at least in dark souls ect they give you the expected accouterments for the games genre
cuphead doesn’t give you much except a middle finger …
I tried Dark Souls and hated it. I don’t have the inclination to run the same thing fifty times to learn the combos to get past it and feel zero pleasure in beating the boss at that point because I’m thoroughly frustrated and could have spent that time playing something else. It’s just not a style of game play that appeals to me.
But… I recognize that it’s very popular and a lot of people DO enjoy that sort of thing. I don’t think the genre sucks, it’s just not a genre for me like Bullet Hell shooters or 2Hard4U style platformers. Which is occasionally a shame – I’d probably like Dark Souls’ world building and some of the other “git gud” stuff like Cuphead has cool art but I recognize my limits, both skillwise and interest.
Games like this are more about muscle memory than rote memorization. You develop reflexes and predictive abilities rather than just memorizing patterns.
You want a single-player game that is 100% memorization, play a Guitar Hero game.
the sad thing is bullet hell shooters are nicer to lay than cuphead …
Dark Souls addict here, it just seemed to click with me. The thing that amazed me was the excellent voice acting, the mysterious world/universe, and the intriguing characters.
The level of narrative restraint is something story writers never have the temperament/patience to pull off. DS, itself, starts off horribly with an incomprehensible info dump of story and world-building that is utterly impenetrable to the player, and often ignored. But afterwards DS gets the tone soooo right; lets the story drop off into the background and tells it only through either hyper-developed lore items or as reflected by NPC emotions, actions and behaivours. Those of us who are curious/attentive, discover bits of story for ourselves and that “legwork” (or mild internet sleuthing) makes the story so deliciously intriguing -like finding thematic connections in a loved book.
I just I can’t think of another game that blends themes like desperation, respite, triumph, and fatalism into key areas of their game’s tone, mechanics, and narrative.
Not just a run-of-the-mill game, it really is a landmark. A well crafted work of art in what is normally a soulless (hyuck hyuck) industry.
See, THAT’s why I wanted to play the game - the atmosphere, the lore, the design. I’ve heard so many goods things about them, and I’m really, really pissed off that I can’t experience them.
Me too, but I tried it on a PC, and I couldn’t even figure out how to pull off a halfway-decent sword-swing, so after about 15 minutes, I uninstalled it. Its excellent story may as well have been written in ancient Phoenician for all that I could access it.
**Alessan **I understand your dilemma. Dark Souls does have accessibility issues from being a difficult game. The gatekeeping culture of DS players isn’t helping too. If all you want is a DS “easy mode” there are ways to get it. Cheat.
Up the **Vitality **stat so that you will have the health to be more resilient from attacks, and up the **Endurance **stat to have the energy to act more often. You should refrain from touching any other stat to keep from breaking the game flow (once everything is allowed nothing is of value to you).
Cheat engine 7.0
Cheat Engine Basic Tutorial/Darksouls
Cheat tables for cheat engine.
If you decide to cheat, play in offline so that you are not ruining other people’s online game-play. If you want to play online, don’t cheat and just use an in-game exploit to get unlimited souls to up your Vitality & Endurance.
That’s a distinction without a difference for some of us.
For me, the reality is that I can only be relied on to press the right button about 90% of the time. It’s usually not a matter of not seeing what I need to do–just a matter of getting my fingers to input the right response.
With enough practice, I can increase this fraction slightly, though it’s not that I’m actually getting better at the hand-eye coordination. It’s just that I’m learning the pattern and getting enough of a head start that I can be a little more diligent at the inputs.
One consequence here is that when I beat the boss or whatever, it’s always due to luck. It’s not that I haven’t improved at all–it’s just that I’m still making mistakes (or potential mistakes) all over the place, and I just keep trying until my mistakes are unimportant or just few enough that I don’t die.
And so actually beating the boss is immensely unsatisfying. It’s like some slot machine where I theoretically have control over the wheels but the timing is so tight that it might as well be completely random. Increasing my odds a tiny bit through practice doesn’t change this feeling.
I suspect that an easy mode isn’t going to make the game enjoyable for me. The unforgiving nature is central to the game. I like hard games, but hard and unforgiving are not the same thing.
It’s like how I can’t stand stealth missions that you have to restart if you’re spotted. Because I WILL be spotted; there’s absolutely no doubt that at some point I’ll slip up and be discovered. As far as I’m concerned, stealth is what happens before the action starts.
I played it ages ago and actually finished it. I remember enjoying it so I bought the Nintendo Switch version recently and I can’t get past the very first section.
I wonder how much overlap there is between Dark Souls, Starcraft and Counterstrike players. They all seem to involve quick reflexes and rote memorization built through long practice. Minimize the delay between sensory input and motor output. That’s one way for something to be hard.
Hard can also be like Kerbal Space Program where it can take 10 hours to even make it to orbit or Oxygen Not Included. But that doesn’t at all rely on quick reflexes and rote memorization. There, it’s more about throughput.
Dark Souls isn’t a game series that requires fast twitchy reflexes, most of the time during a skirmish you are waiting for your opponent to commit to an action so you can counter-respond. All you need to win an engagement is strategic positioning with well timed blocking/dodging and well timed attacks/ripostes.
Think of an old samurai duel from any Kurosawa film. Sparring involves periods of high-tension inaction/waiting, followed by crucial acts of slight deceptions in movement, a commitment to an attack, and finally/hopefully a well timed/placed counter to the attack. It really tests your patience and tolerance to stress.
The layers of deceptions can run pretty deep if you are PvPing too (playing against a computer algorithm is much more simple though).
Eh, debatable - it’s true for 1 and 2 ; but IMO 3 was influenced quite a bit by Bloodbourne’s more aggressive, twitchy gameplay. It’s not quite Bayonetta-level yet ; but timing windows & reactivity have clearly tightened compared to DS1’s ponderous and weighty “pressing the attack button is merely filing the first bit of paperwork that’ll eventually allow you to swing your sword” combat style
(with apologies to Hbomb, whose admirable image I’m probably mangling)
So true. The story of the fair lady touched my heart every playthrough. The other firekeepers were fair game but never her. I may have been invading as a Darkwraith but at heart I was always a Servant of Chaos.
Should Games Like Dark Souls Have Difficulty Settings? This escapist video popped up on my youtube feed a few minutes ago, not a very well done debate but seems relevant.
Apparently there’s a better discussion here.
From little that I’ve seen of DS, I’d agree with orcenio–it’s less twitchy and more about hitting the right timing and responding in the right way.
This doesn’t help me at all, though. I’ve was playing a bit of Animal Crossing over the weekend, and there’s a little fishing minigame. There’s *one *button you have to press when you see the right kind of splash. You hear and feel the splash too. You just have to press that one button in a really sloppy timing window, maybe half a second after you see the splash.
At best, I can do that 96, 97% of the time. There’s just something about my nerve wiring that prevents me from doing better. There are in-game bonuses for getting N catches in a row. 10 was no problem and I just barely managed 50. But 100 or more? Never gonna happen.
I can do a lot of stuff in KSP that some would consider hard–for instance, it’s no problem for me to fly a manned mission to the Mun and then Minmus, by hand (no maneuver planner, etc.) and return them safely to Kerbin. But none of the timing requirements are less than a few seconds, and everything has minutes of lead-in, so you always know exactly what to expect. It has a working pause, too.
I have a slightly different way of looking at it (though the end result is about the same).I just see grinding as unfun, whether it is grinding to level up to be able to play something, or if it’s just playing over and over to “level up” as a player.
It’s not that you can’t have a boss that takes a bit to figure out the strategy to beat. It’s about having to play the same thing over and over to get better.
Dark Souls in theory avoids this, but, in practice, the amount of times you need to retry feels like grinding, since so much time is spend redoing the same thing.
The games that I think do it correctly just have so much content that you want to play again. Binding of Isaac isn’t a game that I play a lot, but I do enjoy it when I do, because each retry is something different. I do wish it could be a bit easier, so I could get a feeling of accomplishment more often, but at least I enjoy going back every once in a while.
I agree with you on this one. Which is why I never did purchase any of the DArk Souls games.
The only way I could accept dying over/over in a game is if it was a puzzle game where you have to work your way through a situation by using your wits or brains.
Learning by trial/error.
But then it’s no longer a mere action/adventure game but a puzzle game.