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Comment by aflag | Hacker News Reader

How is that material in any way?

Consistently defeating the Dark Souls boss requires skill. You have to learn how to beat it. The improvement comes from within yourself, and your ability to recognize what you are doing wrong. Knowing how to beat a boss is like a puzzle or a skill, even if it's a trivial skill less useful than a party trick. You have to analyze the boss, form a strategy, and adjust your strategy until you reach the desired outcome.

Diablo progression is just beating a pinata until it pops. You do the same thing over and over again until you get the outcome you want. It's about as intellectually engaging as cookie clicker.

That’s what superficially different about them. But in both cases you’re just killing time playing something fun. The difference is only whether you prefer rolling dice or learning some useless skill.

Transferable skills. I don't die frequently to Souls or Monster Hunter bosses. I beat many of the Bloodborne bosses on the first try. Not because I'm a god gamer but because I played a LOT of Dark Souls and Monster Hunter as a kid.

Every new ARPG (or ARPG league) requires many hours of grinding regardless of skill.

It feels very different and appeals to different crowds. I hate grinding against a challenge because I have to do a lot of that in real life, whereas blazing through the hell levels with my Diablo 1 Sorcerer was more like a relaxing stroll than much of a grind, with the occasional little reward from the RNG. Other people get a kick out of dying 83 times in front of the same boss, but that has never been me.

In one of them you do a thing. In the other you just roll dice?

Rolling dice is doing something too.

seems purposefully pedantic or ignorant to fail to see the difference here imo

Maybe I just don't see the point. They are different in the sense that the actions are different. But they are the same in the sense that they are both useless activities you do for fun. Some people can have more fun playing diablo than they would ever have playing a dark souls game. I'd even dare to say that more people prefer diablo over dark souls by the sole fact that diablo is the more popular game.

Anyway, my point is that they can look different in the surface, but they are not truly very different. They are just a pastime.

Sure, in the sense that eating a new cuisine or a favored dish and eating a block of tasteless protein is "just eating". Some folks are eager to say "whatever makes you happy" to which the extreme counterexample is why not just get strung out on heroin.

To each their own, but it strikes me as a squandered opportunity.

That comparison is absurd. We need to eat. The only reason to eat tasteless protein is because you have to. No one needs to play video games. Unless they have some addiction problem, people play video games for fun. And people have a lot of fun with diablo. Given the user base, I'd say that more people have fun with diablo than with dark souls game. Dark souls is a pretty niche game. Elden ring sort of the odd one out of the franchise and, even then, it was not as popular as easier games.

Rolling dice is obviously a reduction of the Diablo gameplay. Just because you don't like the mechanic, doesn't mean other people don't find it better than a skill based game. The skill in question is pressing a button quickly when something happens on a screen. Which is the only real challange of any dark souls game. Both are fine distractions. But it's very obvious that one is not objectively superior to the other in any way.

No one needs to play video games but people ultimately do need to pass time in many cases. Doing something that challenges you or engages with an artist's ideas is rewarding. You need to eat. You don't need to eat with the intention to experience the food.

Again, I don't think dark souls is the emblematic, archetypal, or only direction for artistic video game design by any means. But it's at least something. From the lens of challenging yourself or exploring art, diablo has nothing for the majority of it's playtime in end game where you've seen everything and are just thinking about the numbers imo.

That's not an objective view, but man it sure seems underwhelming otherwise.

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