Bringit posted...
I don't get any enjoyment out of high difficulty in games. I always see people say things like how after they spend an hour learning and practicing on a boss, when they finally finish the battle they say how good and satisfying it felt - I don't get that. I'm glad it's over but not in a "go me, I rock!" kind of way and instead more of a "thank god, that sucked" and there's a really high chance the next time I get stuck in that kinda situation I will just stop playing.
With respect, I wouldn't consider Soulsborne games
high
difficulty, just not afraid to present the player with something to overcome. If you're stuck for an hour, you're probably at said boss too early, especially in Elden Ring which has
so many
tools to reduce difficulty. I don't mean you specifically, but this is the sort of thing I was talking about earlier when I said that people smash their heads into walls for too long because "the game is hard".
People who enjoy high difficulty seem to feel that a high level challenge is a requisite to have fun and will often chide easy games for being boring, but I'm on the other end of that spectrum and find high level challenge boring (frustrating and stressful too depending on how mechanics work). I've even played through games such as Control with god mode on the entire way and
loved
it. Just because I couldn't die during combat didn't mean I couldn't soak in the atmosphere, get invested in the story or even enjoy the gameplay. I still try to play my best even on low difficulties, there's just none of that anxiety of game over screens, time wasting or loss of progress when I screw up.
Speaking for myself, it's not that I need high challenge to have fun, but I need some engagement. If an enemy isn't threatening, it's really just a speedbump to me. That doesn't mean they need to be hard, only that they require some response from me instead of ignoring them. To use another example, in X-COM the basic enemies will push your shit in early on if you aren't careful. Once you get a bit further in, they stop being engaging because they just get nuked from orbit. In Enemy Unknown specifically, the game got kinda boring once you got a couple of squadsight snipers because there was no threat anymore, an issue the devs went out of their way to address in the sequel.
I do think this is where accessibility comes in though. The worst bosses in DS1 like the Bed of Chaos weren't just mechanically bad, it took
AGES
to get back to them because of the runbacks. In contrast in ER, you get a respawn point outside of basically every boss or challenging encounter, which is fantastic. Nioh goes a step further and will return your lost souls to you when you enter a boss arena, so you don't have to worry about scrambling to find them before fighting the boss. It makes dying basically the same as if you were to die in Mario.
I also have played many online competitive games and there are a handful I have actually been very good at, I just don't like that level of intensity in my single-player experiences.
The main reason debates like this become so heated is that people who love high difficulty don't want people who don't to have the option of a low difficulty because they feel it will take something away from the game, effectively barring everyone else from the game (I've played two Souls games in my entire life including the original Demon's Souls) which of course makes everyone defensive. I
can
do these games, rise above the difficulty and finish them but what a lot of people can't wrap their heads around is I don't enjoy it, I don't have fun. I could have fun with these games if I was given options but I'm told no and that really sucks.
EDIT: I will add that a quick and dirty but also elegant solution to this is just add God mode toggles to games. This way the design philosophy of the game does not get impacted in any way. I'd be fine with that and probably even pick up Elden Ring finally, and just switch the toggle when something really starts walling me. Obviously have it disable achievements but I don't see any drawback to this as an option that doesn't devolve into gatekeeping.
The issue is that difficulty in these games comes from far more than just the damage numbers. Level and encounter design plays a huge role in how difficult a game is and isn't really adjusted with a god mode. The concern is to make a proper easy mode would involve altering other parts of the game. Funny enough I think Elden Ring does show some example of this. Many of the fights were clearly designed around having a spirit ash in play, which does impact the experience for those who don't want to use them.