LogFAQs > #979181184

pinky0926 posted...

I think it's reasonable to conclude that in relative difficulty terms dark souls is more punishing than games in a similar space (at the time). It required more precision, more practise, more repetition. And even once you git gud and finish the game and have maxed out gear you can still get completely ganked by a low level enemy.

People with a lot of gaming experience had to unlearn a lot of habits and repeat tasks more times than they would have done in other games, with greater care, with more chance of failure, with more demand on doing it precisely.

So yeah, its a hard game.

Sure, that's close enough. But that doesn't mean it's a hard game, it means most people are bad. That's why I said difficulty is relative. Here's a simple way to understand what I'm saying.

Is Chess a hard game? When does someone become "Good" at Chess?

It's easy enough to pick up that I learned the rules as a 5 year old.

It's so hard to master that only a small section of humans who dedicate their entire lives to it can even possibly come close, and even then they can get spanked by computers (because chess is actually a very simple game mechanically, it's almost entirely a knowledge check).

So is Chess a hard game because your average human has no idea how to play it? (A quick google says that the percentage of adults that know the basic rules are somewhere between 8 and 20%)

Or is Chess a hard game because "As of the time of this posting (2021), the average rating (elo) is 832.29 on chess.com"? (For comparison's sake, your default rating with 0 games played is 1200 elo, and 1200+ is considered intermediate, and the absolute best chess players in the world maxed out at 2882, meanwhile computers can hit 3400+.)

Taking the above into account, was 5 year old me good at chess because you average human has no idea how to play it and I did? Am I good at chess now even though I'd get absolutely mollywhopped by anyone that takes chess even vaguely seriously?

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Hopefully this demonstrates where I'm coming from. In most senses Difficulty and Skill are both relative. This general idea applies to pretty much every part of our lives, gaming or not. So to me the actual place difficulty enters into the conversation is

"how easy is it to learn this thing" (AKA beat the knowledge check.)

and

"how hard is this thing to do even when I know how to do it"? (AKA beat the skill check.)

(and then secretly, "how hard is it to do this thing PERFECTLY", which I don't care about most of the time because very few things actually require that and good enough is, in fact, good enough.)

Which is why I can say Souls games are hard relative to the overall gaming landscape, without saying that Souls games are hard.

You CAN play sloppily and not understand most of the game and still get through. I've been there, I've seen hundreds of people do it over the years, I'm literally watching a person who's never played any of them before try out ER and finding out in real time that the difficulty of these games is vastly overstated and she's not playing anywhere close to optimally, yet she's still beaten bosses that 60% of players haven't (according to steam achievements).

(Her words 3 sessions in being something like "I didn't get into these games as a teen because all my guy friends kept telling me these games were way too hard for me and Souls was so frustrating it kept making them angry when they played it so I was like "well why would I play a game like that, it sounds awful", but actually it's not that hard and now I'm addicted and regretting getting into them so late.)

Here's another case. A guy that has actual severe learning difficulties was still able to get to Pontif Sully in DS3, with only a bit of guidance from his brother to help keep him on track (don't think he ever beat Sully though). To put it in perspective, if he'd beaten Sully he'd have done something literally half the playerbase hasn't, and he DID beat the thing that 49% of the players haven't.

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Stuff like that are why I say the games aren't hard. Because, really, they're not, and most "hard" games aren't, and both the elitist and defeatist mentalities around them are both bullshit that shouldn't be tolerated. Souls games are mostly knowledge checks, like most things in life, not mechanic checks like fighting games or RTS's or physicality checks like DDR or whatever.

TL:DR. Simply put, "average" IS bad. Things are hard until you learn how to do them almost entirely because you don't know how to do them, and people generally don't know how to do shit. So comparing anything to the "average" means very little to me, because I'm keenly aware of how dogass we humans are as a general rule.

And as another general rule I don't regard anything children can learn to do as particularly difficult. Now I'm going back to figuring out how tf to separate these audio channels properly without fucking up the audio in some way.