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I hope it's clear which option is the original difficulty. I plan on playing it and honestly I'm worried how they'll implement it. Difficulty settings are great but hard to pull off
There are only two ways a difficulty setting has ever been used, and only one would be good for a game like this.
Either the health and damage (and possibly speed) is going to be adjusted so easier difficulty means you take less damage and deal more, while harder difficulties turn enemies into sponges that absolutely destroy you in 1 or 2 hits.
Or they re-do every encounter, 3 times, adding, removing, or re-arranging the mobs so they are easier or more difficult by actually tweaking the challenge and not the just the "numbers."
Almost every game chooses to do the former and not the latter because it's cheap and easy to do. Takes literally no effort to adjust some numbers by a percentage. It actually takes some thought and planning and time to actually present different tiers of challenge, naturally.
Better find a different term to use than "soulslike" if you're removing and reducing the skill requirement.
I want to appreciate the additions, but...this is also not a good way of doing it.
The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.
Maybe that's navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that's working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it's that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they're playing with an input delay.
That's why the games I've liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.
Im of two minds on this.
On one hand difficulty settings seem good because it gives players choices.
But on the other this genre is meant to challenge you. And for me if Dark Souls hadn’t been one difficulty only and hard was the way it is now I probably would have never beaten it on the hard difficulty. But I persevered and did something that felt great because of that design choice.
Works for me. I got stuck on the puppet king second phase and gave up. Not like rage quit, I just never went back to the game after like a dozen attempts, uninstalled it months later to free up space.
I love difficulty adjustments. Tuning a game to be right for every audience is impossible, better to let the end client have some control over fine tuning their experience.
Control is an excellent example of this for me. My GOTY when it came out, still an all time fav. I love the story and setting, but the combat is tedious after a while. In that case, lowering enemy health made the game less boring without being substantially easier, giving me the kind of experience I could enjoy.
I had a similar experience with the final boss of the Elden Ring DLC. Tried to beat him like 200 times and then quit playing for several months.
I'm not sure if you've played directly on release but they did nerf the puppet king two weeks after release or so, he has way less HP than he used to when the game came out
Amen! There's nothing I hate more than damage-sponge enemies. I love active dodging, blocking, and targeting weak spots, but NOBODY should survive multiple headshots just because they have a lot of HP.
Only a dozen attempts?
/s
Accessibility options are good. Not everyone is a god gamer with the reflexes of a 14-year old hopped up on Adderall and Red Bull. Some people just want to enjoy the story and the atmosphere of a game and it should be normal for us to let them.
Agreed, it's a great idea. I don't even think I would have been good at soulslike games when I was 14. I just don't have the patience for those sorts of constant boss battles where it takes so many hits to kill the boss but you die in 1 or 2.
You hit the nail on the head. Soulslikes aren't about difficulty, they're about patience. And when school was the only thing I had to worry about I had patience. Now that I have to fight for 30 minutes of game time I don't. Great decision by the devs!
There‘s a potential discussion to be had about how much of the Soulsborne/-like experience is about overcoming difficulty - and let’s be honest, the vast majority of people won‘t finetune difficulty but just go as easymode as possible - but on the other hand I strongly dislike elitism in games and in the end it should be on the player if they wanna potentially ruin their own experience or not, as such I agree with you.
Would Dark Souls have ever become the iconic game it is and FROM/Miyazaki the iconic devs they are with an easymode (in their games)? Hard to say.
I‘m always happy to see these options especially in indie games, which so often go crazy hard on difficulty towards the end (Celeste endgame for example).
I usually start on easy mode and then steadily increase difficulty as I go. Nothing will make me refund a game faster than being 20 minutes in and dying 74 times in an impossible encounter. LoP is one of those games.
Yeah, is a double edged sword. But if it makes more people to stick to the game rather than abandoning it, is nice.
My brother has Elden Ring for PS5 sitting on the shelf. The only serious playtime he’s had was a year ago when I visited him and made some character progress. Now, he keeps asking if I’ll play it again during my next visit. I always tell him, ‘No, I’m good-it’s a great game, but I’m coming over for peace and relaxation, not to get frustrated.
So much this! I love a challenging game but sometimes you just want to experience the game without the frustration, and lowering the difficulty for yourself has zero impact on people who prefer the original or higher difficulty
Black myth wukong would be so great with some difficulty options. I'm sure the rest of it story is great, but if I get stuck for a week on a boss I'm going to stop caring about that story.
I stopped playing, and until they patch in an easier mode… I won’t get to experience the rest of the story. It’s been a great story, so far, too.
Absolutely amazing decision. Difficulty settings make games more accessible - period. And gating accessibility behind "artistic intent" and "vision" is just stupid. Sure, not every game has to meet everyone's idea of a good time, but come on - it can't be that hard, and it would only be a net positive for everyone.
Shameless plug: !soulslike@lemmy.zip
This is that Pinocchio game right?
Yes.
I hope he can make lies and then when his nose is big enough he can break it off and use it as a beating stick to fight off the bad guys or light torches in the deku tree
lol, that would be fun.
I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it's a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.
My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we've all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they'd encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they'd provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.
Interesting. I've heard good things about this game from a friend who is way better at games than I am.
It's difficult, but good. I'd advise trying to play with the default settings for a bit - you need to engage with the parry mechanic to have a chance, but if you don't, you lose out on lots of fun. But if you can't make it work, lowering the difficulty is definitely a good option!
Oh yeah reflex is a huge skill gate. I could basically never land a parry in Demon's Souls, so hopefully there are some nice settings to dial that in.
In this one you can get away with blocking too. You take some damage but you have a short time to regain health by attacking right after. I think it makes it a little more forgiving when you are learning enemy moves and fine tuning your reaction.
I haven't played Demon Souls, but the timing feels more forgiving than it does in Elden Ring. Interestingly, Sekiro feels even more forgiving.
I don’t think Sekiro is more forgiving necessarily, but it’s a very tight and precise game so it’s easier to catch onto the timing and feels satisfying to do, never like “I should have been able to hit that, my gun didn’t shoot :(“ I would say Elden Ring is a lot easier than Sekiro though.
That might be it. I felt like I was able to parry much more frequently in Sekiro, but probably just because the attacks are much easier to read.
Parrying in Elden Ring feels much harder than both Sekiro & Lies of P to me.
Oh yeah I didn’t do a ton of parrying in Elden Ring, I just found it an easier game overall because you have so many options for weapons and play styles, and more opportunities to overlevel if you want to. In Elden Ring making use of things like bleed and rot or even just a big old bashing club can really turn things in your favour
Yeah, Elden Ring is definitely easier, I was just talking about parry timing since GP talked about parrying being hard in Demon Souls.
I really wanted to like this game, paid for it and everything, but I just couldnt get in to it. I'm an avid fan of fromsoft's stuff and have done them all several times, but with LoP i never felt like the combat clicked, and I strongly disliked most of the enemy designs. Not that fromsoft always has great enemy design either, but LoP just didnt vibe with me. I'll have to revisit it some day though
Gotta make the stories good for me. The story in all these games is all drawn out dog water trash.