Comment by extrememacaroni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extrememacaroni | Hacker News Reader

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extrememacaroni

One of the things that cause immersion to spike for me is exactly the difficulty, or rather "this enemy just kicked my ass, WHAT do I need to do to beat it? what do I need to change, are there other areas I did not check, any clues I may have passed by" etc.

If the game is too easy chances are I'll zone out and "play" it, in a very inert way just watching what happens.

Not a Souls-like, but the game where I saw this at play the most is TeS Oblivion (not sure if it also works in Skyrim), as soon as I started playing it as a battlemage with the Tower sign (it takes away auto regen of magicka). Lots of content in Oblivion I felt was filler that I just went through out of inertia, but playing a battlemage with no magicka regen? Survival depends on the potions you craft and any other helpful items found along the way. Suddenly even the most boring dungeon became interesting and potentially helpful in the long run because it could contain helpful loot. Those ayleid ruins with the crystals that help a ton with magicka? Godsent rather than long and samey.

Of course I eventually leveled up enough to become OP and the game ended up being a chain of filler stuff once more, but that was several tens of hours into the playthru. But those first tens of hours were an amazing experience, where I needed to carefully plan out and scour the world for items in order to hope to survive.

Do you start each of these games with SL1 runs? Likely not.

This means that you are engaging with the game in an optional way that makes the game easier (leveling up). You do not have to do that. In what way is somebody engaging with the game in a different optional way that makes the game easier unacceptable?

What it sounds like you want is for the game to sit near the top of an individual players' capabilities. What if making the game optionally easier achieves that for some people?

Watching a playthrough is the easiest optionalest option, also one that is doable from start to finish by the largest number of gamers. Such an extra-inclusive option, all games should feature it. "Watch the bots play".

With your philosophy, you get games with pointless difficulty systems like Skyrim & co. Sliders that range from "enemies die in one hit" to "you'll spend half an hour hitting this boss before it dies because now it has hitpoints defined by your_level * 9999999999". None of the bosses in Souls games take half an hour to fight unless you do something exotic like SL1 runs, if you're not done with a boss in a couple of minutes chances are something's wrong with your build, because otherwise your skills are good, else you wouldn't survive for 2 minutes with a Souls boss.

> None of the bosses in Souls games take half an hour to fight unless you do something exotic like SL1 runs, if you're not done with a boss in a couple of minutes chances are something's wrong with your build, because otherwise your skills are good, else you wouldn't survive for 2 minutes with a Souls boss.

I spent several days on O&S. Two hours would have been fun and I would have felt a sense of accomplishment. In the end, I cheesed it by pinning Smough to the broken pillars.

He meant the battle itself ends in roughly a few minutes. The number of battles and attempts could be much longer.

It’s a major deviation in difficulty definitions between fromsoft and difficulty sliders — the usual increase in difficulty is to just bump the stats, which typically just means you have to play perfectly for longer durations.

Fromsoft just asks you to play perfectly for a minute, maybe two (and honestly not that perfectly).

Eg I’m playing triangle strategy atm, and the hard mode difficulty bumps their stats so high that the strategy ultimately devolves into some kind of cheesing in many cases (and then spend 15 minutes executing that cheese because the enemies are taking chip damage). At the same time, normal mode (apparently) is easy enough to just plow through, so I’m pretty much stuck if I want an actual challenge — and that’s hardly a surprising state of affairs.

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