Current Events > Remember when gamers would claim Demon's/Dark Souls were hard games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

That was funny

To this day, I have not played Dank Souls because of the difficulty.

I kept falling down stuff in dark souls 1

Ratchetrockon posted...

I kept falling down stuff in dark souls 1

It's the only way to die in that one

come fight me marth i'll give you difficult

Fluttershy posted...

come fight me marth i'll give you difficult

Souls PVP and netcode is awful

you do kinda need to know how the latter works to be any good at the former, and that's not amazing.

Replaying 1 as a Cleric

Gargoyles dying in 3 & 2 lightning spears is hilarious

So easy

Fluttershy posted...

come fight me marth i'll give you difficult

I'll fight u
Proper duel or no honor. Up to u cedude

That one boss with the dogs was a bit of a pain, especially with how small the room was.

shield + poke wrecks the dogs, and the capra demon itself is too slow to get hit by it when you run in circles around it

They were hard, they just caused a shift in gaming to more difficult games so were used to it now.

KiwiTerraRizing posted...

They were hard, they just caused a shift in gaming to more difficult games so were used to it now.

We also have 10+ years on those games now, complete cheese strats for everything is out there.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Capra demon is one of the easiest bosses in the game they have to stick you in a tiny ass room with another enemy more dangerous than him to make that encounter challenging. Once you kill the dog thing you can literally just run circles up the stair for the rest of the fight and he can't hit you.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Knowledge gained by the game existing for like 13 years now

pretzelcoatl posted...

Knowledge gained by the game existing for like 13 years now

Knowledge gained from seeing them the first time and easily figuring out where to stand to block the shots and not get blown off

I remember being so pissed that I couldnt beat Ornstein and Smough that I got drunk and started murdering all the NPCs. Ruined my game and I never played Dark Souls again.

Ive beaten every From Souls game except for 1

Remember when people thought you made good posts? Oh wait, nobody ever thought that.

and most of them never played ninja gaiden black

Dudebusters posted...

Remember when people thought you made good posts? Oh wait, nobody ever thought that.

Sorry you couldn't get past the Taurus Demon

To this day I havent finished dark souls 1

not because the combat was hard (it wasnt), but because Im not fond of the exploration in that game

MarthGoomba posted...

Sorry you couldn't get past the Taurus Demon

It's okay champ, you tried.

Dudebusters posted...

It's okay champ, you tried.

It's okay 129 karma 2010 account, you're doing your best

The most difficult enemy in any game is the auto-camera; no disable live-play cinematics are a close second.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Poise tanking was at its peak in DS1. That + maxing out your estus charges at the nearest bonfire can carry anyone through pretty much anything.

Idk what's a worse gimmick: This or simping for that girl that looks like she was hit in the face with a shovel

Irony posted...

Idk what's a worse gimmick: This or simping for that girl that looks like she was hit in the face with a shovel

You can insult me all you like but please refrain from insulting anyone from Aqours and Liella

Idk what those are

SL1 +0 is difficult
Leveling normally is not difficult
What's funny is when you hear the blimps saying it's easy. Well no shit lol

Sure there's a few exceptionally good gamers that an SL1 is a walk in the park but it's not the norm.
At the end of the day it's just a game. Just enjoy playing and have some fun

Irony posted...

Idk what those are

The girls I simp for

Ah yes, the classic l33t g4Mer mentality of "it's not difficult, you just need to invest considerable time and effort to learn how to do it with near perfect precision, after many failed attempts where any slight failure is heavily punished. But it's not difficult."

pinky0926 posted...

Ah yes, the classic l33t g4Mer mentality of "it's not difficult, you just need to invest considerable time and effort to learn how to do it with near perfect precision, after many failed attempts where any slight failure is heavily punished. But it's not difficult."

"once you've memorized the patterns it's so easy"

MarthGoomba posted...

The girls I simp for

Which one is the fat one

Irony posted...

Which one is the fat one

None of them

OP once claimed he beat DS1 on his very first playthrough without dying

Giant_Aspirin posted...

"once you've memorized the patterns it's so easy"

I'm sorry you lack basic pattern recognition skills. Right now on the ER board one of the kids of the people there is tearing through it.

pinky0926 posted...

Ah yes, the classic l33t g4Mer mentality of "it's not difficult, you just need to invest considerable time and effort to learn how to do it with near perfect precision, after many failed attempts where any slight failure is heavily punished. But it's not difficult."

I too hate games where I don't have instant mastery of all of its aspects and where I can't make constant blatant mistakes while playing it wrong and not get punished for my horribly sloppy play. I should be presented no difficulties at any point and my ignorance and lack of investment should rewarded.

Genuinely they're not that hard (most of the time), you just have to turn your brain on and stop trying to facefuck everything to death with no regard for strategy or situational awareness. Anyone who's beaten the OG Mario or Zelda or Sonic games or whatever other classics you want to think of can beat a Souls game.

Shockingly, when you refuse to play a game on its own terms because you're trying to play it like something else, you're going to have a bad time. Imagine trying to beat a Megaman game while constantly running straight into the enemies attacks and bodies even though there's contact damage.

KajeI posted...

I too hate games where I don't have instant mastery of all of its aspects and where I can't make constant blatant mistakes while playing it wrong and not get punished for my horribly sloppy play. I should be presented no difficulties at any point and my ignorance and lack of investment should rewarded.

Genuinely they're not that hard (most of the time), you just have to turn your brain on and stop trying to facefuck everything to death with no regard for strategy or situational awareness. Anyone who's beaten the OG Mario or Zelda or Sonic games or whatever other classics you want to think of can beat a Souls game.

Shockingly, when you refuse to play a game on its own terms because you're trying to play it like something else, you're going to have a bad time.

Can you define what "difficulty" even means to you because good god, by my estimation you just said a bunch of stuff that is literally the merriam webster definition of difficult and then concluded "they're not hard".

Seriously, what is hard? Literaly every life skill from using chopsticks to speaking a language to studying quantum mechanics is engaging your brain, practising studiously, refining sloppiness and overcome obstacles,over and over again until you're good at it. If that's not hard, nothing is.

pinky0926 posted...

Can you define what "difficulty" even means to you because good god, by my estimation you just said a bunch of stuff that is literally the merriam webster definition of difficult and then concluded "they're not hard".

Seriously, what is hard? Literaly every life skill from using chopsticks to studying quantum mechanics is engaging your brain, practising studiously and overcome obstacles over and over again.

Difficulty is relative, so I can't say what's "hard" or not, hence why I used those for comparison. Anyone who can beat one of those games can beat a Souls game.

When I first played WoW I thought it was easy. When I tried to get my mom to play WoW she couldn't complete a single quest because she didn't understand how to control her character even when I told and showed her, and she was unwilling to learn further.

I never managed to beat a single level in any of the Halo games on Legendary. But there are people who can do them no problem (or at least minimal problems, I hear those are brutal and given my experiences with Jackal snipers I can see exactly why).

KajeI posted...

Difficulty is relative, so I can't say what's "hard" or not, hence why I used those for comparison. Anyone who can beat one of those games can beat a Souls game.

When I first played WoW I thought it was easy. When I tried to get my mom to play WoW she couldn't complete a single quest because she didn't understand how to control her character even when I told and showed her, and she was unwilling to learn further.

I never managed to beat a single level in any of the Halo games on Legendary. But there are people who can do them no problem (or at least minimal problems, I hear those are brutal and given my experiences with Jackal snipers I can see exactly why).

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. Not the hardest game ever, but hard. Especially hard in the action RPG space of the late 2000s.

People tend to get Challenge and Difficulty confused.

Dark Souls is intended to be a challenging game, but not to a high difficulty. The mechanics of the game are very simple to engage with, and is very clear about how to obtain more power, and doing such is just not hard at all.

A truly difficult game is one that is still hard to complete despite being highly knowledgeable and skilled, which doesn't apply to Dark Souls. It becomes laughably easy.

souls fanboys have mutated the reputation of these games, then namco bandai leaned into it hard

in short i agree tc. i have friends who barely played any games in their life beat dark souls

Dungeater posted...

souls fanboys have mutated the reputation of these games, then namco bandai leaned into it hard

in short i agree tc. i have friends who barely played any games in their life beat dark souls

And its very obvious when it happened. Demons Souls and Dark Souls werent what we have now, this bs prepare to die nonsense came after Artorias and since then they keep copying him over and over. Elden Ring has some semblance of the earlier dungeon crawling but even there its too much action for my taste, if you go that way Id rather have something arcadey.

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?

-

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.

I also want to make it clear that being Bad is not an inherently awful thing that makes someone a shitty person or whatever. I purely mean it as a rating of overall skill, we're all bad at basically everything except for maybe a few things we really focused on along the way and that's perfectly fine.

TC is trolling

Don't know about dark souls, but Sekiro was definitely hard. Literally can not beat that game unless you "git gud"