There is an easy mode in Dark Souls, it's called rolling GiantDad and abusing summons
Mechanical easy modes, while more hidden than a simple slider or menu option, are a great way to let players select their own difficulty. If you've ever wanted a more relaxed Dark Souls playthrough, I recommend spells and summoning.
The only thing with those is that unless you search on the internet or ask in a forum for "easy builds" or "how to beat x game", you might not know how it works. I love DS, but i can understand why someone doesn't want to watch a 20 min video/read a wiki article to understand that resistance is a trash stat, or what attunement even does, much less what the easiest way to play DS (pyromancy of course) is. Introduce different playstyles and their advantages/drawbacks, and then let the player decide which one, not just put cryptic hints about lore and call it a day.
The thing I have to say in defense of Dark Souls on this topic is that it was pretty explicitly designed to have you seek out help from other players, given the whole message mechanic. They know you can search for this shit online now, and frankly people figure out the easy builds on any souls game pretty quick, and where to go to get the item you need to do the spammy abusive thing that makes the boss fight tolerable.
Frankly I'm of the (slightly :freeze-gamer: admittedly) opinion that if you don't like the game, maybe play a different one. They are going for a very specific experience with these games, and that is one of dying over and over again and getting to the point of feeling despair at times, but winning anyway through careful perseverance and getting that amazing dopamine/endorphin rush because you did the thing. Also, the lore is supposed to be obscure so you have that feeling of slowly uncovering something and wondering at what the rest of it might be while you peel it away, bit by bit. (Does that sound too pretentious? Probably, it's just video games)
Remember when cheat codes were thoroughly normalized and you were the cool kid on the playground for knowing cheat codes instead of the weird policing bullshit we have right now?
I just cheat so I can look at the weird monsters :gigachad:
never understood the resistance to it myself
me liking bastard hard games isn't diminished by some rando playing it with cheatengine on or whatever, why would i care at all?And hey, it gives you a whole new population to lord your accomplishments over. The dopamine of telling people you beat [insert boss] legit is almost worth the lack of friends it incurs :')
People don't like their media criticized. There's this, but also pokemon fans which is like the polar opposite of dark souls difficulty wise. The new pokemon game has dogshit performance and graphics, but fans are like "just let me have fun" and claim that their game is perfect, and who cares about not running 10fps even. Or people who like children's cartoons as an adult when they are told that their media is in fact children's cartoons.
Monkey's paw: easy mode added but you're also forced to run whatever build Elon has most recently used
Jesus christ, that Elden Ring build, a straight sword, a rapier, claws, a shield, and a staff in a sorcery build that used heavy armour and had most of the stats dumped in health.
It's a work of art in how to spec a character wrong. I used to believe that there was no wrong way to play a Fromsoft RPG until :melon-musk: came along.
I think an easy mode where you don’t lose souls upon death would be enough.
ETA: Steelrising has a very successful assist mode where you can configure different settings, like what percent of damage you take, how fast stamina regens, if you lose essence when you die, and if your rapid cooling is always as good as possible.
On a personal level I dont really care either way.(I dont play souls games). With that said isnt that kind of the point of souls games ? Overcoming a challenge? Like before I cheat myself through Sekiro I would just watch someone do a walkthrough on youtube. Like whatever just add a godmode to soulsgames and be done with it. Disclaimer ( I play some games on easy and some games on the hardest difficulty)
You could watch the scary thing with the lights on and your partner cuddling you. This may be antithetical to the experience of horror as a genre, but I don't see having art be more accessible as a bad thing. But then again, I'm not a souls player who has staked my social worth on exclusive access to a niche piece of art.
Sekiro has a bit of a more involved storyline and world building than the other Soulsbornes and it doesn't have an official co-op mode so you can't get carried through the game that way.
But it's a single player experience and one I think I would like apart from the severe difficulty so I have no issue with modding to tailor the game for my preferences and enjoyment. When I get around to playing it I'll probably use mods that 5x my health because my reflexes suck shit and I just want to experience the cool locations and boss battles :shrug-outta-hecks:
You cheated not only the game, but yourself. You didn't grow. You didn't improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. It's sad that you don't know the difference.
Jokes aside, as someone that usually defends from games as not being that hard once you accept that you'll die at first and learn the mechanics, sekiro was too hard for my tastes. I still beat it, but it felt very frustrating.
I guess the way I see it. They are missing out on something that could be really cool and that they might enjoy if they gave it a try. Or to put it this way I think there is an "intended" way to interact with certain games.
But If you want to go slow in Sonic... go ahead. In the end it should be about the user experience if someone wants shrek or anime girls in their Skyrim they should be able to mod it in.
(Even if that wasnt in the Developers vision).
The only thing I will add is that well done difficulty modes do take development time and depending on the project simply might not be a priority. Like there are more than enough games with harder difficulties that just mean enemies become bullet sponges.
And I dont care about difficulty modes in souls games because I wouldnt play them even if they added of them.
With that said isnt that kind of the point of souls games ? Overcoming a challenge?
Mostly just learning patterns, telegraphs, and timings, and getting a sort of "ok I understand this now" buzz from the learning process. Sometimes not even that, but just taking the right approach to a fight. For the vast majority of it the difficulty just exists in the form of the player not already being familiar with it, which is why for something like Elden Ring one can just roll through NG+ doing meme bullshit and only half paying attention, because at that point you have the timing down and have learned to pick out the telegraphs.
The rest of the difficulty is just dogshit controls and a camera that is actively fighting against you the entire time. You know there's not a dedicated dodge button in Elden Ring? You dodge by releasing the run button within half a second of pressing it, giving it inconsistent timing (since you're naturally going to hit the button harder and release it slower the tenser a situation gets) and mechanically delaying the dodge by something like .1 seconds, the equivalent to trying to do something remotely across the entire country. I had to make a dedicated dodge button using a macro to send a down and up press 15 milliseconds apart to fix that glaring design flaw.
Now I cant talk about Souls games since I never really played them but I did play starcraft in multiplayer for some years and I would say that was a hard game. Playing starcraft at 150-200 actions per minute is a very unique feeling that no other game has given me and that I honestly kind of miss not even talking about stuff like being able to perfectly read an opponent and counter them. I guess there was always a sense of unease and stress while playing starcraft but there were moments in which you felt like you got a glimpse of what mastery could look like and those moments ? pure bliss.
The mechanical component is part of the charm. Learning to multitask and executing attacks on multiple fronts is fun. Micro/Macro etc. The reality is every classic rts gets apm heavy when you get really good at it doesnt matter wether it is Command and Conquer, Age of Empires or Dawn of War. There is still strategy involved like builder orders, timing pushes or just reading the enemy.
Yes, and I don't like that..?
I think as I've gotten older I've generally moved towards the idea that leisure activities should be relaxing. Real life is already hard enough.
Nothing wrong with disliking it but I like it. Its a mechanical task like playing ping pong or piano. I wouldnt call those things challenging either unless you want to go pro (but if you want to go pro everything is hard).
Big Starcraft nerd here, I beat a pro one time with a build that I came up with. I'd just like to say that while I agree with that being the charm, it still has an easy mode in the form of matchmaking for multiplayer, and plain old difficulty modes for the campaign. You don't just auto-die in the way you would in a Souls game.
They are billions is my favorite rts and it is so good exactly because it hits that sweet spot of not requiring pro level micro or apm to win but still being really tense and demanding of skill. I recommend it a lot, it is basically the best single player rts imo. Beyond the basic skill necessary like hotkey and stuff, TAB is realy about macro.
Mostly just learning patterns, telegraphs, and timings, and getting a sort of “ok I understand this now” buzz from the learning process. Sometimes not even that, but just taking the right approach to a fight.
I think this is where (at least for me) the appeal of souls games is. You can watch hours of videos, or read the whole wiki, but even in the easiest builds, you have to build the muscle memory to do certain things, and a large part of the feel-good brain chemicals come from that. The way I would design an "easy mode" would be maybe a bit more hand-holdy, or handle other parts of the game (like levelling up certain stats) automatically, making the experience more about bashing zombies in the head with a sword while rolling, than about minmaxing your stats to get the optimal build.
back in my day, every game had an easy mode, it was called going into the developer console and typing in "god" :grillman:
Honestly, all the stuff about following the "artistic vision" has always been baffling to me, like the ability to tweak, mod, and just outright break games to your liking is one of the best things about them - sure, it's not for everyone, but the fact that it's there is awesome. Yeah, Valve probably didn't intend for you to play the Highway 17 chapters by just abandoning the car so you can accelerated back hop off a ramp and skip an entire level, but you can do that as just a random consequence of the physics system, and that is really fucking cool.
If you're going to complain about "the intended experience", stick to a non-interactive medium, go be a film snob and complain about people watching stuff on screens that are too small and don't have the necessary color calibration or whatever.
Yeah, I like the challenge, sure. But playing Skyrim with unlimited magic and just annihilating everything in my path is fun. Nothing breaks the smug CHUDDiness of the Thalmor, Dragon, or Vampire when the lowly mortal is an all-powerful deity that eats megalomaniacs for breakfast also has more than its appeal.
Reminds me of the CHUD who tried to dunk on leftists for speedrunning, and his the reason you suck speech boiled down to "leftists hate blind conformity and think for themselves....and that's terrible!"
Booyah. I wouldn't have appreciated Contra III so much if I'd only been able to play the first few levels.
I don't care about an easy mode, I just don't want to have to waste several minutes running back to a boss after it kills me.
No. The only fromsoft games I've played are Sekiro and Bloodborne. Is that one of the bad runbacks?
White guys when they get Easy modes in vidya: :wojak-nooo:
White guys when they get Easy modes IRL: :so-true:
i always thought the souls games could easily get away with an easy mode because the world is so freaky and weird and ive generally always loved the creature/world/level/boss designs. easy mode would also make it so much easier for me to just play it while listening to a podcast or w/e. there aren't a lot of 3rd person games i enjoy with melee combat that feels this good (because of its great animations/variety of weapon movesets). keep in mind i do LOVE the challenge of souls games, ive 100%ed dark souls 3 and elden ring, but if i could create a new character and just relax instead of have a clenched butthole while fighting melania? great
