For real, the Epic G!mer :brainworms: that are so obsessed with how a fucking video game should be played by other people that the Epic G!mer doesn't even know and may never meet are insidious.
I've met them here, too, specifically about the Dark Souls treat and specifically about a theoretical accessibility mode. I may even get some fresh Epic G!mer rage about it in the comments here. Again. :freeze-gamer:
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.
Bleh, I kinda hated the "actions per minute" paradigm of RTS.
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.
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.