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.
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 think it's hard to make multiple difficulty modes that are all engaging. I played DS3 but got kind of bored with it, don't remember getting stuck at a certain part but just stopped playing and didn't get back into it. Maybe i got bored of the dodge-roll spamming.
I beat Halo collection on heroic and did a lot of it in legendary, and that's a game clearly built around the Heroic difficulty because it's the most balanced. Legendary just cranks the sliders to make it hard if you don't memorize levels or if you don't take the speedrunner approach. Plus a bunch of guns end up being useless in Legendary, so it really forces only one type of play. You have all these cool alien guns but only variations of 2 weapons are actually useful in legendary mode.
Halo is my example here of a game with one 'good' difficulty and a bunch of bad ones, because Legendary with difficulty skulls is a mode that only exists for people who play too much Halo, so Heroic seems like intended way to play.
The existence of Normal and Easy don't detract from the experience of playing Heroic, but I'm guessing the Dark Souls gamers are just gatekeepy and worried about devs going for mass-market appeal and ruining the game by having a lower difficulty be the "intended" way to play, and the current difficulty just becoming a bonus mode they didn't put much effort into (like Halo legendary mode).
By adding lower difficulties, devs would have to put effort into actually making those ones engaging, since you'd have an influx of new players who might just go "wow normal mode is boring, clearly this game is shit". It's not really as simple as just scaling down all enemy attack damage the same amount and buffing all your attributes a certain amount. Balancing requires effort/playtesting. And the hardcore dark souls people might feel worried about being crowded out of the franchise they like.
It's like if people complained about Gran Turismo being too punishing, and wanting it to become Forza Horizon. They're both different approaches to racing games that emphasize different things, and maybe the easier dark souls people actually want a different dark-fantasy themed game that is built very differently.
Maybe the production of video games should be overseen by a committee and that committee includes in all game’s difficulty sliders and disability aids.
I'd like to give 'em some credit for skulls, too, though. For my partner, normal ends up a little too on the easy side for us both while heroic is a bit too much on the difficult side for her. Throwing a couple skulls onto normal difficulty gave us a pretty good middle ground for co-op. Plus, Grunt Birthday Party puts a smile on my face every time.
You're right, I forgot about skulls being good for that because when I play I usually try to put as many skulls as I can handle on legendary. Plus my attempts at LASO. I always play with grunt birthday party to have better feedback on if I got the headshot.
Now that you mention it, skulls are actually a way better idea than just user-adjustable difficulty sliders. They might be the best version of user-adjustable difficulty.
I like oblivion, but it's pretty bad with level scaling and having to know mechanics well to optimize your character. To compensate it just has a bunch of sliders you can change yourself at any time.
This bothers me because it feels kind of bad cranking down the difficulty at certain parts because your character build just doesn't suit that quest. It takes too much trial and error to balance the sliders for not only you as a player, but also the character you built at their current level. There's a quest where you're trapped in a painting and fight your way out of it, but you lost all your equipment temporarily. My build was made around the equipment bonuses i had, so that quest was impossible for me. It was annoying I had to change difficulty for only that quest.
Meanwhile halo skulls you can turn on and off for certain missions, it's definitely a better mechanic because it actually changes enemy behaviours and isn't just flat percentage change of attributes.
Ideally souls game would have a good difficulty adjustment similar to that, but with game crunch and how bad they are at doing stuff that should be standard like accessibility options, I wouldn't have hope for that.