Bucky Seifert on 29/5/2017 at 02:55
I've gotten into debates with my friends about whether having an easy difficulty in Dark Souls would totally ruin it, which I say no it wouldn't, because it's something totally optional. It's kind of similar to how I feel the same way about objective markers. As long as I can turn them off and still work out where I should go, I don't mind if they are in a game. I'm not against having elements that make a game more accessible, so long as they are entirely optional and can be turned off, or at least ignored.
But I get arguments that no, it would ruin it, despite being optional, because in the case of Dark Souls the game builds it's reputation on being hard. While I can see where this is coming from, I'd counter argue that XCOM still has a reputation for being hard, and it has an optional difficulty level that is very easy. This may make people who play this a quote "filthy casual", but there are quite a few people who enjoy games and want to play them, but just aren't very good at them, or use them as a means to unwind and don't want to be frustrated by them.
What are your thoughts?
Pyrian on 29/5/2017 at 03:52
I've seen plenty of optional features that ruin games for some people who just can't stop themselves for whatever reason. I'm not sure easy difficulty is one of them, though. Most people I know look down their nose at "easy" and frequently jump straight to "hard", even in games where they can't actually hack it.
Mr.Duck on 29/5/2017 at 04:20
I wouldn't mind if they included such a feature, though I can imagine it being a bit tricky (albeit not too much, I think) in any of the Soulsborne games due to their online components (mainly the co-op), thinking they wanted to have one cohesive whole where they'd only divide players by souls level.
But yeah, for most games, adding different difficulty settings should not be a deal breaker of any sorts.
:)
Sulphur on 29/5/2017 at 04:27
Given that the only person who can 'ruin' the game is yourself, that really depends on your personal outlook. If you don't care, it's not ruined. If you do, you either make peace with the feeling that you're experiencing a relatively compromised version of the game, or you don't.
As to whether Dark Souls and the like would be, ah, ruined by a difficulty option -- not really. If it's an option that's labelled to ease people in, the hardcore faithful can ignore it. The only situation where difficulty options can ruin a game for people in general is when they're insultingly labelled or chided for choosing them (Furi does this, I think), or the game locks off interesting ideas behind higher skill-level tiers (don't think I've ever seen this, however).
Trance on 29/5/2017 at 04:34
The initial gut reaction I have to things like that is that it isn't a good thing, in the same way that I react to reboots of movie and game franchises. But then I very quickly realize that, unlike reboots, optional easy modes are very unlikely to decide the future course of the series.
Future Dark Souls titles aren't going to start getting generally easier just because some people are playing it in easy mode so they don't give up in frustration. It's billed on being hard, but there's no reason that the game should be shutting out a massive pool of potential players, many of whom will use easy mode to practice for normal difficulty without so much of the pain and anguish involved in "getting gud". The payoff to Dark Souls is a sense of accomplishment and/or bragging rights for having gotten gud enough to conquer it, and people will work for that goal even if they start from a lower rung than those that came before.
Jim Sterling provided that alternative viewpoint that I now hold, in a video he did a year ago on Nintendo's announcement of an easy mode for their latest Starfox title:
[video=youtube;TanzVLIA8sQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TanzVLIA8sQ[/video]
Starker on 29/5/2017 at 04:54
Dark Souls has so many things built in the game to help players that I don't see how making it any easier would even work -- the game is already balanced to the breaking point, as can be seen if you overlevel or get a weapon that's too good or use magic. It's so easy to cheese Dark Souls it's not even funny.
The problem is that a lot of these options to make the game easier are hidden away behind exploration, so maybe what the game really needs is a quest arrow that shows you where all the shortcuts and good equipment are? Or better yet, maybe there could be an autoplay option that plays the game for you.
Seriously, though, the game is not that hard. Really. If you don't rush into things, take your time to explore and work out the game mechanics, you can beat most non-optional enemies one on one with ease. The only real exception to this is some of the boss battles and a few tricky bottlenecks and you can get help for a lot of the boss battles.
Would an easy mode ruin Dark Souls? No. Not any more than god mode ruins Doom or savescumming ruins Nethack. But Dark Souls on easy mode would hardly be Dark Souls any more than Doom on god mode is Doom.
Thirith on 29/5/2017 at 05:11
Quote Posted by Starker
Would an easy mode ruin Dark Souls? No. Not any more than god mode ruins Doom or savescumming ruins Nethack. But Dark Souls on easy mode would hardly be Dark Souls any more than Doom on god mode is Doom.
That's a good point, and it's one that goes both ways. Make something like
Abzu or
Journey more difficult, and it turns into something entirely different. Doesn't mean the option itself would be wrong, but there are games where the difficulty (or lack thereof) is a fundamental part of the experience. An easy reader of
The Sound and the Fury is very different from reading
The Sound and the Fury; you might get the plot, but you won't get what the book is and what it does. IMO it's the same with something like
Dark Souls. Difficulty is also a means of expression - which doesn't mean that there isn't such a thing as a game that's unfairly difficult, or that all of a game's means of expression are equally apt. Just like a game can have shitty graphics, bad writing and horrible world design, its difficulty can also be a bad fit for the rest of the game.
Starker on 29/5/2017 at 05:27
Yeah, that's essentially the argument Campster makes in his Errant Signal series, and the gist of it feels spot on to me, although I haven't played Dark Souls 3 yet.
[video=youtube;55dc8DGAM1s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55dc8DGAM1s[/video]
Nameless Voice on 29/5/2017 at 11:03
I don't think options are bad, but they are work and they have to not be afterthoughts.
For example, a lot of modern games have terrible directions for the player, but it doesn't matter because there are giant quest markers pointing to everything. An option to simply turn them off sounds great, but risks making the game unplayable because you have no way to know what you're supposed to do.
An example of that might be one of the generic quests in Skyrim that doesn't even name the location you're supposed to go to, much less give directions.
The game needs you be designed with the option in mind for it to work properly.
Also, implementing and balancing the different difficulty options would be a fair amount of work - is it the most valuable thing that the development team could be spending their time on?
Gryzemuis on 29/5/2017 at 11:17
Easy mode would ruin the Dark Souls games for the hardcore players.
Easy mode would open the game to a lot more potential players. And easy mode would made the game less frustrating for many players. I think that would be a good thing. I think the Dark Souls games are really good, but not because of the difficulty or challenge. I know a lot of gamers who I can not recommend Dark Souls now, because I know it would be too confusing and too frustrating for them. And they would quit after a few hours. I quit after a few hours twice. DS1 was a mess at first, because I couldn't install dsfix and dsmfix properly. And especially DS2 encourages players to stop during the first hours. It's terrible in this respect. If I could't have copied savefiles back-and-forth, I might never have actually gotten past the first bosses in any Souls game. I think From Software is missing out on a lot of potential sales because of this.
Quote:
Dark Souls has so many things built in the game to help players
The problem is that those are all things that only experienced players know about. Or can do. Running past mobs to pick up items, without fighting them. Getting the proper gear. How to upgrade stuff asap and to the max. Not dying often means you won't play at 50% health in DS2. Not dying often means you'll have enough embers, etc, to be able to summon when you want. You can only abuse magic if you know exactly what spells are overpowered, and how to get the max out of them. Not dying and losing your souls often means you'll get higher level easier. Etc, etc.
The proper goal is: "easy to learn, hard to master". Dark Souls is exactly the opposite. Very hard to learn. But once you've learned the game, it gets really easy. Not (only) because you are better, but also because the game really becomes easier for the better players. I think Dark Souls does it completely wrong in this respect.
About online play. I think people who want to compete against others are either: 1) already rather experienced at the game, or 2) dicks who want to ruin the fun for others. So it's easy: let people invade each other only when they play at the harder difficulty-level. When they play at easy, don't let them invade and don't let them be invaded. But let them play in coop if they want to. Without the potential to be invaded when they are playing coop.
