The Hot Topic Returns

[Maf]

Re Souls difficulty. I haven’t nailed this down yet but here is where I’m currently at in my thinking on why they’re not actually hard games

 

 I think generally there are 3 things needed to be good at games. Skill, knowledge and experience. These 3 things can be applied to every game ever (and skill is doing a lot of work here; speed, reactions, precision, decision making, creativity, talent, etc).
 

But effectively I think all games require these 3 things and some games lean into one thing more than the other. Resi4 Remake was bought up earlier, I think that’s a super skill based game because of how dynamic and pressurising it is. And even though knowledge and experience helps, the fact that enemies react to the player and items drop variably makes skill, in particular decision making, the biggest component.  
 

For Souls games (Lies of P the outlier, Elden Ring kind of an outlier) I think the difficulty is made up of 90% knowledge. 
 

The few reasons I think this is firstly these bosses are old school pattern memorisation bosses. Once you know the pattern, for the most part they fall over. The only boss that sticks out against this is Ornsteon and Smough. And the only reason is because you’re trying to juggle 2 over lapping patterns at the same time and it’s why it’s easily the hardest thing in the game 

 

Another thing these games are mostly knowledge is I remember looking at a trophy guide and realising I would have to play Dark Souls 2.5 times for the platinum. And knowing that each NG+ the game levels up and gets much harder. 
 

But my first play through took about 80 hours, my second play through took around 30, and the last .5 for the material I needed was like a speedrun 

 

I was wondering why the times got so much shorter and was so much easier, and why some bosses took me hours to beat and now I walk in and deck them first try 

 

See memorisation answer from before. But also I realised Souls games are very simple games to play. Attack buttons, dodge button, hide behind shield. What more is there really? There’s a little bit of skill in quickly switching 2 handed to 1 handed. But it’s not exactly hard or a test of high dexterity and button combos. I think the game is so easy to play in terms of controls, there isn’t really much room for a high skill ceiling 

 

Some people do soul level 1 runs and some avoid shields, etc. But it’s still the same patterns to dodge in and out of, they’re just making less mistakes and upping the risks. It’s more skillful but I still don’t think the level of skill is that high. It’s much easier to practice a slow paced and predictable game that’s heavy on memorisation and dumb AI manipulation like Dark Souls compared to a highly dynamic, fast paced, and button heavy game like DMC 

 

The last thing I think Souls games aren’t really that hard is where the challenge lies in the game. The challenge is finding the answer, but once the answer is found it’s generally not difficult to execute.
 

It’s just figuring it out and walking through the fog wall over and over again and breaking the fight down one move at a time. It’s more patience testing than skill testing. But once you know every move it’s just about executing. And again because of the controls and the way the game plays actually being really simple the execution or skill requirement isn’t that high. It’s just memorising the attacks, react accordingly, and it feels dangerous because you only get a few mistakes and you’re dead, but once the answer is found there’s not too much more to it 

 

Expanding outside just the boss fights. I think this is quite easy to explain. Blightown was really hard the first time. That stupid fucking rope bridge room in RE4 is hard every time

 

I dunno. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and this is my rough thoughts and conclusion of; Are Souls games really that hard to play, or is it just figuring out what to do. They’re so much more knowledge based than skill based 

[Metroid66]

I always play on normal. For some reason I have this idea that that's how the game was intended to be played. Or why call it normal?

 

Two interesting points on this have to do with my recent run on the Halo games and Cyberpunk. With halo the default difficulty is famously not the 'correct' difficulty, although it's always been hard enough for me. But on halo infinite the default is, so I'm told, set to heroic. So I played Halo infinite on that and could feel the difference to be fair. I don't think I enjoyed the gameplay any more, although I did really like it as a game. Maybe my favourite halo experience.

 

With cyberpunk my first playthru was with guns of various types. This I found to be a regular to challenging experience, with some rather troublesome bosses.

 

On my second run I went katana and was a blade crazy kill machine from the off, with the game offering hardly any challenge at all. For the first time in my gaming life I had no choice but to put the difficulty up to hard. And even then I sliced thru those formerly tough boss like a block of cheddar. Not even cheddar, more one of those soft french cheeses. Brie, perhaps.

 

Having said that, the game sure was fun with blades. Not everything has to be a challenge.

[one-armed dwarf]

Knowledge is absolutely a part of difficulty. Tekken is imo a more difficult game to learn than Street Fighter, even if you play a low execution character, cause there are 32 characters in the game with 100+ moves with unique properties and frame data, which you're forced to learn even early on to progress. There's also executional difficulty, particularly with Mishima character movement (electric wind god fist example) which has an insanely high skill ceiling that can take a decade+ of refinement, going back to the PS2 and PS1 games. But that knowledge check aspect is the upfront most difficult aspect about the game

[Maf]

Knowledge can be a difficult thing to acquire in games. Even in Dark Souls. But I think it's the only hurdle. Once that knowledge is gained (and gets easier and easier to gain with every subsequent Souls game) there's not much more left to the game. 

 

Which I don't play Tekken. But I'm going to guess the same isn't true 

EDIT: Also the level of knowledge is different as well. Tekken you're saying you have to learn frame data. Dark Souls you have to learn, whoops, don't stand there 

[mfnick]

I used to be really really stubborn. I’d only

play games on normal or above and would refuse for drop the difficulty no matter how hard I was finding it. Even preferring to just stop playing altogether rather than drop it down. 
 

Nowadays I don’t care. I’ll start it on normal but if I’m finding it too hard or it’s a type of game where the challenge isn’t the draw of the game I’ll drop the difficulty. Take Persona 5, I wasn’t playing that to fail and redo battles or dungeons. That wasn’t fun at all and the experience of that game is the story side so I dropped it to easy. 
 

If the challenge is part of the game though I will not drop it still. 

 

Some games do benefit from not having a difficulty too IMO. Take Sekiro, I’d have no doubt caved and dropped the difficulty of that if it had one but it didn’t so o stuck at it and I do believe it would have hurt the overall experience if it did have an easy mode.

 

Some games can be so easy they become boring to play as well - I’m including most recent Nintendo games here. Mario Odyssey and Wonder in particular. The final challenge levels are amazing. Everything before them is just so breezy it becomes dull IMO. 
 

Also I agree with @Maf, games like Devil May Cry are absolutely harder than Dark Souls. Dark Souls difficultly comes from having no patience rather than skill challenge. Making you walk the same 10 minute slog before a boss battle after every attempt is a patience check not a skill check. 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

There's really no objective measure here though about which is more difficult. It's extremely subjective. For one, Dark Souls-like games forces you to take your turn and hard-learn every boss fight. In DMC, no boss fight can keep up with a mid-level player, it's actually a pretty glaring weakness with 4 and 5 tbh (5 moreso, 4 has better fights and 4 Dante's sections are pretty hard tbh). To me, modern Souls games are harder cause they just cripple my patience. Even Armored Core 6 burnt me out after a bit cause I got tired of the dancing around mechanics

 

I think it's reductive to look at skill and difficulty as purely about reactions, timing, execution. Fighting games are very illustrative for this, but it's applicable to other stuff too. Knowledge and patience

[Maf]

I’m not trying to be reductive and boil games down to 1 skill quality only. More I’m saying I don’t think any game encapsulates the phrase knowledge is power more than the Dark Souls games. They’re 90% knowledge and not a lot else.

 

Doesn’t mean the first playthrough isn’t a pain*, but punishing is different from hard. Something can be really difficult to do with no penalty or be very easy to do but one mistake and lose everything. 
 

Souls can be frustrating and punishing. But once figured out I don’t actually think they’re very hard. 
 

*Although again I think every souls game I’ve played has been easier than the last because they rely a lot on the same tricks over and over, and the knowledge/experience transfers quite easily from one game to another. Oh, look. Another poison swamp 

[one-armed dwarf]

What Souls games have you played? Or Souls adjacent ones, I feel you undersell how narrow the margin between correctly executing and fucking up is in a game like Elden Ring or Armored Core VI, and the extreme effort in executing mechanics well enough to learn to execute mechanics for a different phase.

 

Balteus and Malenia (not Trump's wife) require you to maintain a level of composure that isn't at all matched by anything in DS1, 2, 3 or Bloodborne. 

 

(I know summoning in other players can beat Malenia.. but tbh call me a gatekeeper if you want but I'm not counting that lol)

[Maf]

Demons Souls, Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Ashen, Wo Long, Star Wars Jedi games (I think this counts in this genre, although maybe not this discussion) and a little Lies of P. 
 

There’s like, adjacent stuff as well Hollow Knight, Ender Lilies. Remnant 2. But similar in some design concepts, massively different in what they’re about. 
 

EDIT: I think Elden Ring is different because of speed, though.

 

I could take the same principles I’m talking about in Souls game, coming down to memorisation and repetition, and apply that to like a bullet hell game. Because technically that’s the same. If you go to the same place on the screen and do the right attack everytime it will work. What changes that for the end result is the speed, precision and complexity of what’s happening on screen.

 

Part of the reason why I’m saying Dark Souls isn’t hard and doesn’t take much skill is because it’s not even that fast and really there’s not much happening other than look out for that sword. Once you’ve figured out where to be on the screen. That’s kind of it. 
 

Elden Ring is a bit of an outlier because it’s a much faster game and there are frame traps and much long combos that bosses can stop middway through and stuff. 
 

There’s  more skill involved in something like Elden Ring, but it’s still very much a souls game and I feel a lot of that game was beat by the same tactics and ideas, but the bosses upped the anti. Which I think is good They needed to change things up

 

I also like that game because it had a fucking kamehameha sword it was awesome 

 

DOUBLE EDIT: This post reads like I beat Elden Ring when I didn’t. I must have played most of it, though 

[Maryokutai]

I agree that there are way too many different layers of difficulty to just brush over some of them. This entire discussion has been focused around action games, but what about RTS games for example? They're based on the 'knowledge difficulty', but in a different way than Souls games. Troop placement, cooldowns, resources etc. And even in action games knowledge is intertwined with the dexterity aspect, as you can't just conjure infinite amount of attack patterns as a developer. There's so many different ways games can be hard or not hard, and I think all of them are valid for the kind of genre they've been shaped into.

 

I remember some people having trouble with the last boss of Metroid Dread, while I beat him on the second try without much hassle. It's pattern recognition and memorisation and then executing on that without fail, which is all I've done in videogame since I started playing as a kid. But put me in front of those RTS mentioned above and I will most likely fail the tutorial. That doesn't mean Dread is easier than those or vice versa, it's just my perception of difficulty shifting around due to prior experiences.

[one-armed dwarf]

The issue I have with the way it's been argued here is there's not a lot of subjectivity being considered here. With the DMC example, I was giving that as a game I find very easy cause the boss mechanics can be trivialised by a character's kit (who the fuck cares if they have a big sweeping ground move if you can jump cancel indefinitely). But on the other hand, games like Sekiro, Elden Ring and Armored Core force you to respect boss mechanics and engage with them on their own terms, and learning the terms of engagement there is its own type of challenge that is not trivial for lots of people (in the same way it is not trivial for lots of people to jump cancel and do combos in DMC, but is very easy for me to do). One game has higher execution requirements, but tons of latitude to allow for error due to how expressive it is. The other is the virtual opposite.

 

The hardest game I've ever played is not Street Fighter or Tekken (well, Tekken might get there for me) or GG or whatever, it's this one. FFXIV. The high end content in this is all about knowledge. Where to stand, when to buff and debuff. When to burst damage, when to shield and heal. But the level of composure and awareness involved when you're in a group with 8 people, that is extremely difficult. Even if this fight isn't 'up there' with the hard fights of this raid tier I remember it being a new kind of skill I had to develop to get decent at this type of thing. Knowing when to not heal is as important as knowing when to heal, yet it is all 'knowledge', you're essentially following a pre-defined script that you figure out with practice.

Spoiler

I almost get us wiped here on 2 separate occasions, forgetting to have mitigation for a mechanic and forgetting to use a cooldown that gets me killed later on. Knowledge I would integrate better on a reclear

 

I realise Souls is the example being used and it's a different type of knowledge, but a game isn't easy because it leans so heavily on knowledge over execution either, it's a mistake to look at it like that. it to bring it back to the topic, the thing with difficulty levels in single player games (and casual content in online MMOs) is about offering an experience which can be catered to anyone's subjective comfort level, taking into account the very different things people get challenged by in difficulty. 

 

Knowing how to fight Malenia does not make that fight not ridiculous to deal with. Waterfowl dance is too stupid. Her Advent Children Omnislash thing in phase 2 just stumped me entirely

[Maf]

But you are all giving examples where it’s knowledge + something else. RTS has management, decision making, and being able to predict and think long term strategy

 

I don’t understand the MMO breakdown but from what I read is it‘s knowledge + all this screen awareness and adapting on the fly and working in a team

 

I saying souls games are you just learn (sometimes painfully) where to stand and when to strike and that’s it

 

Add the fact the games are generally slow paced, only focus on one thing at a time, and easily repeatable. The skill required is minimal and the game’s difficulty comes from finding the answer. 
 

I pick in Souls games specifically because they have a reputation. Not trying to deny subjectivity or what an individual finds harder

 

But I think actually objectively you can break Souls games down and say, actually there’s not very much going on here. It’s just trial and error + gimmicks

 

Yes there will be bosses that escape this. But I think 90% of these games is knowledge a lot of the rest is just experience, but the actual skill required to play the game is super minimal

 

I I think hard games are actually hard every time you play them. Even if you get better and it gets easier, it should still feel challenging every time. I don’t think any type of game falls over as quick as souls games on the second run.  There’s just something in that that makes me think these games are not that hard. They’re just kind of torturing and bullshit (and again, the more of them you play this part drastically decreases as well)

[HandsomeDead]

If you put all games on a difficulty spectrum no matter what the Souls games are gonna be pretty far along in the hard part.  It's not the hardest game ever but it's in the ball park.

 

What I think most people are responding to in Souls games isn't that they are hard on some inconceivable level, they're very conceivable.  But they really relish in killing and putting you in a fail state.  Miyazaki has said as much in interviews:

 

 

Like, I don't think he'd ever tell people to 'git gud', it's more like "didn't you not find it fun when that rolling boulder pushed you off a cliff?"

[one-armed dwarf]

So he's the Takashi Miike of games then. We might not have our Citizen Kane but we may one day be blessed with our own 'Ichi the Killer'

[Maryokutai]

I've been thinking about that Citizen Kane comment all day and yeah, we don't have one, don't we. Progress in games has been way too fractured across different titles from different eras for that to have been possible. But I guess that makes the medium's history just as interesting to observe and analyse.

[Jimboxy]

1 hour ago, Maryokutai said:

I've been thinking about that Citizen Kane comment all day and yeah, we don't have one, don't we. Progress in games has been way too fractured across different titles from different eras for that to have been possible. But I guess that makes the medium's history just as interesting to observe and analyse.

I guess it depends on how we relate Citizen Kane to film and apply the same standard to games. For example Tetris could be the Citizen Kane of games. Timeless, highly regarded, influential, some people hate it, often imitated, ground breaking etc. But does it need to be something narrative driven to count? Maybe it could be a hot topic question

[Nag]

1 hour ago, Jimbo Xiii said:

Maybe it could be a hot topic question

 

You'd better write in to GameCentral then... it certainly won't be one of my questions as I have no idea what Citizen Kane actually is.🤣

[AndyKurosaki]

Isn’t that the one where some old bloke goes “Rosebud” before he dies, and it turns out to be the name of his childhood sled, which gets yeeted into a fire? 
Then there’s a car chase sequence on stilts, followed by a giant badger destroying Tokyo. Finished off with a big goatse. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Kane was/is important for its technical innovations wrt shot composition, camera movements, angles, transitions and set design which facilitated those movements. How all the above got leveraged to tell a story where narrative was fragmented by these techniques

 

Its also still really good, even today, but the thing with it is its a perfect situation for such a film to be made. Orson Welles was very young (25), and he had carte blanche to do what he want. The hunger and fearlessness of youth to try things more seasoned filmmakers wouldn't consider standard (or even good) practice.

 

But gaming is a more difficult canvas to work on and the above situation impossible to replicate. Theres probably not a single game which has as large an impact which carries into the future like Kane. Theres a couple you could take together maybe, ff7, deus ex, hl1, Mario 64, OOT, mgs. All fairly innovate games where technology enabled new things and which chart a course forward for modern gaming.

 

It doesnt have goatse, however Ichi the Killer has a number of things which go even beyond this. Check it out

[Nag]

So no giant robots, explosions or gratuitous sex scenes?.... pffft, think I'll give that a miss all together then. 😉