Current Events > FromSoftware fans are weird like this

(+) Yeah! (+)

This task isn't difficult. All you need to do is spend a lot of time, effort and patience developing the considerable skill required that you don't currently have to be able to progress. There are many challenges even right at the start that will ruin your progress should you make even a single mistake, so you will either have to perfect your timing or you will need to spend hours grinding in order to be able to overcome them. To begin with, you will be bad at the task, but eventually and with a lot of trying you will become competent at it.

However it is not difficult.

I'll open by saying that while I'm not a fan of Fromsoft's other games, I've been playing Elden Ring and love it.

There is definitely validity to the statement "the game is as easy as you make it"

The combat is deep but ultimately pretty simple and intuitive, and grinding (while still grinding) is a far more enjoyable experience than in other games.

If you reach a dungeon or boss fight that's too difficult the game also encourages you to just go off and do other shit for a while. It's very nonlinear like that

Its half humble brag and half not understanding competence, because souls fans arent competent at much else

Like yeah nerds, if you practice something hard it gets easier wow amazing

My favorite is "actually there is an easy mode, you just have to use this specific character build that you would have no way to know about if you are new to the game"

My favorite is "actually there is an easy mode, you just have to use this specific character build that you would have no way to know about if you are new to the game"

ah yes, the high HP build, truly gaming's best kept secret.

elden ring is the best the series has been about a built-in easy mode. well, the most effective. the spirit ashes are a big deal.

but pinky i'm not sure what your specific complaint is here. fromsoft fans that are saying the games aren't hard?

correct TC

but the non-fans are the ones asking for easier difficulty so they could get into it

Solution:

Make non-Souls games to the quality of Souls games. That way fans of Souls games can enjoy their Souls games and non Souls fans don't have to be tortured.

I've never heard anyone refer to a high hp build, but there's that characteristic defensiveness lol

Hollow Knight fans are exactly the same, and probably the same breed.

Like I beat Nightmare King Grimm. Probably the hardest gaming thing I've done since trying to unlock invincibility in GoldenEye. That guy was REALLY HARD.

And these motherfuckers are like "he's not that hard, you just have to learn perfect timing, never get hit and be prepared to slog it out for 25 minutes".

jesus. What is hard, dark souls fans?

Fluttershy posted...

but pinky i'm not sure what your specific complaint is here. fromsoft fans that are saying the games aren't hard?

I'm laughing at Dark Souls nerds who say that the games are not difficult and then give a textbook definition of what difficult means

Do they really want to get into it though? It always sounds more like they want to curbstomp a version that can't fight back and then judge the game based on its story.
It's some sort of noob revolt.

I've never heard anyone refer to a high hp build, but there's that characteristic defensiveness lol

well, i did say it was gaming's best kept secret.

Probably the hardest gaming thing I've done since trying to unlock invincibility in GoldenEye.

what? i got invincibility accidentally on my first try. it was so easy i actually started nodding off halfway too.

I'm laughing at Dark Souls nerds who say that the games are not difficult and then give a textbook definition of what difficult means

i don't really see many souls nerds claim the games aren't difficult, but i have seen some claiming elden ring is the easiest.

i do think the games are actually easier than people realize, though, and it's in part to what i mentioned earlier -- leveling vit or vig. there are still guides on this website that discourage getting more HP, calling them fuck-up points or something equally stupid.

(this is a whole other tangent i have where i complain about how the game could incentivize vitality somehow -- you have all this motivation to level damage stats because you get access to stuff, so there is tangible growth there, whereas adding slices and chunks to a bar gradually doesn't have that point)

pinky0926 posted...

And these motherfuckers are like "he's not that hard, you just have to learn perfect timing, never get hit and be prepared to slog it out for 25 minutes".

That is really fucking annoying lol

There's similar stuff with Elden Ring rn. A newer update tweaked a very difficult boss to make him less overpowered and certain very stupid people in the fan community feel the need to complain that the company is catering to people who want the games to be easier, and then trying to make it a superiority thing like "You beat Starscourge Radahn? Big deal I ackshully beat him BEFORE he was patched"

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Do they really want to get into it though? It always sounds more like they want to curbstomp a version that can't fight back and then judge the game based on its story.
It's some sort of noob revolt.

I have more of a nuanced view on this part. Certainly when I first played Dark Souls I thought "this shit is just more hard than it is fun". And it frustrated me because the world looked interesting and yet I couldn't be bothered to beat down the same 3 fucking draugrs in the Undead Burg for another 3 hours. Then as I started to git gud at the game I realised that that is the entire point of the thing, and you either like that or you don't. And sure, it's very rewarding. I don't think these games need an easy mode. I think they might be worse off for it, in fact.

That said, the games are definitely difficult! I don't know why they say it is not. How else do you define difficult.

I think every person who says DS isn't difficult needs to post how many hours they logged on their first playthrough, or especially how many hours it took them to get up to say, beating capra demon.

im sorry people hurt your feelings and i hope you have a good day free of meanies op

What you're describing isn't really consistent through their games. Some lean into it, while others lean away.

Doom_Art posted...

That is really fucking annoying lol

There's similar stuff with Elden Ring rn. A newer update tweaked a very difficult boss to make him less overpowered and certain very stupid people in the fan community feel the need to complain that the company is catering to people who want the games to be easier, and then trying to make it a superiority thing like "You beat Starscourge Radahn? Big deal I ackshully beat him BEFORE he was patched"

I liked Dunkey's video on it. Nobody could say dunkey is bad at gaming, and he beat elden ring 4 times, and he says the game had some bullshit difficulty they needed to balance. I think that's fair.

Nothing in life is hard. Everything is easy. If you think something is hard it's because you aren't good.

Soulsborne is really all about leaving your ego at the door for able bodied people. How many jump in right after assassins creed, god of war, spider man or some other triple A title that doesn't punish you for making mistakes and makes you feel powerful, then hate on their first souls game?

ViewtifulJoe posted...

Do they really want to get into it though? It always sounds more like they want to curbstomp a version that can't fight back and then judge the game based on its story.
It's some sort of noob revolt.

I would like to get into the excellent world-building and interesting monsters without having to cheese a bunch of frustrating bosses, yes

Their games appeal to me in a lot of ways, I just really hate the focus on making them punishingly difficult. That isn't fun to me.

pinky0926 posted...

I liked Dunkey's video on it. Nobody could say dunkey is bad at gaming, and he beat elden ring 4 times, and he says the game had some bullshit difficulty they needed to balance. I think that's fair.

There's definitely some stuff they need to smooth out

But that said, even as a guy who plays story/easy mode on basically everything else, ER is actually shockingly approachable. Still difficult, but it's designed to give you options and some leeway.

And this is coming from someone who tried Dark Souls and never got into it and who absolutely HATED Sekiro.

Nothing has taken hours of grinding in any of the Souls games since Demon's.

I just don't get the point of... A video game... That says "this approach doesn't work here"

MedeaLysistrata posted...

I just don't get the point of... A video game... That says "this approach doesn't work here"

That's literally every video game.
All a game is is a set of rules and constraints.

I think every person who says DS isn't difficult needs to post how many hours they logged on their first playthrough, or especially how many hours it took them to get up to say, beating capra demon.

oh, a ton of hours. i made it way harder on myself than it ever needed to be by staying low-level through the whole run (sl12.) i remember the tomb of the giant beast skeletons practically always one-shotting me.

but i have no misgivings about how i was playing mario with no powerups for no reason. mashing against a game until rng opens up a way does not make me good at it, and there was a healthy amount of that. i admit.

about elden ring's difficulty, i'm at the end of the game (pretty sure the next fog gate is the last one) and superboss down too -- elden ring leans into damage sponge + crazy damage combo a little hard. in other games you would just call it artificial difficulty :o

i liked the superboss once i realized it was time for crab.

If you were to persist there'd only be so much the game could do to stop you. I don't think you can really back yourself into a corner unless maybe you got a truly terrible save file stuck in the Duke's Archives cell or used a single weapon until it broke without knowing where to find a blacksmith maybe. The game can't really stop you from powerlevelling, is it difficult if you can just boost your numbers?

I kept my distance from the series for a while because I thought when people said it was difficult they meant unfair, esoteric or reminiscent of I Wanna Be The Guy in general. When it turned out not to be the case it felt weird calling it a difficult game, I wasn't stuck exactly, I was playing a seemingly pretty fair game that made sense at my own pace. I had a big sword for staggering, a bleed weapon, Great Chaos Fireball and the option to run back to Darkroot Garden and even if I couldn't defeat those forest guardians I could lure them near the mountain and kick spam them off for souls.

It gives you too much to work with for it to feel like it's just straight up difficult. Something like F Zero GX I'd call difficult, it's more restrictive about how you can approach it, you either have the technique and precision to handle the track and 29 opponents or you're in trouble. DS1 you can just back off for a while, explore and come back more prepared. I don't deny that the "Heheh just run to the catacombs and get the great scythe even though you barely know the controls broooo" people are real and very unhelpful though. That or they're big fans of leaving unhelpful messages both in-game and out.

DocDelicious posted...

That's literally every video game.
All a game is is a set of rules and constraints.

Open world that shuts you down for being yourself

"These games actually have very good stories, here's a YouTube video that goes over all the lore the game itself didn't"

pinky0926 posted...

considerable skill required that you don't currently have

i played kingdom hearts 2 which is far more difficult. dark souls isnt a difficult game. it seems like the only people that find souls difficult are the people who only ever play cod and fifa and decided to try something new

If you were to persist there'd only be so much the game could do to stop you. I don't think you can really back yourself into a corner unless maybe you got a truly terrible save file stuck in the Duke's Archives cell or used a single weapon until it broke without knowing where to find a blacksmith maybe. The game can't really stop you from powerlevelling, is it difficult if you can just boost your numbers?

so since you're talking about 1 here, you can kill all the blacksmiths.

I just don't get the point of... A video game... That says "this approach doesn't work here"

what approach?

sometimes i feel like people spend more time complaining about these supposed dark souls fans than the game itself.

Kloe_Rinz posted...

i played kingdom hearts 2 which is far more difficult. dark souls isnt a difficult game. it seems like the only people that find souls difficult are the people who only ever play cod and fifa and decided to try something new

See this right here, this is it guys

All the sarcasm aside, if having patience and learning is difficult for you then you will have a difficult time playing. If that turns you off the game then that's perfectly fine, not every game is meant for every player.

Fluttershy posted...

so since you're talking about 1 here, you can kill all the blacksmiths.

Honestly if someone starts a fight with Andre, has the willpower to tough it out and kill him despite apparently not knowing how to upgrade weapons then manages to exhaust all their other options, I'd 1 struggle to keep a straight face and 2 tell them very clearly that blacksmiths repair weapons and see if they can work out what might have gone wrong here.

Can you kill forgot name Rickert? of Vinheim though? He's in the cell in New Londo Ruins. I assumed he had the same invulnerability as Anastasia. I've never had a reason to try.

Kloe_Rinz posted...

i played kingdom hearts 2 which is far more difficult. dark souls isnt a difficult game. it seems like the only people that find souls difficult are the people who only ever play cod and fifa and decided to try something new

How was that more difficult with two NPCs backing you up at all times except for when you have to be alone

Solid_Seb posted...

All the sarcasm aside, if having patience and learning is difficult for you then you will have a difficult time playing. If that turns you off the game then that's perfectly fine, not every game is meant for every player.

Since when did difficult mean insurmountable

Difficult means challenging, like you'll *checks notes* need to spend effort and time and develop your skills and knowledge in order to do the thing

Needing considerable patience and time to learn is quite literally what you would call difficult

I assumed he had the same invulnerability as Anastasia.

he doesn't! you can!

MedeaLysistrata posted...

two NPCs backing you up at all times

two dead npcs dead at all times

pinky0926 posted...

Since when did difficult mean insurmountable

Difficult means challenging, like you'll *checks notes* need to spend effort and time and develop your skills and knowledge in order to do the thing

Needing considerable patience and time to learn is quite literally what you would call difficult

If it was insurmountable no one would be able to beat it

Difficulty is subjective; many would say patience and learning is not difficult. There isn't some insane level of reaction speeds required, or crazy button inputs that need to be mastered (things I consider difficult), so again it comes down to not every game is meant for every player.

The idea of a new player somehow discovering Vamos, watching the cutscene where he helps you in his own misanthropic way and then deciding to destroy him only to blame the game afterwards is even better.

ViewtifulJoe posted...

The idea of a new player somehow discovering Vamos, watching the cutscene where he helps you in his own misanthropic way and then deciding to destroy him only to blame the game afterwards is even better.

https://youtu.be/CYxOhazaLSg

Most people don't even make it that far. Turns out the vast majority of people quit after the tutorial. Lack of quest markers and waypoints really throws people off.

I think you're mixing up Souls fans and FROM fans. FROM has been making games for decades. Check out some of their older stuff, I recommend ECHO Night.

lmao

pinky0926 posted...

Hollow Knight fans are exactly the same, and probably the same breed.

Like I beat Nightmare King Grimm. Probably the hardest gaming thing I've done since trying to unlock invincibility in GoldenEye. That guy was REALLY HARD.

And these motherfuckers are like "he's not that hard, you just have to learn perfect timing, never get hit and be prepared to slog it out for 25 minutes".

jesus. What is hard, dark souls fans?

I've never played a FromSoft game, but I can at least speak on Hollow Knight, which is a game I love in spite of its punishing difficulty, not because of it. The devs seemed to have this uncanny knack of always taking their challenges one step further than what my maximum patience allows. The Soul Master was my first taste of this - a perfectly-paced, difficult boss that I was able to squeak out a victory against on my first try and feel really proud of doing so...until oh ho ho he reveals a second stage of the fight and ground-pounds me into oblivion. I was so pissed and thrown off my game that it took half a dozen tries after that to beat him for realizies, at which point all goodwill I'd initially felt towards the fight had evaporated.

It's also a bit of a letdown that all of the extra content was just harder boss fights, when we could have gotten new areas to explore in addition to that. And if it's not harder boss fights, it's shoving the game's already-hard existing boss fights into a boss rush mode. Bitch I do not want to fight the fucking Traitor Lord more than once in any given playthough.

Ultimately I just have to stop caring about HK's late-game challenges because there's nothing to gain from beating them. I'm most likely not going to get any enjoyment out of it - after a certain point, eventual victory turns from 'yeesss!' to 'ugh, fucking finally.' I'm certainly not going to impress anyone else, either: anyone who hasn't beaten the Path of Pain won't care if I have, and it's doubtful that anyone who has beaten it will give me a pat on the back either, seeing as how they're probably halfway through breaking their blindfolded speedrun record (of course the Path of Pain is a bad example in my case; I've resigned myself to the fact that I will simply never have the mental focus necessary to complete it).

Yeah I liked HK a lot but I hated how hard it was. I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if the boss fights had been a bit more reasonable

masterpug53 posted...

after a certain point, eventual victory turns from 'yeesss!' to 'ugh, fucking finally.'

Yea I had the same realization in hollow knight. I went from "this is fun, I'll probably plat it" to "beating the main game is enough for me."

It was still a fun time for the most part, but the endgame just wasn't for me.

i'm a huge FromSoftware fan. they're my favorite games by a margin and shaped what i look for in a video game.

that said, the games are rather difficult at times, at least for me. but part of what i love about them is that feeling of finally beating that mf'er who tossed my shit around for a couple of hours.

from soft souls games aren't any more difficult that your average super nintendo platformer, and tbh are even easier considering you can level up and be carried by other people

games are just at a point where typically on the standard difficulty you'll go the entire game without getting a "game over" screen.

im not good at video games and im not good at souls likes. i get my shit packed in in PVP. but ive beaten every single one just by grinding.

Kloe_Rinz posted...

i played kingdom hearts 2 which is far more difficult. dark souls isnt a difficult game. it seems like the only people that find souls difficult are the people who only ever play cod and fifa and decided to try something new

Lol KH2 is not hard at all. That was a big complain when it first came out.