Did Radahn today, third big boss - be interested to see what folk make of him as I suspect he’ll be polarising.
First storyline boss where you can use Torrent, and the whole set up / arena is a different dynamic.
Liked the change of style but had some frustrating deaths - he has some nuke attacks that felt a bit random. Poor horse taking a walloping.
I think a broken game mechanic is something completely different from intentional game design.
FWIW, I am familiar with that game. I own it. I don’t like it but I do not know why. I was never able to put my finger on it. It is the sort of game I usually like. That one is all on me though…I have no particular complaint about it. Just my personal preference.
The most famous “easy mode” play for DS1 was buying a bunch of arrows and shooting the drake dragons tail off from under the bridge. That weapon was so OP it diminished the first half of the game a little because no cool new gear could even come near its damage.
Oh yeah, I remember doing that. It felt cheap. I have no regrets.
Then there’s a point where, all the sudden, it wasn’t powerful anymore and you were fucked. lol.
The Gargoyles were brutal. I quit multiple times fighting them. Not like “turns it off for the night” quit but “done with this fucking game” and shelved it. I doubt I could easily beat them even today. Eventually something clicked and I started surviving. The drake sword made the gargoyles achievable for me.
This is why I suggested getting the zwei, the drake sword quickly becomes worthless once you start upgrading weapons.
The zwei stays relevant throughout the entire game. Also, with how poise works in DS1, you can stack the heaviest armor you can find, and trade hits with enemies until they fall. (It’s even a part of the infamous Giantdad pvp builds)
I think I’m done with DS1. For a reason I didn’t quite anticipate.
It’s true that it’s not as difficult as commonly said, at least in this area. In fact it’s downright easy. The problem is that it’s grindy. You’re basically forced to replay the same area over and over, not because you’re dying, but because the only way to level up or refill your fireballs/flasks is to rest and reset the area.
I’ve probably done this 20-25 times now, and died maybe 4 times. And because everything is always in exactly the same position, I can tell you exactly where each mob is, the type, and the range at which they attack you. I have a route through where I can kill each one with little to no damage. The only exception is when the RNG is against me; in particular, if the bomb throwers score a couple of lucky hits on the bridge. Otherwise I could almost do it blindfolded.
I hate this. It’s not memorization, per se–but that’s the net effect by being forced to repeat so many times. I don’t want to spend my precious brain cells remembering the map. I’m not even trying to; it’s just being imposed on me. And it’s boring as hell to play the same thing over and over again.
I know there are a couple of bosses coming up. Maybe I’ll give them a try since I’m decently leveled at this point (I think?)… but dang, I thought when I got past the difficulty aspects there would be something I liked in there. I know Skyrim gets some crap for kinda repetitive dungeons and stuff… but it never made me play through the same tiny area with the same exact enemies in the same linear path 20 times in a row as DS is doing. And doing so with infinite dreariness and no one to talk to besides a crazed merchant and not a single thing to do otherwise.
The same rules, a level playing field, is really important and ER feels like that is generally the case. Like a boss might have 100 times your stamina and health, have crazy moves, but it’s still fighting in the same engine, according to the same(ish) game physics.
It’s not always the case and there will prob be some exceptions in such a massive game. In DS2 some enemies would animation cancel out of a fat roll into an R1, which is completely impossible for you the player, or they would have infinite stamina - kinda bullshit to see this on routine enemies imho
Anyone playing Dark Souls 1 has prob been staggered by a hollow holding a torch - how TF does the weakest enemy in the game have a million poise on this attack? It’s a cheating hollow, that’s how - the poise on this one torch attack is distinct from the poise parameter that governs every other attack in the game.
Breath of the Wild ultimately had three difficulty levels if you think of it.
Normal: The default one that comes with the game. Enemies do not regenerate health and are “leveled” the original way. No extra super monsters out there, either.
Master Mode: Enemies regenerate health, are all one level higher in difficulty, and there are harder monsters out there on the map.
Super Duper Easy Mode: Find Majora’s Mask and wear it a lot. It makes you 90% invisible to all enemies and you can legit just walk around. Only available with the DLC, but you can even find it on normal mode. Almost a God mod of sorts, but not quite.
Storyteller described the summon as something that lets you bypass the content by more or less killing the boss for you. In that case I would call it no different than the Mario warp zones. Tools to skip content are not the same thing as tools which help a player engage with content.
That’s ungracious. I feel like everybody in this thread has been engaging in good faith, and that we’ve cracked into some really interesting game design topics.
I keep seeing the statement from franchise fans that a difficulty slider wouldn’t help because [reasons] but, speaking as someone who isn’t a fan and is playing the game, I strongly disagree. It’s possible to be playing the game for the exploration, world building and lore – which fans insist is amazing so why wouldn’t other people want to experience it? It’s possible to be playing because you DO enjoy the combat but you’re just not very good at it and an ER “easy” would give them the same joy and challenge fans get now on the default level rather than walling them off. Or people who enjoy the fluidity and mechanics of the combat but aren’t enthralled by the “Prepare to Die lol” aspect of it and are perfectly happy engaging big weird monsters with a strong probability of success from the start. Who’s to tell them they’re not getting the “right” experience from the game or are “missing the point”? Hey, throw a Nightmare level in there as well and give the people who say “Pfft, it’s not hard at all git gud” something new to do.
Hell, even for people who are only moderately taken with the lore and design and all that, a lot of people are willing to travel through a game to see how it shakes out provided they can actually progress at a decent rate. So, again, it’s inaccurate to say an easier difficulty “wouldn’t help anyway”. In fact, I struggle to think of a scenario where a slider “wouldn’t help” aside from someone who straight up doesn’t want to play an action-RPG at all. There might be reasons to not add difficulty adjustments but I don’t think “It won’t help you anyway” is one of them unless we’re talking about a very specific instance.
You can summon other players. They might be able to do it all for you, or they might not. I was talking about NPCs, I think they’re more useful as help, they won’t take down a boss for you but they will make it easier. Certainly the ash spirits have only been good as a distraction so far.
Obviously a difficulty slider would help make the game easier.
I think the Souls design decision is to level your character instead of having a difficulty slider. Boss too hard? Go away and farm runes, level up, find some better gear, come back for another go.
So a slider would help allow people to enjoy the meat of the game without wasting hours upon hours killing trash mobs for EldenBucks to level with. I fail to see the downside for those people.
Perhaps the meat of the game is the levelling and grinding? I don’t know. I wouldn’t care if it had a difficulty setting, but I understand that it doesn’t, and probably never will, because that is the game the developers want to make so all this talk of difficulty settings just seems pointless. It seems that DS games are intentionally made to be a single difficulty and if someone doesn’t like the game because of this then the game is literally not for them. Just like Mario Cart games aren’t for me. I’m not the intended audience.
Maybe. But I never hear anyone talk about how great the game is because they were able to spend hours killing soldiers and skeletons and wolves.
I also understand that it’s unlikely that the game will ever get a slider. I just think that “…and it wouldn’t help you anyway” is misguided and inaccurate. Speaking as someone who is a casual player rather than a franchise defender, I see numerous ways a slider would easily help me and other non-die hards enjoy the game much more on multiple levels. Again, there might be arguments for not adding a slider (precious art vision, whatever) but “You don’t actually want that because it wouldn’t help you” isn’t one of them.
I think for many people who don’t enjoy playing the game, a difficulty slider won’t increase their enjoyment. For people who do enjoy playing the game but can’t get very far (like me), a difficulty slider would be good for them but then it comes down to the other reasons for not having a difficulty slider.
FromSoftware have carved out a niche and made a game style unique enough that other games are compared to them, “Souls-like”, “Souls-lite” and so on, similar to how perma-death dungeon crawlers are compared to Rogue. I think having a set difficulty is just part of what they do. No-one would suggest a Rogue-like game have save points, even though it would make the game easier and more accessible.
I recently played Deep Sky Derelicts which is considered a roguelike but has both a save point mode and a permadeath mode. That’s literally the only difference between the modes. I’m sure there’s plenty more but since I just played that one, it immediately sprang to mind.
Personally I’m loving the game. I initially got discouraged and started going through the process of getting a refund. Now I’m staying up until 2am in the morning playing it. ER is a lot more accessible than other Souls games in that there is a lot to do so you can level up without feeling as grindy.