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A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

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Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#31

Post by dsuth »

Rickasaurus wrote: post #4

Having played both Demon and Dark souls, I think Demon souls was only better in that it flushed out the Maiden and the monumentals in a way which was deliberate and set the tone of the game. Dark Souls could have used something along these lines, but in every other respect it's the better game. From the improved enemy AI, to balance in the weapons and crafting, to the variety of locations and enemies, and don't forge…

If you like the feel of Dark Souls, try Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, if you have a Wii U or 3DS. The theme is very different, but the game is very similar in terms of difficulty, crafting, and multiplayer. It also sports, quite literally, the most finely tuned difficulty ramp I have ever come across in a game. Every new challenge will be amazingly tough, yet fair. The boss creatures are very inventive too. It ranks equally with the Souls games for me, which are easily my favourite games in the last 10 years too.

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#32

Post by [deleted] »

vacri wrote: post #24
zainny wrote: post #18

What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port. They're still selling tons of copies of the game for PC because of all the silly hype around it, and yet the game is virtually unplayable - even with all the mouse fixes, mods, etc. Why is it acceptable for game developers to completely abandon their customer base and continue to sell a broken product? I picked up the game during a Steam sale, spent a good…

I bought a controller especially for that game and never looked back. This being said, I completed the game right up to just before the final boss fight on kb + mouse... but with the controller, the game is really incredible. The port is shitty without the third-party fixes, but they also specifically said "we're not PC people, this will be a shitty port". They didn't launch the PC version with a lot of fanfare - and…

[deleted]

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#33

Post by zwdr »

roarroar wrote: post #13
autarch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not though. At least for me, I find that there's a balance between giving and receiving damage in the boss fights. While having higher vitality (more HP) lets you survive longer, unless you can also dish out a lot of damage the fights can become incredibly difficult. Basically, the question is how many times you can hit the boss by taking advantage of their timing versus how many times you screw up trying…

A Fire Uchigatna+6 or +7 makes Four Kings easy if you have 20 estus flasks and plenty of vitality. Since this weapon doesn't scale with stats you barely have to alter your build to use it. I'm not saying it's the only viable build, nor the only fun one. I'm saying that the builds aren't exactly a work of genius, which is I suppose unavoidable when on your first run there are basically zero clues as to what's to come.…

Elemental Weapons are okay, but not really very viable. If you want a weapon without scaling, chaos is your best bet, if you're => 10 humanity. The way to play is break points though. Most stats fall off at 40, then 45, then 50 points. Meaning that You should at most invest 50 points into one stat. So pump up VIT/END to 40/45 and then your primary attributes. For a generic melee characters a mix of STR/DEX works really well, since a lot of weapons scale with both stats.

Just in case someone was wondering about builds...

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#34

Post by ilitirit »

Classic Reddit "review" of the game's predecessor:

Demon’s Souls is a game that will make you into a man. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, after two hours with this game, will be grooming his muttonchops and ready to ship off on the next boat to fight the Kaiser. If you are already a man, it will make you into some sort of bizarre double-man. What’s that you say? You’re a woman? You don’t want to be a man? Too bad. Too bad. That’s the Demon’s Souls way.

You’ve probably heard that Demon’s Souls is hard. Pshh. Lots of games are hard. Some are even harder than this one. The difficulty is not the point. What sets Demon's Souls apart is the way that it doesn't just kill you, but also stomps on your genitals when you’re down. And it will make you realize that that’s what you needed all along.

It’s a lot like life. Sometimes in life you win, and sometimes the giant armored skeleton stabs your face off because the flying mantis monster you didn’t even see shot you in the back with a spike at just the wrong time. And when that happens in life, do you respawn at the same spot and carry on like nothing happened? NO, asshole. You go back to the beginning of the level, leaving all your hard-earned souls out there on the pavement, and you fight your way back. And you learn a lesson from the whole thing, because you should have been wearing your Thief’s Ring, now shouldn’t you? That’s life.

The trend in hard games these days is to unlock “Easy” mode for you once you’ve died enough times. Do you think Demon’s Souls does that? Do you think Demon’s Souls is so much as aware of the concept of “Easy” mode? NO IT IS NOT. If Demon’s Souls even knew we were talking about “Easy” mode, it would come over here and kick the shit out of all of us. And we would deserve it.

I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.

Have I told you about the online elements? At any time when you’re in Body form, another player from anywhere else in the world can invade your game and murder you to regain his own body, or just to keep you on your toes. This happens when you’re in the middle of fighting armies of unthinkable monsters that are probably already three-quarters of the way towards killing you. And no, you cannot opt out of this feature! This is what you signed up for when you agreed to be a man.

When this happened to me -- when a guy strolled into my game like it was Taco Bell and exploded my torso, costing me my body and all my progress in the level -- was I mad? No, because I was too busy being in awe at how fucking hardcore the experience was.

Now, don’t let this dissuade you. Demon’s Souls is a pitiless master, but let it never be said that it is not fair. The game rewards handsomely those who stand up to it, and the greater the challenge, the greater the glory.

What the hell are you waiting for?

www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/acz2t/let_me_tell_you_about_demons_souls/

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#35

Post by jamesaguilar »

vacri wrote: post #24
zainny wrote: post #18

What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port. They're still selling tons of copies of the game for PC because of all the silly hype around it, and yet the game is virtually unplayable - even with all the mouse fixes, mods, etc. Why is it acceptable for game developers to completely abandon their customer base and continue to sell a broken product? I picked up the game during a Steam sale, spent a good…

I bought a controller especially for that game and never looked back. This being said, I completed the game right up to just before the final boss fight on kb + mouse... but with the controller, the game is really incredible. The port is shitty without the third-party fixes, but they also specifically said "we're not PC people, this will be a shitty port". They didn't launch the PC version with a lot of fanfare - and…

Which makes sense. They don't want you to be able to turn too fast.

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#36

Post by jamesaguilar »

simias wrote: post #21
zainny wrote: post #18

What really annoys me about Dark Souls is the shitty PC port. They're still selling tons of copies of the game for PC because of all the silly hype around it, and yet the game is virtually unplayable - even with all the mouse fixes, mods, etc. Why is it acceptable for game developers to completely abandon their customer base and continue to sell a broken product? I picked up the game during a Steam sale, spent a good…

The consensus seems to be that the game is hardly playable without a controller (by the way, steam has a big warning about that on the game's page in the store). Some people make do with the mousefix mod (the default mouse targeting behaviour is beyond silly). It's quite a bad port indeed, but it's a good game so I guess it's better than nothing... If you do a lot of gaming on PC buying a controller can be a pretty g…

I don't know why people expect to be able to play this with a keyboard. It's designed for a certain input paradigm. Play it with the same or face the impedance mismatch. Nobody complains that wii bowling is unplayable with a GameCube controller.

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#37

Post by guizzy »

simias wrote: post #23
roarroar wrote: post #3

Dark Souls is a bigger, less polished version of Demon's Souls. It has a problem with hidden information that can only be discovered through trial-and-error. Demon's Souls was like this too, but the scope was small enough that it didn't cause big problems. Not sure what there is to praise about the character builds. In both games there's an easy and obvious way to get a bulletproof character: plow everything you have…

I agree, I love both games but it's casual nethack as far as I'm concerned: it's very difficult to enjoy the games without a minimal amount of spoilers. I went blind for my first run in both games, and while I could finish demon's souls with a minimal amount of grinding I hit a wall in DaS because some upgrade paths are simply dead ends. Leveling up resistance, for instance. Certain weapon's upgrade paths. And you ha…

Indeed. The OP's link praises the way the game branches at the very beginning and teaches you to go up first, but the way up was not nearly as obvious to me as it seems to have been for him. I had to use a walkthrough. Most RPGs, when they take you out of a tutorial, have you facing the way you need to go. It's very unintuitive (and I'd say bad design) to force me to do a 180 right from the start and go the opposite way from where I'm facing. It might just be me being dense, but it took a while before I realized that the skeletons on the way down were not just the game being "difficult" but purposedly unfair at that point.

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#38

Post by guizzy »

octaveguin wrote: post #15
roarroar wrote: post #3

Dark Souls is a bigger, less polished version of Demon's Souls. It has a problem with hidden information that can only be discovered through trial-and-error. Demon's Souls was like this too, but the scope was small enough that it didn't cause big problems. Not sure what there is to praise about the character builds. In both games there's an easy and obvious way to get a bulletproof character: plow everything you have…

Diablo 2 was arguably terribly designed similarly - character builds required external information to progress to the harder difficulties. Not to mention what I'm sure the designers weren't intending at first - repeat farming over and over of the same content. In the end, this became what made it such a huge hit. The fact that you had to study character builds made a sort of meta game. Minecraft is another example wh…

Some learn to like bad design. One of my friend was arguing with me that it was bad design that you could change your skills easily in Diablo 3; that the permanence with which you could fuck up your character in Diablo 2 was better.

Now there are many ways in which Diablo 2 is better than Diablo 3, but that is not one of them, unless your believe that Diablo 2 was made to require walkthrough, wikis and external tutorials.

Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress aren't exactly the same thing as Diablo 2; the complexity and lack of meaningful tutorial is intended right from the start. As for the UI... At least in Dwarf Fortress, I don't think it's bad once you get the hang of it. It's not well designed for beginners and its lack of micromanagement tools is clumsy in early game, but it's very efficient for late game.

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#39

Post by JonSkeptic »

ilitirit wrote: post #34

Classic Reddit "review" of the game's predecessor: Demon’s Souls is a game that will make you into a man. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, after two hours with this game, will be grooming his muttonchops and ready to ship off on the next boat to fight the Kaiser. If you are already a man, it will make you into some sort of bizarre double-man. What’s that you say? You’re a woman? You don’t want to be a man? Too bad. Too b…

My mustache grew two sizes just from reading that!

Re: A Close Look at Dark Souls’ Ingenious Difficulty

#40

Post by zerohm »

roarroar wrote: post #3

Dark Souls is a bigger, less polished version of Demon's Souls. It has a problem with hidden information that can only be discovered through trial-and-error. Demon's Souls was like this too, but the scope was small enough that it didn't cause big problems. Not sure what there is to praise about the character builds. In both games there's an easy and obvious way to get a bulletproof character: plow everything you have…

there seems to be a lot of misplaced praise out there for the trial-and-error, but this part of the game really just sloppiness.

I have to disagree. I thought the "here is the whole map, figure it out" aspect was brutal but brilliant. Dark Souls is the modern equivalent of Zelda for NES. You immediately have access to paths you have no business entering at the start of the game. But that makes it all the more gratifying when you come back later and concquer that path.

With ever advancing quest logs, way points, and real time navigation arrows, it's nice to see game designers go with the opposite approach.

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