abilities changed there isn't any clear equivalent to giving someone the rocket launcher a few levels early.
When people say they want an "easy mode" I don't understand what they want. They game is "easy" if you accept that going through the same areas over and over until you win is the core gameplay loop and you make use of all the tools you have.
Like if you're R/G colorblind, or need visual cues for audio due to impaired hearing, I get that. But in the context of a souls game what do people mean by easy? It's not an fps or arpg where enemies are just a bundle of hp that you click on until they die. If you have god mode you can ignore all game mechanics and click the enemy until they die. But short of god mode no amount of fiddling with stats is going to get someone past Malekith or Radhann.
Maybe some kind of time-dilation thing where you can slow the game down dramatically?
There's a saying "a game for everyone is a game for no one" and I think at some point the souls hater crowd needs to sit down and chew on the idea that soulslike games have specific features that make them different from other genres of games and that the "story mode" or easy mode or whatever that can be relatively easily implemented in to crpgs, arpgs, fps, or tps games cannot easily be translated to souls games due to differences in core gameplay mechanics.
The best analogy I can come up with would be sim games. You can set all the conditions to optimal and make enemy jets fly in a straight, level line, you can turn off damage to your aircraft and fuel, but at some point the player does need to know how to fly the simulated aircraft. And if they cannot do that they should consider other genres than simulation.
Maybe I'm just overthinking this. I'm trying to work this out from "how do you make the game "easier" and still have a souls game. Maybe the folks who want an "easy" mode don't care and just want to toodle around in god mode in a game that would otherwise be totally unenjoyable for them.
The idea that any player should be able to play any game however they want, though; hard disagree. Single player games are not sandboxes. God mode is fine, but like, idk, i see the idea a lot that players should be able to use whatever weapons or skills or whatever they want and everything should be equally, uniformly viable for all gameplay. Lots of talk about "power fantasy" and "there's no wrong way to play". That's not a good attitude to approach games with. Do whatever you want within the limits of the engine, but if you're trying to play the game in ways it was not made to be played then you're making a decision to do so. I'm seeing this a lot with Helldivers, with people complaining that the game requires them to take a variety of weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies instead of taking whatever they think looks cool and having every weapon be equally effective in every situation. And there's also a great many players refusing to learn basic game systems and complaining that the game is too hard because they don't understand how to use those systems.
When a person selects a game to play they should be ready to invest a certain amount of time learning the game's rules and systems, and they should engage with the game in good faith. That means accepting the goals of the game - fps games are about shooting things, arpgs are about character builds and clicking monsters, puzzle games are about solving puzzles, simulation games are about simulating systems, platformers are about jumping between platforms - and engaging with the games on those terms.
Elden ring isn't a walking simulator, it's not a ttrpg adapted in to a crpg, it's not a conventional arpg, it's not a zelda game or a metroidvania. Soulslike games are their own thing. If you want to vibe and enjoy the scenary, just walk around and look at things, you're asking the devs to give you options to play an entirely different genre and style of game. All the scenery and vibes are in a soulslike game to give substance and flavor to the core of fighting from one bonfire to the next bonfire. Putting in options to completely ignore that and just wander around isn't a mode to make it easier to play dark souls, it"s a mode for not playing dark souls. "I want to be able to engage with the combat in a way that is within the limits of my abilities" is reasonable. "I want to play a walking simulator and i want options to make ds or er a walking simulator" is unreasonable. If someone feels they cannot enjoy the game they should not buy it, and instead find a game in a genre they enjoy.
I do think you are overthinking it a little and worrying too much about the Souls experience vs what some people who could potentially derive some form of enjoyment from the series that you and I might not be able to grok actually want. Dodge iframes, parry windows, poise, stamina, stagger, status effects, all of these are mathematical variables inside the game that can be easily controlled on the fly with global difficulty modifiers. More iframes to dodges makes one able to avoid attacks with less precision on their read and timing. Longer recovery times between enemy patterns can allow for greedy hits that would otherwise get punished which also means more damage on the enemy, less time it is alive and less time for you to make mistakes. Less stamina drain from attacks combined with more forgiving regen can make it easier to simply stand with your guard up and endure. Less incoming damage and more poise means that you can make more favorable trades of blows. Flasks with more shots and more healing mean that you can make more mistakes or trades between fires. All of these things add up to allow for more mistakes, less precision, less grind, less risk for more reward, less mastery. They can make the difference between dying 20+ times between bonfires and dying 3 times, which for some people takes the game from unplayable frustration to fun dark fantasy romp.
As you said yourself, you can use the systems to deal disgusting amounts of damage, or become disgustingly tanky and laugh in the face of your enemies, as a friend of mine did after getting real tired of some of Elden Ring's shit, but it requires mastery of the systems and the patience to achieve it. I know all the ways to make it easier. Some people don't want to deal with that noise. A difficulty modifier that allows them to mess with the numbers on the fly achieves the same effect in a way that is more in line with the amount of effort they are willing to invest in the game. And an "I really don't want to deal with this shit" godmode toggle covers the edge cases that maybe mathematics alone is not able to overcome. It's anathema to the game's design and intended way of engaging with it, yes, but literally just let people have fun in wrong and bad ways, in a singleplayer game it's not hurting anything other than their own experience. They may not want Souls but they might be on board with something Souls can made into via easy to implement difficulty options.
I don't think that any game should be designed from the ground-up with the notion that it can be played in any way you wish. If all weapons and skills are equally viable then there are no decisions to make and nothing ultimately matters. Power fantasies where you can do anything and be anyone and use whatever you wish are a bad design paradigm that leads to shallow and empty games. Absolutely agreed on this one. Ideally, games should have a clear idea of who they are aimed at and be built around delivering that experience rather than being an identity-less one size fits all product that is made to maximize mass appeal. Hell, most of the games I enjoy are niche products. I also completely agree with you that multiplayer games should be approached in good faith and that you should be expected to learn the basic systems of the game and hone them. If I am playing Helldivers and I am matched with someone who repeatedly shows that they are unwilling to engage with the game and respect its fundamentals, then I want to kick them from my squad. Especially if we are playing on the higher difficulties and they are complaining about game balance being supposedly bad rather than putting in the effort to learn the fundamentals and improve their gameplay before tackling harder difficulties.
I also don't think any developer should be expected to carefully tailor and curate every difficulty setting to the point that they are essentially making several different games either. That is indeed unreasonable. Keep it to easily tweaked variables and cheat code equivalents and if that isn't enough, then, yes, people should just find a different game to play. Make it clear what is the setting for the "proper" experience and be transparent about the scope and limitations of adjusting the difficulty. Ideally, every game should offer a demo that allows you to see what you are getting into and if the available scope of experience customization is enough to cover your needs.
What I believe is that how individuals choose to engage with singleplayer games is entirely up to them and I respect the fact that they might look for different types of experiences than I do. If these individuals can be provided with more choices to tweak their experience to their liking, that require low development effort and are put in after the game is designed around its intended gameplay loop and experience, then just do it and let them have their fun in peace however wrong it might be. Let people give themselves 99 flasks that heal them to full and and reduce the damage they take while increasing their own and boosting their stamina regen and even godmode themselves and play Ruined Medieval Dark Fantasy Walking Simulator instead of Elden Ring, idgaf, it's their money and their time. Hopefully they will one day think "maybe I should try the actual intended experience" and play the real Souls but if they don't want to that's also fine.
In conclusion my stance on difficulty in singleplayer games is:
Good post. You've given me things to think about. I hadn't considered changing i-frames, flask charges, etc as those are mostly things that you can already do vs game systems.
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