Difficulty of soulslike games.

[SailusGebel]

Before I start, I did not play newer soulslike games, Sekiro or ER. However, even if we look at DS trilogy I think my point still stands. I don't think this is simply a problem of getting more experienced with soulslike games either.

The thing I want to discuss is the difficulty of those games. To be more precise, how newer games achieve their "infamous" difficulty. Is it just me, or did people get it wrong? Older games, Demon and Dark souls, at the time when they came out challenged the player. Considering when they came out, and what games were the competition, the large audience wasn't ready. The thing is, there were, are, and will be games harder than Dark Souls. It's honestly not as hard. Even back then it was not as hard. It becomes hard if you compare DS 1 to, let's say Skyrim or Gears 3.

I believe the main reason those two games(Demons and Dark) were hard, was because they challenged skills of a player, and not just one type of skill. They didn't challenge only your reaction and timings with bosses and enemies. Your patience, attention, and so on were also challenged. Is it just me, or this was completely lost in future games? I won't mention soulslikes from other developers since they can misunderstand the point, they simply copy stuff. But what about From?

The later titles will occasionaly challenge other skills of a player, but I feel like they change more and more into a boss rush type of game. They challenge only a certain set of skills needed to defeat a boss. And bosses themselves changed from a puzzle into reaction and timing test. Even bonfires near bosses signify this change. Now it's not the game that is challenging, but bosses. There will be occasional minibosses or simply hard enemies, but usually, once you defeat them, there isn't really any need to defeat them again. And I'm not talking about running past them, the same way you could do it in DS1.

So is it just me and I got it wrong? Or soulslike's difficulty move in a wrong direction?

 

[Cynthell]

Fromsofts design philosophy shifted from "Fair but challenging, test of skill" to "Difficult for the sake of difficulty, test of endurance"

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

Before I start, I did not play newer soulslike games, Sekiro or ER. However, even if we look at DS trilogy I think my point still stands. I don't think this is simply a problem of getting more experienced with soulslike games either.

The thing I want to discuss is the difficulty of those games. To be more precise, how newer games achieve their "infamous" difficulty. Is it just me, or did people get it wrong? Older games, Demon and Dark souls, at the time when they came out challenged the player. Considering when they came out, and what games were the competition, the large audience wasn't ready. The thing is, there were, are, and will be games harder than Dark Souls. It's honestly not as hard. Even back then it was not as hard. It becomes hard if you compare DS 1 to, let's say Skyrim or Gears 3.

I believe the main reason those two games(Demons and Dark) were hard, was because they challenged skills of a player, and not just one type of skill. They didn't challenge only your reaction and timings with bosses and enemies. Your patience, attention, and so on were also challenged. Is it just me, or this was completely lost in future games? I won't mention soulslikes from other developers since they can misunderstand the point, they simply copy stuff. But what about From?

The later titles will occasionaly challenge other skills of a player, but I feel like they change more and more into a boss rush type of game. They challenge only a certain set of skills needed to defeat a boss. And bosses themselves changed from a puzzle into reaction and timing test. Even bonfires near bosses signify this change. Now it's not the game that is challenging, but bosses. There will be occasional minibosses or simply hard enemies, but usually, once you defeat them, there isn't really any need to defeat them again. And I'm not talking about running past them, the same way you could do it in DS1.

So is it just me and I got it wrong? Or soulslike's difficulty move in a wrong direction?

Guides. Today, most encounters are usually solved before you touch them. That is a huge part of the problem.

 

[SailusGebel]

Guides. Today, most encounters are usually solved before you touch them. That is a huge part of the problem.

I barely spoiled anything for Sekiro or ER, and I doubt this will affect bosses in those games. I bet a lot of them, if not everyone, would be the same as Gael in DS3, rather than Adjudicator in Demon Souls or Taurus Demon in DS1.

 

[Assurbanipal_II]

I barely spoiled anything for Sekiro or ER, and I doubt this will affect bosses in those games. I bet a lot of them, if not everyone, would be the same as Gael in DS3, rather than Adjudicator in Demon Souls or Taurus Demon in DS1.

Maybe you are just good then. Or experienced. Anyway, influence you probably more indirectly then, by cutting away on the puzzle part.

 

[So_Indecisive]

I never played any other from soft game except Sekiro so I don't feel I'm quite qualified to judge but yeah it was hard even with guides to help.
And I don't really think it's a game that tests your reaction speed it's more of a memory thing.

 

[Corty]

Regenerating health, auto-saves, checkpoints, map markers, guiding light within a game, glowing weak spots, etc.

I could go on. Everything became hand-holding. Old From games retained what it was to be thrown into an alien world and explore it. It didn't tell you jack shit, figure it out. It became easy as you discovered what works on what, why, how, etc.

People forgot how it was. Many times, you had one game, and that game lasted you a month. Or more. Meh. I'm old; I'm just salty; ignore me.

 

[DannyTheDaikon]

Agreed. And I agree with the "difficult for the sake of difficult statement". While I enjoyed Elden Ring a lot, it still felt much worse than DS1 or Demon Souls.

Bloating boss HP to some ridiculous level and making them input read while having infinite stamina and mana then no shit it's going to take a couple of tries. It also makes the experience hardly fun.

 

[SailusGebel]

Maybe you are just good then. Or experienced. Anyway, influence you probably more indirectly then, by cutting away on the puzzle part.

Err, no. I was talking about how they are designed. There isn't really any way to defeat Gael other than hitting him and evading. If we don't take cheating or glitches into consideration, it's a game of timing and reaction. You swing your weapon and evade his attacks. In case of Taurus demon from DS1, you can swing your weapon and evade his. Or you can cheese him into falling down. Or you can cheese him and perform continious plunging attacks. There are multiple ways to defeat them, and the way you defeat him depends on your attention and wit.

Adjudicator in Demon Souls is similar to Gael, but not really. You should evade his attacks, but you don't deal any damage if you simply hit his body. There is only one point you can hit, which is obviously telegraphed to you. You hit it, and only after hitting that place multiple times you can deal damage. Nowadays it is obvious. But before, considereing how there was a long way to the boss, how big the boss looked, and how cramped the boss arena was, you were nervous. And that nervousness was affecting you, and you could miss the point of how to defeat them on your first try.

Guides or getting more experienced can ruin the Adjudicator fight, sure. The thing is, they don't do anything new LIKE Adjudicator. Instead of doing trick bosses, they either do a lazy DPS rush like Wolnir, or straight up fights that rely on muscle memory. They don't make puzzles and let me figure out how to defeat a boss. Learning attack patterns and timings of Midir is not the same as figuring out how to kill Fool's idol.

 

[2wordsperminute]

Guides or getting more experienced can ruin the Adjudicator fight, sure. The thing is, they don't do anything new LIKE Adjudicator. Instead of doing trick bosses, they either do a lazy DPS rush like Wolnir, or straight up fights that rely on muscle memory. They don't make puzzles and let me figure out how to defeat a boss. Learning attack patterns and timings of Midir is not the same as figuring out how to kill Fool's idol.

In sekiro, there is one boss that is basically just a puzzle.

 

[Poleg]

Before I start, I did not play newer soulslike games, Sekiro or ER. However, even if we look at DS trilogy I think my point still stands. I don't think this is simply a problem of getting more experienced with soulslike games either.

The thing I want to discuss is the difficulty of those games. To be more precise, how newer games achieve their "infamous" difficulty. Is it just me, or did people get it wrong? Older games, Demon and Dark souls, at the time when they came out challenged the player. Considering when they came out, and what games were the competition, the large audience wasn't ready. The thing is, there were, are, and will be games harder than Dark Souls. It's honestly not as hard. Even back then it was not as hard. It becomes hard if you compare DS 1 to, let's say Skyrim or Gears 3.

I believe the main reason those two games(Demons and Dark) were hard, was because they challenged skills of a player, and not just one type of skill. They didn't challenge only your reaction and timings with bosses and enemies. Your patience, attention, and so on were also challenged. Is it just me, or this was completely lost in future games? I won't mention soulslikes from other developers since they can misunderstand the point, they simply copy stuff. But what about From?

The later titles will occasionaly challenge other skills of a player, but I feel like they change more and more into a boss rush type of game. They challenge only a certain set of skills needed to defeat a boss. And bosses themselves changed from a puzzle into reaction and timing test. Even bonfires near bosses signify this change. Now it's not the game that is challenging, but bosses. There will be occasional minibosses or simply hard enemies, but usually, once you defeat them, there isn't really any need to defeat them again. And I'm not talking about running past them, the same way you could do it in DS1.

So is it just me and I got it wrong? Or soulslike's difficulty move in a wrong direction?

I know what you mean, that's why elden ring feels a bit dissapointing. I wish it would be closer to dark/Demon's souls and that the Bosses wouldn't spin like Beyblades.

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

Fromsofts design philosophy shifted from "Fair but challenging, test of skill" to "Difficult for the sake of difficulty, test of endurance"

I don't agree. I never felt the newer games of theirs was difficult for difficult except for DS2

 

[Poleg]

In sekiro, there is one boss that is basically just a puzzle.

They should do more puzzle bosses, really not everyone needs to be Gale (altough I liked Gale). Even demons Souls had action bosses like the penetrator, but they were more "special" since they were more like a exception.

I don't agree. I never felt the newer games of theirs was difficult for difficult except for DS2

I feel like it was the opposite, dark souls 2 isn't really hard, it can be attrociously grindy though. The hardest part were dlc or buggy, sometimes both (smelter demon).

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

Before I start, I did not play newer soulslike games, Sekiro or ER. However, even if we look at DS trilogy I think my point still stands. I don't think this is simply a problem of getting more experienced with soulslike games either.

The thing I want to discuss is the difficulty of those games. To be more precise, how newer games achieve their "infamous" difficulty. Is it just me, or did people get it wrong? Older games, Demon and Dark souls, at the time when they came out challenged the player. Considering when they came out, and what games were the competition, the large audience wasn't ready. The thing is, there were, are, and will be games harder than Dark Souls. It's honestly not as hard. Even back then it was not as hard. It becomes hard if you compare DS 1 to, let's say Skyrim or Gears 3.

I believe the main reason those two games(Demons and Dark) were hard, was because they challenged skills of a player, and not just one type of skill. They didn't challenge only your reaction and timings with bosses and enemies. Your patience, attention, and so on were also challenged. Is it just me, or this was completely lost in future games? I won't mention soulslikes from other developers since they can misunderstand the point, they simply copy stuff. But what about From?

The later titles will occasionaly challenge other skills of a player, but I feel like they change more and more into a boss rush type of game. They challenge only a certain set of skills needed to defeat a boss. And bosses themselves changed from a puzzle into reaction and timing test. Even bonfires near bosses signify this change. Now it's not the game that is challenging, but bosses. There will be occasional minibosses or simply hard enemies, but usually, once you defeat them, there isn't really any need to defeat them again. And I'm not talking about running past them, the same way you could do it in DS1.

So is it just me and I got it wrong? Or soulslike's difficulty move in a wrong direction?

After rereading the OP, I don't think its lost. At least not when FromSoftware is concerned. I never felt like DS3 and ER were hard for being hard. There are other people who will think so, but this will lead me to why I like DS3 more than ER.

I feel like in DS3 you can get good and you won't have to rely as much on stamina. With a few exceptions like Midir, most bosses aren't that tanky.

Meanwhile, ER favors a farming experience. You could make the Tree Sentinel so easy by rushing past and farming enemies, and the list will go on, but things in ER are tankier to favor the open world.

 

[Keene]

Also as Fromsoft has progressed to becoming more mainstream, and their games becoming more popular, the skill level of players fighting "dark souls" type enemies and bosses has only increased and FS has needed to respond with more difficult boss fights to keep things feeling fresh.

Although as that difficulty has increased, as bosses become more and more complex with more detailed animations and combos, so has the options the player has to defeat those bosses. There are plenty of builds in Elden Ring that trivialize the game, and already in the DLC there are weapons that are so broken bosses just melt.

As a comparison, finish the DS3 DLC, or Elden Ring, and then go load up Dark Souls 1 and see how trivially easy the boss fights are to read and react to.

And, compare that to the ER DLC, which has reached probably the highest level of difficulty, beyond that of Malenia.

Of course, even Malenia, once considered to be their most difficult boss, is now considered "fair".

I think Sekiro was probably the only true game with an enforced difficulty curve because you kinda *have* to play the game the way its intended.

 

[SailusGebel]

I feel like it was the opposite, dark souls 2 isn't really hard, it can be attrociously grindy though. The hardest part were dlc or buggy, sometimes both (smelter demon).

DS 2 is hard in a sense that it is always swarms of regular enemies, even bosses are like that. Some "hard" bosses will be easy if you take away the regular enemies or simply don't make them a gank squad.

After rereading the OP, I don't think its lost. At least not when FromSoftware is concerned. I never felt like DS3 and ER were hard for being hard. There are other people who will think so, but this will lead me to why I like DS3 more than ER.

I feel like in DS3 you can get good and you won't have to rely as much on stamina. With a few exceptions like Midir, most bosses aren't that tanky.

Meanwhile, ER favors a farming experience. You could make the Tree Sentinel so easy by rushing past and farming enemies, and the list will go on, but things in ER are tankier to favor the open world.

Read my second long reply.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

Controllers suck.
PC master race.

 

[RepresentingEnvy]

Read my second long reply.

I think the reason for this is people don't like those kinds of bosses. There are still ways to make the bosses easier however. There is Yorm. In Abyss Watchers you could actually run away and win the first phase. There are more, and I think there are some in ER too

 

[Jerynboe]

I’m a deranged lunatic who liked DS2 best in the whole series, personally. I liked that it was comparatively nonlinear, with multiple viable directions you could go from the very start of the game.

I liked that persistence would unlock a soft easy mode by virtue of making the boss run easier due to finite respawns, which you could turn off to grind with a covenant that they added to compensate for that.

I liked that there was a multiplayer option for short jaunts into other peoples worlds without it being tied to boss fights.

I liked the DLCs, which is the least controversial take on this list

I liked that occasionally you’d run into a boss fight outside of its arena and wished they’d done a little more with that.

I liked that there were cheese strats and non-estus healing items I could use (mostly out of combat) *if I wanted to*.

I finished DS2 long before I finished DS1 because the last portion of DS1 just wasn’t fun for me while the last portion of DS2 still was. After DS2? Most of the things I liked about DS2 were either declared flaws or totally ignored by most. From went a different direction. The games are still good, but let’s just say I haven’t bought any of them unless they were on sale in a loooong time. I don’t know if iterating on and perfecting DS2 (which, to be clear, IS a flawed game) would have made for an objectively better series long term, but I suspect I would have liked it more personally and I doubt I’m alone.

 

[SailusGebel]

Also as Fromsoft has progressed to becoming more mainstream, and their games becoming more popular, the skill level of players fighting "dark souls" type enemies and bosses has only increased and FS has needed to respond with more difficult boss fights to keep things feeling fresh.

Although as that difficulty has increased, as bosses become more and more complex with more detailed animations and combos, so has the options the player has to defeat those bosses. There are plenty of builds in Elden Ring that trivialize the game, and already in the DLC there are weapons that are so broken bosses just melt.

As a comparison, finish the DS3 DLC, or Elden Ring, and then go load up Dark Souls 1 and see how trivially easy the boss fights are to read and react to.

And, compare that to the ER DLC, which has reached probably the highest level of difficulty, beyond that of Malenia.

Of course, even Malenia, once considered to be their most difficult boss, is now considered "fair".

I think Sekiro was probably the only true game with an enforced difficulty curve because you kinda *have* to play the game the way its intended.

My second long reply in a thread. Your mechanical skill definetely increase. The thing is, they don't raise the requirments to the wit skill. In fact they've complpetely abandoned this route. Now that I've mentioned Adjudicator, there is actually a similar boss in DS3, Greatwood. But here is my question. Why did bosses like Penetrator or Artorias have evolved into Gael or Pontific, but Adjudicator stayed as Adjudicator? Cause Greatwood is almost the same as Adjudicator, you deal damage only by hitting a certain part. It is a remaster of the same battle. Why is the difficulty that challenge your wit is not evolving? Don't ask me how to do it, I'm not a game designer.

I think the reason for this is people don't like those kinds of bosses. There are still ways to make the bosses easier however. There is Yorm. In Abyss Watchers you could actually run away and win the first phase. There are more, and I think there are some in ER too

Who said they don't like those kinds of bosses? And I am not talking about making bosses easier, quite the opposite. I'm asking to up the difficulty in my other gaming skills. My wit or attention. Remake a Fool's idol boss. Make a not so hard boss that you can't kill unless you've explored the world. Make the world matter, make it more than your levelling ground. Don't make one boss like that out of 20. Make 5 bosses like Nameless King, and the rest are not simply Wolnir or Ancient Wyvern, but all require a different strategy. Here you need to break special barrels to make the boss vulnerable, here you need to evade his attacks with the help of columns or something, here the boss is easy but your inputs got inverted. I don't know, I'm not a game designer.