The Boschian Horror of ‘Elden Ring’
artreview.com
artreview.com
There's a quote from an interview with Miyazaki I really likes which underlines how carefully crafted the world is: https://imgur.com/zO6CcDq
Nioh, for example, is a great series that's even more challenging than Souls, and with an even more in depth combat system. But the atmosphere, world building, and level design is just nowhere near FromSoft's level.
But having all the games would probably allow me to more fully appreciate the art’s evolution.
Be sure to check out Bloodborne as well.
Now that I'm heavily mentally invested in their games, I am enthralled by their deep yet vague stories, but I'm constantly impressed by the visual creativity and aesthetic sensibilities. That screenshot in the article is incidentally an area I screenshotted myself just yesterday, although mine was more about the shadowy silhouettes of the statues in the foreground (not really shown in the image in the article).
Then again, I do that for many things. Video games, tabletop games and even non-interactive media like comics, books, mangas. It's probably a faulty switch in my brain, but somehow I enjoy reading about and looking at the art of X (currently and fittingly to this thread, Berserk) more than consuming X.
I think that's true for many topics. Some people evaluate developers based on lines of code because it's hard to evaluate the value of the code. In sports, athletes are evaluated based on how fast they run, because it's easily quantifiable and understandable, even if that's not especially important to the job. People tend to focus on flaws, IMHO, for the same reason.
And I think it's especially true in the arts. When people don't know what to say, when it makes them uncomfortable, they find the flaws - easy to talk about, and it dimisses the uncomfortable thing from the conversation. What makes art art is hard to define, unquantifiable, and often challenges our understanding.
The key is that there is probably a fairly uniform consensus that the art direction is good, while the topic of game difficulty is a more volatile topic and one where there is more room for debate.
And, of course, most forum users cannot brag about how beautiful the game is, but they can implicitly brag about how good they are at the games by disputing the difficulty.
Or indeed explicitly brag by affirming the difficulty but making it clear that they did it with their eyes shut.
I mean that's what forums are for, right? Peacock feather displays?
Personally, I've never really played these games, but from what I've seen they don't look particularly difficult -- provided that you dodge within a certain number of frames, know your enemy before charging in, and avoid trying to play the games as you might approach something with faster-paced combat.
The devs say you're supposed to die -- to learn. Not all that difficult then? They're just tailored for a certain type of gamer, like most games.
certainly agree
> Even moreso when we are talking about a work of art.
why does art get special consideration?
because art is a way of personal expression and its function, ideally is to elicit growth in the people who engage with it. On the other hand I don't need a Dark Souls can opener.
'growth'? in what?
what is 'engage with it' mean?
What if I disagree, does that mean I have a different and valid opinion, or that I'm mentally stunted and unable to 'grow'?
I could go on. Your justification is the kind of unchallengeable nebulosity that artist types come up with to justify stuff, and if I don't get it, I'm wrong.
I'm not anti-art by any means, but I do wonder at the ability of 'art' as a topic to inhibit critical thinking, or making up one's own mind.
IMO anyway.
Growth can come in many forms. Learning something about the artist, learning something about yourself while studying art, learning how to distinguish good critique from bad critique, how form and function of art work together, and so on.
There's nothing nebulous here. It's ironic that you go on a rant about 'art types' and demand critical thinking but then in some passive aggressive tone deserve that people serve you definitions on a platter.
And sure you can disagree, nothing I said implies you can't, I didn't call anyone mentally stunted so I don't know where that comes from.
I don't agree with what you say but I do appreciate your trying. Not enough karma to upvote you so a simple thanks must suffice. I wish we had a chance to talk in person on this.
So for the people who likes hardmode, you are extremely greedy when you want to remove the only game offering the hardmode those people want, you can just go and play any of all the other easy mode games while they have no other options. You are a part of the majority who is catered to in almost every game going to the minority asking them why they don't cater to you as well, of course they get angry.
Agreed, go play something else if you want an easy game. This ain’t it.
"We don't want to include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment," Miyazaki said. "So we want everyone … to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player."
"We want everyone to feel that sense of accomplishment. We want everyone to feel elated and to join that discussion on the same level. We feel if there's different difficulties, that's going to segment and fragment the user base. People will have different experiences based on that [differing difficulty level]. This is something we take to heart when we design games. It's been the same way for previous titles and it's very much the same with Sekiro."
It makes some sense, the constant in the world is the bosses, so you have to change yourself in some way to beat them. If you suck at souls games, like I do, that means a lot of studying to finally win. But then I'm content that I've beaten the same thing everyone has.
Quotes from https://www.gamespot.com/articles/heres-why-dark-souls-blood...
I don't believe this is true at all. Heck, you can look at the patches put into the various games to see places where FromSoft agreed that they botched something. I don't think anybody thinks that Bed of Chaos is the good kind of hard.
And Soulsbourne games do have multiple difficulty options. NG+ exists. SL1 exists.
The fact that they patch the experience of their hardmode helps my case, not yours. It shows that they care deeply about the experience of their hardmode players, since everyone is forced to play it they have to care about it. While other developers just say "if you find it too hard just play on easy", fromsoft has to actually fix their games when they mess it up.
> NG+ exists
NG+ isn't a higher difficulty, its just continuing the game with yoru current character. The monsters have higher stats than the first run, but so do you since your character is higher level.
> SL1 exists
Deliberately choosing to not use certain options in the game makes every game harder, yes, but that isn't a part of difficulty options and the game isn't designed around SL1 runs.
Instead, the real solutions to the mechanical challenges that Soulsbornes throw at you are sprinkled throughout this thread.
The "difficulty" really arises from the need for game knowledge -- you have to keep dying until you figure out the right weapon, right spell, or right attack which works well against a particular encounter. And find all the places you can upgrade your weapons and tools and such. After you do these things, the game is in fact quite easy. Hunting around and gathering this stuff is the core fun of the game and I can't see how this is exclusionary toward anybody who would want to play.
I suppose there is a segment of people who would like to see images of the game without doing that but honestly... just watch a Let's Play. That way you don't even need to pay for the game.
I think this is uncharitable. You can look at completion rates on Steam for some data. I personally stopped playing the xbox360 version of DS1 because the goddamn giants in Lost Izalith kept respawning (something that was mercifully changed with patches). I'd have kept going if I had the patched (and easier) game.
I think we have to accept that not every game is for every person. How adamantly FROM Software fans defend the difficulty shows that this style of game is greatly appreciated by many and, while it sucks to not be into that if the rest of the game looks good to you, I think we just have to be ok with the fact that ok maybe this game was made for people who are into that.
Personally, I appreciate that FROM Software basically force me to learn their games mechanics rather than button mashing my way through, even if it is very frustrating in the moment. I know I'm not good enough to persevere if I could just play in easy mode, and I would have missed out on some truly exhilarating moments. I understand that that's just me and everyone is different, but I mean, there's plenty of games out there, not all have to cater to everyone. There are certainly plenty of games that I think look really cool but ultimately I don't feel are for me (most multiplayer games, really. Even if they look awesome, I just don't have the dedication for it).
This is also why I think its important to watch gameplay videos before you buy, so that you know what you're getting yourself into.
I'm not asking to be able to button mash my way through. Perhaps this is a problem with terms. I'd like a "hard but doable for me" mode. That mode is tuned lighter than the default tuning of the game as released.
Consider that the games already come with many various forms of hard mode. You can do NG+ runs that are harder. You can do SL1 runs that are harder. You can put all of your souls into Resistance and waste your character. If the game shipped without level ups and everybody was forced into SL1 runs, would that make the game better? Surely for some people that'd place the difficulty right at their boundary of "hard, but doable." But for you (or certainly me) that'd be a frustrating wall.
I can understand it though. I mean, leaving aside whether or not adding an easy mode actually affects the game for those who don't want to play in it. Its kinda like, the developers created a game that, as it stands, appeals to person A. Person B wants changes made or added to the game so that the game appeals more to them. Of course person A is going to be upset that others want the game changed to suit those other people, when it works perfectly fine for person A as is.
For me, I know that adding an easy mode would affect my experience, but the reason for that is a me problem: because I know I don't have the tenacity to persevere if I have a choice to just play in easy instead (yet I also know that being forced to persevere has led to some of the greatest satisfaction I've gotten from playing games). That's my problem, though, but for me its like yeah well the game as is suits me, so.. please don't change it. Of course I totally understand that this is just me and that others could enjoy the game much more if this were added to the game, and I should just work on my self control in that area.
But I totally get it, especially if this is the only thing that prevents someone from enjoying a game that in every other way would be enjoyable to them.
Different things are fun for different people. That sounds pretty tedious to me, a long slog of arbitrary "guess what the game designer is thinking of" puzzles. Especially when it's all built around killing, something that just doesn't interest me much. To each their own, I guess.
Maybe I can explain by analogy. I'm very fond of the author Raymond Chandler, who wrote noir mysteries. I love his work, and especially the way he uses language. But I don't care at all who did it. The artificial puzzle aspect of mysteries just doesn't interest me.
It's the same deal here. I get people like this kind of thing. I'm just saying I'm not one of those people. It sounds like I might appreciate the aesthetics of the game, so if I could play through it on easy mode, I might. Sort of the way I read through a mystery and am allowed to ignore the whodunnit aspect.
Looking at it from the opposite side, some people have no problem with the gameplay, but pay little attention to the aesthetics or dialogue and lore or item descriptions. For them they can instead look up YouTube videos or Wiki articles to explain things. I don't think it's a bad thing those alternatives options exist, but I think adding say a logbook like in Outer Wilds would cheapen the experience for people who really want to get immersed in the world.
I think practically watching a playthrough or just modding the game to make your character OP is the best workaround.
I'm 46, I have well over 10k hours in hundreds of video games. Been gaming since I had an Atari and games had no directions or guides like Indiana Jones.
Having difficulty that I don't enjoy in a game is the number 2 reason after "it didn't click" that I abandon a game.
There's literally nothing that stops me from reading a novel or watching a movie or walking through a museum or a world historical site to gate keep that experience. Games is the only one where we say "you must enjoy frustration or read spoilers to progress". Just gate keeping that great artistic vision. If it is art worth the experience it shouldn't behind a wall saying "get gud to enter". Let people experience it how they can or want to or have time to.
We're no longer charging quarters based on deaths but that still has it's tendrils in our artform.
To be clear I die a ton in games, I also appreciate it when the game is like ok buddy you tried you can go forward like gta5/gth2. I died 10 times to gremlin shamans in valheim yesterday, but that isn't gatekeeping some artwork, and that game has creative mode.
It's also important to appreciate how difficult it is to balance a game especially when your character's power level increases throughout the game. Most games that have a hard mode are lazy: bosses just have more health or enemies suddenly get headshots all the time. The game needs to be balanced around an intended difficulty level to make it compelling. It takes a lot of talent to make a good difficulty curve, as proven by the lame ripoffs of Souls games that have come out over the years.
I think I skipped one mission in GT5 (yoga) and about 5 in GTH2 (the cuba stealth missions that were broken). My brother played along side me and is not an experienced gamer, he would skip the parts that required constant fast aiming, but played the rest. It worked well for both of us.
As a note, Sony had an internal stat a while back, only 10% of people ever finish any game, only 30% make it past the first 3rd... This was for people who purchased the game. This wasn't an average across all titles, this was very consistent for most titles. This was measured with trophies. People fell off very obviously at each boss or challenge increase. If you're making an "Authorial experience" this type of gate keeping will keep most people from experiencing it that would have otherwise.
Sometimes it's worthwhile to keep an artistic vision as intended, even if not everyone will enjoy the work for it.
Sure, it's physically possible to read any part of Ulysses as there are no physical barriers but for what gain? You're not going to pull any enjoyment out of reading the last few pages of Ulysess. The non existing barrier is a moot point.
The only way of enjoying the last pages of Ulysess is by enjoying the whole thing. And to enjoy Ulysess, you havr to put in your time and go through hoops that aren't usual for most other books. I feel like it's very disingenuous to say that the only reason you haven't read Ulysess is bc you didn't enjoy it. Enjoying Ulysess contains enjoying going the extra mile for it.
How is that different from the Souls games?
For me that says it all. And I don’t find the Souls games fun. Too much 3D camera control, and frustrating rather than fun when dying. I think if you removed the beautiful graphics, few people would play them. I also think the player base for these titles are going to skew younger, those who haven’t experienced as much as we have. I see nothing special in them at all. They landed on no magic for me.
The game that brought me to this realization that a good game should be fun even when losing is League of Legends. While there’s too many kids that think the fun is only in stomping out the opponent quickly or they want to quit, for me that game is fun in the struggle for a comeback. And I’m still mysteriously unbothered when I lose. I enjoy it all the way.
For me, that’s the mark of a good game. And it’s probably not a coincidence that it’s the most popular video game in the world.
Needing game knowledge is a great approach to game design. Dispensing such knowledge in the random way FromSoft games do is not. And this goes beyond just the combat aspect. Equipment and items in FromSoft games usually have non-discoverable hidden effects that at best turn the game into a weird puzzle, and at worst draw parallels to graphic adventure games of old. Case in point: Father Gascoigne in Bloodborne. You can find a music box that staggers the boss if you use it during the battle. It makes some sense from a lore perspective, but it's pure bullshit from a game perspective.
because its use it not handed to you on a silver plate?
dont you think thats part of the game design? that such things are 'secrets'? you can find and share with the community?
That item is just one of many in that game. The end effect is that players have to either treat the game as an arcane puzzle, or just search for solutions and ruin the mystery. No middle ground. Even accessing the DLC content borders on bullshit! There's only one clue to find the solution that puts the player in the first DLC area, and finding it becomes a process of trying dumb things until you find the right one by pure chance. Of course, that creature did a different thing when you found it earlier, but the game usually rewrites its own rules constantly so that's less of a surprise. Players can do this... or just turn to a guide and forget about the "graphic-adventure-puzzle level of randomness" aspect of Bloodborne and the other FromSoft games.
This is why I think this is a valid criticism. FromSoft games excel at world building, atmosphere, combat design, and music. But their approach to game knowledge is only enjoyed by those who love that arcane aspect, and the only way around it for those who love all else save for that part is to ruin the magic and reach for a guide.
PD. Also, some text translations in Spanish do not manage to keep the knowledge clues present in the English version. Discovering that was not very fun.
Welcome to the 70s and 80s where there was no such thing as savegames for the most part and you got 3 deaths before starting over. This is no different. A boss is just a level of sorts. You learn the mechanics and then you beat the boss and move on. Do it enough times and you can do it in your sleep. People have been playing ridiculously forgiving and easy games where there's no cost of failure so long that they don't even know what a merely challenging game is.
The "just learn the boss" argument is also somewhat frustrating given how frequently there are long ass walks back from bonfires to boss doors. Dying a bunch to learn the tells and attack timings is much less attractive when it takes minutes to go from a death to your next attempt. Compare this to something like Hotline Miami where you are playing again instantly. Much better option there.
The difference is whether you see death as a set back and learning experience, or just a complete failure that frustrates you. It's a matter of mindset.
But in general the difficulty of Soulsborne games is overstated. They're mechanically simple, combat is fair (RNG isn't a big factor), with plenty of opportunities to make the game easier. Just level up more. Now with Elden Ring you can choose to go elsewhere, and come back later, stronger. This game isn't about easy victory, so easy mode has no place existing. A piece of media doesn't have to cater to all audiences.
And further, it is clearly not the case in any of the soulsborne games that the difficulty is tuned perfectly for each player. If that were true, there would be no interest in SL1 runes or there wouldn't have been patches rebalancing of Lost Izalith in DS1 or summons wouldn't be an available option.
It's not the dark art that makes Dark Souls unique. It's the combination of deep lore that isn't fully explained or explainable in the game, world building that somehow finds a way to look and feel extremely realistic and fitting while being dreamlike and fantastical at many points, a story that couldn't care less if you followed it, NPCs building an inescapable spell on your mind with 3 lines of non-sensical dialogue, and dark art that underlines and brings all those things together.
There certainly aren't many games like that out there. I'd wager very few to nine, to be honest.
On the contrary, there are boatloads Soulslike games out there that imitate the gameplay (including the difficulty and risk of death) that cannot even be mentioned with being in the same league as the original Souls games. If anything, in the year 2022 it's the Souls gameplay that's "generic" while the rest of the game is still unique in every sense of the word.
I'd just watch a YouTube walkthrough if you don't want to play. Playing the game, alone, is not enough to fully appreciate any of the Souls games.
1) There is the "Git Gud" part. This is fine. Having some difficulty in executing game actions is fine. Having to be alert to even low-level enemies is fine.
2) There is the "WTF do I upgrade?" part. This is bad. "Poise" was the canonical example where if you didn't understand it you would get turned into paste by enemies with no idea why. Having to read a full treatise on the web before starting a game is not something you should have to do.
To be fair, most RPGs suffer this problem, but the Souls games suffer it worst because the enemies hit very hard. I think the Souls games would benefit a lot from being able to freely reallocate your points in skill until you hit some level (10-15-20?) that then locks them in. "Hey, I got pasted by that enemy. Maybe I should adjust my skill points and see what that "poise" thing does on the next pass."
The problem is that some people find it highly satisfying to learn when to hit which button, but some people find it boring. To the latter, this manifests as a level of difficulty so high that it almost prohibits playing the game. Which is fine -- not everyone needs to like every game -- but it's annoying to those people when others tell them that they should like it.
I'd be much more receptive to the "no easymode" argument if the games didn't have RPG elements at their very core.
For example, some of the early bosses I've heard people complain about, Margit and Crucible Knight, I beat first try without much difficulty at all because I explored the starting areas thoroughly before reaching them and was naturally overpowered. I plan to actually play again when I'm done and purposely not level just so I can experience the challenge.
Speaking of self-inflicted, I've also seen a ton of people (eg on Reddit and Youtube) complaining that they're being one-shotted by bosses with their high level characters, but when they share their stats, they pumped everything into a damage dealing stat and few (or often NONE!) into their health. Of course they're being one-shotted if they don't increase their health. Again, this difficulty seems completely self-inflicted.
There are some truly hard bosses, for sure, but with a game as huge as Elden Ring and with as much value for money as Elden Ring is, I think people just have to make peace with the fact that unless you're dedicated to overcoming the challenges it presents, you may not see every bit of content the game has to offer. FROM Software certainly are ok with that.
Unfortunately it happens to the same people who will shout the loudest that "BUT THE GAME DOESN'T TELL YOU THAT YOU HAVE TO DO THAT", as if somehow that should validate their (wrong) choices in the game. It's a role playing game. That's what the RP stands for in RPG. If you are role playing someone with inhumane strength but no health whatsoever, then you have to accept consequences of your choices. Like the other comment said - games require a certain level of literacy, not just in terms of actual reading but also in terms of understanding what the stats actually mean.
Resistance is a stat you can put points into. It does virtually nothing. Little in the game will make it obvious that putting points into Resistance will be a waste. "Well, you made bad choices" is not a perfect defense against this.
I would not recommend a casual reader pick up "A Brief History of 7 Killings" but it is still a great book.
Fromsoft games have an author, Miyazaki, and that author has the right to decide how their work is presented and engaged with.
Honestly I agree that there should be an "accessibility mode" but I understand why it is not in there. Musicians don't include a "kids bop" copy of their albums
Miyazaki has the right to set whatever difficulty he wants. My complaint is less with FromSoft. I've resigned myself to the fact that they'll never release a game with difficulty that is accessible to everybody. My complaint is more with the community, who sees any discussion of "hey the monster design and lore and scenery look cool but I can't get past the Asylum Demon" as some sort of threat and responds with vitriol. The discussion here has been largely positive but even here I've got somebody who decided to just respond "git gud." You can imagine how it goes on reddit or twitter.
give it a shot
you can thank me later :-)
Elden Ring sold 3 times as many copies as expected so far. The smartest thing Bandai Namco can do is let Miyazaki do his thing.
Lowering the difficulty is not going to fix that. If the devs cater the game to players who can't be bothered to explore or read their own characters stats, it will ruin a lot of aspects that most fans enjoy. After seeing so many franchises release boring, easy, focus-grouped games (where the difficulty is just HP and damage multipliers) time and time again, can you really blame fans for saying "No, don't change it, we like the game how it is"? Almost all of the From Souls games are highly regarded classics, and sticking to their guns on design philosophy is a big part of that.
PS run through the grate door, pick up your weapons and plunge attack Asylum Demon, or pick Black Firebombs as your starting gift (only takes 4-5 to kill him)
Because you disagree. Which is fine I respect your opinion. However, I would argue "community toxicity" is a bad cloud to yell at and can be used to justify any statement.
That said, I think this is what Elden Ring was going for. There's a massive amount of content such that you can avoid fighting a tough boss until you're strong enough.
I started as a Wretch and arrived completely under leveled and without gear at the first boss, which felt nearly impossible to beat so I just started adventuring. At some point you get blocked by a barrier that requires you to defeat two main bosses. I was actually a bit disappointed about that.
For the most part, outside of some specific bosses, the games aren't actually thaaat difficult, they're just uncompromising and they punish mistakes. I feel that the Dark Souls 1 marketing focusing on the difficulty so much was a detriment to the series really. Don't get me wrong, the games are definitely not easy, but most of the content can be experienced without too much challenge if you're methodical and take it slow.
I find that phrasing interesting, as I would consider punishing mistakes part of being difficult, since I'm terrible at execution.
(Not saying any particular game should accommodate me, of course.)
I've watched a ton of beginners to FROM games play Bloodborne on streams and there are a few common trends I noticed. For example, players often tend to rush into an area without first observing what's actually there. They get punished for this by getting ambushed or surrounded or whatever. Its not that the area is hard, but the player gets punished for the mistake of rushing in without first taking a good look around. Players also rarely look up... and FROM games love to hide enemies above you.
Another mistake I saw a lot is that players see something that looks scary, get scared and back away. Or they get hit, panic, and back away. But instead of just backing away enough to get out of range of the enemy and then stopping, they continue to back away... right into another group of enemies. They get punished for this mistake.
Actually, panic was a major cause of death.
Consider also that you can basically run through any region or level without engaging in any enemy, all it takes is some understanding of the required spacing and to not be afraid of them. Yet the first time I go through an area, I certainly fear the danger the enemies represent. So the regions aren't actually all that hard, when you really look at it.
The enemies also tend to hit hard, especially bosses. So its harder to just shrug off an attack and brute force your way through. You often have to take a step back and take some time to learn the attack patterns, the openings, etc.
Not that there aren't some truly hard situations or bosses, where even these things are taken to the extreme, because there certainly are, but most of these tend to be optional. Although admittedly there are a few throughout the series that aren't, so I'm definitely not claiming the games are easy. Because they are not.
It’s the bosses that frustrate people. They break a lot of norms and falsely make people think it’s a stats problem.
My issue with dark souls is that it encourages high variance play styles if you’re not good. Biggest weapon, dodge around and hit the boss in just a few spurts. Allows you to succeed if you suck but does nothing to really improve your skills given enough tries.
Sekiro was much better. It forced you to get competent to succeed. Many bosses were serious inflection points in difficulty and you just felt so much cooler when you nailed it.
It starts to feel like an unearned slog, or at worst, a Skinner Box if you luckily pull it off after the nth time.
I think you're right. Its one thing to require me to learn to dodge and find an opening a few times, but having to continuously do it for ten minutes straight might be a bit much for most people.
Enemies (and especially bosses) in FromSoftware games usually have big, slow, windups. It's visually interesting and a big part of getting to know the openings like you mention. I find I have to empirically learn the cause/effect of those animations though, or I find I can't necessarily know how big Godrick's wind attack is without experiencing it a few times first. I sometimes wonder how the game would play if there was more visual information on the safe zones of attacks that the player could intuit. Or, I've noticed that my friends have gotten frustrated when they've gotten hit and not known why. Thoughts? Maybe it ruins the magic though.
All that said, I think Elden Ring is overall fine as it is.
[1] https://makegames.tumblr.com/post/4949412103/firm-but-fair
The sweet spot is when something is challenging for the particular player and they are able to overcome that challenge through growth. But because each player is different, it is not possible for a single tuning to hit that sweet spot for every possible person.
I don't think that's quite a good comparison -- because leveling up is literally a method to overcome the difficulty. Grind. Get Good. Kill some foes, run back to the bonfire. Kill them again, run back to the bonfire.
Eventually killing them becomes trivial, as a combination of muscle memory and leveling up.
Some might even call that practice.
It's an unwillingness to invest time into practice that hinders people from enjoying more of it, not the inherent difficulty. And this goes for a great many things, sports, music, painting, programming, woodworking etc.
It's also totally ok that people don't want to invest the time -- I'm not making a value judgement here.
For a sports analogy: I don't want to invest time in practicing (or even learning about) basketball. As a result, I'm horrific at it. I'm quite fine with that. It does however mean that a decent chunk of popular culture is inaccessible to me.
If the game didn't have RPG mechanics and there was no mechanism to just make the enemies deal a smaller percentage of your health pool or to make your attacks deal more damage then I'd be much more amenable to the "the game is flawlessly tuned according to the developer's vision and that should not be touched" but it obviously isn't since every single player will arrive at each encounter with different character and weapon stats.
This one-fits-all-or-goodbye approach means I'll miss this game, forever. And just as you say - only damage/defense stats would need to be tuned a bit and I could approach it. Why would that hurt anybody wanting to play it on harder level is beyond me...
Two reasons, first people can't control themselves. Just like people have a hard time not eating a cake sitting in front of them they also have a hard time not using easier difficulty modes, even when they would enjoy the harder ones more. You can't just tell these people to control themselves, to them this is a really important part of the game and adding difficulty options hurts their ability to enjoy the game. Not using easy mode is as easy as not eating so much and get fat, if you could solve the issue that easily then 50% of the population wouldn't be obese.
Secondly is development, if you add easy modes most testers will run the game through on easy, and the game will mostly be designed around easy. Hard mode gets run to see that it is possible, but not to see that it is enjoyable, meaning that in basically every game with multiple difficulty modes the hard mode is a boring slogfest. Fromsoft games is a breath of fresh air here, they are hard without being boring, that is its major selling point.
When you use the word “grind”, it connotes that you feel the game is extracting an unreasonable price from you in order to allow you to progress: making you play the “bad parts” in order to see the “good parts”. Lesser games are certainly guilty of this! But that’s not at all what these games do. People don’t put “insane hours” into these games because of the grind - they do it because they love it.
All one can ask is that you forget what you think you know, and take another look. There’s something really special here.
I’ve got kids too man, I don’t have time for bullshit, but Miyazaki’s given us something really special here. I’m just thankful that in the few hours left to me each week, I can sit down and play something like this.
But I was just told to grind to level up to make the game easier. That isn't putting in insane hours for fun. That is saying "if you want to beat O&S, go spend a bunch of hours killing knights in Anor Londo for hours."
Look, you complained about gatekeeping, and about the community. This is a bona fide attempt from someone in the community to ask you to set aside your preconceptions and take another look at what the game is trying to say.
If it doesn’t gel with you, well then maybe it really just isn’t for you - and that’s fine. Not every game is for every person. But changing a bunch of difficulty sliders isn’t going to fix that.
> I don't think that's quite a good comparison -- because leveling up is literally a method to overcome the difficulty. Grind. Get Good. Kill some foes, run back to the bonfire. Kill them again, run back to the bonfire.
I don't know how that can be interpreted any other way than "do a repetitive and boring thing until your stats are higher."
I've played all three Dark Souls games as well as Bloodbourne to completion. I switched from xbox to PC for DS1 because I had the original unpatched disk and got frustrated in Lost Izalith. I'm very confident that I would have had more fun if it took me four attempts to beat O&S rather than 20.
I guess just the last thing I would say is that one thing that ER tries to communicate to you early on is that, if something is frustrating you, don’t keep banging your head against a wall. Heed that advice: go away, explore, learn, come back later. With a new perspective it will look different.
Also, few ppl understand this, but community knowledge is actually a core part of the design philosophy. That’s why there’s player messages and blood stains built into the game. It’s not a dirty thing in this game to look stuff up or ask for help. There’s a huge community and comradary aspect to the game.
If you made it through O&S and don’t like the game, then I think it’s safe to say that it’s not the game for you.
And that needs to be okay too, for people to say that. Personally I’m not good at basketball, it’s just not the game for me.
I can enjoy difficulty when I don't have to redo things I've already done; I'm fully on-board with something like a Super Meat Boy or a Hotline Miami, which are also games where death is expected and a core part of the loop, but when dying to a boss involves trekking back through 5-10 mins of low-level enemies I very quickly lose interest.
Am I suggesting all games should account for my very specific tastes in difficulty in games? Absolutely not, but I sure wish that one did. I'm also not sure I buy the argument that the mere presence of an easier mode would somehow invalidate the enjoyment of those with more skill and patience.
Not exactly the same genre as the ones you mentioned, but some challenging combat (at times, not throughout) that doesn’t involve slogging back if you die.
Hollow Knight on the other hand does.
Sekiro and Elden Ring are both much better here in terms of checkpointing close to bosses, though it's still not always just right outside it often is. Indeed I remember a few very tedious routes in Bloodborne and Dark Souls. It just didn't bother me quite so much because I enjoyed optimizing them also!
With Elden Ring also at least there is always other stuff to do/explore (at least so far for me at ~50 hours in) so you can come back later.
They drop trivial amounts of souls which are used to buy levels, but souls are also gained by beating bosses and from using items that also grant souls.
I've experimented a lot with this. If you just fight bosses and use boss soul items and other easy to reach soul items, you will end each game roughly 5 levels below someone who is more meticulous and clears each zone of enemies without grinding them repeatedly.
At the end of the game, those 5 levels will be a trivial difference.
Now, this often means said bosses are often quite a bit tougher than in earlier games, but you don't have to go through a 10 minute dungeon to get to them every time you die.
The number one thing is this: you cannot interrupt yourself once you begin an action. Neither can your enemy. An attack is a commitment of the entire animation associated with it. This one single thing affects everything else.
Also: rolling! You are very briefly untouchable while rolling.
Time your rolls and your attacks with intention, and the difficulty drops drastically. The game’s are still tough and unforgiving, but in a good way.
Hope you end up revisiting and enjoying the games. I’m historically not a fan of “hard” games and these have quickly become my favorite, gameplay being just as big a reason as atmosphere and lore.
Elden Ring has taught me calm and resolve in the face of overwhelming odds. Also, the value of a battle honestly fought. It's a great teacher, and an amazing game.
I'm already using summons regularly in these games. Invasions sure are a "fun" trade for being able to use human summons.
If the game is too easy chances are I'll zone out and "play" it, in a very inert way just watching what happens.
Not a Souls-like, but the game where I saw this at play the most is TeS Oblivion (not sure if it also works in Skyrim), as soon as I started playing it as a battlemage with the Tower sign (it takes away auto regen of magicka). Lots of content in Oblivion I felt was filler that I just went through out of inertia, but playing a battlemage with no magicka regen? Survival depends on the potions you craft and any other helpful items found along the way. Suddenly even the most boring dungeon became interesting and potentially helpful in the long run because it could contain helpful loot. Those ayleid ruins with the crystals that help a ton with magicka? Godsent rather than long and samey.
Of course I eventually leveled up enough to become OP and the game ended up being a chain of filler stuff once more, but that was several tens of hours into the playthru. But those first tens of hours were an amazing experience, where I needed to carefully plan out and scour the world for items in order to hope to survive.
This means that you are engaging with the game in an optional way that makes the game easier (leveling up). You do not have to do that. In what way is somebody engaging with the game in a different optional way that makes the game easier unacceptable?
What it sounds like you want is for the game to sit near the top of an individual players' capabilities. What if making the game optionally easier achieves that for some people?
With your philosophy, you get games with pointless difficulty systems like Skyrim & co. Sliders that range from "enemies die in one hit" to "you'll spend half an hour hitting this boss before it dies because now it has hitpoints defined by your_level * 9999999999". None of the bosses in Souls games take half an hour to fight unless you do something exotic like SL1 runs, if you're not done with a boss in a couple of minutes chances are something's wrong with your build, because otherwise your skills are good, else you wouldn't survive for 2 minutes with a Souls boss.
I spent several days on O&S. Two hours would have been fun and I would have felt a sense of accomplishment. In the end, I cheesed it by pinning Smough to the broken pillars.
It’s a major deviation in difficulty definitions between fromsoft and difficulty sliders — the usual increase in difficulty is to just bump the stats, which typically just means you have to play perfectly for longer durations.
Fromsoft just asks you to play perfectly for a minute, maybe two (and honestly not that perfectly).
Eg I’m playing triangle strategy atm, and the hard mode difficulty bumps their stats so high that the strategy ultimately devolves into some kind of cheesing in many cases (and then spend 15 minutes executing that cheese because the enemies are taking chip damage). At the same time, normal mode (apparently) is easy enough to just plow through, so I’m pretty much stuck if I want an actual challenge — and that’s hardly a surprising state of affairs.
I haven't tried yet, though, as I'm playing my way through the Dark Souls series proper before giving Elden Ring a try.
Once you do it, you will likely internalize that you’re not capable of doing it and will rely on such methods and general lack of skill for the rest of the game, and eventually reach a point of indifference where it’s not about you doing well but rather just attempting it a number of times where your incompetence works.
If that makes things more fun for you, sure, whatever. I did this a lot as a kid. But now I would be acutely aware that I’m cheating myself of the full experience and skill curve of the game and feel very little satisfaction from it.
I’m current doing a bit of owl cat’s pathfinder video games. The game is pretty well balanced on normal. The game includes a very unbalanced mode called unfair which requires a lot of metagaming hyper min maxed character development. There is further a mode that gives you one self deleting save slot so you have one chance permaloss.
I see a fair number of people playing in unfair, with one save slot, bragging about their completion of the game having looked up character builds for every unit, used mods to make some parts easier, and save scummed to undo the effect of choosing permaloss.
I think they’re morons personally. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you’ve accomplished something when you’ve outsourced, cheesed, and cheated many parts of it. Play games on lower difficulties and play them fairly instead of playing them on harder difficulties and cheating to get through.
There’s a wide spectrum and sure it’s just a single player activity but I find it personally exceedingly lame. My mum plays games and is not technically skilled so she plays on the lowest difficulty and uses guides and it’s still very hard for her and you know that’s great.
[0] as long as it's not a multiplayer game of course.
I build games myself. Nothing released. Likely won’t ever manage to do so.
7 AAA titles and counting.
>>Have you personally experienced the toxicity of complaining players who want to be handed every sense of achievement and simultaneously feel like it’s very difficult and exclusive?
Also yes. We have millions of players. I have experienced both the very good and very bad from players - that doesn't mean I'll start telling them how to enjoy our games. As for communities being "multiplayer" - forums for games have existed for decades, and you always had people complaining that yes, their idiotic build doesn't work in your game. But that didn't lead me to developing a position where I think people are stupid for doing something and trying to ovverride their desires.
I just want to add one thing here - you seem to be saying(and please correct me if I'm wrong) that the way to play a game is ultimately up to the creator and no one else.
And well, I agree but only to a certain extent. For a counterexample - creator of Studio Ghibli said many times now that his films are made for children, and he finds it weird that adults watch them. Like, he can have that opinion, it's his work after all - but I think he's very wrong about this. Disregarding his opinion is not lame or weak, because ultimately once his work is out there it's not his role to gatekeep access to it. Similarly, From Software games obviously have a certain style of gameplay attached to them, but if your preffered way is to play with a guide, or by installing a mod that just gives you top stats......great. Enjoy it.
For the last example - one of my favourite games of all time is SOMA - it has a fantastic Sci-Fi story that is well worth exploring, but unfortunately it also happens to be a horror game. I don't enjoy those, not even because they make me uncomfortable, it's just that the horror elements of the game get in the way of enjoying a fantastic story. So I installed a mod(way before it was made official) that made the monster docile - that allowed me to complete the game and enjoy myself. Is this wrong or lame? Maybe - but the point is, you as a player shouldn't care what others think.
>“I do feel apologetic toward anyone who feels there’s just too much to overcome in my games,” Miyazaki told me. He held his head in his hands, then smiled. “I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship.”
>“I’ve never been a very skilled player,” Miyazaki told me recently, via Zoom. He was sitting in his office, a book-lined room in the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. “I die a lot. So, in my work, I want to answer the question: If death is to be more than a mark of failure, how do I give it meaning? How do I make death enjoyable?”
source - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/hideta...
How are you really paying attention to the work that was created if you don't learn its systems.
https://www.giantbomb.com/profile/7force/blog/dark-souls-des...
However, the translation differs a bit (e.g. zombie instead of undead dragon, which actually makes more sense).
>I remember when I was drawing the Undead Dragon, I submitted a design draft that depicted a dragon swarming with maggots and other gross things. Miyazaki handed it back to me saying "This isn't dignified. Don't rely on the gross factor to portray an undead dragon. Can't you instead try to convey the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin?"
If you explore a bit you'll find a site of grace that's directly in front of one of the gates. I also switched to frost damage and it made the fight almost trivial.
Also if you never lock on to either of them, they are less aggressive.
I love that these games are turning to my old man. “Back in my day you Had to think your way through the problems…”
Arguably this is his only motif.
Elden ring is basically a huge ungodly mountain of character flaws.
[0] is the Asylum Demon, which is literally the first boss in Dark Souls.
Bloodborne cranks the gross-out factor up to 11 with [1] and [2].
[0] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6qCB_x7KQR8/maxresdefault.jpg
[1] https://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Bloodborne/ludwi...
[2] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kXCskueejFY/XLlAKLB-nmI/AAAAAAAAd...
Ludwig (your second example) is, I think, a perfect example of this. He's one of the most disgusting designs they've ever made, and yet when he stands during his second phase, and the music swells, you get an immense feeling of the grandeur and power of Ludwig before his fall to the disgusting creature he became:
https://youtu.be/7n1qe2ZSTPA?t=102
That being said, I think FromSoft's designs sometimes ARE "just gross". But it's an admirable guiding principle, even if they don't always hit it.
[0] https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/dragons/images/a/ac/OtTP...
[1] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/darksouls/images/4/49/Ceas...
if you want to see pure grossness like they try to avoid watch something like peter jackson's "dead alive" the souls really nail a kind of tragic or even self respecting aspect of deformation in their more "offputting" characters.
If you need any indicator the team behind Dark Souls 2 misunderstood Miyazaki's vision, the global death counter in Majula is all you need.
Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are three of my all time favorites. So far feeling favorable towards Elden Ring but I would still rank it below those three.
Check out Darkest Dungeon
Slay the Spire
Everything by Amanita Design (Machinarium, Samorost)
2: The GP talked about “worlds”
2. What are you saying?
There’s some good worldbuilding and backstory in StS, but you have to play a lot to comb through all the random events etc. to discover it. It won’t sit you on its lap and read to you.
(Don't forget to play it with the Spanish voice acting - superb)
Recently played the Demons Souls remake and the locations, enemies and atmosphere was just amazing, I couldn't wait to see what was around the corner.
very shameful to put all the fame on a single person when the work is done by the developers and artists, it's a team work, not the fruit of a single entity
very selfish mindset, only japanese get away with that, i don't understand why westerners are this simple minded
only to let their industry and home companies rot thanks to "shareholders"
In Elden ring you often find sudden drops and cliffs, 10 acher lakes that are ancle deep, etc. In Death stranding the rivers have realistic depths and current that pushes on you and knocks you off your feet, mountains are realistic instead of random cliffs that wouldn't hold up to gravity, etc.
Interestingly both games are lead by japanese dudes and both are about a calamity that brings the dead back to life.
Contrast Dark Soulds and Death Stranding with a typical zombie game, the basic idea is the same, but how imaginatively it is developed!
> Miyazaki: Yes, according to the artists it was, but I think, If your instructions are too specific, the designs you get will be somewhat devoid of creativity, so I try to give them just the most basic, essential information before handing it over to the artists imaginations, which inevitable eclipse my own. But my initial instructions are certainly abstract. For example, when designing equipment I'd simply say "Make Something you can trust your life to on the battlefield, or "Make something that has enchantments to protect you." I think the artists probably didn't know what I was talking about half the time. Haha.
> Waragai: That's true
> Miyazaki: I'm sorry. Haha. Of course, If I don't get what I want, then I start giving more specific descriptions, and I might even start drawing things on the white board, but even then I'd never go so far as to say it has to be this colour or this shape. I don't want the designers to just become my tools. Of course, It doesn't always go as I want, but I think that's probably due to me not getting the best out of the artists, and this is something I want to get better at in the future.
https://www.giantbomb.com/profile/7force/blog/dark-souls-des...
With work and family and ageing I don’t have the time, patience or reflexes for this type of game unfortunately.
I really enjoyed Jedi Fallen Order, which is ostensibly a Souls type game. I managed most of the game on regular difficulty before one boss bested me and I was able to drop to easy difficulty.
I get that the desolation and feeling of hopelessness against insurmountable odds (and finally overcoming) is part of the gameplay loop. I just can’t do it.
My typical approach for open world games is: find travel mechanism, explore, find items OP to my current level, figure out how to level up, then have fun.
Elden ring is a huge world and I'm really enjoying it! It is my first souls game, and I've learned that you shouldn't care much about the bank balance of runes/souls/gold/etc.
Also the game is designed around collaboration. People are supposed to discover things and share what they learned on wikis / Discord / etc, and help each other with cooperative multiplayer.
With FPS it is not worth it for me because I'll never have as much time as a kid to dedicate to the game. With Soulslikes at least I can memorize the boss moves and eventually get by or go level elsewhere and then cheese the boss.
The frustrations of the genre feel very similar to me but soulslikes I have options on how to get better.
For some reason I come back to it 6 months later, and persevered through (not realizing that you absolutely DONT need to fight that damn thing). I kept dying until something clicked, and from then on everything become much easier and I enjoyed every minute from then on.
Same with Demons Souls, I kept dying to Armour Spider, got really angry, frustrated, then something clicked and I broke through, and the rest of the game was amazing.
Not saying this is/would be your experience, and I generally agree that the difficulty does get in the way sometimes, but maybe it's worth it to see if you can break through. I do think Elden Ring is the hardest of all the ones I've played, BUT the open world means it's as hard as you make it, if something is too hard in ER, you can just nope out of there and explore somewhere else.
You can also just play as a spell-caster and the game gets much easier.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was by a wide margin my favourite game of the past few years. An amazing world, incredible characters, and a wonderful story. But never once did I feel like the game was apathetic to my existence. The game wanted me to win. Winning was guaranteed. So while I felt so many emotions, accomplishment was not one of them.
One thing Souls games get right is that they’re fair. They’re consistent. You almost never die in a way that wasn’t your fault. And that’s what makes the sense of accomplishment possible. You get better. Your reflexes improve. You learn to be patient, studious, thoughtful. The game isn’t an amusement park ride. The difficulty isn’t simulated like it is in most modern AAA games.
Besides that, most if not all of the major bosses/characters names start with either a G, R, or M.
* Elden Ring is a bit like Bosch, Doré and Caspar David Friedrich;
* Elden Ring is an open world game.
I just want to zoom in on the picture of 3m-wide Garden of Earthly Delights...
Here even the text doesn't zoom.
It does also prevent accidental zooms when users intend to scroll, so maybe that's a use? Often times the meta viewport tag (which is quite arcane) is just copy-pasted without deep knowledge of what it does.
Two fingers.
The most obvious one is as always the idea of stagnant water at the bottom that becomes corrupted, which from what I understand comes mostly from the asian religious ideas about impurity. I'm not sure if it's coming from Shinto or Buddhism, or something else, but there's always something about stagnant water/stagnation being "bad", and water at the bottom "washing away" impurities on the way and being the "worst". That's where the usual poison lake comes from. It's also a strong idea in Sekiro, with immortality coming from the heavens (with the divine dragon) and being corrupted on the way down (with the centipedes). Here in Elden Ring we have the lake of rot, the deeproot depths, and the bottom of the Haligtree.
Then there's the idea of a fallen empire hiding behind illusions. In DS1 Anor Londo was the prime example of that: everything is an illusion, that you can break. This was used here in Raya Lucaria: the Rennela that you fight is an illusion put here by Ranni, which mirrors Gwynvere/Gwyndolyn, and Fillianore. Rennela and Fillianore both hold an egg. I'm not sure about the reference here, there's the same theme in Angel's Egg by Mamoru Oshii, but maybe there are deeper origins.
There's the idea of some people living a corrupted form of life that still try to live their life "in peace": in Demon's Soul there's Maiden Astrea in the valley of defilement asking you to leave them alone, in DS1 there's the inhabitants of the painting (with Priscilla asking you to leave them alone), in DS3 the painting makes a comeback, with its inhabitants that want to rot in peace. In Sekiro, there's the monks in Senpo Temple, that acceeded to a corrupted form of immortality and are being devoured by insects/corrupted by centipede. There's the same in Elden Ring with Fia and those who live in death, and in a way the Haligtree people.
Lots of ideas are refinement of previous ideas: Rykkard seems to be a refinement of Aldrich as a "person in the world", and of the King of the Storm/Yohrm in terms of gameplay (Serpent Hunter is way more interesting than Storm Ruler). This one is a bit of a stretch, but Ranni's questline with Blaidd reminds me of the questline with the Painter and Gael. Both are about partially revolting against the order of this world to find a way outside the influence of the fire cycle/equivalent in Elden Ring. The smith at the hub is also an improvement: he gained a real personality, a real purpose. We meet again the last giant of his species that's already hurt when you meet him and removes one of his limb. Giants keep transforming into trees. Sorcerers doing too much research keep ending up in weird places (brain of mensis, the end of Sellen's questline). We went from giant crabs (there's a hilarious PC Gamer article about this) to giant crabs AND giant lobsters. There's something about Miquella (arm coming out of a coccoon, removed from a tree) and the curse-rotten greatwood, though I don't see much else about it. Maybe I'm missing some cultural references, maybe a DLC is coming, maybe it'll be refined in a next game/
All of that to say, it's nice to discover who Hieronymus Bosch is and what he did, but I wish the article instead focused on From Software themes and where they come from. Where do girl with eggs come from? Why are giants always corrupted in some way? What's the history of impurity in asian religions, and how did it influence From Software? We now have 7 games: Demon's Soul, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, Elden Ring. They slowly went from niche hits to a specific audience to a mainstream appeal. They come from a country with a rich culture, that's often seen through the lens of "weird Japan". They appeal to people through the gameplay, but also through the themes, the visuals, the gameplay. I think it's time to take them seriously as pieces of art by themselves.
Miyazaki seems to have been inspired by Angel's Egg. I never read a quote, but the similarities are there.
> Rennela and Fillianore both hold an egg. I'm not sure about the reference here, there's the same theme in Angel's Egg by Mamoru Oshii, but maybe there are deeper origins.
Hi, friendly neighbourhood hackernews buddhist here. That's not from us. Washing away your 'impurities' seems like a foolish idea, since there's no you to have them. Also, we don't really get along with anything like immortality or heavens either. Impermanence is kinda..... obvious?.
Either way, as a (very) casual gamer with kids and not enough time as it is, I'll probably skip these. :}
I understand theologically this must not be a "ritual purification" but as an outsider I definitely can't tell the difference.
But yeah, I'm not a Buddhist, so I would absolutely be interested in a Buddhist's interpretation of the games. Miyazaki pulls from many sources and inspirations, and I think Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism are both present in there (as well as a myriad of inspirations from Western culture and history as well). The games are honestly an amazing example of the immense creativity that can come from a melting pot of ideas from many different cultures.