I don’t think there’s a place for non-changeable difficulty settings in FromSoft games, imo. In any game, for that matter. It just artificially keeps more people from playing your games and makes them less accessible to people who are struggling for whatever reason that may be.
I get the “vision™” argument in that developers create games as they want them to exist and don’t want to dilute it. However, I think it’s a very narrow-minded view to have nowadays. Accessibility options for games are quite common too after all
There’s nothing artificial about players bouncing off of souls games. As for “whatever reason that may be”, I think we both know you only mean difficulty, but you have a very shallow perspective on difficulty.
Every souls game has been cleared by a striking number of visually disabled people, and each game presents the opportunity to “grind” so that your character is substantially more powerful than enemies in the area you’re in. The selectable difficulty is in your approach. It’s one of the main reasons the games have mass appeal, and you can choose to play without player invasions in every single one via mechanics or offline mode. You can effectively, through just simple math and perseverance, play the whole game on easy mode.
The design flexibility in souls games is MADE for people who find the game too hard to have agency. If rolling is difficult for you, a large majority of bosses can be tackled by sprinting away and casting spells. If magic doesn’t make sense to you, there’s weapons with naturally long reaches that stun enemies well. Many challenging segments can be handled by not interacting with them directly, such as shooting immobile enemies or ones that otherwise cannot reach you with a bow. The games even provide a spyglass or binoculars so you can aim at enemies outside your lock on range with magic.
Traditional difficulty settings in the face of all this would be worthless. A huge portion of the appeal of the souls games is Friction, an element of design where there’s an obstacle for the player to overcome. Without presenting the player with a challenge where walking forward and light attacking might stop you for a life or two, there is no point in acquiring any equipment to empower yourself further. There are PLENTY of games where you may just mash one attack button and see success, even within the same genre(s)(action and rpg).
Pokemon games are somewhat unique in this regard, where the game itself will literally never ask you to do anything but be aware of type advantage and press attack. There are no cases where you NEED a setup team or baton pass in the core game, it’s just for playing with other people. If that’s your speed, that’s okay, but there is an enormous demographic we used to refer to as “core gamers” that are looking for games with sufficient friction.
Accessibility and difficulty do not always hold hands. None of Fromsoft’s games start off easy, they expect you to learn their mechanics and interact with them. If you’re getting frustrated that you aren’t improving personally, or don’t know how (it’s practice), the games may legitimately just not be for you. The amount of extra effort to rebalance every enemy’s statistics to make the game easier is enormous, and it would not fix the reasons many players die repeatedly; you would have players who did not learn a lesson from normal enemies dying over and over again to a boss that “checks” whether or not you know what was being taught.
What would you actually want from an easy mode? Slower enemy animations? Changed health values? Edited enemy behavior, like decision making speed or aggro range? All of these things are already curated to allow the player to overcome them either through learned mechanical precision or improving their stats, so when neither of those matter how much game is really left outside the barbie doll dressup?
I get what you’re saying, yet I feel like it’s a gatekeepy opinion. I myself have played and finished all FromSoft titles except for DS 1-3, multiple times even. I enjoy the challenge, some don’t, simply put. FS adds a lot of variables to the games that make the games easier in one way or another. However, implementing difficulty sliders like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example, literally does not take away any accomplishment from players who don’t want to adjust those.
So yea, in an ideal world, all the suggestions for difficulty adjustments you mentioned would be added to all games where they make sense. It’s a game to be played and enjoyed. People pay for it, so they should be able to play with it the way they want. If they want a story mode, let them have it. If they want to reduce enemy health, resistance, whatever, let them do that. It literally does not matter.
I wouldn’t feel any less accomplishment from beating Isshin three times over, finishing Bloodborne four times etc. if there were difficulty settings. The argument of “this game isn’t for you” just leaves a sour note for me.
Edit: The Souls community is toxic and gatekeepy towards new players as is. Why not make an effort and change something so minute that would alleviate some of the issues?
It’s not a small task, it’s a monumental task. I listed examples of existing difficulty features in games and outlined why it doesn’t make sense for from games. You’re completely missing the point, and willfully ignoring the fact that you are not the target audience.
The reason I even mentioned the mainline Pokemon games is that they aren’t for me. They will NEVER add any level of real difficulty to a pokemon game, so it doesn’t provide the friction I want in a game. And that’s okay. I’m not so entitled or delusional that I think gamefreak should cater to my tastes over that of their existing fanbase, and I’m content to rely on romhacks, mods, and similar titles like siralim to provide the depth and challenge I’m looking for in the genre. “Just add an easy mode” is an asinine take when you imply, like you have here, that it’s something the developer could just turn on. It’s more like three or four digits of work hours that wouldn’t contribute to sales in a meaningful way.
The difficulty is an intrinsic part of a game’s design. Changing it means the game changes entirely. Not every game is designed with variable difficulty in mind.
There is an entire branch of role-playing games these days that argue that balancing is a pointless endeavour, so just make it clear to the players that so and so is gonna kill them if they ain’t careful and let them figure it out. It’s called Old School Renaissance and as a GM, I absolutely love that approach.
Dark Souls is exactly that. You wanna go through that boneyard? The skeletons that one shot you and keep respawning don’t intimidate you? Then fair fucks to you and onward to glory. Otherwise better take the other path or come up with a stratagem.
It’s really wild to get a group of players that expect (consciously or not) that everything in the game world is there for them to defeat. So when the level 1 party is like “fuck it let’s attack the dragon” and gets roasted they’re like “wtf??”. The DM is like "it’s a gods damned dragon and you’re two farmers and a guy with a lute. What did you expect?’
Hopefully the style and such gets sorted out before the game starts.
You can change the difficulty, it’s just not spoon-fed to you with a single button. Their games are RPGs, if they’re too hard then level your character and upgrade your weapons. There’s also a myriad of items and spells you can use to buff/assist you through challenges, and if that’s still not enough you can use wikis to find what attack types enemies are weak to or strategies/cheeses other people used.
And if all of that is still not enough, you can use mods to make the games easier.
I don’t think there’s a place for non-changeable difficulty settings in FromSoft games, imo. In any game, for that matter. It just artificially keeps more people from playing your games and makes them less accessible to people who are struggling for whatever reason that may be.
I get the “vision™” argument in that developers create games as they want them to exist and don’t want to dilute it. However, I think it’s a very narrow-minded view to have nowadays. Accessibility options for games are quite common too after all
There’s nothing artificial about players bouncing off of souls games. As for “whatever reason that may be”, I think we both know you only mean difficulty, but you have a very shallow perspective on difficulty.
Every souls game has been cleared by a striking number of visually disabled people, and each game presents the opportunity to “grind” so that your character is substantially more powerful than enemies in the area you’re in. The selectable difficulty is in your approach. It’s one of the main reasons the games have mass appeal, and you can choose to play without player invasions in every single one via mechanics or offline mode. You can effectively, through just simple math and perseverance, play the whole game on easy mode.
The design flexibility in souls games is MADE for people who find the game too hard to have agency. If rolling is difficult for you, a large majority of bosses can be tackled by sprinting away and casting spells. If magic doesn’t make sense to you, there’s weapons with naturally long reaches that stun enemies well. Many challenging segments can be handled by not interacting with them directly, such as shooting immobile enemies or ones that otherwise cannot reach you with a bow. The games even provide a spyglass or binoculars so you can aim at enemies outside your lock on range with magic.
Traditional difficulty settings in the face of all this would be worthless. A huge portion of the appeal of the souls games is Friction, an element of design where there’s an obstacle for the player to overcome. Without presenting the player with a challenge where walking forward and light attacking might stop you for a life or two, there is no point in acquiring any equipment to empower yourself further. There are PLENTY of games where you may just mash one attack button and see success, even within the same genre(s)(action and rpg).
Pokemon games are somewhat unique in this regard, where the game itself will literally never ask you to do anything but be aware of type advantage and press attack. There are no cases where you NEED a setup team or baton pass in the core game, it’s just for playing with other people. If that’s your speed, that’s okay, but there is an enormous demographic we used to refer to as “core gamers” that are looking for games with sufficient friction.
Accessibility and difficulty do not always hold hands. None of Fromsoft’s games start off easy, they expect you to learn their mechanics and interact with them. If you’re getting frustrated that you aren’t improving personally, or don’t know how (it’s practice), the games may legitimately just not be for you. The amount of extra effort to rebalance every enemy’s statistics to make the game easier is enormous, and it would not fix the reasons many players die repeatedly; you would have players who did not learn a lesson from normal enemies dying over and over again to a boss that “checks” whether or not you know what was being taught.
What would you actually want from an easy mode? Slower enemy animations? Changed health values? Edited enemy behavior, like decision making speed or aggro range? All of these things are already curated to allow the player to overcome them either through learned mechanical precision or improving their stats, so when neither of those matter how much game is really left outside the barbie doll dressup?
Tl;Dr: git gud
I get what you’re saying, yet I feel like it’s a gatekeepy opinion. I myself have played and finished all FromSoft titles except for DS 1-3, multiple times even. I enjoy the challenge, some don’t, simply put. FS adds a lot of variables to the games that make the games easier in one way or another. However, implementing difficulty sliders like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, for example, literally does not take away any accomplishment from players who don’t want to adjust those.
So yea, in an ideal world, all the suggestions for difficulty adjustments you mentioned would be added to all games where they make sense. It’s a game to be played and enjoyed. People pay for it, so they should be able to play with it the way they want. If they want a story mode, let them have it. If they want to reduce enemy health, resistance, whatever, let them do that. It literally does not matter.
I wouldn’t feel any less accomplishment from beating Isshin three times over, finishing Bloodborne four times etc. if there were difficulty settings. The argument of “this game isn’t for you” just leaves a sour note for me.
Edit: The Souls community is toxic and gatekeepy towards new players as is. Why not make an effort and change something so minute that would alleviate some of the issues?
It’s not a small task, it’s a monumental task. I listed examples of existing difficulty features in games and outlined why it doesn’t make sense for from games. You’re completely missing the point, and willfully ignoring the fact that you are not the target audience.
The reason I even mentioned the mainline Pokemon games is that they aren’t for me. They will NEVER add any level of real difficulty to a pokemon game, so it doesn’t provide the friction I want in a game. And that’s okay. I’m not so entitled or delusional that I think gamefreak should cater to my tastes over that of their existing fanbase, and I’m content to rely on romhacks, mods, and similar titles like siralim to provide the depth and challenge I’m looking for in the genre. “Just add an easy mode” is an asinine take when you imply, like you have here, that it’s something the developer could just turn on. It’s more like three or four digits of work hours that wouldn’t contribute to sales in a meaningful way.
Agree to disagree. I don’t think there’s any convincing to be achieved in either direction
The difficulty is an intrinsic part of a game’s design. Changing it means the game changes entirely. Not every game is designed with variable difficulty in mind.
There is an entire branch of role-playing games these days that argue that balancing is a pointless endeavour, so just make it clear to the players that so and so is gonna kill them if they ain’t careful and let them figure it out. It’s called Old School Renaissance and as a GM, I absolutely love that approach.
Dark Souls is exactly that. You wanna go through that boneyard? The skeletons that one shot you and keep respawning don’t intimidate you? Then fair fucks to you and onward to glory. Otherwise better take the other path or come up with a stratagem.
It’s really wild to get a group of players that expect (consciously or not) that everything in the game world is there for them to defeat. So when the level 1 party is like “fuck it let’s attack the dragon” and gets roasted they’re like “wtf??”. The DM is like "it’s a gods damned dragon and you’re two farmers and a guy with a lute. What did you expect?’
Hopefully the style and such gets sorted out before the game starts.
Easy mode already exists, it’s called summoning.
You can change the difficulty, it’s just not spoon-fed to you with a single button. Their games are RPGs, if they’re too hard then level your character and upgrade your weapons. There’s also a myriad of items and spells you can use to buff/assist you through challenges, and if that’s still not enough you can use wikis to find what attack types enemies are weak to or strategies/cheeses other people used.
And if all of that is still not enough, you can use mods to make the games easier.