Personally, I get through them fine and enjoy the challenge, but I couldn't give a fuck less if in future games there was an easy mode added for players who want to experience the dark fantasy atmosphere and lore without the challenge.
I actually think they should make all Soulsborne games incredibly easy just to spite gamers. :gigachad:
For real though I don't see why anyone would have a problem with an optional easy mode (although apparently a lot of capital G gamers do...)
But it’s just not possible to understand the lore if you don’t watch the cutscene of the man turning into a bear made out of mold over and over. The “I hate peasants. You’re a peasant, thus I hate you.” speech doesn’t sink in till the 1000th time you’ve heard it.
I like the idea of what Hades did. Just add a godmode. I think it'd actually be helpful for less confident players. They could make a rule like 5 or 10 deaths on a single boss before I godmode. They'd probably get one of the easier ones by the end and it'd be a great experience for them.
It's also important to note that the difficulty/gameplay isn't the only draw of these games. Art and story are a huge deal too. Its really fun to see and experience the world, people shouldn't be denied that because they're not good at games.
Not everyone can be me, the :only-good-gamer:
You know personally I do like there are games out there that are like a get what you get kind of thing. I mean some novels are very complex and sometimes that’s what I want but others are easier to grasp and sometimes I want something less dense. There’s a really stupid “git gud” culture around FS games and they’re held up on a pedestal, but I think that’s a problem with gamers and the gaming community. It’s absolutely how they would respond to a good game without any difficulty options. But personally, makes me feel like there’s some neat intentionality around a single difficulty game. I’m glad it’s out there, it’s a distinct texture. Andthere are zillions of other games with many difficultly options to choose from too
Yea
I might actually play them if they did :shrug-outta-hecks:
Same. I bought DS3 and uninstalled it in the same day because I couldn't get past the first boss fight and it just made me mad. I don't play games to get upset and if they do I'm going to stop playing them. It's why I stopped playing fps games too. I will 1000% play an easy going casual game that I enjoy over something that makes me miserable because frankly it's a video game the point of games are to enjoy them, not to beat them.
Later I played DS3 further than the first boss but I just didn't have it in me to go much further. I don't expect them to cater to me but I'm not gonna play it if they don't.
The only problem is how do you do that? Flat number adjustments would help a little (although less than you'd think, since the player tends to be overkilled by combos rather than chipped just a little too much), maybe increasing the number of healing items the player gets so they're less worn down by attrition over a fight, but that's still going to leave something that's fundamentally a challenge. The core of the difficulty is about timing and learning responses to telegraphed moves, and I don't know how that can be fucked with in a way that wouldn't make them unintentionally harder (like in Elden Ring some of the trickiest timings are the ones where it's held for longer than usual so you end up getting caught dodging). Maybe increasing the iframes to make the timing more forgiving as long as someone reacts in time.
I'd rather they just fix the fucking controls though. Make a dedicated dodge button, give a proper item hotbar system, make the camera not actively fight against your inputs because it really wants to clip into a wall and blind you, that sort of thing. Add some QoL stuff like a journal to compile quest information so you can check it again later instead of just having to remember everything or look it up. The core of the modern games is fine where it is, it's all the deliberately inaccessible bullshit that's layered around that that's a problem. In Elden Ring, for example, there's only a small handful of fights you can't just faceroll if you're at the expected level for them - all the hardest fights are obscure optional ones, while the core story is all easy sailing so long as you aren't underleveled.
One of my favorite parts of Elden Ring was that I put questions and encounters and little drawings into a leather notebook of my own along the way, since there isn’t a notebook in-game. It was really satisfying and made me feel more connected to it. Like I had actual skin in the game for figuring out what it’s all about. If every game was like that, that would be super frustrating lol but for something so esoteric as Elden Ring, it was a welcome change of comfort zone
Yeah, this is my feeling about it too. I genuinely don't know what they could do that would make an easy mode actually easier without making the player invincible. Maybe make the enemy AI less aggressive? Have them punish healing less? Those are the only things I can think of.
This is the real issue. Maybe giving the player a ton of hp might help, but you may as well just have console enable god mode as an option for players that don't want to get two/three shot by bosses.
I could see something like a boss practice mode being good - allowing you to continue practicing against a boss without dying and reloading - but I've always felt that that's why summoning exists. You can fight the boss without putting key resources on the line and learn the fight thru multiplayer.
There’s a lot of ways to implement an easy mode that don’t change the game design at all.
The most obvious one is not losing souls when you die. If they implemented this, I would play the games.
Steelrising is a soulslike that has an assist mode with other options like what percentage of damage you take and how quickly your stamina regens.
OP is a day old account. Surely HexBear won’t fall for the Souls difficulty bait post yet again.
I mean i've had other accounts on here before. I make a new one every so often just because I don't want to accumulate too much information on one account, I'm pretty Doxx paranoid and conscious and I will probably abandon this account in a few months and make yet another one, bipolar paranoia be like that sometimes. Honestly most Hexbears from what I remember are pretty pro Souls easy mode from what I've seen, don't think this is that controversial, at least around here. On somewhere full of GamersTM like the steam forums or gamefaqs, maybe but most people around here seemingly could not give a fuck less.
Yeah, but what if they specifically like the lore and atmosphere of the souls series? I think they should probably be able to play it. I just don't see that big a deal in there being some kind of easy mode in souls games, treating souls like some exclusive club is pretty lame and very gamer esque.
There's always gamers lurking somewhere. You're whole life is video games and this post just told me so. An easy mode in souls won't ruin your experience. You are a gamer pretending to be a leftist.
As long as it's optional I wouldn't give a damn.
Nerds gatekeeping their treats because they think it makes them hardcore or talented to beat a hard game that casual players can't beat need to go outside.
It's just pattern recognition anyway, it's not that hard, you just have to be patient. You're not that hardcore for beating it.
Apparently, it would make a lot of gamers mad, so I am in favor of it.
I'd be totally fine with adjustable difficulty.
I like how certain games like Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity do it:
You can turn on things to increase challenges like enemy skills/health, dropped items/money, number of enemies, or available healing items.
That way you can add or reduce challenges while increasing replayability. I don't get people who don't want more options especially when they can be toggled so easily
yeah that's what jedi fallen order did as well, with additional presets for the sliders. i think it's a good system
seems like something that wouldn't affect me whatsoever and would make losers shit and piss themselves so I support it 100% and desperately want them to do it
(assuming it's a relatively easy thing to add and working on it doesn't somehow fuck the devs)
A lot of people enjoy those games specifically because of the feeling of overcoming a great challenge, of being able to do something others might not be able to, experiencing something gated from others. Is the feeling factual? No. Is the enjoyment rational? Also no. But demanding that people enjoy art on a purely rational level is silly.
I would not personally care if an easy mode menu option was added to the games (done well), but I think it would make the games artistically lesser. The easy mode is also already implemented through much more clever ways in many of those games, where it does not take away from the feeling of overcoming difficulty.
Well there’s two types of gamers going on there — one type is certainly feeling special because others can’t do it, which sucks, but the other type is feeling special because it’s just plain hard. Both are based in the reality that fewer people complete a FromSoftware game vs a more typical game due to difficulty in general, but I think it’s an important distinction. Personally when I’m playing through one, I’m not thinking of the players who gave up, and that I’m better than them or something. I’m enjoying the fact that I stuck with something difficult and died many times but ultimately saw it through, as a personal gratification
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I would prefer a choice between "normal" and "easy" over more creative balancing decisions like the summons in elden ring.
I think the bell summons was an attempt to make an optional, more accessible, way of playing the game, but it turned into kind of a mess. As a long time souls player, using summons felt too easy in a lot of fights while other fights felt like they were designed around the player using summons. Just let people press a button saying how hard they want the game to be instead.
I just take an 'honorable' approach to it really. Fight me 1 on 1 and I'll do the same. If you get friends then so do I. Unless you're so weak that you need the friends to challenge me in which case I'll probably leave my buddies in my pocket.
Same reason I don't really care about the idea of difficulty settings either. The challenge is always self-imposed, I could just boot up cheat engine if I wanted the game to be easier.
