I always think it’s fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It’s always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.

I had to search “Bethesda space game” just now to even remember its generic name …

I think there’s really cool conversations we should be having about how we can make attack animations more readable to a visually impaired player without compromising on difficulty, for example.

Good post, I agree with you and the above poster.

This brings to mind the parry system in Metroid Dread. Enemies flashed yellow before a parryable attack signalling you should hit the button at that moment. It’s possible and it works.

So then why don’t all games do this? Because Metroid Dread was designed from the beginning to support this system. In Souls games, parrying is not just a matter of timing on attacks, but if the attack can even be parried at all given the specific attack (not all can)/player stats/equipped items, 3D positioning of hitboxes for both the attack and the player’s defensive parry, as well as variable parry windows based on the specific shield or weapon equipped. Now take into account that Souls enemies often have multiple attacks each and this becomes a very significant amount of developer work. Not to mention that given all these factors, timing a button press to a parry flash may not always result in 100% success rate. Imagine how frustrating a system like this would be if even when you did everything “right”, the physical placement of hitboxes only resulted in an 80% success rate on any given parry. Would players not find this frustrating? The point I’m trying to make is how complex this system would actually be and how much work it would take to implement.

However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.

I’m going to be honest here, I did not end up caring for Metroid Dread much. For a number of reasons I won’t go into here, but partly because of this parry system. Parry windows were clearly telegraphed, did huge amounts of damage often resulting in one hit kills AND they guaranteed to drop health/ammo pickups. With the risk/reward system practically non-existent you were so highly incentivized to use them that it made combat feel much more defensive. Rather than attack enemies, it was often more beneficial to approach them, bait out an attack, and punish.

Now I do take some responsibility for my actions here. It was my choice to begin playing the game this way. But I do also think there’s something to be said for design elements that train or at least encourage players to engage with them in certain ways. Difficulty options are not just game design decisions but also attempts to understand how individual players may engage with those decisions. Expecting developers to have the ability or even foresight to anticipate all these different interactions is an extremely high, if not unreasonable barrier.

But in the end, I simply say that Dread was not a game to my liking. I know there are a lot of people who absolutely love it. Just not a game for me.

Potentially my hottest take, but this is my biggest criticism of Silksong. Even as someone who likes difficult games, I bounced off it. I’ll get back to it eventually, I know I’ll love it once I crack it, but it was taking a lot of effort I just can’t devote to it right now.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s too difficult or that the difficulty level is bad, but it’s overtuned. The devs spent 7 years developing it, playing it, replaying it, adding, tweaking. I believe they made exactly the thing they wanted, but that makes it very dense and intricate and you gotta be on just the absolutely correct wavelength to get there …

And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.

Again, no one has insisted this. The game is for those that enjoy it.

Running out of breath here.

Developer: I have made the game exactly as I intended. The Intended Audience: Wow, this is for us, we love it exactly as intended! You: I hate this game, I do not like it or the decisions you’ve made. You should change it for me so that I might like it.

???

Again, you all keep trying to paint us as the selfish ones as if we’re gatekeeping this game from you, but there’s nothing stopping you from picking up and engaging with the game exactly as it is, as we’ve all done, other than that you do not like it. The notion that ALL games MUST be for EVERYONE seems much more selfish and unhinged in my opinion.

Expecting every developer to cater to every possibility of everyone’s subjective opinion of what is good and bad difficulty is impossible.

People need to touch grass. Is your ego really so fragile that you beating a game on hard mode is diminished by someone beating it on easy mode?

No one, least of all me, has been arguing this point. It is not a valid point, I do not give it credit. It’s a straw man that keeps getting brought up repeatedly.

The truth is there are really only a “few” games where the difficulty actually matters in that it’s a core part of the games experience,

This is in fact what is being argued, extensively, yet for some reason you can’t see those arguments as valid. I’m out of breath on this topic, truly I am.

I have gone over extensively why adding a wide and nebulous range of difficulty options to cater to the very subjective notion of what difficulty even is to begin with is not free of development time or cost for the programmers when they are tuning every aspect of their game: movement, stat balancing, enemy placement, level design, attack patterns - to their specific vision. It’s just not.

Of course it’s possible, just like I could wake up and do a 5 mile run every morning but I simply don’t because I have neither the time nor energy to devote to that. Dark Souls was already notoriously rushed - looked into criticisms of the late game areas like the Demon Ruins and the dragon butts.

It won’t even be obvious to you it happened or what may have caused it. Some AI algorithm determines you are an un-citizen and checks a box. Rejections keep coming back as you slowly fall down the social ladder, or not so slowly at all, until you become the invisible poor and disappear altogether.

fart noises

Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.

They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience.

I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.

In addition to this if you were to implement sliders for each one of those features separately (neverminding how you’d do something like level architecture) what you end up takes both additional developer time and may not be as good. The fine tunings don’t fit together as nicely; it’s the difference between a model kit you buy and assembly yourself vs. one that comes premade form the manufacturer. There are different tolerances here and I think you need to get some dev perspective on this at this point.

People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.

Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.” Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”

I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but when the dev of the game itself says “naw” and the game is so popular it literally spawns its own subgenre with millions of adoring fans and you’re trying to armchair unnecessary solutions to things people don’t think are problems, I ask again who is being selfish. This game ain’t for you, dawg.

From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.

Miss me with that sales speak. Disgusting. We’re talking art here. Gross.

This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.

I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll? But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online and then actually playing them. I think I’m gonna go beat Dark Souls again while you mald.

FINAL EDIT: Cheat. Just cheat. We’ve already established elsewhere in this topic that I and many others DON’T actually care about the “sanctity” of the game, that’s a talking point people like you made up to throw around, mostly. Nobody cares. Get a cheat engine and double soul drops. Crank your stats. Enable one hit kills. Cheat. Don’t care, cheat.

Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.

Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.

No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.

This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.

They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them.

For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!

Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.

If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.

For a game where difficulty is based on reaction time then it is accessibility.

This describes literally any action game.

It’s a little bit pathetic actually when all people are asking for is a slider

And I’m telling you, sliders are not always structurally viable to the game or efficient for the developers to implement. By your arguments here, what do you want? A literal speed timer that slows down the entire game? Should Super Mario Bros. have had an easy mode that runs the game at half frame rate?

This is all fine and good, it really as.

I hate to keep overextending the restaurant metaphor, but it’s the difference between demanding a world class chef be prepared to make a number of different substitutions on the spot to suit your individual tastes vs. taking the dish home in a doggy bag and then slathering it with ketchup.

It’s fine. There’s no law against it. It doesn’t hurt anyone else (assuming we’re not talking about multiplayer here). No one has to care. No one does. Cheating and mods are a great way for you as an individual to tailor a more personalized experience to your tastes with the tools you have available.

This is a very bad and damaging take and undermines real accessibility options in games.

You are conflating two different things. The game is the food and the difficulty is a nuanced flavor that results from the individual ingredients. You are arguing that the flavor of the dish or the way it is prepared should be changed for everyone to suit your tastes.

Accessibility ramps are structural and in no way related to the food. I in no way want to be seen as arguing against accessibility because I am a strong believer in it myself. But accessibility comes in the form of color blind modes, subtitles, ability to change or rebind controls. Actual structural issues to the game that allow you to engage with it as it has been designed.

I do not suppose I will get through to people that have already taken up this position, but I cannot allow it to go unchallenged. Difficulty IS NOT (*necessarily) accessibility.

If you want to dislike a game: fine. If you want to critique a game: fine. If you want to say, “I think this game is bad”: fine. But do not try to conflate your own distaste with the difficulty level as some accessibility issue.

This was never the argument. Cheat all you want, no one cares.

There’s just a bunch of people in this topic that read these developer’s own words on their artistic takes and were like, “Wow, uh, wrong? Cater your games to me.”

We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?

This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.

Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?

Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?

A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.

Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.

Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.

Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.

The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!

This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.

I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.

Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.

If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.

The protection of FDE is the carrot they give to get you to enable TPM 2.0. The stick is the remote attestation which can be used for nefarious purposes like DRM and other types of denial/system lockdown at Microsoft’s discretion.

It’s true it’s hard to motivate people into taking a better security posture for themselves but forcing them like this doesn’t come from a good and sincere place.

I think most people tend to forget that part of the cat girl fantasy IS having an ancient demon trapped inside. Uphold the traditions!

Agreed. I was actually afraid to modify my KDE desktop for months because of the trauma sustained from just trying to customize Gnome a bit. My configuration is still pretty vanilla, but it’s got enough personal flair to it that it feels uniquely mine and I’m the happiest I’ve been.

Aww, I will always love XFCE and save a place for it in my heart … but I moved to Plasma 2 years ago and haven’t really looked back either >_>