That definitely does not make the game look good, if this is a widespread belief among the players. Why the hell would it be up to you to force people to play the game the way you want them to? If it’s in the game, the devs put it there for a reason, and it’s not up to you to say it’s “wrong.”
I won’t object to people liking a type of game I don’t like or for enjoying things that are hard and frustrating. But I do object to what amounts to bullying. What you described is just bigger, stronger players beating up on the smaller, weaker ones to “keep them in line.” And, outside the game world, that is called bullying.
PvP is not about dominating other people, pushing your will onto others. It’s just an additional challenge.
And, on preview: Everyone who I’ve ever met who plays Dark Souls says it is hard. Hell, you just were arguing that it’s okay for you to attack other players because they were playing it on “easy mode.” You actively make the game harder for people–sure seems like you think the difficulty is important enough to even mistreat people.
Because it’s an interesting discussion. The OP tried playing the game, got frustrated, and thought it might make for an interesting topic to discuss. And the number of replies suggests it has.
It’s not like this thread is just some whinefest about the game. It’s people discussing what fundamentally makes them not like this type of game–and then others saying what fundamentally appeals to them about the game.
I know I had never before even considered the idea that people found the game to break their suspension of disbelief as a problem. I just always assumed that it was people like me who don’t like the repetition and frustration.
I even wonder if the people who enjoy the game actually have to do as much repetition. Maybe their frustration is lower because they’re better at playing these types of games–that they mesh well with their brains. Or that maybe they’ve played so many more games than I have that they’ve built up skill.
And I never would have imagined that people in the online game were going around attacking noobs and forcing them to play in “hard” mode. I mean, that’s just griefing. They literally have no chance of beating them. I figured people who like challenge would, you know, do things that are challenging, not stepping on the noobs.
I learned a lot from this thread, even though I normally barely even think about the Dark Souls games. The game that I lament being so hard is Cuphead. The whole concept is extremely cool, but I can’t dodge that much stuff in boss fights, even with an easy mode.
Getting invaded by a twink build is the least of your problems. If you’re unlucky, you get invaded by someone who corrupts your character and gets your save game banned, destroying all progress unless you had a backup.
I think, to me, a game is mostly about an experience—a narrative, a setting, a world, a bit of escapism, and yes, when crushing faceless minions of some dark whatever, a bit about power. The idea of gaming for a challenge is, to me, a bit like reading a novel for a challenge, or watching a movie for a challenge—it’s just not the right category.
Perhaps a part of that is that I play pretty much exclusively single-player. Challenge, to the extent that this applies to the medium at all (to me), is something I could see myself enjoying against others—like the challenge of getting better at chess to beat opponents I couldn’t beat before, and likewise for sports and such (not that I’m terribly much of a sports person, but I get the concept in a way I don’t with video games). Even in these settings, I’m not hugely competitive, though.
So maybe the problem is just that, to me, games belong more to the category of novels, films, plays and the like—things to be experienced and enjoyed—than they do to the category of sports and such—things to improve at, beat others, and so on.
I’m also not saying that games ought to change to better accommodate my own tastes. I do think that there are certain games that would’ve benefited from not incorporating a Dark Souls-like mechanic, or making it optional—mostly, the aforementioned Jedi: Fallen Order and Darksiders III. But again, to me, this is in the same region of discussion as examining the relative merits of films or novels—one can criticize without the demand that everything conform to one’s own tastes (otherwise, Cafe Society would be a pretty empty forum).
Well, except that this argument includes the multiplayer invasion mechanic! The devs put that in the game too, and they put it in there for a reason (actually, I’d argue they put it in for a lot of reasons). The people who made the game made it possible for powerful and skilled players to murder less powerful and less skilled players - that is an explicitly allowed part of the game design. Why do you think it’s there?
Here’s my half-assed theory. The From games are my favorite video games in the world, and it’s not because they are difficult - but the difficulty is an essential component of the actual reason, which is this:
What I value in games, more than anything, is a sense of emergent gameplay - that I have many choices of how to proceed, and that each one will result in a different outcome. I want to feel like my experience of a game is different from anyone else’s experience of that game - like I am having a truly unique adventure that no one else will ever have. It is the difficulty that enables this. The game is challenging enough that I have to explore different approaches, and find the ones that work best for me. The way that I experienced Ornstein and Smough (paired bosses in the first DS that are exceptionally difficult) is a unique and specific memory. And yeah, the time I got ganked by a much better player using a sword I had never found myself and dressed, for some reason, as the Joker - that’s a unique experience and it hardly ruined the game. I just died. So what? I died a lot!
By way of contrast, right now I’m playing the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it’s fun enough and beautiful to look at. But it’s basically easy, and at times it feels like I’m basically just tapping “X” to proceed. That’s not the same level of fun for me, so I’ll finish this game but I’ll barely remember it down the line.
I think this ignores the fact that games as a participatory medium are simply able to use other devices than a novel to create a mood and tell a story. For instance, novels, films, and plays absolutely uses devices like this in their storytelling. If we want to stick to challenge, for instance, Finnegans Wake is a deliberately difficult book written in such a way to recreate a surreal experience. David Lynch’s works do similar things – it presents events in an obfuscated, disjointed style to heighten the surreal feeling. If you want a simpler example, works will sometimes present characters that are hard to understand as a joke, or write language that’s hard to parse just to, well, give that feeling.
Games use difficulty for this purpose as well. For instance, the game Celeste is a game about overcoming anxiety and other mental illness, confronting your personal demons, and bettering yourself. It keeps a tally of every death you’ve had at the end of every level, but it uses this not to taunt you, but to cheer you on and show you how much you persevered, and this ties into the game’s narrative about how determined Madeline is to climb the mountain and overcome her personal issues.
Now, Celeste also has something I wish Dark Souls had which is an Assist Mode. Which is a mode explicitly labelled as not the intended experience, and contains things like slowing the game speed down, so people with disabilities, declining reflexes, or simply lack of time can experience the game at a pace and difficulty that’s appropriate for them. So they can still get that intended feeling of perseverance and, but tuned so you’re actually physically able to complete it. It wouldn’t work well with Online, but if they mandated offline only, it would be something in the Soulsborne games too I’d really support.
As is, Dark Souls also uses the difficulty in a similar way. The game is all about feelings of futility and hopelessness, and especially is concerned with the problems with immortality (whether it be of people, states, or ideologies), and it uses the difficulty in a very intentional way to set that mood and accent that. Now, again, it’s fine if you don’t like what Dark Souls does with this, but it is using its difficulty in the same way a film may use rapid editing to make a scene exciting, or a book may use a really long run-on sentence to simulate a character not shutting up.
Not all challenges in games do this, of course. Most very old arcade games don’t have any themes like this (or if they do it’s simply “the alien force is overwhelming!”) and while you can read a narrative and themes into it based on the execution, it would be fair to call most of them just challenge for challenge’s sake. And similarly, many games have optional superbosses that have no real narrative significance (again, beyond maybe “they’re this tough cuz they’re like, the strongest character in universe, man”) and are just there for bragging rights. That’s its own situation. But Dark Souls isn’t that, not only at least. While From probably set out to make a difficult game because they thought that would be fun, first and foremost, it absolutely uses the challenge to support a narrative, themes, and an experience, so I don’t think it’s really right to say it’s doing anything different from a film or book etc. It’s just using devices to support its narrative that are unique to games being an interactive experience that aren’t available to films or books or plays (though, again, see the first paragraph, both mediums have absolutely toyed with a concept of “difficulty”).
E: While it’s not execution difficulty. A good illustration of this is that Miyazaki (Dark Souls’ lead designer) designed the games to be cryptic and difficult to figure out what to do and interpret the story, because he wanted to evoke the mystique he had felt when he was younger and reading and playing from untranslated Dungeons and Dragons source books while his English wasn’t that good.
I love/hate the genre. I love the exploration, the small fights against the mobs, the pathfinding and puzzles, and the rpg gear experience. I loathe the boss fights.
My typical play is very enjoyable until I reach a boss gate. I immediately start webbing and youtube for shortcuts/strategies/playthroughs so that I can spend the absolute minimum amount of time in tedious frustration. If there is an ally summon, I use it every time possible.
I’ve played Dark Souls 2, Bloodbourne, and Nioh. My Nioh playthrough is stopped at, you guessed it, an annoying boss that even ally summons have failed to get me through. The game is now living on my shelf gathering dust.
I like emergent gameplay too… but it has to not suck. KSP has emergent gameplay; it’s not much more than a physics engine and a few pre-baked parts that you snap together, and yet it feels like you’re running a space program. Everyone has a totally different experience. It’s awesome.
On the other hand: in Fallout 76, mostly you’re in PvE mode, but certain things transition you to PvP mode. A bit like getting invaded, I guess. One day I needed some fusion cores, and spent an hour or so clearing out a power plant that can produce these cores. This is a PvP-triggering event. When I finished, I was immediately shot in the back and died instantly. I didn’t even see my attackers until after dying, but then saw they were using duped super-powerful items. So yay, I spent an hour hoping to gain some much-needed resources, and it was all for naught.
This was emergent gameplay, too. The game set up some basic rules about how PvP is triggered, the value of resources in the game, and so on, and out of it we get a situation where ganking noobs who have just opened up a workshop is strongly incentivized.
This was a memorable experience. It was also completely lame and a significant reason I put down the game for a while. Not because dying that one time was really that big a deal, but because the whole thing felt cheap and stupid. One of the worst crimes a game can make is to instill a sense of “why am I bothering”; after all, all games are ultimately pointless and so they need to earn their keep in that respect. I see no reason to think of emergent gameplay as a positive when it results in weaker players being made miserable.
And another memorable experience in F76, more recently: I was sneaking around the outskirts of some homestead that can been overrun with powerful creatures. They were tough, and I had died once already, but I was generally effective in waiting for one of the creatures to get far away from the group, then picking it off. Slowly I was making progress in my sneaky way.
But then some guy shows up with a legendary minigun and power armor and goes in blazing, mowing down the remaining baddies. I’m sure he thought he was doing me a favor, and in a sense he was. But it was lame from my perspective; I was hoping to do things my way and this guy disrupts the experience. Instead of erasing progress like the gankers, this guy erased part of the quest progression. Almost as bad in my experience.
This was also emergent. The map is big and so it was likely just luck that the guy ran across me. He may have thought of himself as some kind of paladin, saving the helpless–enhancing the role-play from his perspective. But that’s not the kind of emergence that enhances *my *experience.
Yeah, I just can’t get into “forced” PvP in predominately PvE games. If I’m playing a game based around PvP then, cool, that’s what I came for. It’s not as though I’m trying to collect random winky-dinks in Battlefield and getting mad that someone shot me.
For a personal version (since I don’t play Dark Souls), I play The Division 2, a shooter that is 95% PvE. There’s a couple “Dark Zones” that have PvP but they can be mostly ignored. Unless you want one of the few items that drop exclusively in there. Then I gotta go in, kill NPCs (i.e. play the PvE game) until my drop comes around, grab it then pray no random PC comes along to kill me before I can safely extract it. It’s not fun. I mean, the PvP advocates will spin a yarn about how it’s a thrilling experience of anyone potentially being an ally or enemy, yadda yadda but really it’s just an annoyance. I don’t feel thrilled or some nerve pounding tension, just annoyed at the extra steps and more annoyed when some dude tries to gank me for the shit I just wasted an hour or two trying to get. I don’t want the PvP and I don’t feel it creates a unique story (“I got a thing and some dude with an min/max’d build one-shotted me” isn’t really a story), I just want to go back to the PvE game play I loaded the game for.
The DS1 PvP / PvE balance seems very well balanced to me - you can play the whole game PvE and never get invaded by another player (playing hollow). But, if you want to summon help (another player or an NPC) for a difficult level, or a hard boss then you must turn human and you can then be invaded.
Seems fair, and even then there is an invasion timer to stop you getting re-invaded in the near future. So if you’re really not into PvP you can still summon no prob. Most players seem cool with it but there is a vocal minority of hatemail senders who want multi-player on their own terms, not the games, and feel invasion is somehow unfair if they are playing coop.
Anyhow was just thinking of this thread after a fun gravelord sesh in the Depths. Spread misery to lure phantoms?
I just meant it as playing invasions. Invaders appear as red phantoms in Dark Souls.
Ds3 has the way of blue covenant - if you’re in it and get invaded by a red, 1 or 2 players in the Blue Sentinels covenant will be summoned to your aid. Cool mechanic when it works.
This kinda equivocates on the notion of ‘challenge’, though. Sports and such are competitive challenges; a David Lynch movie isn’t something you can win, or be best at. I’m fine with the challenge a difficult—in the sense of, requiring engagement to appreciate—work of art presents, but the challenge of ‘gitting gud’ at a video game simply does nothing to me—the incentive and reward just isn’t a good fit for my personal predilections, I guess.
This kind of argument runs the danger of being able to justify anything, though. That something is intentional doesn’t necessarily make it good. A three-hour recording of nails scratching on a chalkboard is annoying, but it doesn’t become good just because it’s intentionally annoying, aiming to create an atmosphere of annoyance, or what have you. On the other hand, if it’s the point of Dark Souls to generate an air of frustration, then it’s succeeded impressively, frustrating me right out of wanting to play it!
However, I should reiterate that my complaint isn’t with Dark Souls, as such: it’s a game I tried, found not to my tastes, and gave up on. My loss, if anyone’s. I can’t even claim to have formed a terribly sophisticated opinion on it.
It’s rather that it seems now that every other game has some form of DS mechanics, without there being even a pretense of justification. Telperion above made the comparison to complaining about rom-coms not having enough car chases, but it’s rather the other way around: imagine there was a hugely successful film revolving mostly around car chases, and now, every other film feels the need to inject lots of car chases. Whatever the merits of the original film, and whether or not you liked it, I think it’s fair game to be annoyed by such tendencies.
The Dark Souls games are difficult to get in to, when I plsyed DS1, I got as far as the the bridge in Undead Burg where the hollows lob firebombs at you and decided it wasn’t for me. I cam eback about a year later played it a bit more and struggled through and beat the Taurus Demon after multiple attempts, after which point I got it. The game is about struggling to overcome seeminglt insurmountable odds by improving and not so much improving your character, becoming OP by levelling up is an incredibly slow wy to defeat the game, but by learning from your failures. It’s not a game though that requires precise button presses or perfection, those games exist, it’s a game that says look you can’t expect to go in to a situation cold and suceed everytime, but with perservance what at first seems impossible can be overcome. The idea of rebirth is integral to the pplot, though the plot is obscure, whcih I do like about the games.
When I first got in to DS I used to play offline after being invaded a few times, but after a whiel a learned to lvoe the multiplayer mechanics, thoguh was never great at it. DS2 was okay, but I never got really in to despite perserving for a while. DS3 I completed and enjoyed, but after coming back to it a couple of years later I got in to massively, especially the multiplyer and i can beat most people one-on-one. I would rate DS3 as the best game of all time due to its improved graphics and mechnaics over the original.
Wouldn’t most people be in a similar boat there? Gitting gud at a video game does do something for me, but it isn’t much. The challenge of reading a demanding book, say, can give you insights that last your whole life, even the emotional response on first read can resonate through the decades. But if I solo Sister Friede (v hard boss on Dark Souls 3) I’ve basically forgotten about it the next day to all intents and purposes.
It is sort of empty, at least the gitting gud part in isolation. If it’s part of a big community or social interaction around the game then that’s a different story, or there are wider aspects to the game. There are a lot of posts on the DS reddits saying how the game helped people through tough times, for example, or coping with mental illness, I guess due to the themes of perseverance and refusing to give up.
Good vid here of someone to which the above manifestly does not apply - not to amke any particular point, it’s just an awesome example of someone who cares about gitting gud (loads of swearing so NSFWFH).
It's interesting because the passion is so real. HAve you ever heard anyone say 'I am a legend' like that and so obviously mean it? Corporations would pay a billion dollars to learn how to bottle that real-ness and sell it. But he is doing something that literally less than 100 people on earth directly care about - speed-running one level on a 25 year old video game.
There’s challenging and there’s challenging. I don’t want the game equivalent of four schoolyard bullies two grades ahead of me beating me to a whimpering pulp, stealing my pants and laughing at me for what a loser I am.
Watching through runs of the various Souls games via Twitch or Youtube or whatever, I get the whole “try, fail, try again, fail a little better, keep improving until you succeed” bits in terms of the general gameplay, but it seems to go a little overboard with the “quest/storyline” stuff. Like if you want to complete Onion Bro’s story, there’s a point where he will die if you don’t make some preparations ahead of time, and I don’t think there’s any real warning that you have to do something before you talk to him.
So, if you’re not looking at a guide, you’ll probably fail first time, but he won’t reset if you die, you’re just out of luck until your next playthrough. Running back through a group of mobs everytime you fail to kill a boss is one thing, running through 2/3 of the game to get to a certain quest point seems quite another.
None of the NPCs respawn in playthroughs and most are fated to die tragically. Let Sir Onion go as the heroic knight of Caterina that he is. It’s more tragic if he survives.
