All The Reasons Why Some Games Shouldn't Have An Easy Mode
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- čas přidán 26. 06. 2024
- In this video I detail every reason why I and people like me believe not every game should come with an easy mode.
0:00 Intro
1:07 Howard Moskowitz story
4:17 People don't know what they want
6:37 Player choice can be a bad thing
11:39 Yoko Taro explains intended experience
13:05 Difficulty is a creative tool, Yoko Taro
14:27 Outward's intended experience can't have an easy mode
17:45 Difficulty serves the intended experience
20:17 Dark Souls' intended experience can't have an easy mode
22:41 Recap
23:22 Yes it does affect me
28:05 Not having an easy mode is a feature
32:53 Final thoughts - Hry
I'm a disabled gamer, and I'm utterly fuckin' sick of bein' held up by those "accessbillity = easy modes" types. It's incredibly condescending, the suggestion that disabled gamers require a lack of difficulty.
A game can be incredibly difficult and still accessible. The two things aren't even related.
There's that one disabled guy who plays fighting games with his face. It undoubtedly holds him back against top-tier pros, but he can school plenty of people who use, like, their fuckin' hands.
@@MadassAlex Thankfully the "weh, gibs easy mode" types stay faaaar away from fighting games. Ehahah.
@@MadassAlex There's even that one blind man who plays Street Fighter V like a fkn pro lol Literally beating dudes with sound cues.
For anyone who wants to look at the person Windwalk is referring too, his name is BrolyLegs.
i agree. accessibility should be about promoting access, not tailoring an experience to a mood. games are art. accessibility is about stuff like audio descriptions for the sight impaired at a fine art museum. it's about not turning mona lisa into octopus hentai.
The way I think of it, Dark Souls is balanced to the tune of "fuck you" and your ultimate goal is to adapt yourself to be able to competently sing "no, you" back
Not really though. The game NPCs are mostly very warm and welcoming. Everyone is working together to cope with misery and deal with a bad situation. You have choices. And some of those choices can make the game easier or harder for you.
@@amp7980 and i think finding those ways to make the game easier is part if the "no you" finding a bullshit way to cheese a boss or finding an op spell becomes a different path to success, it still comes from the in universe tools that you have been given, as opposed to changing something out of universe and nominally accepting defeat.
Or u can use speed runstrats and cheese the game just to say to the devs YAY FREE GAMER SCORE
@@awesomepawn2 and this is EXACTLY my thought. Knowing the rules well enough that your able to turn the tables on the game is when you've ultimately conquered the game
@@amp7980 Priscilla: "...the residents warm, and kind. Especially the vomitous undead dragon."
Garbage take
Dark Souls always had this "too hard for me" image, and I never tested it out
Elden Ring had such a positive feedback that I tested it out, and god I would have turn the difficulty down some many times if I could
But I couldn't, and had to persevere
And I love it.
And I completely feel connected to people commenting how they are struggling, the "Me too !" spirit is great
Same here. I always put the souls games in the category of speed runners and e-sport players.
Then I tried elden ring and realized that the only thing holding you back is time and effort.
Goes on to show that nothing beats personal experience when it comes to media. As a side note, should you ever go back and try the older games be warned that they often force you down a linear path, yet also provide one or two extra destinations that are equally linear.
You know cheats are a thing, right?
But it seems that it turned out for the best in the end, so good for you :)
@@Nerobyrne You cheated not only the game, but yourself. You didn't grow. You didn't improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained. It's sad that you don't know the difference.
@@CatchTheseMechanicalHands oh no.
Anyway
As one wise man once told: "Elden Ring HAS a difficulty slider, it's just not in the menu".
Yeah... There are enough farming tricks that can be spoiled.
@@mz655it's not even that. There are items and strategies in the game that objectively make certain bosses and areas easier to deal with. Margit's Shackle (and Mohg's) is one of the most explicit examples. Summons is another. They are wonderful aspects of the game because they are entirely optional at any given point in the game, but are also completely integrated into the world. It doesn't feel like you have "to turn down the difficulty" like it would if there was a slider, rather, as long as you are taking the time to engage with the mechanics and features of the game, it will naturally mold into your preferred play-style and optimal difficulty.
I love how you have now used at least mint chocolate icecream, pepsi, tomato sauce, mushrooms, cucumber and grapes to explain your points on video games
This guy somehow manages to use things that have nothing to do with anything he says still make sense.
@@danielz6177 the art of the analogy
isn't mint chocolate jakob or am i going crazy?
@@CIOTECHSFX Yup the original analogy is by Jacob, all credit to him for it of course!
Low-key Doug Doug Explained with Food vibes here
I found this whole conversation kinda galling when it first became "a thing".
For years people have been saying that we should view games as art. But the second an artistic vision comes into conflict with their desires some of those same people suddenly pull a 180 and want control over the experience presented to them.
Seems as though some people aren't so much interested in art as they are validation.
@Hatwox I get that, but, having grown up alongside the medium to some extent I can recall the times before there was a general acceptance of video games.
"Games as art" evolved out of that cultural sidelining. I think some of the reflexive defensiveness around the subject that leads people to hold contradictory positions still lingers.
@Hatwox I see games as art, merely due to it just being another medium of expression. They sit alongside film, photography, paint, illutration, sculpture, and literature as an art form; though, more akin to film and literature in term of story telling.
I’m all for the “games are art” viewpoint because it’s something I genuinely believe in. If a game is to hard I suck it up and keep going or I quit, I don’t ask the devs to change their vision because otherwise they are making a product, not a vision. You are right about “validation” but they are just that, validators. I want art, they want control, nothing more, nothing less.
I genuinely do not understand why people would want to play a Souls game on easy mode. If you just want to look at the cool weapons, armor, locations, creatures, bosses, etc., without any of the challenge, you're better off just watching a Let’s Play on CZcams and saving yourself a few bucks.
@@ManiaMac1613 exactly
There are parts of this video I now find poorly explained. I am going to make several better ones that tackles individual arguments in more detail.
First off: I don't think every game needs an easy mode. But: I watched the first 25 minutes and you are mostly talking from your own experiences. They don't apply to everyone. Like if you find a boss hard, other folks might find that boss unsurpassable and will quit. If overcoming hardships is what the game is about, that's relative. Gaming is complex, many gamers™ have years or decades of experience maneuvering in virtual spaces, knowledge of design conventions and such, which people who have been gaming less excessively have not been able to acquire. They won't 'get good' in a couple of afternoons. Spicyness is actually quite a good metaphor: The hotness of food has little to do with taste, it's a phantom pain that envigorates taste if applied in the right amount - varying from person to person. Would you cook f**king hot and tell people to git gud at eating chili? Or would you spice somewhat and let them add spicyness to taste?
Having watched a little further: How can you say people cant tell you you're not affected by the inclusion of an easy mode in a 40 min video about how the exclusion of an easy mode doesn't affect them? Or are you just saying it does affect them but you know better what's good for them? (What's being hard games.)
Also: They are a virtual product, why not have a chunkyness-slider?
Those tweets at the end are pretty good. But you can still have a difficulty selection at the beginning with no option to change mid-playthrough. Just commit to a hard difficulty, should be no problem for pro-gamers.
@@frederikklarname149 the main thrust I think is that saying it doesn't affect "hardcore gamers" if there is an easy mode is a false premise. It's just not true. In the video he did specifically say you could still argue that the harm done to those who want an easy mode outweighs the good done for those who want it to not exist.
I remember when Borderlands 3 came out. It was the first game in the series to provide and easy mode option. I remember whenever anyone asked how to optimize their build or get past a hard boss, there would inevitably be a bunch if people saying "just swap to easy mode". Makes me think that a lot of people ruined the experience for themselves by doing that.
"There are a lot of things a game can't be, to be what it is."
What a damn good line.
Its so good that i dont even understand
@@DarkOminigiri The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is many things: an light-hearted adventure game with puzzles, melee combat and a decently lighthearted story to name a few descriptors.
What it doesn’t have, are guns, cover systems, a gritty, dark story, cyberpunk aesthetics, permadeath systems, weapon breakage, survival elements, town raiding, multiplayer or PVP, platforming, a 2D aesthetic or any number of other things.
The things wind waker _ISN’T_ help define what it _IS._
@@DarkOminigiri basically saying dark souls can't be easy to be dark souls
Profound as f*ck
Daam good line indeed
I have over a thousand hours in Dark Souls and not once I thought of using alluring skulls the way they're being used at 27:30, that's incredible.
i have over a thousand hours too and i never even USED an alluring skull, like i just sell them for scrap cause theyre uselless to me
I use them for Dark Souls 3 NPCs that I don't like fighting, such as Tsorig or Alva.
They are found for the first time (usually) exactly at that spot, for that exact purpose. It's just a mall example of the wonderfully beautiful ways that From Software designs their games to organically teach you through the environment. Some people miss it because it doesn't hold your hand, but for players that figure it out, it's a massive "A-ha!" moment.
It's a good case of using wits, but for most people especially originating from RPGs that incentivised item hoarding (it's a big problem for many games) coupled with the rarity of the item means that people are only reserving them for 'emergency' cases (aka never, since these games allow you to retry forever). I still refuse to use beast blood pellets to this day, even in BL4.
Bruh I played since PS3 and I never even used them. This is probably the intended way of using them in this scenario but watching that seems like a 900iq play.
As a First time elden ring enjoyer, I love and hate the frustration of getting absolutely demolished by bosses but every time I fight the boss again I get closer to defeating it and it's so satisfying that you just don't want to quit and keep going until you get it right
Lovely man, wouldn't you want this experience for everyone? Yes? Then you're in favor for adjustable difficulty.
@@Chibs You're so passive agresive its bafflig
Yeah I'm playing dark souls one now for the first time totally blind. it is awesome . I've looked a few things up like what is covenants and stuff
@@Chibs thanks for providing a good example of a disingenuous argument, also known as a straw man.
@@Chibs holy crap ur a loser
Dark Souls (and to an extent MHW) are games where I just couldn't imagine a difficulty slider.
The entire game is modeled around this one experience and how you, as the player, adapt and learn to battle and thrive in this harsh world.
How do you approach this poisonous swamp? Do you just try to find a way around, battle the enemies on the fringe and find a hidden cave near some roots? Or do you try to barge straight through, fail a few times, because there are enemies you didn't see before and now you're poisoned and have rocks tossed at you and you don't know where to go, until you just run toward those stone-throwers and find a boss behind them?
Now apply the easy mode to that experience. You just run through the swamp without getting poisoned, one-hit the dangerous rock-throwers, 5-shot the boss on your first try and bam, you're done with that area, never to return. You have no desire to farm for more souls, explore for better weapons or find other things, because you just beat the area, so off to the next, right?
And that just isn't the experience, that FromSoft wants to give the players. That's the big part here. As much as certain people want to yell for an easy mode, it's on the developer to choose what their "vision" entails. You wouldn't ask an artist to change a picture he drew, because you personally like it simpler. You don't call up George R.R. Martin and tell him to tone down on the medieval talk, so more people can read the books without having to look up words.
This is a game, about a world that is inimical. A world in which people struggle to survive and that includes the player. A harsh world in which you need to forge your own path, get stronger both in regards to your weapons and armor, but also in spirit. YOU as a person "level up". You start noticing where enemies may hide in ambush. You start approaching unknown corners with concern and caution. You turn from the obvious path in hopes of finding a shortcut, a weapon etc. to make it easier to forge on and maybe you even find an entirely new area along the way, which blows your mind.
To be honest, the mass of people that want the game to be easy, fail to see that they're essentially asking to paint a room blue with a can of white paint. And they fail to see that not every game is meant for everyone AND that that is ok. Not every game HAS to be enjoyed by everyone or made in a way that it can be.
To be fair monster hunter world is like easy mode added in monster hunter I've played older monster hunter games and they are more punishing. like you need to make sure you do take the map and the paintball if you want to keep track of the monster. Otherwise he can escape you and it's a time waster tracking him down. and by the time you do he may have already recovered a lot. MHW is more friendly to casuals which is a good thing since it can get people interested in the game and then visit the harder ones. I mean the fireflies help out a lot tracking monsters and tracks and everything in the surrounding area. Hell the mini map keeps track and shows you the monsters even when he flies away. No need for the paintball.
I’ve listened to the pasta sauce story so many times before, but adding those images for “plain” “spicy” and “extra chunky” really takes it to a whole new level.
Agreed
That definitely made me laugh
He forgot savory although I make my own pasta sauce.....
What anime are they from?
@@LastStar007 Konosuba
When I first started dark souls I was infuriated. I was a FPS player. Only playing CoD, halo, Battlefield, ect. I played for 6 hours barely making it past the asylum demon and into the starting area. After dying over and over and over I did something i rarely do. I rage quit. I throw it back into it's case and swore to never play again.
But then a couple of weeks past and I had what I could only explain as an itch in the back of my brain. I that damnable game was just sitting there in my mind. I played again. Making little head way but I found myself engrossed into the challenge. Every corner had the potential for reward or death. Every victory whether clearing a small horde, a difficult npc, or a devastating boss began to fill me with a since of pride and joy. It kept my ego in check however. I felt that if I began thinking that I was the best, a true force of destruction. It was quick to humble me. I fell in love with this series due to that challenge and that itch it put into my head. I never realized that I needed that challage, that game that took one look at your fetal attempts and smiled menacingly. Only to later take one look at you valiant attempts and smiled even more menacingly. The difficulty of the series is my favorite mechanic of the games.
“FPS player”..
@@noop9k ?
@@rfs1506 A player of gamepad FPS games..
@@noop9k Yeah i'm at a loss too. Care to Clarify?
@@noop9k but isn't COD better played on mouse and keyboard for easier aiming? I haven't ever played dark souls or any single player rpg without a gamepad. Unless its molded skyrim
I had never played a souls game before Elden ring I got my ass kicked by every early boss. Margit was easily over 100 tries for me but when I finally beat him that feeling of accomplishment was the best feeling I’ve had gaming in 10+ years
Just play it on easy mode why would you waste your time and try the same Boss 100 times that's insane just change it to easy mode you could have beaten the boss first try
I jumped up and did a lap around my house....
@@AssoSiaa would you rather fight a wet noodle or a worthy opponent
@@eryk8340wet noodle
you do not understand that feeling then trust me its the best
@@jojobod
Another example, in elden ring, there are no quest markers, no to-do lists, you never know if youre doing it right, but guess what, thats what makes the game even better. It feels like youre actually exploring the world
It’s a bit annoying sometimes, I don’t need quest markers or anything but a little note in a journal or something would be nice. Just something saying “this person said this”
I've noticed this with a lot of indie/smaller games lately.
They use achievements to hand out rewards. Essentially, you have all the "quests" already, but you just don't know what you have to do.
So if you want to discover things yourself, you can, but you can also just look it up.
@@shiranuithewolf8559 then write it down, or dont, your choice
until you lock yourself out of rannis quest cuz you went to caelid beofer liurnia. or you lock yourself out of blaidds quest cuz you didnt talk to the santa vendor the church of elleh AFTER you heard him in the forest. or when half of the quests dont have a real ending ending cuz its cut content, i still havent seen nepheli after giving her the eagle ashes.
@@olaf8778 damn that sounds like a nightmare.
I remember doing something like that in Fallout NV, except it was just a bug.
Thankfully I could bring up the console and unlock the door which didn't unlock during a cutscene.
Hey, thanks for highlighting my comment there at the end. That was a nice surprise to hear my own thoughts repeated back to me. I'm glad I could contribute to this excellent video in a way :D
There is only one thing in here I disagree with and it's not even something you said yourself: The GDC speaker mentioned that Dark Souls offers players the feeling of earning a badge of honor or being one of the elite. I think this can easily be interpreted in the worst possible way by opposing people like the Twitter guy Tamoor you're responding to.
Everytime he argues against the value of difficulty he makes sure to mention that for our enjoyment the game needs to be hard enough *that others can't beat it* . This may be true for some but it is of no concern to me. I like the difficulty because it's challenging *for me* , not because of anyone else.
I don't care about getting into some imaginary super exclusive "I beat Dark Souls" club where I can feel like a superior god amongst gamers and laugh at all the plebians who die to the asylum demon so I can compensate for a lack of achievements IRL. We've been accused often enough that that is supposedly our sole motivation. Like I get that there are some unpleasant fans who insult and talk down to anyone struggeling in order to feel better about themselves. But it's reductive to lump us all in with them and disregard valid arguements.
Tamoor seems to be under the impression that my enjoyment *relies* on the failures of others. In my eyes it's just an unfortunate side effect of the intended experience that I have accepted. As you said, we *want* others to feel like we did while playing and recommend these games to them, encourage them to persevere. We want to share these feelings with as many people as possible without diluting the experience.
I agree, a large part of why I enjoy Dark Souls and other difficult games is *self*-satisfaction. The feeling of knowing that I beat that challenge by my own hand, through either skill, perseverance, knowledge (including cheese), or some combination of the aforementioned.
If other people struggle with something I breezed through, that doesn't make me feel better because "Oh they can't do it, clearly I am the superior gamer," or anything like that, it's just a difference in how we approached the same challenge.
Same thing with fighting games, just because I beat my opponent or my opponent beat me, that doesn't mean either of us are "better" players. It just means that how we approached the match was either successful or unsuccessful, due almost solely to our own efforts.
Succeeding where others fail can certainly be satisfying, to know you conquered something difficult, but that's not the same as taking glee in the failings of others.
I agree with and feel this comment 1000%! You really articulated well the issue with a lot of these arguments.
That's a good thing to add. I don't care if games make lots of people give up (although in can be funny in some cases like the cuphead tutorial thing) as long as they give me a challenge that I have to work to overcome. The satisfaction comes from working out and and implementing what to do, and watching it work. It isn't just because it makes me feel better than other people. That should never be the goal of a game or the player.
However...I don't think it's fair to paint those who *do* extract some enjoyment out of the suggestion that a thing they can do is something not everybody can do, as bad. Exclusive cosmetics are always a lot more valuable in games where cosmetics can be traded. Why? Literally, because they are exclusive/rare.
It's the same thing with gaming accomplishments. They feel better (for some, maybe not you) *because* you know that not just anybody can do it.
The understanding that something is not achievable or obtainable by *everyone*, definitively makes it more desirable or satisfying *and there's absolutely nothing wrong with feeling this*. It's completely natural, and I don't like how you tried so hard to distance yourself from that mentality as if you have the "superior" mentality.
@@zipzzo I don't mean that it is bad to feel good about overcoming things that stopped others, but I mean that it shouldn't be the main goal. Just doing things to feel better than others is a crappy way to look at challenges.
"If the game doesnt make you feel the 7 stages of grief. Why play?" -Bowser
A week ago, damn
@@MartinPurathur whats up?
what are the aditional 2
@@catinamask5019 depression and therapy
I'll still play even if I can only experience half of it. Better than nothing.
So perfectly said, the best example is Ghost Of Tsushima, I put the game on hard right away as I do every game so I can try and get a dark souls feel. I get to the parts of G.O.T where you have to fight one on one with a boss...It's so challenging, I kept losing and all of the sudden a prompt pops up for me to lower the difficulty and temporarily fight the boss on easy and then it would go back to hard. Now you gotta understand how much I love the difficulty of all fromsoftware games too, it's my favorite part due to the sense of accomplishment when I defeat a hard section or boss. I ignored the prompt but then 5 attempts or so later it popped back up, and I considered it. Another 5 or so attempts and it popped back up and I took it. I beat that boss on the very first attempt. And I ended up turning off the game and then deleting it. Not only did I lose that sense of accomplishment, but I felt dirty, I felt weak, it felt so cheap....why would I of all people accept that option to make it easier when I'm so against it.....???....idk but
I will be honest, my take on games is mostly that games start and end in the same game, meaning that I, for the most part, ignore the fanbase and especially ignore the creators, mostly because I find myself uninterested about learning about them untila after I beat the game see if there is something for me to say or find out. That's why I just don't give much though to the arguments regarding marketing or popularity, since, at least for me, a game having a "high profile", being "marketable", or having a "shared experience" don't call my attention, because that's not the game itself, is other people.
I know people love wearing their badges of honor, but that never felt like a good excuse to not include a slider.
I was always pro "games would benefit from dificulty sliders" because I always saw them are options more for the player to try and get their best experience, especially because an easy mode can be a good intro to learn the mechanics better to finally face a hard mode. That's actually what I did with some games, until I got better and started going straight to hard mode.
Now, being honest, I think this is a great video explaining why an easy is not good for some games. It is especially remarkable because most videos regarding this subjects are made with a pretty mean spirit, attacking more than arguing. Just to find this video I had to go three at least five where I was called "baby", "bitch", and so on just for holding this opinion.
Also, to clarify, I don't think players are entitle to a difficulty slider, they exist only if the developer wants to put one, and we should not harass other people to add them, even less just tag a game as "bad" for being very difficult.
The good part of your presentation is that this properly tackled my options argument, the only one I hold really, and now I can see how not having that option can be part of the experience of the game, the only part I think is important. So, I guess I change to: yes, some games would benefit from a difficulty slider and other wouldn't.
I mainly did this comment to appreciate how respectful you were in this video.
I'm reminded of when you first step through the fog gate and fight Artorias in Dark Souls. This guy has been built up across the game. He was part of an elite group of knights. The best of the best. Sent on a special task to stop the abyss, a mysterious and chaotic entity. In the cutscene you first encounter him, Artorias effortlessly flings a corpse across the arena at you with his massive sword. And then he almost certainly pounds a first time player into the coliseum floor.
And I think that's for the best. Can only imagine how disappointing it would be if this LEGENDARY knight you kept hearing snippets about across the game was a complete pushover of a boss.
Hes fighting with his off-hand too, the madlad.
@@FarmerSlayerFromTheEdoPeriod and he doesn’t have his sick ass shield either
Ex-fucking-actly! If you just set it to Easy: Game Journo Mode and stomped him as soon as you met him, everything the game did to hype to him up and hype the Abyss up is destroyed. It's such a spit in the face of the developers to want an Easy Mode in From's games.
"Can only imagine how disappointing it would be if this LEGENDARY knight you kept hearing snippets about across the game was a complete pushover of a boss"
You mean like Gwyn? :/
@@fernandofaria2872 Lore wise, it makes sense to be disappointing, it's a shell of a god that has rekindled the first flame over and over for decades.
For newcomers though, Gwyn can be hard if the player hasn't dominated rolling or successful parries.
When he says anyone can play dark souls he means it. When my roommate and I met I learnt that he was really into berzerk and he convinced me to get into it. All I knew about it was that it inspired a lot of dark souls so I thought he might be interested. Thing is he didnt play video games, but he agreed. He started out just learning how to use a controller and couldnt figure out how to walk and move the camera at the same time. But he kept going and it was such a joy to watch him learn and he loved it, and now 3 years on he has played dark souls 1, 2 and 3 as well as bloodborne and he is /good/.
czcams.com/video/pKyKGuGU4bw/video.html&lc=UgxOegLZr2aHNSoAcZN4AaABAg
What about Sekiro, has he played that
@@Pwoodz_official Not yet but it's on his to play list
Let us not forget this guy.
czcams.com/video/HHzFuwLvF_4/video.html
Just a heads up, if you were trying to italicize “/good/“ for emphasis, the command is one “_” on either side.
Playing on hard mode with an easy mode present can make me frustrated, with an easy way out of the challenges dangling in front of my face. But at the same time, if I take the bait and switch to easy mode I will feel guilty and/or unsatisfied. The presence of the difficulty slider inherently creates problems for people like me.
Mgs:V always annoyed me when it was like "oh no looks like you are struggling would you like the chicken hat :(?" No i do not, I'm only resetting to get an s rank.
People “struggle” to understand this dynamic. It makes perfect sense to a lot of us, but at the same time I do understand why it doesn’t to others.
@@Beezer1742 because people act like people can easily say no to an easy out of a hard situation.
So let me get this straight: Because you can't stick to a higher difficulity like you want, people with disabilities shouldn't be able to play the game at all? Reasonable logic, good compromise.
What'd be wrong with choosing difficulty at the start of the game?
@@joshwist556 Because there are people who WANT an easy way out of situation--the cowards way out--and are unable to comprehend other people who like challenge, overcoming difficulty, and find enjoyment in effort.
I was part of the "pro easy mode bc it doesnt harm anyone" crowd but playing Elden Ring kind of changed my mind. It's my first souls game and I suck at it and I love it. The most important thing I learned is: Making the game easier for yourself can be a (very fun) quest in itself! You can become quite OP in this game and there are routes that make many bosses much easier. But you have to explore through trial and error to find these ways (which I really like to do as it turns out). If you aren't keen on solving everything yourself you can talk to other people and get useful advice, which is also fun and gives you a sense of community. I still think people who say "if you suck at it you dont deserve playing the game, loser" are stupid but there arent actually many people who say things like this. Instead, there are lots of people who want to help you on your journey to understand these games and have fun with them. No matter your skill level. Especially Elden Ring can be approached in a lot of different ways and is in a sense accessible because of that. You wouldn't call chess inaccessible because you have to learn rules to play it.
Exactly. Elden Ring has an “easy mode”… you just have to work to enable it.
While there are the trash "Git Gud" people in the community, it is true that there's only a few of them. Just like in any gaming community (except League of Legends. That community is shit. I don't know why I still play that game).
AFAIK, it's only people who cry about an easy mode for From Soft's games that imagine that every Soulsborne player try to gatekeep the games to themselves. I would think that the community is always ready to welcome new people who want to join in their struggle to overcome the game.
Exactly. The game wants to put you in a position to engage with the community, to search for clues in game, try different stuff. The difficulty is there to make you think. This is why we say easy mode doesn't work for souls games. I'm glad you were able to understand it.
And I promise you, when you finish it and start a new playthrough you'll be breezing through the game and thinking to yourself "I can't believe I was struggling at THIS". Knowledge is the part that makes the game easier, and you can't enforce knowledge by adding an easy mode.
People asking for an easy mode don't know what they are asking for. They think they want it, but they really don't.
I at least appreciate that in Soul games people will understand that the game is hard and you can either choose to play it hard or try to cheese it to make it easy, if that makes sense. In some games like Genshin Impact i have to avoid some part (huge part) of the community because i would legitimately be attacked for not choosing to "follow the meta" and "make the game easy" when i just want to play however I want and giving myself a bit of a challenge (like using hard to play characters).
It's funny, in Soul games you're not given much choices, but everyone is cool with whatever you choose. But in games where choices are many, you then get attacked for choosing differently.
@@slimetank394 I'm not familiar with Genshin Impact. Is it a co-op PvE? These games tend to revolve around efficiency. In MH for example I would get angry if people showed up with crap armor for G-Rank stuff (I'm talking about zero skills and crap defence). If you have a solid build but outside of the meta I say fuck these people and just have fun.
I think it's weird to call fans gatekeepers for defending the creators intention and vision. If they wanted souls to have an easy mode, it would. He should be whining to Miyazaki instead of trying to insult people who enjoy a challenge.
That's like going to a chef and telling him how he should've made his signature dish instead because that is how you specifically would enjoy it. Who gives a shit that it's their creative vision they are expressing, it needs to cater to all my needs to be acceptable.
I find it hilarious that he said anyone who disagrees with difficulty sliders in Fromsoft games isn't a real fan and then has the audacity to call those people gatekeepers. Absolutely zero self-awareness.
@@Mhopson968
Exactly.
"WHAT!? This game isn't handcrafted and tailor made to MY experience!?"
"HOW DARE YOU"
Tamoor is definetly an average Twitter fan
@@introvertedwall44 this is what happens when we devolve into a hyper-individualist, highly “customizable” people
I explained it like this to a friend, Doom Eternal and dark souls 3 are two very different games with different stories and ideas. But Doom Eternal has an easy, normal, and hard as well tougher difficulties for different reasons from Dark Souls 3 would. Doom Eternal you are the slayer. The man feared by hell itself, the thought of you makes even the most staunchest of hell baron's dread the thought of fighting you, you're the protector of humanity, anyone who threatens them be it the heavens or the forces of hell you'll crush with your boot and shotgun.
But in dark souls III you're.... Well that's it, you are. You're no hero or renowned warrior of ages, no they were raised before you were and shirked their duties, you are nobody, a last ditch attempt, you become the hero, you become legend through percervering through the game and beating the odds, you were the long shot that payed off. Now you never do save the world in dark souls, any of them. You change it, and at the end of it all you can go through a new game +, now though. You're truly a warrior ready to conquer once more. That's who you are in the dark souls games, a no one who succeeded the gods themselves, and still faded from history.
I've never seen dark souls described this way and the more I think about it the more I think you're right
@@rmbwemanplays5567 my favorite way I've seen it described is "the only thing special about you is you're the first undead to be too stubborn to give up. And that's litterally the only thing special about you"
23:45 The ultimate easy mode already exists for almost every game.
Just go on youtube and search for "no commentary gameplay + full walkthrough + game's title"
You don't like the gameplay part of a game, fine. Now you can enjoy everything in the game except the part you don't like.
True. And for those few games that don't have this feature... DO under PC gaming mods lol.
Just go watch a gameplay without commentary of the entire game.
You just experienced the story without any difficulty, was it fun? No? Well you asked for something easy didn't you?
I've heard people say this before but it makes no sense. They want easy difficulty not non-existent difficulty.
@@Arakandai eh it's fun for some people and good for them honestly
@@Arakandaii want to be able to destroy my enemies without struggling
I’ve played games which have had difficulty options. I went with Normal most of the time. I enjoyed it but after I was done, I didn’t really care about playing it again on a harder difficulty because there were other games to try.
most games have a normal difficulty to be the intended first experience, and the Harder difficulties as the true experience.
There are only perfect CZcams videos, there is no perfect CZcams video
except this one, this one is perfect
3/3
9/10 could use more pasta
I love this guy! I'm so upset I didn't know about him until now!
no dude, this video its crap elitist hardcore gamer bullshit.
No not at all
Everyone calling for FromSoftware to add an "easy mode" to Elden Ring should just stay away from Soulslikes. Making the required level of skill optional completely ruins a lot of what makes these games special. Some of us embrace that challenge. They're tough, but they're also 100% fair. The man who makes the Souls titles is Hidetaka Miyazaki. He's almost 50 years old. If he can't beat a game that he and his team have developed, they go back and change things until he can. I think a lot of people just underestimate their own abilities.
I was a "only normal mode" kind of guy, because before Dark Souls, most hard modes were either BS or horribly designed.
So if Dark Souls didn't completely destroy me, I left it for about 6 months and then tried again, which was when I tried and finally understood the style, I would've never enjoyed these kinds of games so much. Personally I've also always been the type that never uses super power weapons/powers/etc out of fear of "optimizing the fun out of the game", but if there was something I loved about Dark Souls, is that, because it's inescapable difficulty and the world felt SO ruthless, didn't just felt justified but full validated into exploiting every trick on the game would offer, and that experience is awesome too.
Also, I VERY MUCH include myself on the camp that if it did have an easy mode, I would've escaped there at some point, and it would have very much affected my enjoyment of the game (most likely I would have quitted it out of boredom, because easy DS doesn't require to engage with the mechanics that make it fun).
So yes, I don't mind if games developers choose to make their intended experience to give options for people who don't want to engage with the mechanics, BUT I do mind A LOT when people are trying to shame and demonize the few devs that cater to my niche, because giving those options prevent NEW people from understanding my niche and enjoying it FULLY.
This has, of course, opened my mind to not just Soulslikes, but nearly any game that's willing to provide me a well and carefully crafted difficulty, and I've enjoyed them a lot, but I would've never gotten into them without Dark Souls NOT giving me the easy mode option.
I completely agree. its mostly impatient children who want the games to be easier because they like how they look but are too lazy to learn how to play them.
Playing through dark souls 3 rn and tbh it s not even that hard, i think the main difficulty in souls games comes from the fact that you re not given a proper tutorial on how everything works, but once you figure everything out the game becomes much easier.
This makes no sense lol. I think the best counter to all this weird elitism is that DOOM (I'm talking about originals here) exists and difficulty modes from "baby" to "almost impossible" exist in it and yeah as a 7 year old I started on the 2nd easiest but the music slapped, the levels were great and the guns felt good so I kept at it and when it got too easy I just cranked the difficulty up, now I don't play anything below "ultra-violence" and often do it with fast monsters. Souls games have great lore and cool worlds, they are also pretty replayable. I'm pretty sure the game would hold up with easier modes and you could still boast at beating it on max difficulty because that's what everyone does with every other fucking game lol.
I have always wanted to play games with the experience the creator wanted to make me feel, and Thus I always put the difficulty on games to "normal" as I think the creators intent me to play on normal, and the other difficulty are just for replayability or some other purposes, but they aren't the true experience. That is why I love hard games so much, hollow knights, dark souls, I love their worlds, their ambiance, and I wouldn't enjoy them as much if I could choose how to handle things. If something is told to me that it is hard and I should fear it, genuinely feeling the challenge is what makes the game so believable to me, being able to control the game and it's gameplay makes everything so blend and tasteless. But people telling type of gamers like me we are just try harders or other things like we spend our lives on games.. fuck! I don't even have a game with more than 600hours in it (altho I think Minecraft could be but there's no time-counting on it) and I'm not even that good in general
"There is value in not having options in certain scenarios."
It's interesting to hear this kind of thought put towards gaming when I myself have advocated it often in photography, my professional field of work. In the photography world, if you have the money, you can easily carry around multiple cameras with multiple lenses that fit all different types of situations and that expand your creativity to a near limitless horizon. As a professional photographer, I myself had a camera that shot 12 frames per second, could practically see in the dark, and I was armed with every kind of lens you could imagine. So, why did I go out and buy a little camera that had a fixed lens on it and in terms of specs was nowhere near my work camera to take on vacation with me?
I bought it because it was so limiting. When I'm on vacation or out doing street photography with it, I'm now forced to rely solely on my own creativity and artistry to make the images I'm after. There's no other lenses I can go to, I can't just set the camera to 12fps mode and push the shutter down and spray and prey that I capture the perfect moment, and I can't miss my exposure too heavily and just say "well, I'll bring it up in post." Hell, the lens doesn't even zoom in or out, so if I want to change the size of the subject in my frame, it's completely on me to use my feet to get in close.
By limiting my options, I'm forced to become more creative and expand my artistic thought process to get the photos that I want out of a given situation. With the added bonus of not making myself sit in my room for 15 minutes trying to think exactly what lens or lenses I'll take with me when I go out. The value of not having options is one that rings very true to myself.
And I say this as someone who gave up on Dark Souls 3 but is pushing through Elden Ring. DS3 was still too much of the "bang your head against the wall until you get it right" for my taste of enjoyment when it came to video games. Elden Ring is the perfect mixture of me being able to go do something else until I'm able to take down the asshole giving me trouble (go fuck yourself Tree Sentinel). And yes, the satisfaction of beating them (see my previous comment) is amazing.
Honestly, the difficulty of Dark Souls is not what has turned me off of the series up until this point, rather it's the "get gud" culture that surrounds it. And I think we all know what I mean when I say that. It's not the "you just have to keep trying, here's a few tips" people, it's the "get gud, or get wrecked, screw you for asking for help, you're not a hardcore gamer like me" people.
That and there does seem to be just needless difficulty added to the games, mostly in their menu systems. Like, if I have to google how to equip a weapon, that's not me not being willing to "get gud" that's a game's literal interface and usability not being intuitive.
All of this to say, I've found myself wanting an easy slider at times of frustration in Elden Ring. But I'm glad it's not there. I solved the challenge on my own, without relying on hampering the system to treat me differently.
smithing stones are the easy slider
I have a similar experience as an artist. I am right handed. I draw with my left hand. When I draw, I force myself to be still, and not to change the orientation of my wrist. As you might imagine, my control over the pen’s raw physical output suffers tremendously. I have to be diligent, adaptive, inventive. I have to be able and willing to accommodate every errant swerve of my hand. The works are never precisely what I wanted. Something more beautiful than what I wanted, emerges.
The saying goes, "limitations breed creativity."
damn this is good
@@Klayperson Untill the boss catches up with your damage with more health.
"In order to make good choices that will make you happy, you first need to understand what a game's intended experience is. Once you understand the developer's intent you can make an informed decision on wether and how to modify that experience. And if you make that choice prematurly, you risk robbing yourself of something valuable, something you didn't know was there."
I didn't play dark souls until late 2021. Because I've heard stories of how "hard" it was. But hard is subjective to the player. After spending time and numerous deaths, I figured out the enemies, and the game became much easier.
A big mental breakthrough for me was when I read an interview by Miyazaki; the base assumption (even among game devs, seemingly) seems to be that Souls developers are at some level just intending to be sadistic towards the player, while in fact Miyazaki says as a player he’s a masochist and as a developer he makes games he’d like to play. It may seem insignificant but if you think about it long enough I think it makes all the difference in the world.
To me, I think the strongest argument is that the best games are made when devs can make games that they themselves would love playing. Miyazaki basically got handed Demon’s Souls and due to the assumed failure of it was allowed to make it the way he wanted it, and it turned out he found a chunky pasta sauce that vídeo games were lacking. Frankly I don’t think it will make for better games to listen to the people who now complain “this chunky pasta sauce is TOO chunky!” - they’re simply not the target audience for it.
Miyazaki even said he's not that good of a player.
He added the ability to summon after an experience where his car was stuck in snow and a random group of people stopped, helped him, and went on their way. He wanted summons to be like that, for people who get stuck in a tough situation and just need a push to go forward. It's not about being hard, about the experience of overcoming hardships.
You could’ve saved yourself a lot of time by saying some games are meant for boys and some are meant for men. Simple math.
yeah...let's pretend he's the second coming.
@@nicholasnajibi3082
That is not math, that is metaphor.
Demon’s souls was a commercial failure at the time
DS1 was pasta sauce that took off
And really despite what most aresholes will say online, series didn’t truly take off until 2/BB
2 also still has highest meta rating of entire series excluding remastered, which doesn’t count cos not an original release
I'm in the opposite camp where I hate difficulty sliders. I hate being asked, before I've even played the game, "hey, what difficulty do you want to play on?" I have no idea. I haven't played you yet. There's also a stigma with playing on easy. It sticks in my mind as, "I was too weak/dumb/not good enough to play this game on a higher difficulty." But in reality, if the game didn't have a difficulty slider I would have stuck through it on its designed difficulty and instead of seeing the difficulty slider as my solution, I would have tried a different approach to the fight. Difficulty sliders cull creativity and ask you a fundamental question to the game before you've even had a chance to play it. And this isn't even getting into the fact that a lot of games don't know how to balance the extremes of a difficulty slider, with easy move being so easy it's like a power fantasy or the hardest setting not actually being hard and is instead tedious as enemies have massive health pools instead of fun or interesting new mechanics or a more challenging AI.
I especially hate it when I get stuck on a boss and die about 3 or 4 times and the game starts giving you messages every time you die like "Hey there pal! You want me to put the game on assisted mode for you? We'll aim for you and everything!" Despite not having died once in the rest of the game. (im looking at you, RE2 remake) Like. Im not frustrated because I'm dying, now I'm frustrated because the games basically trying to pressure me to put it on baby mode.
I LOVE Soulsborne actually treats you like a human with a functioning braincell and can actually get over hurdles on your own.
Dark Souls got me out of a serious depression spot. If it wasn't as hard as it was, I wouldn't be around right now- and I owe so much to its difficulty looking back.
Wow!
I'm thinking of dipping a toe in the rebooted Demon Souls on PS5.
Then progress onto Sekiro SDT.
Wish me luck :-)
Good luck@@Ytnzy250
For a long time I thought that the Souls games were too hard for me. Instead of asking for the games to be easier, I watched other players who were streaming the game and enjoyed the difficulty vicariously through them. I think that experience was better than if I had played the game and it was just easy. In recent years my situation has changed, and I have had more time to play and engage with these games. Playing DS3 and now Elden Ring, I finally get to feel what it means to overcome the challenges of the game. I never thought "there should be an easy mode for me", because I knew that would ruin the experience.
I actually amazed at how many people there are who
1. Complain that games are too hard for them
2. Don't know that cheats exist
I used to use cheats to get past stuff I couldn't beat all the time. These days I don't really care anymore, because there are literally hundreds of games in my Steam library, so I just play something else.
@@Nerobyrne or, even if not outright cheats, you can often kinda cheese stuff; whether that's looking up to advance more quickly or spending time grinding, or whatever other methods.
not gonna fucking lie I thought I was in class because the first video just doesn't seem to talk about any souls game. Also I feel like if the game had an easy mode then there would be no point in playing in a harder difficulty and there was be so feeling of accomplishment if they had just beat the game in easy mode when the game is supposed to be hard.
Elden Ring actually HAS a difficulty slider but it's build into the game itself, its called spirit summons. When you summon them you turn easy mode on then you can get them to +10 wich is like turning the difficulty slider to baby mode basically. So you can play it as easy or as hard as you want and it doesn't ruin the immersion.
@@Nerobyrne cheats lol that’s easy mode silly 😜
honestly when I first started the video I was hard on the "games shouldn't have sliders for difficulty" side but since I've watched all the way through I've decided to reconsider and come to the conclusion that honestly I'm fine with difficulty sliders, just as long as the intended from the dev's is maintained.
I perfectly remember my first experience on dark souls 2. I came prepared, and resolute, but after less than 2 hours I died one more time, losing all the exp I had earned and actually my character was even weaker than when I started the game because of how the game works. Not only I didn't progress, but I was behind the point I was 2 hours ago. I'm a relatively calm player overall and I haven't been tilted in a single player video game for a long time. But this feeling of "reverse progression" got me. I was about to throw my controller into the wall (which I had never done in my life btw) and then I smiled and think to myself : "this is it, that's what you were looking for, that's why you started playing this game." I hit the wall and I was happy about it. Honestly I was so confident I didn't think it was possible. That's exactly why I was happy to fail, I was bored and I needed a real challenge to question myself and having the opportunity to improve one more time.
I could have restarted the game from scratch but instead I just kept going with my weakened character because I realized my avatar's stats weren't important. I had already gain some experience from my 2 hours of playing and that something that could never go and will only get better and better as long as I keep playing.
I had the same experience playing Sekiro, when I restarted the game (because I made a choice that screwed the secret ending route without knowing it). I just rolled on the first areas, I was almost doing a perfect run, and it wasn't hard anymore, even if my character was technically weaker because I didn't stop to farm experience at all in this second run. The game was easier not because of my character getting stronger, but just from the experience I had acquired from my first run. I felt like a real ninja, I could really felt how much I improved doing effortlessly what I was struggling to achieve a few days before. This feeling of improvement, of real experience is unparalleled.
The frustration, the feeling of facing my own failure even if I thought I was good enough, this was one of my best gaming experience. Because once you overcome it, you really feel better, not just from abstract numbers on a virtual avatar. You actually become better, you learn something. Part are some skills related to the game but the other part is self-control, perseverance, patience and dedication, something that's way harder to learn in real life, and that will often cost you more than just getting upset in front of your screen playing a video game. Also, these skills are traits that can really help you for everything else for the rest of your life, or even existence if you believe in it. Video games potential for personal growth is underrated.
You nailed this video. 45 hours into Elden Ring which is my first From Software game and your description is on point
For me, the "it doesn't impact the atmosphere" claim can be disproved just by imagining what Fatalis would be like if he was easy.
Picture this, the great black dragon is a nightmare in the form of a dragon. He's killed hundreds if not thousands of hunters and in some cases has forged their corpses into his own skin as a kind of armor. He's the scorcher of kingdoms and the arch enemy of humanity.
Now, imagine that one single hunter just strolls in and wipes him out first try with barely any difficulty. Kind of ruins the atmosphere doesn't it? Kind of paints Fatalis as a really shitty threat.
That right there is why Alduin is one of the worst bosses I've ever fought.
"The bringer of the end of time"
"The world eater"
"Firstborn son of Akatosh"
"Yeah I shot him a few times with my hunter bow and he blew up"
@@randomfactsthatdontmatter3466 Yeah, that actually perfectly describes it. Especially for people like me who does everything and your mother before the main quest. In a normal Skyrim playthrough for me, I usually finish the three guild quest lines and a lot of other ones before I even start the majority of the story. I think one time I didn't even absorb my first dragon soul yet
You'd have a point if easy mode was the only option to the game. It isn't. Easy mode has no effect on anyone other than the person playing it.
@@mechanomics2649 Get good
@@mechanomics2649 get good
I like your point on appreciating bosses more when they kick your teeth in, cause, while I never really thought about it like that, its entirely true. In the lore, Artorias is a badass, a one man army worthy of being among Gwyns innermost circle of knights - how could you take that aspect of his character seriously if you can just waltz into his bossfight and curbstomp him first try?
Indeed, the bosses in Dark Souls being hard is part of why they're respected for the most part. It's essentially a pure expression of "show, not tell" - I'm not going to tell you that Artorias is a badass with his greatsword, I'm going to let him turn you into paste to demonstrate.
@@StrikeNoir105E they do tell us in the strangest way possible, and maybe someone can understand why this is so common in Japanese stories, artorias was left handed, for some reason most badass swordsmen are left handed in Japanese stories. It's was really cool in dark souls 2 when in order to use the wolf knights greatswords weapon art you had to hold it in the left hand.
And then after you do beat him you learn that he wasnt even using his dominant hand, he was that tough and that wasn't in his prime or even have his shield what a badass.
@@dreammachine3522 he was literally fighting you with his strong arm broken in 3 places.
@@ralcogaming7674 The Artorias is lefthanded debate is actually still unfinished since there is a lot of evidence for him being right handed, such as his left arm is broken because he needed to block an attack, which ended up breaking his arm since he left his shield with sif. Also people like to discredit dark souls 2
It’s so pleasing that nowadays you can so easily find such well thought out “essays” on the subjects of games, their design, shared experiences, difficulty, and all things in between. What a time to be a gamer.
Yeah I think the best video essays have a sort of lesson. The worst either do the opposite or are trying to force a view upon you. For example the ds easy mode debate. Or the worst try to vilify somebody. In a debate i wish more people had the mindset your not a bad person you're just a challenge for my views.
Super metroid wouldn't be a masterpiece in my eyes had I not learned to love it
Ds is a game thats challenge is your mind itself. On my first playthrough of ds did not finish got stuck on the gargoyles. Second playthrough restarting the game glassed the monster in my second attempt
My 63 year old mother has beaten bloodborne and made it to the final boss on Dark Souls and this is a woman who used to think that Super Mario and Banjo Kazooie was hard
Beating Fatalis in a solo hunt was one of the most satisfying experiences I had in my entire gaming life. These people have no idea what are they talking about.
Yeeeeeeah but...solo is also easier. Trying to fight him with 4 randoms is suicide.
When you are the only person that can fail you, and you aren't a failure, he's pretty easy.
plain, aqua; spicy, megumin; chunky, lalatina
looks like I found another youtuber of taste and culture
Darkness as Chunky cracked me up
I remember the day that Dark Souls was released and how I was excited to play it as soon as I got home. And then I remember how utterly defeated, pissed off and robbed I felt within the first 30 minutes of playing it. I didn't touch it for another 6 months until I was bored and was like screw it. I legitimately have to say that, in the realm of gaming, that was the best decision I have ever made. That level of challenge and the elation of overcoming and beating it is unlike anything I had and have ever experienced. The funny thing is, I'm not all that good at it, I always gravitate towards the same style build and play in each iteration of these games. Yet when I challenge my kids to play or friends or the wife and none of them can even come close to defeating Gundir (for a DS3 example), it reinforces just how impactful and special these games thought to be "too hard" are.
Holy hell,, I remember gundyr, and one and half hours of after trying and failing to beat him. Maybe I'll try DS3 again after Elden Ring, but damn
@@thecyanpanda241 I don't even know who gundyr is. Prolly some scrub I stomped without even noticing what bug was under my boot. Yall are just scrubs lol.
I think it was Steve Jobs who talked about the idea that people can't know they want something if they don't realize it exist. And that one of the key jobs of people inventing new products is to create things and then go about convincing people they do want something they hadn't thought of. In gaming, the hardcore stuff like Dark Souls sits at one end of this, and more chill cozy stuff like Animal Crossing sits at the other. Most games sit in the middle zone between these two extremes. Much akin to the three different types of pasta sauce.
I started this video fully expecting to disagree with you. I’m an easy mode person, and I also have personal reasons for using some accessibility features, and these options have made games much more accessible and enjoyable for me. But listening to your well-researched and presented arguments I found myself agreeing with you more and more. As the comment you quoted said - maybe some games aren’t for me and that’s ok.
Thank you for this extremely coherent video.
And now I feel like I want to have a go at Dark Souls, if it’s too difficult then that’s ok.
The issue is that some of those games can still be for you at no real expense to anyone else.
I hope you enjoyed your darksouls journey, I was a "only normal mode" kind of guy, because before darksouls, most hard modes were either BS or horribly desginerd.
So if Darksouls didn't completely destroy me, I left it for about 6 months and then tried again, which was when I tried and finally understood the style, I would've never enjoyed these kinds of games so much. Also, I include myself on the camp that if it did have an easy mode, I would've escaped there at some point, and it would have very much affected my enjoyment of the game (most likely I would have quitted out of boredoom).
@@mechanomics2649 The problem is that people who play on easy mode don't deserve an opinion. You and OP can go fkk yourselves.
@@sleeperboi8701 being a person who insult others as an argument point makes your opinion hold less weight
@@FurnaceKnight Idc if my words hurt your feelings bro. I really don't.
The thing that always makes my blood boil is when the easy mode advocates bring up disabled people like they'd be doing them a favor. I've seen it far more than I'd like. Not only is that using a certain demographic as a scapegoat (not sure if it's the correct word here) but it also makes the same group looked down upon when they aren't even part of the original discussion. It's the reason I largely stopped trying to argue on this topic because it *always* seems to get dirty.
Anyway, ranting aside, I have another reason why I don't like difficulty options: I don't know which option received the most attention from the developers. Hard mode could be the original vision of the dev like hear some people say is the case for Bayonetta or Devil May Cry. Hard mode could also just be an addition as an afterthought that just bumps up some sliders which will make some enemies straight up break the balance of the game because no finetuning is done (this, I encounter in turnbased games more than anything). Personally I'd rather the game straight up tells me what's the intended difficulty (either by lacking a choice or by designating choices as recommended, for beginners, etc...)
Also, the algorithm is scary. Just this morning, I watched the same GDC talk.
"this is how the game is meant to be played" is definitely a nice touch that games should include. That or when they give a small explanation for who the difficulty was targeted towards. "People who haven't played this genre before" "People looking to enjoy the game" "People looking to be challenged" etc., etc.
Sometimes devs have blatant bias towards the super hard mode (Kingdom Hearts Critical Mode always having a free (don’t need to 100% to unlock it) teaser for the next game) and low key distain for easy (also Kingdom Hearts)
@@notproductiveproductions3504 That's true. I don't know how I feel about locking content behind difficulty bars. On one hand, it blocks off that content to some players who may never be able to witness it, but on the other, it rewards players who improve their skills enough, especially with optional harder difficulties unlocked after beating the game once, and other players can still experience the entirety of the base game otherwise.
ah yes, devs just throwing in options they didn't properly map out and program in... reminds me of my first deathmarch enemy auto scaling playthrough of the witcher 3. I hated the fact that some monsters and people would just die in one hit due to me being several levels higher while others (same monsters, same armour and weapons on people, different areas) put up quite a bit of a fight so I thought why not bumb those low tier guys up to my level...
now stuff like this only happened 3 or 4 times throughout the game and only in gimmicky missions like this one but I thought it so damn stupid. in one mission I had to kill a whole bunch of rats. they're usually level 2 seeing as, you know, they shouldn't be able to do anything to a blood reeking monsterhunter.
cdpr stapled on auto level after the fact so sure enough, the fuckers were level 25, all their stats just upscaled, and they ended up 3 hitting me while I had to hit a singular rat about 10 times to kill it.
there was a room filled with 30 of them so I literally couldn't progress without turning it off for that mission.
I love video games, but man let me tell ya the amount of times I've started a game and got a quater of the way in before I realized "Oh shoot this is too easy...maybe it gets harder?" or "Oh this is too hard, am I just bad or is this unbalanced?".
The games that clearly outline their INTENDED difficulty are godsends.
Like with God of War (not the new on, it's always been the mode that is the hardest (not the one you unlock after beating the game). Or with Halo how Heroic is the agreed upon balanced mode.
But then you have RE7 and RE8.
RE7 only had normal as its hardest at the start, so I played that.
Went into RE8 and now they had a third difficulty. But me assuming it would follow the same difficulty as the previous title, I went with Normal.
Turns out they tuned down normal because people complained enough that it was too hard in 7 so my time in 8 was way too easy but I learned that 4 hours into the game and didn't feel like replaying all that over again.
“Nothing worth having comes easy.” - Theodore Roosevelt
The frustration and challenges and limitations along the way, overcoming it, make the success at the end all the more sweeter. The same can be said of life.
Thanks, now i have "Getting Over" PSTD
Absolutely. Well said.
It will probably make me sound old, but nowadays, many folks have it too easy. They don't understand how rewarding it is to beat something difficult.
@xAkame The least they could do is just respect our hobbies.
Nowadays, they like to bitch about everything and ruin it for all the fans.
Missing the obvious point that the level of being able to overcome certain challenges and what is a reasonable level of frustration and limitations differs per person entirely.
Also 100% certain I'd enjoy having a free house, so fuck Theodore Roosevelt.
I've always generally despised difficulty sliders, because they bring out a conflict in me between the part that wants to experience a challenge, and the part that just wants to progress through the game as fast as possible. I just can't get the same experience in games with difficulty sliders as I can in games like Dark Souls.
The point you brought up about shared experience is also a huge factor. Knowing everyone else is on the same playing field serves to heighten my investment and enjoyment in the game.
If you want to play the game as fast as possible the game probably isnt worth playing at all.
@@eczamurai I don't just mean finishing the main story as fast as possible, I mean exploring, completing side quests, collecting unique treasures, leveling up my skills etc. without spending my time wailing on HP sponge mobs.
Well I remember when Alatreon first came out in Monster Hunter World. He was an insane wall that everyone struggled to beat, then everyone came together to discuss strategies and armor sets and now you can find all sorts of guides on how to beat him. Difficult things in games can bring people together, whether its joining up to beat it, laughing at our failures, or celebrating our triumphs.
That's exactly the point.
I hate that some people took it way too seriously and considered Alatreon an objectively bad thing in the game. Discourages Capcom from wanting to give us a similar challenge again.
@@smileyjojo4913 ah the “”””””””””challenge”””””””””” of an auto wipe (which tried to treat the game like its some MMO even though it’s not) that discourages joining with randoms and promoted meta chasing hmmm yes that’s fair and balanced.
@@fulltimeslackerii8229 1. The behemoth crossover
2. They literally give a warning message before you do it with it's mechanics
3. Its true endgame content, it's *should* have difficulty
@@fulltimeslackerii8229 alatreon was fine
@@darkjackl999 you’re missing the point.
Behemoth had an insta wipe the same way as Safi does. Arena wide death zone that can be blocked by certain rocks. In behemoths case, meteors. While simple it was effective and fairly good design.
Alatreon however, his arena wide death zone is countered by a DPS check, that isn’t interesting or considered well designed, it’s a gimmick. Actually fighting Alatreon isn’t hard, he’s got stupidly telegraphed attacks (and really accurate hit boxes, that’s good) the only thing that’s semi difficult about the fight is is his nova.
I remember playing bloodborne for the first time, it was my first FROM Software game. It took me 2 days to get through Central Yharnam and reach Oedon Chapel.
I very very vividly remember thinking "god this game sucks, why is it so hard? Why cant I switch it to an easier difficulty?" But you know what? I stuck with it. Overcame that section, and eventually with a lot more time and effort, the rest of the game too.
It changed me, changed the way I look at adversity and challenge. I wouldnt trade that experience for the world, and putting the option to rob people of that would be wrong.
I bought it thinking it was a straightforward horror game and then got stuck at Gascoigne so I played through the entirety of DS2 so I could learn the Souls mechanics with a shield 😅 Went back, got stuck at Gascoigne again but I knew why I wasn’t approaching it correctly mentally, and now Bloodborne is easily top 3 games of the last 10-15 years for me and I have platinums for it and all 3 Souls games. (I’m like 85% to platinum for Sekiro but it’s just too tedious due to the relative lack of replay value for me 🤷♂️)
Bloodborne was my first, fired it up in March of last year. Yeah, just clearing patrols was difficult... but wandered too far, stumbled into the Cleric Beast. All my molotovs and most my blood vials later, I beat him. First try. Such a rush. These games were so built up as so hard, but I walked away from that first boss to grab a beer and thinking "I can do this." Love these games for both world design and the challenge of having to figure who and what was where. Nothing has made me feel like getting through Father Gascoigne or another "wall" boss for the first time.
I had a very similar experience. Friend convinced me to get it because he wanted me to play it with him. I knew nothing about it, but said sure. He watched me play it for a couple of hours and I just thought: it's fun... but not as fun as I'd hoped it would be. He had me summon him and he helped me through a few bosses (and even convinced me to get the Chief emblem instead of fighting BSB... this was before I knew you had to do one or the other to open the gate). Got past Vicar Amelia and the Witches of Hemwick I think before leaving it. That's when I stopped playing it for a bit... only around a month or so.
Well, then a CZcamsr named Sean (Jacksepticeye, who I'm sure many of the people who see this reply will know of) started a playthrough of Bloodborne, claiming it's his favorite game. So I watched it because I personally didn't get what the hype was about. Well, around 30 minutes in, I found myself creating a new character and hopping back into the game. Turns out, what I hadn't liked was the combo of Hunter's Axe + Blunderbuss which is what my friend suggested (well, technically he just suggested "not the cane" and so I chose Axe which was my own undoing). Using Saw Spear (lol, dropped the saw cleaver quickly) and pistol (to make parrying easier) was much more fun and in the enemy's face. Also, Yharnam is a labyrinth, so his video helped.
A few hours go by and Cleric Beast, who I struggled with on my first playthrough and thought was a bs boss, went down on my first try. Now that I'm on NG+ yeah... in hindsight not as difficult as I first thought, but it was my first FromSoft game, so the playstyle was new. I even explored some of the areas on my own (and got frustrated in Forbidden Woods because I found the shortcuts and the boss room, but turned back because I felt I wasn't ready... and then couldn't find the boss arena for over an hour). Suddenly, I had already beaten all the bosses (not counting Chalice bosses because Amygdala at half health in a tiny arena can screw off, and therefore Yharnam is kind of blocked off right now) including all DLC bosses within 2-3 weeks of starting it again. Some bosses my friend who got me into it didn't even know (Celestial Emissary and Ebrietas).
Anyway, I'm glad there wasn't a difficulty choice. Sorry for the rant lol. Anyone who read it all, thank you and have a nice day.
I played Dark Souls 1 and 2 because my friends liked it, and I hated it. Then I played Bloodborne and something clicked. Now I am a fan.
You actually described the difficulty as something negative, but the rest of the game was so good it didn't matter ^.^
I had this discussion the other day playing elden ring with my girl next to me, I was literally sweating fighting a boss for around 20-30 mins, I was getting annoyed but not in a bad way because I was still thinking rationally to the degree of wanting to try different strategies. She said “why don’t you just play an easier game so you feel like you accomplish something?”. To which I replied nothing because I was so focused on the boss, like 2 mins later I beat the boss told it to go f itself and turned to her and said there’s my accomplishment, that dude was beating me up around left and down and he’s dead now I beat him, I sat back figured out his weaknesses and beat him. I actually stopped playing MHW because it was a bit too hard for my liking but now that I’ve beaten elden ring I’m gonna give it another go because quite frankly I think I can go in with a fresh perspective. My new perspective is that I don’t need to rush, I don’t need to beat something first try or no hits or no death, I’ll leave that to the pros, my angle is figuring out how I can do it, my way. And I think as you explained that’s the point of these games. But also screw outward that game is crazy, I’m sure it’s a great game but holy smokes is it intense.
That's the spirit!
why you lying. she never said that. you don't even have a girl. Space Jam DVD.
As a demon’s/dark souls guy from day 1, I hate monster Hunter.
Lol people's minds would be blown to hear that Monster Hunter is actually harder than Dark Souls.
@@person906 in my admittedly limited excitement, it’s harder due to terrible controls and just excessively long fights. I tried and really wanted to enjoy it (MHW and the one on PSP) but I did not.
I just stumbled into this channel today and I got say that I love how conversational every video I've watched so far is. Something about it welcomingly demands interaction. Definitely will be watching more of your content
As a big Monster Hunter fan, I can't even begin to describe how great it feels to beat a hard monster: the challenge makes me appreciate the monster and the atmosphere a lot, something that would hardly happen if the fights were shallow and easy. Not to mention that you value yourself more afterwards.
Also makes it feel better to go back and be able to farm that monster with a better build imo
It's nice killing a boss that killed me alot in demon souls or blood borne it would be bad if they had a difficulty's unless you could make it even harder
You value yourself more...fucking CRINGE
If a game is what you depend on for self value that’s a whole other problem
or if there was an easy mode, which makes me know my achievement is less impressive as i could have just picked easy mode
If anything, they are gatekeeping the game creators - “You must make the game this way!”
Challenge sliders don't hinder developer vision lmao
@@rose1858 yeah they do. Did you not watch the video?
@@rose1858 The developer vision was literally for there to be no difficulty settings
Complicated movies should be required to have an easier to understand version also filmed
@@cleverman383 An apples to oranges comparison.
This was a very well executed argument. Thank you for presenting this viewpoint so articulately.
Made me think about this series in a far greater layer of depth than I used to. While I was originally of the same opinion, I was pleasantly surprised with how you portrayed both sides, and in the end, steel-manned your own opinion with that of others as well as yourself (even if taking the others opinions from pasta sauce studies, but that's the DS mindset,I guess) thank you for this treat, and I look forward to future content from you. (Even knowing this is 8 months old and I'm probably just being a hassle)
But all Souls games have an easy mode, It's called summoning!
And the hundreds of fucking items that do all kinds of shit that can make the game easier. But using those would be boring so instead the bad players just complain about difficulty.
And turtling
Sorcery or Pyro is easy mode in 1 and 3. Don't know and don't care to know about 2.
@@proximityclockworkx1572 Can confirm, in 2 as well
The myth that souls like games are the hardest games in the world needs to die already
As a game designer, thank you for this. Everytime i tried to make the argument in my mind, i always felt like i was an selfish asshole. Anyways i didnt get that from here.
I think this was really well explained and there were nuances even in the first 11 minutes that i had overlooked in my thought process.
Indeed. The video is extremely well articulated and informative.
[BTW, it seems like the number of subscribers is too low for the quality of the content]
Honestly, this whole thing can be boiled down to one very simple thing: if the dev doesn't want to implement it because it compromises their artistic vision, that's the end of the story. The consumers are not entitled to a game being made how they want, the artists make the game and the consumers choose to consume it or not. It's not selfish, it should really be common sense, but unfortunately there is a lot of entitlement in gaming. Personally, I just choose to trust the intended vision and play on the default difficulty.
@@TyrannoFan A bit late, but thank you for so aptly putting something I have been trying to tell some dumb guy in the thread of my own comment. He says that consumers are entitled to demand that the game devs change the game to suit them, but they're actually not. Consumers choose to consume the product, the devs don't have to appease them.
@@freedomgoddess they can speak on it and ask for changes, but they aren't entitled to the changes themselves, which many people don't seem to understand.
If you're right then who cares if some perceive you as a "selfish asshole"?
Some people will whine about anything, you can't make them happy and they'll always see you as "toxic" unless you conform exactly to their views. In the end not a single game is made to please everyone, and if a developer believes that a high level of challenge is an indispensable part of what they want to create, he/she should be free to do so and anyone who doesn't like it can find a different game to their taste, plenty of fish out there!
Great video! Well-spoken and hits all the notes with real world examples. Love it!!
Really appreciate your reasoning and interestingly parallel analogies/examples.
I would like to add that every Dark souls has an "easy mode", simply summoning phantoms makes every area and boss a cakewalk. Difference is you have to make it easy mode by playing. Hell, using certain builds and weapons could make the game easy but you have to figure that out yourself. That's why I love this franchise so much! Elden ring is almost here!!!
I mean I’d say this might be why this discussion got kicked into high gear with Sekiro lol
I guess you didn't watch the whole video. I do cheese some boss sometimes because it's to difficult, but you break the experience of the game once you add "Easy mode" especially in a souls game. It's not that hard, it does need additional effort to win, I'm not the best gamer in the world. But making things easy on a particular level breaks the experience of getting the reward at the end of the level.
@@vonnblagaming984 Exactly. If you wanna make it easy on yourself, go ahead! Pick up the Sellsword Winblades and make a sorcery build! GG you beat the game. But you're trading probably the biggest part of the Souls experience for that. If you don't care about the experience, good on you. You gave the developers money and the rest is your choice lol.
Not always. Some NPC summons are useless but still add extra health to bosses making the fight harder.
Sorcery= equals easy mode 😂
I hate the disability argument, I have zero doubt there are disabled Bloodborne players who eat the Chalice Dungeons for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not everyone wants to play on kindergarten difficulty and it's very insulting to assume that to make a game more "accessable" you need to treat your player base like toddlers who can't deal with anything harder than Candy Crush.🙄
Disabled people DO want games to be made more accessible.
They want this to be done, by inventing controllers that they can use more effectively, or texture options so they can see things on the screen better, like colorblind options.
They do NOT want you to turn the game down to baby level and hold their hands through the whole thing. PLAYING the actual fucking game is the problem.
If a gamer doesn't have any fucking hands, so you offer to make a Dark Souls mode that plays the game automatically, also called a movie, he'll say "Fuck you bitch, make me a controller for my feet!" then he'll kill Gwyn! They don't want the games to be easier, they want to be physically capable of playing them.
@@haku8135 so true
Might as well give special god-mode versions of games for those supposed disabled people they seem to think they speak for. Seriously, talk about insulting...
@@haku8135
For real, though. There was a disabled Melee player who played with her foot because she has an unusable hand.
True but Candy Crush is actually way more brutal than Dark Souls, granted you don't pay real money.
This was a fantastic video. What a intriguing angle to examine this concept!
i think there should be a difficulty slider for the souls games bc i want the games to be MORE difficult
based opinion
I learned from Bloodborne that I love incredibly difficult games, I love struggling to overcome a challenge and finally making it after practice and patience. I would have probably played it on a lower difficulty setting if I had the option, I would have never learned I love these types of experiences and I probably would have never finished what is now my favorite game of all time.
Alright Alright, you've actually convinced me which I was not expecting. Difficulty is and experience. I do think games like that (aka dark souls) are more of an exception than a rule, I think 90% games probably still need difficulty modes, although it would be nice to have a better idea of what the "intended" difficulty is. I used to think easy modes were an accessibility thing, but on reflection I think accessibility looks more like controller remapping and colour blind modes. Great video
I think it is fair to assume that, in a game with difficulty settings, the "intended difficulty" or the difficulty that the game/ experience is designed around would be the one in the middle; whether that's called "normal" or "medium" is arbitrary. Considering most people will play that difficulty, I have a hard time thinking that a developer would "intend" for the higher or lower difficulty to be the way people experience the game.
@@NewbPhil maybe true but many games have more or less than three too. I always assumed heroic was intended difficulty for the halo franchise but who knows
I'm glad. I believe that without its difficulty, a game such as Dark Souls wouldn't quite hit the same. The thing is, overcoming struggle is at the core of what Dark Souls is all about. An unimportant hollow, just too stubborn to give up despite all the challenges, overcoming all odds.
@@NewbPhil there are several games where normal is the training wheels difficulty. For example Devil May Cry, when you get to Dante Must Die mode you realize this was the intended difficulty all along, the first two playthroughs were just training you to be ready.
Same with Ninja Gaiden.
And both of those do have an easy mode too for people to just breeze through the game if they want. It’s all about options.
@@MadDragonify Yes, and we would call that the exception to the rule; I'm not going to list off every example of games that don't follow the rule in order to keep replies like this away. If you're just trying to add some interesting info to the thread then all good, but jesus christ I SWEAR you cannot make a generalized comment on the internet without someone pointing out that it is, in fact, generalized and that there are exceptions...
Well put together video; your assertions were on point.🙂
Great video and all but that rag doll at 18:13 had me dying.
Lets imagine if Sif was easy and didnt put up a fight and just died for thr sake of it. Would him protecting his masters grave to the point of limbing and still pushing on make an impact? I really dont think so.
While you would be correct in that regard, thats an example that isnt based within the narrative theme of a world that wants to beat the shit out of you. Using a similar example as you, imagine if artorias, the knight whos always highly spoken of in the story, the man who “triumphed” the abyss and has a dog the size of a building, keeled over and died. You gotta look at the entire experience, not yoinking one example.
@@magiv7573 yeah no if I walked into a boss room expecting a fight and the boss just keeled over and died and that was it I'd think it's not impactful regardless of context. That's why people don't really find encountering True King Allant in demon souls very impactful. Context isn't a bandaid for lack of impact
I'd say Gwyn and the Hollow Knight from Hollow Knight are much better examples of bosses that are easy yet still impactful, they're also both final bosses just like True King Allant
Depends on the players and their experience with the game. My friend doesnt care about dog and was beaten by Sif so hard that he didnt care in the 2nd phase.
@@Abyzz_Knight Ever fight Gwyn without parrying? I've never found him to be easy...
@@MazrimTaim I have actually because I'm stubborn and just don't bother learning to parry
This is something that I've said for a while now. Fromsoft's RPGs are a great example, because they aren't just fantasy stories. They're stories about bleak, terrible, and unforgiving worlds. They're stories about main characters that are often hated by other people living in that world. But most importantly, they're stories about overcoming adversity, and not just adversity, but extreme adversity. You'll see characters who have given up. You'll hear NPCs tell you that _you_ should give up. The story is meant to present the world as one that has lost hope, and where success seems impossible to hope for...and then for the player to triumph despite that. However, for that to work, death has to be ever-present. Every step of the journey must feel fraught with danger. As you say, the games aren't as hard as they appear - there are plenty of tools provided to the player to help them get past any roadblocks, and the design of the game is made to encourage and reward buying into that world, and taking it seriously. However, for that narrative to not ring hollow (pun not intended), for it to deliver the experience of the player overcoming insurmountable odds, there needs to be a real difficulty. Mistakes _need_ to be punished...even if the game often uses clever tricks to make the actual punishment less severe than it appears to be. Otherwise, you have a clash between story and game, where everyone keeps _telling_ you how dangerous the world is, while what the game _shows_ you is not that you overcame the odds, but that you were an unstoppable badass that everyone constantly underestimates.
Underrated comment
Intend your puns coward !
I love how they added the rebirth statues to cut down the time needed for getting to some really difficult encounters, making the challenge the central point of experience instead of the annoyance of running through enemies a la DS2.
@@TheSeth256 btw at least one of those is bugged and takes you to the beginning of the cave instead. I hope they fixed that in the patch. Don't remember where, I was just confused the first time I died to the boss and pissed the second.
@@squashiejoshie200000 If it's the same as the one I found, it was the Erdtree Catacombs in Caelid. I distinctly recall failing on that boss a few times and thinking what??? Luckily not tough to get back of course, but a bit annoying that it actually sets you back further than the grace poin at the start even when the Statue of Marika is right in front of the boss door.
If a game has a choice in difficulty, I usually just go with whatever the default option is. I feel like that's probably the intended experience I'm supposed to be getting
a lot of the times the harder difficulties need at least previous knowledge about the game, so me too
I've noticed that more and more games make "normal" difficulty really just "slightly less braindead" difficulty and call it normal so ppl dont feel scrubby. It's a real problem because it can make a first playthrough super boring, because if I havent played a game before I dont know to start with hard instead of normal for a decent challenge. Re4 remake was like that a bit, but not as bad as some other games are. Introducing several difficulties from the start usually comes with problems like this.
this so elequently put into words how I've always felt about the topic. brilliant video.
I've read somewhere that Games lose the ability to hold the Players Accountable for their mistakes if an easy mode is introduced and thus the Player does not learn what wrong they did and make the same mistakes over and over.. Leading them to Gain nothing in the Process.
Edit: It actually came from Gamemakers Toolkit
Its true if its not hard what's the point of getting better.
Speaking of which, the thing that taught me that was Devil May Cry itself. I only learned that I was playing the entire FRANCHISE wrong when I finally tried DMC4's bloody palace. Then and there I found out how DMC is supposed to be actually played, and then and there DMC went from being a series of games that I liked to one of my top 5 favorite franchises in games easily.
I find it to be akin to the "Cheaters never prosper" saying.
If you are presented with a test, and before the test you are told to do your research in order to complete it competantly, but you opt instead to just be given the answers. Then congratulations, you have passed the test, but you have learned nothing.
That's why we tell them to "git gud" easy mode you're basically flailing around either powered up and or fighting weaker mobs. So if you can face tank standing in a volcano there's no threats to be had if there's no threats in a game made to have them did they REALLY play a game or did they just waste time?
RPGs lose the ability to hold the players accountable for their mistakes because the numbers a player may have at any given point beyond the beginning can't be predicted which obfuscates a lack of skill.
Reading through comments and even replying to one has made me thought about DOOM and its difficulties. It's a game that does more than change some numbers, often adding or changing enemies.
It gets me thinking then... Is it truly the same game on each of the three(properly anyway, the easiest and hardest are just modifications to the actual difficulty levels to reduce or increase penalization on how well a player plays). Each have their own experiences, even if they are so similar. Compare this to most games who will mostly change stat numbers, enemy aggression, or aim. The experience is technically based on the same attributes, but the core does not change. You don't deal with a different challenge, but one that, more often than not, is just more frustrating.
It is a whole other world between "grunt 1-3 hits me more often" compared to "I walk into a room and instead of 3 zombiemen there are 3 cacodemons"
More so food for thought, I guess
Also separate comment to make sure this is read, always glad to see people take the intellectual route and disguise rather than dismiss. We need more Rataoskrs and less "reaction talk pieces"
In essence, better difficulty settings require you to use different (and probably better) tactics for the same encounter. Encouraging skillful plays.
Ima use The Last of Us 2 to reply to this.
I believe MOST players, even streamers were playing either of the easier difficulties in their first playthroughs. I myself chose Grounded.
What were the differences between my playthrough and those who played on easier modes?
I died quicker. Ammo was more scarce. Finding materials to craft was a blessing. To me, it felt perfect with the setting which is a world a decade+ into a zombie apocalypse.
Now how did streamers deal with the easier modes? Lots of ammo. Tanking hits/bullets. Lots more things to scavenge.
The Rat King boss fight was a STRUGGLE and literally came down to my last couple bullets. Watching Pewdiepie loaded out really convinced me I was playing the same game but having the complete opposite experience.
It's not even about the story, but the fact that I can play such a drastically different game from someone else is crazy.
I'm personally a fan of letting developers choose if they have several difficulties or just one. However I would LOVE if they would identify which mode is the INTENDED expereince like with Halo most people agree that Heroic is the most balanced difficulty across the board.
There can be multiple intended experiences in the game, in varying levels of difficulty, with one of the experiences being more intended than the rest.
With Doom for example, say, Ultra-Violence is the intended experience, but if you hit a wall and it's not fun anymore, then Hurt Me Plenty is also an intended experience. You still feel like the Doom Guy, you still have fun, you still get the message the dev is trying to send. Say Ultra-Violence is too easy! Nightmare is still an intended experience! You still feel like Doom Guy, you still have fun, and you still get the message!
Doom (2016/Eternal) is a different game on Ultraviolence compared to the lower difficulties. It reinvents itself again on Nightmare. Higher than nightmare is just shades of nightmare really. That said, U.V. assumes a lot about its player base- if Doom Eternal is your first ever FPS, then yeah, you're the target for that lower difficulty.
What we NEED is for games to better broadcast who difficulties are for without condesension. Millions of people have played halo games on """normal""" difficulty without realizing Heroic is the intended experience, with Legendary as optional hard more. Easy is 'First FPS' and normal is 'Casual' or 'easy' - what have you.
Apart from that the arguement is spoiled by artificial difficulty- which is utter junk and ought not to exist at all; definitions vary but you can imagine it as damage-sponge enemies that have been boosted by a simple to implement %health/damage increase buff- or the same but applied negatively to the player. For instance, bethesda difficulty sliders. These kinds of tweaks while easy to implement immediately torpedo game balance, show a sort of laziness on behalf of the dev-team in implementing them, and are kind of their own seperate topic.
On a related note, 100% agree that customizable difficulty- with lots of options, is great- albiet it comes at the risk of diluting the intended game experience if such fine control is handed to players who have no experience with the system they are tweaking.
It's not a controversial subject, not everything in this world is or has to be easy. In fact, most things are not easy.
The chellange is what creates the meaning and identity of the task and altering the difficulty to appeal to a wider audience, is altering the game.
Take the 100m Sprint for example, the game is to run 100m as fast as you can, if you move the line to 50m, it's not the same game anymore. Every game, may it physical or digital, has a set of rules and inherit difficulty, set by the creators so everyone has the same base to work off of, it is literally and figuratively the level playing field.
Are some people at a disatvantage and some at an advantage? Absolutely, i will never be as fast as Usain Bolt who trained his whole life to be the best, my fastest run would be a casual jog for him. Not everything is for everyone, some tasks are easier, some harder and some impossible.
Great video! Didn’t know about the Pepsi guy and appreciate the info!
That tweet you showed from that Tamoor guy.. Give every Fromsoftware game easy mode "For all I care"
Like dude, it's not about YOU. It's not worth 2 shits whether you care or not. It's about Fromsoftware and their creative liberty and the design decisions THEY want to make... not YOU.
This Fromsoft easy mode discourse is really starting to grind my gears
It's always been funny to me to see some people who talk about how video games must be viewed as art then go on to make demands of the artist which are contrary to the artist's vision. "It's your art but you must cater to my vision."
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you care about the integrity of the artist's vision or you don't. If you don't care about that integrity of vision, then don't try to call it art.
Personally, I don't think every video game is art. Many I would call artisanal products. These are the works of craftsman who may have some creative influence but whose ultimate function is utilitarian in nature. The craftsman takes a prescribed set of requirements and builds something to fit them.
I think this demand for accessibility makes sense when you're dealing with something that falls into this artisanal category. But I think that the conflation of artist and artisan has resulted in the kinds of category errors which lead people to make contradictory claims and demands.
Personally I think we should make efforts to reintroduce the concept of the artisan to the broader critical discourse around video games.
It would make a lot of these sorts of conversations much more nuanced and interesting than the black and white essentializing that they currently devolve into.
To be fair, he did follow it up with 'if they want to do it' - but I agree, he misses the point entirely and the gatekeeping argument is a huge stretch. We recognize and respect the vision, and as players who have benefited from it and had our experiences enriched by that unwavering approach to challenge FromSoft take, I think we're pretty qualified to defend their argument.
Don't know the guy. But he does look like some random guy that lives on the streets. Let's be honest hobos can't even comprehend the beauty of Souls games let alone trying to judge lol
@@Akherousia502 Gatekeeping itself is a very flawed argument for Difficulty, people like this Tamoor guy believe that the "Git Gud" mentality was bad but it's anything but... before it became a meme "Git Gud" was a sign of camaraderie between folks who have struggled from the same Boss and achieved a Great level of respect to one another, if these people even slightly know how good the Soulsborne community they probably will have change their minds about it, like there's an entire Subreddit dedicated to help others that are struggling giving them Instructions on how to beat the Bosses in each games heck even how to cheese them.. my point is that they shouldn't label one Community or Players that like a challenge into a singleminded claim that they Gatekeep.. No! they want to keep the difficulty cuz they want you to experience what they did so they could welcome you with open arms and be able to talk and laugh about it afterwards.
@@dantefromdevilmaycry9857 I've spent years sharing these exact kinds of conversations with people.
"Oh, I struggled with Pontiff. You thought he was easy but struggled with Aldrich? Heh. I one shot Aldrich on my firs play through."
Everybody being asked to achieve the same thing in their own way creates diversity and a shared experience which creates a community.
I question what experience people think they will have if they can just 1 hit kill everything. Is seeing it the same as experiencing it?
Wow. I didn't think I would learn a new strat watching this video. I always just assumed Alluring Skulls and other such items were for players who wanted monsters to come to them. It has literally never occured to me to use them to lure enemies to traps and hazards. Shit. I can't wait to try that out. Thanks, man!
The easy mode for the Dark Souls games is watching the walkthroughs, FightingCowboy has some nice ones. 😉
I can not parry, I never have the stats for shield blocking, I prefer big heavy one shot weapons, I constantly get lost, and I still beat Dark Souls 1, and I will complete #3 soon. If I can do it, anyone can.
If you ever play bloodborne and struggle with the Bloodstarved Beast, you can use the pungent blood cocktails to get it to ignore you for a couple seconds, giving you time to pop an antidote and a blood vial. It helped me kill it in my first playthrough before I could parry.
@@d3adl1mbs66 oh yeah I had no idea about that my first time through! Again I saw it in a video like this one and I tried it but it just didn't work out for me I had to kill it in my own way. Just like anything with these games though eventually I got good at beating that guy and I killed him. Still him and the other beasts like him in that game or some of my most frustrating I hate him, I hate dark beast Paarl it's all the worst.
I think the biggest mistake is the idea that difficulty is an accessibility issue. Difficulty, like you said, is a tool for both the developers to craft the experience and for the players to have an experience. I don't think every game needs to specifically address difficulty from an accessibility standpoint, though it is nice when the experience allows for it.
I do think we need to be more cognizant of accessibility though. Alternate designs that account for disability (sound-based signaling have a visual counterpart, color-based gameplay having other alternatives alongside those indicators, modifiable control schemes, etc) don't feel like they're yet at the level they could be, and I think those designs mostly enhance games (from personal experience as someone half-deaf).
But I do appreciate getting rid of a bad argument. Thank you for this video!
Difficulty is most definitely an accessibility issue. Colours are also a way for a developer to craft an experience. So fuck colourblind people. Being a 'tool for a developer to craft an experience' does not somehow magically make something not an accessibility issue. All game design tools relate to these issues.
@@Chibs Difficulty really isn't an acessibility issue. Accessibility is instead a hardware issue where the means of interacting with games doesn't suit some people in particular.
Specailly in the context of fromsoft games where you really don't need any mecanical skill to win.
I just wanted to say thanks for this video. I’m working on an assignment at the moment and Moskowitz’s work presents a good contrast to the required reading.
I’ve been watching since your first longsword tutorial for rise, and am still waiting for the day I become alienated
A year ago, I had no interest in Soulslike games. I thought that the difficulty would frustrate me, after endless failures. But then I played Exanima. And I realized just how rewarding difficult games can be. Even though I haven't even gotten close to finishing the first level, I still enjoy it. Even when I die, I'm still rewarded, because I can feel myself get better.
I'm eventually going to play Dark Souls now, because I have discovered what I want.
This feels like such a magical video thank you for making it!
Really well-done video, thanks a lot for making it!
In the case of Celeste I had a weird reaction to the knowledge I could slow the game down. I got caught in a headspace where I knew I could use slow mode (so it felt futile to keep trying at full speed) but didn't want to (because I thought I'd be cheating myself). So I just never finished the game, tapped out in the mountain core. Maybe that's irrational. But even if it's irrational, it's who I am. I know the presence of save states has tempted me into ruining my experience with several CRPGs, and I know that the ability to credit feed has tempted me into ruining my experience with several arcade game ports. In some ways I've gotten more disciplined over the years and I'm grateful for that, but ... is it too much to ask that some games exist which don't tempt me into ruining my own experience? Easiest way to avoid giving into temptation (like easy mode) is to not surround yourself with temptations.
This is a good video which manages to articulate some insightful things that I think other "defense of Dark Souls" videos/articles (e.g. the one by NeverKnowsBest) don't.
To be fair, Core is also just... not a fun level. Easily one of my least favorite parts of the postgame, and I know some people with low-end PCs get performance issues in there to boot.
Sounds like a you problem.
@@mechanomics2649 I really hate how finicky bouncing off objects can be, and I especially don't like having to repeatedly walljump to get up ice walls - I refer to walljumping up a single wall as "meatjumping" after Super Meat Boy, and only Mega Man X/Zero/ZX has actually been able to make this kind of walljumping feel good. Yes, it is my opinion, but I don't think it's one that's difficult to understand or agree with!
@@mechanomics2649 I saw you other comments and this is the one i am responding to because this is the one that shows the contradiction in your argument. It's his problem that he can't help the temptation to ruin his own experience, but it's not the easy mode player's problem their lack of patience prevents them from enjoying a Fromsoft game? You are also gatekeeping.
I came into this video on a whim, ready to dismiss it because I held the opposing viewpoint. I hit the dislike button before it started, so certain was I that would be my opinion. And then I actually watched the video. You made a good show, with good arguments, and I came away convinced.
I'm an aspiring creative, which is code for wanting to make stuff but being caught in the endless cycle of worrying whether anyone would want it, and whether I would enjoy it, figuring out the message I want to send. So taking this from a developer-centric perspective really worked on me.
Customer advocacy is incredibly important in such a broken and abusive market, but taking it solely from that viewpoint introduces blind spots. Thanks for the new perspective.
It's interesting that when it comes to microtransactions and loot boxes, the idea of a perfectly individualized experience can be dismissed. Just having that stuff in the game psychologically impacts it for everyone.
Yet when it comes to difficulty modes or other features of the game intended by the developers, suddenly we're supposed to become totally rational free actors who always understand what we want and are never tricked or regretful.
This video helped me connect those ideas, which in the past were not. Thanks.
Git gud scrub
@@carpetbomb8986 Joe
@@FaithLuvUnbroken Limbaugh?
Why would you ever hit dislike before even watching it TF?
You can dismiss opinions out of apathy but you shouldnt consider them wrong before even listening to them.
@@tomasaho4334 don't worry man, this person has the skills of a gaming journo
They'll never understand the idea of challenge
They way he described his Morrowind experience sounded really cool and made me want to play. I kinda wish more games were like that
There are a lot of games like that but it doesn't last much, like you can have that same experience in vanilla wow not using questie, but you will get tired of that fast.
Excellent video, and it briefly touched upon a couple of things I've often felt myself. First, the video mentions the community aspect of sharing and learning as well as the tools that already exist in the game. Almost every single Soulslike game has multiple powerful builds, weapons, spells, etc. They have summons and co-io. They have easy farming spots for "Souls." There are a ton of guides, both written and in video form, that can be found at the touch of a button. For anyone looking to "make Dark Souls easier," well, they already have pretty much everything they need to do so without the added cost/resources/time (and loss of developer intent) that comes with a dedicated Easy mode. Thing is, all of the difficulty options that already exist still require the player to engage with the game as it's designed and intended.
Second, the video mentions the discussion needing to be a two way street, which it often isn't. There's this immediate assumption (that some members of the community don't help) that the only people who like Dark Souls are "git gud bro" neck beards who need success in a video game to make them feel some level of personal worth. Which is not at all the case. And any dismissal of developer intent is only focused on what developers of harder games "need to do" without ever examining the other side. As a personal example, I love Gone Home. It's one of my favourite games of all time.. but it's admittedly a "walking sim" that trades on horror game trope while not actually being a horror game. The game is very short, not replayable at all, and there is no challenge or even a fail state. But that's all the intended experience. When Gone Home released there were some complaints about it's design (most notably by "Hardcore Gamers") and yet there was never any call for the game to be changed to fit those who didn't like what it offered. The developers of Gone Home were never shamed or called on to add faster movement speed, a monster that chases you and can kill you, guns to shoot the monsters that would be added to chase you, etc. They were never expected to add difficulty so that it would be the sort of game that appealed to everyone. Everyone not only accepted that Gone Home was it's own special game that did things it's way but they actually praised the game for it.. despite the fact it was clearly not intended to be enjoyed by every single gamer out there.
Cheers for another knockout video.
As a Souls simp since '09 when Demon's Souls was released, one upsetting thing about this debate is the one-sided aggression. Although Souls fans are vicariously proud of their favourite series, there's no cultural conversation over whether all games should be moody action RPG metroidvanias -- of course they shouldn't. That would be ludicrous.
I watched Dark Souls break through the mainstream gladly, because it was the continuation of something unique and visionary in a sea of military shooters. But as soon as FromSoftware struck their fortune, this conversation began. People who didn't care about Dark Souls wanted to take it away and sculpt into something superficially preferable to them, but at the expense of those like me. And would it have actually accomplished anything for them? Like you, I suspect not.
Furthermore, I found the Souls community extremely helpful when I required clarification regarding systems. The idea of the "git gud" attitude is mostly a straw man, which Souls players are tempted to use when others want to dilute the experience due to their own frustration.
So I really, really dislike this debate. It seems to me that the pro-slider side wants to dilute something unique from a moral high horse, when Souls players are, at worst, overly proud. One of these sides is going on the offensive and trying to exert control; the other just wants their bass cannon experience modified only by skilled designers.
"Git gud" is the reply you get from incessant bitching, blaming the game for your shortcomings and generally being immature. I have never seen someone tell a guy, who genuinely wanted advice being told to just stfu and "git gud". Because they don't need to hear that. They are already tring to git gut.
And yeah, the "include me please" argument is super annoying...
Bitch, almost the entire shelf is catering to you. Stop demanding the two spaces, that cater to me, cater to you, too.
I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, since it's a genuine question. Where have you been interacting with the Souls community? I know fans irl that are great, but most of the times I've found Souls fans online, they've been absurdly toxic. Is there somewhere with a decent-sized, established community that's actually positive, or are you just referring to isolated encounters?
@@orpheus2921 yeah, nah you seem to be talking about the pvp enthusiasts...
@@TheAusar i dont want them to take my babies away. they already partially took elderscrolls and FF, not souls games too ....
@@orpheus2921 To be honest, it's been a while. But when I first needed guidance, back in the DeS and DkS1 days, I found the community universally friendly and helpful.
I'm going to be honest, most Souls-like fans, to my eyes before watching this video, were mostly entitled masochists and extremists. The reason being that I thought a difficulty slider was a simple thing and a no-brainer for games. That was until my experience with Elden Ring, then I realized much of what the people in favor of a slider criticized about people against it, was present in themselves . I wholeheartedly agree with the argument that says someone doesn't know what they enjoy and from my personal experience, that is true.
Playing and watching Elden Ring related content made me realize that it wasn't the suffering you would focus on, but instead the planning, the thinking, the memorizing. I feel like Souls-like is a specific and, similarly to how it was presented in the Outward section, sophisticated to the point where when the intended experience is reached, you get better. One thing I feel is a nice addition I'm not sure was present in other FromSoftware games since I haven't played much of them, is the fact you can always take a break and explore other areas in order to gain strength, equipment and experience enough so that you can overcome your initial obstacle, the at the time pinnacle of difficulty for you.
Watching other people kill bosses you've had difficulty even imagining how they could be beaten is a great motivational factor. It's like getting a taste of what you can become if you don't give up. Because of that, I think - as much wishful thinking or optimism it is - that these "hard" games could help you overcome things and obstacles in real life. It shows you that with time, patience and dedication anything could be dealt with.
On that note, I feel like this video is extremely well constructed and worded, with each argument being valid and reasonable whilst not necessarily hammering in the idea presented forcefully and without proper argumentation. I came to this video from another of this channel and I was surprised to see the topic covered due to it's controversy. And I was again surprised to see that I wasn't left frustrated or mad, but instead enlightened. With Elden Ring's release, a lot of contradicting opinions are being formed, which might or might not've been present even in the days of early souls-like games, and it pains me to see that people can't see how valid the opposing side's points are.
I am personally not really skilled in gaming, especially on games like Dark Souls, but being introduced to it showed me that it wasn't about someone's skill entering the game but how much they'd be willing to spend time and effort trying to get good at the game. I can't quite put it into words since it's a new feeling to me, but if I had to compare, typical games are more casual, you'd often go towards them in an attempt to distract or entertain yourself for a few hours, but most of the time it ends up falling short of something special. It's like a short dose of numbness with a slight hint of adrenaline or excitement that you can't feel in real life easily. As for games without a difficulty setting, it's more focused, demands more of you but in exchange it rewards you with a much greater feeling of completion, now being something similar to a powerful shot of excitement, relief and the feeling of empowerment, which drives you to challenge yourself even further.
I guess this says more about games who don't focus on a feeling, emotion or a set of specific ideals than it does difficulty itself. Games can be easy and make you feel other things but in a similar manner, I think an example of this is Journey, which is beautiful, thrilling and can make you connect with someone you've never met, something that can't exactly be normally achieved by something like CoD, for instance (And that's not specifically a bad thing, but it means they're focused on different things). What I mean is that a game can be just that, a game, something you spend time on because of one or two factors or solely because it gives you a little endorphin hit, but they can be much, much more. Games can be experiences, they can provide something you wouldn't achieve anywhere else and I think that's the beauty of interactive media. You can, whether for a moment, a whole playthrough or your whole life, connect with the game-maker and take it to your very core, grow with it.
Either way I want people to know this is solely my opinions and experiences, even if I got a little philosophical at the end. I just wanted to thank Ratatoskr for making this video and giving me, ironically, an experience I wouldn't normally get. That was probably one of the easiest subscribes I've ever given lmao.
commenting just so I have a way to come back to this comment again and again as I go through elden ring, its so well put ;-;
The only Souls-like fans that get on my nerves are the ones who claim that FromSoftware are the "only good game developers left" or some such BS.
Some game design choices that they made I find to be utterly terrible or lazy, like how you can't pause the game, even in single player. But, many people seem to like it, so I just accept that that's what the fans want.
If I find the game too difficult, I either stop playing it or look for ways to get better.
If people really want to experience the game but at a difficulty not set by the creators, then just use cheats. As kids in the 90s, we used to do that all the time. Because we were kids and the games were hard. That's my response to anyone who complains about the difficulty fo single-player games. The possibilities are endless, complaining just shows that they haven't the first clue how gaming even works. The fact that some of these people call themselves "journalists" is a complete joke, and an insult to a very important part of our democratic society.
I think the best difficulty options are ones which are either locked in at the start and can't be changed (I think the Doom games do this), or that actually reward the player for playing at higher difficulties. Diablo-style games are well-known for this mechanic, to the point where the highest difficulties were secrets you have to unlock first. I've never really played a Souls game, but I think they have something similar.
Although I am kind of salty about the Switch version of DS Remastered which I bought for full price, and then I couldn't reassign the A+B buttons. (They're reversed in Asian games, apparently.)
@@Nerobyrne not being able to pause has absolutely nothing to do with laziness at all.
from does absolutely know how to pause a game, e.g. sekiro.
it is because multiplayer is so intertwined with singleplayer.
the souls games go as far as "simulating" pvp invasions.
it's actually super simple.
you might not like that, but it has a very good reason to be as it is.
@@Retro_Rainer except it isn't, you have to opt into multiplayer.
Personally I don't care one way or another, I'm an avid mmo player. But interesting point about Sekiro, I didn't know that.
@@Nerobyrne You absolutely can remap the buttons on the switch version. I just did, it's not even on some obscure menu. Go to system and there is an option that says button settings. switch itself allows a button remapping anyway for any game that doesn't inherently support it.
This is an exceptionally well put together argument and I thank you for presenting it. I particularly like the spice analogy, I myself enjoy spicy food, and I believe it makes the experience richer. Anyone is free to order a different curry with less heat, but to eat the same curry, with less heat, is a different experience to the one I had. It doesn't make your experience less valid, but different, and if I then express how much I enjoyed that experience I would be talking about a different one to what you had. Shared experience is important to the lasting impact of dark souls, I believe it is why the game is still talked about so fondly, so many years after release.
Amazing video love the time stamps. Keep up the good work 👍
The second at around 14:00 really resonated with me.
In "The Beginner's Guide," one of the big questions or debates between Coda and Davey is whether or not a game should be "playable," meaning, should the game be reasonable to experience? Many of Coda's games were not. He made several games where you're stuck in a prison and there is *literally* no way out. In one of his games, you were forced to wait out an hour in a jail cell before the door would open again and you were able to escape. In his final game, he made a maze where all the walls were invisible, and if you touched a wall, the screen would flash red, and your character would be teleported back to the start. Also in his final game, he made a door where the lever was quite literally on the other side: the game was impossible to complete without outside modifications. Coda thought that games like these could still portray a message, that they could still be used to create that player "experience" that Yoko Taro talked about. Davey disagreed so strongly that... Well... I won't spoil the ending, but it's an incredibly emotional game. Go play it if you haven't
This video is awesome, Rata, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for making this
Yea but coda's games were not trying to make profit,
Its a single hobbyist vs a game company with different goals
And im sorry but its a made up story. A good one tho
@@devilvocano420 The OP never mentioned it being a true story though, just that it is similar topic brought up.
@@devilvocano420 fromsoft games have done amazingly well without an easy mode. If you you want an easy mode in dark souls then don't play it or git gud.
Those games you were describing at the end weren't made as games for enjoyment in the fictional universe of the beginners guide, they were made to show Davey how messing with codas games affected him, by forcing Davey to mess with them more
I’m going to say something very rare to see on social media…..you’ve changed my mind. I was on the fence when it comes to this debate but you brought me over.
You make excellent points, very well done. I experienced this first hand with Elden Ring. It's my first souls game, and at first it just felt so alien and difficult, so I spent 30 hours grinding the dismounters and then the imp dudes until I was level 85 with a solid faith build. Then I got the halo scythe and upgraded it to +9 and wrecked Margit, Godrick, Renalla, and Radahn in a 3 hour span. But i experienced none of the story, I just followed videos to key places for items and had no idea what I was doing or what was going on. So I made a new character, went for a quality build, and Haven't allowed myself to summon anything, friends, npcs, or use ashes, and no magic of any variety, no over leveling, and my experience has been so much better. Harder, but better.
It's the same thing as saying "I wish Horror games were not as scary, because I can't handle them."
I get that the "git gud" comment is annoying and condescending, but a better way to put it is "overcome!" (It's not impossible, and it will feel good!). I strongly believe a lot of people who want EASY modes for the souls games either didn't try enough, or are used to have the whole world handed to them in a silver platter.
“Your only option is to improve in skill until you have the proficiency required to overcome the obstacle that is blocking you”
just doesn’t have the same ring
Improvise, adapt, get bodied again but this time you got two hits in instead of one. Repeat till boss dies