It's really not difficult the way people think it is, especially Elden Ring. If you want to solo the game using a very specialized build, yeah. But you can also just pick stuff you like and guard counter or turtle or magic spam through the entire game while summoning friends and being summoned to help people. You can goof off, do sub-optimal builds, try wacky stuff, and fuck around a lot. If you don't like your build re-specing in er is fairly straightforward. Idk, i think "souls games are difficult" has been built up to mythological levels to the point where people either don't try to play Elden Ring at all, or try to play, get killed by the Tree Sentinel a few times, then throw their hands up in frustration without engaging with all the systems the game gives you right from the start.
ER really has been made much friendlier and more approachable and easier to get in to than prior games. Summoning is much easier and more reliable. Re-speccing is much easier and available from relatively early in the game. Any time you're stuck at a boss you can go somewhere else and try something else.
But yeah, the combat is 99.9% of the game, so if you don't groove with it then it's not the game for you.
As for the lore - what I really like about the Dark Souls story is that it's very much about persevering in the face of adversity. It's Absurdist to it's core, and the story and game mechanics are deeply tied together. The Dark Souls world is trapped in stasis. Gwyn and his heirs, fearing the age of dark, keep linking the fire over and over again to re-boot the age of fire. And the result is that every cycle is the same, but worse. The world gets thinner and thinner. Time and space break down dragging disparate places together until they're all stacked atop the kiln of the first flame. As long as this miserable cycle persists there's no future for the workld and no hope. The misery will go on forever, the world will become more and more hollow until nothing is left but the thinnest shell and the faintest ember.
This is directly reflected in gameplay. There is no way to lose Dark Souls. The game has no fail condition. As long as you keep trying, keep bashing your head against a cruel world that hates you without seeing you, you cannot fail. Your enemies are hollow, their humanity scooped out by overwhelming despair and indifference. They fight you out of a cold, reflexive hatred of your stubbornness and determination to press on long after there's any reason to do so. This is the core of Existentialism and Absurdism; choosing to live, grow, and change after recognizing that there's no meaning in the world.
The multiplayer reflects this, too. As Miyazaki said, the cooperative summoning was inspired by a situation where strangers were helping each other get their cars un-stuck in a bad snow. They were strangers, owing each other nothing, never seeing each other again, but they chose to cooperate and aid each other in that moment.
The pvp reflects this. People will invade your world to try to harm you, but some people will leap to your aid. There's predatory violence, but also virtuous defenders. No matter how desolate and empty the world feels there are always people nearby who will lend you a hand in even the worst circumstances.
The way you learn about the story also ties in to these themes. When you first travel through the world it seems like a miserable, empty wasteland. It's only by exploring and gathering relics and rubbish from the past that you can slowly piece together what happened. You're not a great hero. The age of heroes was long ago, and you're an archeologist exploring it's wreckage. You learn about their hopes and dreams, and their inevitable fall and failure. You take up their rusted arms, polish them until they shine anew. You clean the dust from crests and sigils that long ago lost all meaning and carry them with renewed purpose. You come to empathize with gods and monsters that proved to be pathetically mortal in the end.
And you just keep going. You keep going after you get burned by the pot throwers just outside firelink, when you get crushed by the charred and burned out shells of Gwyn's silver knights, when you're invaded by sadistic killers, when you finally drag your poisoned body to the bottom of blight town and the top of the gargloy's belfry. You keep going through the death traps of Sen's fortress. You keep going when you encounter the city of the gods and it's false pretense of glory. You just keep going, through all the adversity and setbacks, because you want to keep going.
You can give up at any time. You can turn the game off. You can grow frustrated and bored. That's when the player goes hollow. There's no way to lose the game, except to turn it off.
And I connect with that very deeply because that has been my entire life. I have very severe, untreatable depression that has made more of my life miserable than not. The only reason I keep going is that I choose to keep going. Absurdism and Existentialism are the core of my ethos; there is no meaning accept what you yourself create.
Dark Souls is a deeply, achingly humanistic game. It says, very plainly, that to exist is to suffer. And it also says that there is always hope, always comradery, always beauty, amidst that suffering. The conclusion of the story, the "good ending" in Dark Souls III, isn't restoring the bourgeis status quo or installing a monarchy or defeating the minority and communist coded enemies. It's holding hands with someone who is just as scared and uncertain as you are and accepting your mortality. Two strangers watching the last rays of the last sunset, wondering what will happen next.
Elden Ring doesn't hit nearly as hard, but there's still a good story about the reckless pursuit of power, the horrors of war, agency in the face of systemic oppression, racism and intersectionality. I could go on for hours, but i need to wrap this up and hit enter.
I can see this series is very important for you, almost therapeutic in a way. I see your points very clearly, and I 100% get why there's people into Dark Souls, and people into Dark Souls. It's just not a series i can jive with, personally. When the movement and combat don't feel good, which as you mentioned is basically the game on its face, yeah, i'm going to walk away. My comment was obviously not meant to be serious, but a deflection from the usual culture surrounding the series.
Yeah but only some people can actually experience the story this way. Imagine being a disabled person who can't beat the game at all because you're just not quite able to have the manual dexterity to manage your weapons and time dodging. If it's dozens of times more difficult to persevere, even the most stalwart spirits would just give up and do something more fun eventually, and if the game itself refuses to give any aid, it shows an entirely different message to that player. Without proper accessibility options this messaging and story becomes sour rather than beautiful towards those who are disabled. It says they should be able to continue going without anyone helping them at all, that their extraneous suffering is necessary or inevitable. Rather than being shown a trek against adversity with constant adversity and triumph over that adversity, they're just spat on by the game and told they're weak and... by extension, with the rest of the philosophical overtone of the game, specifically combined with the individualistic perspective of refusing to have difficulty choices, shouldn't even exist because they can't handle the suffering of it. It's just the same blank wall of indifference and outright malice disabled people experience all the time everywhere else.
Thank you for pushing me on this. I've been wrestling with it all night, and I think in the last analysis I'm just afraid of change. Dark Souls has been one of the most important works of art in my life. The grim, determined, brutal optimism of the series kept me alive in the throes of utmost depression, gave me an experience of struggling with adversity that translated to the worst parts of my struggle to survive severe mental illness. I'm afraid that there's something delicate about it, and if it changes too much it'll break. But you're right - That's inside me, and my inflexibility. I should find more compassion for others, as well as more faith in the Fromsoft team to be better than they are and strive to overcome their own limits and setbacks. f
thank you so much for listening. And I really dont want to take away from what you took away from the story- I think perseverance is a virtue and there is a lot of meaning in holding onto hope despite it being . Stubbornness can be based asf. I think the main difference in my thinking is that my perspective is that perseverance is a collective thing; It's about finding resources and options available to you, and a lot of the time the most effective ones are other people. Like you've pointed out this is rather explicit in the game. You can summon others to help you and stuff. I think the only issue is that this help might not be enough alone for some players, and while it might seem cheap or devaluing to the hostility of the world to give them the option to make it easier, I think it fits into the theme of perserverance well. For perseverance as a message to be portrayed to the player, they have to have a chance of succeeding, and giving accessibility and easier options enables that for disabled people. From that perspective I think it would only take away from the hostility of the world if players enabled accessibility options needlessly on purpose. Which while I understand the concern about it, I feel like if someone is choosing to play a famously challenging game, them turning around making it trivial for themselves on purpose is a huge Skill Issue and means they probably wouldn't properly internalize the themes anyways.
Or in other words, perseverance is a communal effort and giving accessibility options could help players without access to the community for whatever reason to still receive that message
It's really not difficult the way people think it is, especially Elden Ring. If you want to solo the game using a very specialized build, yeah. But you can also just pick stuff you like and guard counter or turtle or magic spam through the entire game while summoning friends and being summoned to help people. You can goof off, do sub-optimal builds, try wacky stuff, and fuck around a lot. If you don't like your build re-specing in er is fairly straightforward. Idk, i think "souls games are difficult" has been built up to mythological levels to the point where people either don't try to play Elden Ring at all, or try to play, get killed by the Tree Sentinel a few times, then throw their hands up in frustration without engaging with all the systems the game gives you right from the start.
ER really has been made much friendlier and more approachable and easier to get in to than prior games. Summoning is much easier and more reliable. Re-speccing is much easier and available from relatively early in the game. Any time you're stuck at a boss you can go somewhere else and try something else.
But yeah, the combat is 99.9% of the game, so if you don't groove with it then it's not the game for you.
As for the lore - what I really like about the Dark Souls story is that it's very much about persevering in the face of adversity. It's Absurdist to it's core, and the story and game mechanics are deeply tied together. The Dark Souls world is trapped in stasis. Gwyn and his heirs, fearing the age of dark, keep linking the fire over and over again to re-boot the age of fire. And the result is that every cycle is the same, but worse. The world gets thinner and thinner. Time and space break down dragging disparate places together until they're all stacked atop the kiln of the first flame. As long as this miserable cycle persists there's no future for the workld and no hope. The misery will go on forever, the world will become more and more hollow until nothing is left but the thinnest shell and the faintest ember.
This is directly reflected in gameplay. There is no way to lose Dark Souls. The game has no fail condition. As long as you keep trying, keep bashing your head against a cruel world that hates you without seeing you, you cannot fail. Your enemies are hollow, their humanity scooped out by overwhelming despair and indifference. They fight you out of a cold, reflexive hatred of your stubbornness and determination to press on long after there's any reason to do so. This is the core of Existentialism and Absurdism; choosing to live, grow, and change after recognizing that there's no meaning in the world.
The multiplayer reflects this, too. As Miyazaki said, the cooperative summoning was inspired by a situation where strangers were helping each other get their cars un-stuck in a bad snow. They were strangers, owing each other nothing, never seeing each other again, but they chose to cooperate and aid each other in that moment.
The pvp reflects this. People will invade your world to try to harm you, but some people will leap to your aid. There's predatory violence, but also virtuous defenders. No matter how desolate and empty the world feels there are always people nearby who will lend you a hand in even the worst circumstances.
The way you learn about the story also ties in to these themes. When you first travel through the world it seems like a miserable, empty wasteland. It's only by exploring and gathering relics and rubbish from the past that you can slowly piece together what happened. You're not a great hero. The age of heroes was long ago, and you're an archeologist exploring it's wreckage. You learn about their hopes and dreams, and their inevitable fall and failure. You take up their rusted arms, polish them until they shine anew. You clean the dust from crests and sigils that long ago lost all meaning and carry them with renewed purpose. You come to empathize with gods and monsters that proved to be pathetically mortal in the end.
And you just keep going. You keep going after you get burned by the pot throwers just outside firelink, when you get crushed by the charred and burned out shells of Gwyn's silver knights, when you're invaded by sadistic killers, when you finally drag your poisoned body to the bottom of blight town and the top of the gargloy's belfry. You keep going through the death traps of Sen's fortress. You keep going when you encounter the city of the gods and it's false pretense of glory. You just keep going, through all the adversity and setbacks, because you want to keep going.
You can give up at any time. You can turn the game off. You can grow frustrated and bored. That's when the player goes hollow. There's no way to lose the game, except to turn it off.
And I connect with that very deeply because that has been my entire life. I have very severe, untreatable depression that has made more of my life miserable than not. The only reason I keep going is that I choose to keep going. Absurdism and Existentialism are the core of my ethos; there is no meaning accept what you yourself create.
Dark Souls is a deeply, achingly humanistic game. It says, very plainly, that to exist is to suffer. And it also says that there is always hope, always comradery, always beauty, amidst that suffering. The conclusion of the story, the "good ending" in Dark Souls III, isn't restoring the bourgeis status quo or installing a monarchy or defeating the minority and communist coded enemies. It's holding hands with someone who is just as scared and uncertain as you are and accepting your mortality. Two strangers watching the last rays of the last sunset, wondering what will happen next.
Elden Ring doesn't hit nearly as hard, but there's still a good story about the reckless pursuit of power, the horrors of war, agency in the face of systemic oppression, racism and intersectionality. I could go on for hours, but i need to wrap this up and hit enter.
I can see this series is very important for you, almost therapeutic in a way. I see your points very clearly, and I 100% get why there's people into Dark Souls, and people into Dark Souls. It's just not a series i can jive with, personally. When the movement and combat don't feel good, which as you mentioned is basically the game on its face, yeah, i'm going to walk away. My comment was obviously not meant to be serious, but a deflection from the usual culture surrounding the series.
Totes fair!
I might give it another fair shot in the future, but having tried DS2, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, i'm not 100% sure it'll stick the landing for me.
Yeah but only some people can actually experience the story this way. Imagine being a disabled person who can't beat the game at all because you're just not quite able to have the manual dexterity to manage your weapons and time dodging. If it's dozens of times more difficult to persevere, even the most stalwart spirits would just give up and do something more fun eventually, and if the game itself refuses to give any aid, it shows an entirely different message to that player. Without proper accessibility options this messaging and story becomes sour rather than beautiful towards those who are disabled. It says they should be able to continue going without anyone helping them at all, that their extraneous suffering is necessary or inevitable. Rather than being shown a trek against adversity with constant adversity and triumph over that adversity, they're just spat on by the game and told they're weak and... by extension, with the rest of the philosophical overtone of the game, specifically combined with the individualistic perspective of refusing to have difficulty choices, shouldn't even exist because they can't handle the suffering of it. It's just the same blank wall of indifference and outright malice disabled people experience all the time everywhere else.
Thank you for pushing me on this. I've been wrestling with it all night, and I think in the last analysis I'm just afraid of change. Dark Souls has been one of the most important works of art in my life. The grim, determined, brutal optimism of the series kept me alive in the throes of utmost depression, gave me an experience of struggling with adversity that translated to the worst parts of my struggle to survive severe mental illness. I'm afraid that there's something delicate about it, and if it changes too much it'll break. But you're right - That's inside me, and my inflexibility. I should find more compassion for others, as well as more faith in the Fromsoft team to be better than they are and strive to overcome their own limits and setbacks. f
thank you so much for listening. And I really dont want to take away from what you took away from the story- I think perseverance is a virtue and there is a lot of meaning in holding onto hope despite it being . Stubbornness can be based asf. I think the main difference in my thinking is that my perspective is that perseverance is a collective thing; It's about finding resources and options available to you, and a lot of the time the most effective ones are other people. Like you've pointed out this is rather explicit in the game. You can summon others to help you and stuff. I think the only issue is that this help might not be enough alone for some players, and while it might seem cheap or devaluing to the hostility of the world to give them the option to make it easier, I think it fits into the theme of perserverance well. For perseverance as a message to be portrayed to the player, they have to have a chance of succeeding, and giving accessibility and easier options enables that for disabled people. From that perspective I think it would only take away from the hostility of the world if players enabled accessibility options needlessly on purpose. Which while I understand the concern about it, I feel like if someone is choosing to play a famously challenging game, them turning around making it trivial for themselves on purpose is a huge Skill Issue and means they probably wouldn't properly internalize the themes anyways.
Or in other words, perseverance is a communal effort and giving accessibility options could help players without access to the community for whatever reason to still receive that message
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