Lies of P

Yeah ‘hard’ and ‘fair’ need go together for these games to be truly satisfying.

Because the struggle is integral to the intended experience. If you play a Souls game with invincibility turned on, you will absolutely NOT gain a full understanding of their appeal. Yes you'll get to "see" the whole game but at that point you might as well watch it being played on YouTube.

You've misunderstood my point. Playing Dark Souls with an easy mode would mean you completely miss out on that rush of relief when you make it to a bonfire, that sense of fear and vulnerability when carrying a large number of souls, that "oh Christ, not now!" feeling when you get invaded at an inconvenient time, that agonizing choice of which stat to level up because it could make all the difference, and most of all that sense of progress when you finally beat that tough boss. All of this is fundamental to the Soulslikes formula. Hence the intentional choice to not have an easy mode.

Christ, I literally just explained why the player experience would not be as good on an easy setting. The intent of the developers is that you struggle and overcome.

For you. A lot of people would like to just play through the game and move on.

It doesn't hurt anyone if they can do it on an easy setting.
Let's not forget a big reason why early souls games got the reputation as hard was because of how broken they could be at times and the response was just "get good bro!"

Sorry to bang on about this, but I'm just trying to imagine what Sen's Fortress in the original Dark Souls would be like on an easy setting, without that fear and caution, inching forward on your last Estus flask, looking out for traps and fearful of what's around the next corner. Jumping at statues and panic rolling at each noise. It just doesn't work! You'd be left with just a boring castle.

Then you have the NPC characters struggling alongside you. Some stoic, some depressed, some utterly broken. All heroic in their own way, as you know from experience the horrors they're going through. Their storylines aren't gonna have quite the same punch when you tell them "No worries mate, just flick it to easy mode."

Not sure how else I can explain how absolutely inseparable the difficulty of these games is from their experience, story, lore, world and gameplay.

The difficulty and the challenge it brings is one of the key bits of satisfaction in a From game- it’s a puzzle you have to absolutely nail to move through an area to safety. No different to nailing a level in Spelunky and a million other skill games.
So it’s an important bit to include, not crucial, no, but from the range of From game attributes it’s more important than many others so i it’s no surprise it looks like it’s in here.
Even From fuck up the fairness aspect at times though and, if the balance is badly off here, then that’s going to cheapen the whole thing foshure.

I think that's what the developers are thinking, yes. Although the skill level isn't arbitrary (it would be if there were multiple difficulty settings!). And there are plenty of things you can try before uninstalling (practicing, summoning, levelling up, trying different weapons, spells or builds, etc).

Yes, that’s perfectly correct- I wasn’t really making the point that difficulty is a choice every single developer makes and that it being included here isn’t that surprising since they’re copying tropes from a famously exacting series of games. I was saying gamers are lame and shouldn’t even play it. Well done you 👍

Again it depends how you view ‘easy mode’. I get the idea of the challenge being integral, but if you view easy mode as a way of giving shit gamers the intended experience I can’t see any argument against it that isn’t just snobbery against shit gamers.

I wonder if the same ‘not as the developer’s intended’ argument would be wheeled out if the game had a hard mode? I suspect not.

I was quite enjoying wo long until I got to Lu Bei and that fight annoyed me so much I just stopped playing. It wasn't even the difficulty of the fight it was that when I hit him fuck all happened to his health bar so it was a war of attrition where he could one hit kill me. If I could have dropped the difficulty down to walk through him and get back to enjoying the game I would have.

I’m not against easier playthroughs- and they’re even in From games, normally by chosing magic and/or overlevelling. What’s pleasing is, even with those advantages, you can still let your guard down and get mobbed easily. So it’s never a breeze. That feels as fundamental to Souls type games as the risk/reward of the keeping what you have or pushing forward and losing it idea.

The implication that I'm some elite gamer type is funny. I see myself as pretty average at games, and am exactly the type that says fuck it and switches to easy mode given the chance. I am currently replaying Wolfenstein on "Can I Play Daddy?" just to enjoy the story and setting. Difficulty isn't integral to that game, though! At the same time I'm also playing Returnal, which is hard as fuck, has no easy mode, and (just like Dark Souls) dying and trying again is literally baked into the game at the molecular level.

Anyway I've made my point and will shut up now. Looking forward to playing Lies of P at some point.