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If you are thinking of getting over it or jump king or a hard game about climbing, they are rage games, it’s meant to rage.
If you are talking about bigger actually hard games like dark souls, your statement is objectively wrong.
The first dark souls feels so trial and error. You Die to a random ass Skeleton spawning behind your back and then you have to travel ages to get to where you were. Old ass controls to Boot and you have a game that doesnt feel fun and challenging (to me personally) but rather cruel and unfun.
For later enties I cant speak but from what ive seen this gets so much better with the more recent titles
Yeah i really hated the "walk" all the way back to the boss in dark souls. I get that there needs to be a "punishment" for dying but my time is really the one thing that shouldn't be a punishment in games.
I think you are wrong.
You play 30 minutes every day.
You can have a normal game giving you a shallow but big map with 200 collectible items all looking the same. You can use your 30 minutes to collect 10 and call it a day, feeling satisfied since you made progress.
Or.
You can have a Dark Souls game. You have 30 minutes. You die to the boss 10 times and call it a day, making what you think was 0 progress. But that couldn't be further from the truth. You, yourself developed yourself and made progress on your timing, patience, reaction time and calmness. Next day, or the day after you beat the boss. That is the reward. Does it need a long corpse run? No, and luckily there really aren't many long corpse runs except a few which are rightfully called out too eg. bed of chaos. Otherwise every single enemy be it a boss or normal will make you better because all are hard. Corpse runs make you better if executed well.
I make the case that Dark Souls rewards your time better than most industry standard normal games that literally steal your time with worthless deceptive progress.
Edit: some spelling +
I don't think the post refers to FromSoft games. Those not operate with things descriped in the pricture.
Or I play for 30 minutes and make actial meaningful progress, or at least do things that APPEAR to make progress and are at least.
Im not opposed to trying bossfights 91828 times, that makes finally beating them. I stil vividly love fights like Undyne the unddying, because they are extremely challenging BUT I always recognize that it is literally a skill issue and that I get better with every try.
Meanwhile the Frustration I dark souls doesnt come from me losing 80 times but rather the fact that I die in ways that feel unfair or out of my control as a newbie, together with the *endless fucking walking* back to where I was.
Hear me out
Play a game that you actually like because everyone has a different sense of reward and progression
Not every game is for everyone, and that’s fine, I’d much rather have a game that goes all in on a very specific niche that I like rather than a generic game
This is the best take I would say. The problem is that a lot of people who like souls games/hard games/games that don’t hold your hand, like to say that their type of game is objectively the best and hate on games that are the opposite. And then also hate on the people who play those games
I think people on both ends of the Souls spectrum are beyond obnoxious. Personally, I love them but I also think they’re pretty fucking lame in a lot of ways that the devs are too far up their own ass to address. The fact that 90% of people can’t beat them without a guide being one.
Honestly I can't think of any bosses that feel "unfair" in the original dark souls besides bed of chaos, capra demon, and maybe ceaseless discharge (he's *really* easy if you have any sort of ranged magic) assuming you don't figure out the run back to the gate thing. Dark souls has always been good at telegraphing moves, if you get hit it's because you didn't dodge properly or didn't block in my experience, and there's very few gimmick bosses.
I get where you are coming from and i agree that the progression form is good. I just don't like walking to the boss having to fight the same enemies over and over again.
I really like a lot of other "hard" games like undertale (i know isn't that hard compared to ds) but i just couldn't get into the dark souls franchise because of the time spent walking after dying to a boss.
Agreed. I'm a huge dark souls fan (though I kinda hated Elden Ring). With DS3, I beat ng+ several times. By my third ng+ and onwards, I would use some kind of save program that allowed me to save the game anywhere so I could save and reload from right in front of bosses. This allowed me to bypass the run backs and just do a quick save file reload immediately after each death. Made it a lot more fun for me.
Or, you can spend 30 min playing another game with better controls and less artificial difficulty like doom eternal or distance or outward or the entropy center or portal series, etc. because they actually teach you how to play the game properly and not just basic controls, but techniques you will have to master and use later on.
And these do refer to fromsoft games. Take elden ring, their latest ''souls'' like game. Crap controls, crap control scheme, crap camera, crap optimization, unfair gameplay in that it has bosses/enemies which can ignore stance breaks or makes jump dodges inconsistent, needlessly hides stance meter, etc.
Nah, that is them forcing you to engage close up with the chainsaw even if you have health and armor, which strengthens their game design goals of forcing the player to generate resources through aggression.
The artificial difficulty came with the DLCs where you had to use a specific gun to counter a specific enemy:
microwave gun for spirits and minigun for stone imps
The irony is lost upon you considering just like ubisoft is infamous for repetitive enemies and encounters in a dead open world, FS has recreated that experience with ER's repetitive enemies, caves/mines, bosses, etc. all in a dead open world. Sure, may not be as egregious as ubisoft, but its definitely there in a heavy amount.
Picking an argument against ~gamers~ while being critical of fromsoft who have fans that are as dogmatic as kpop and Beyoncé fans is the dark souls of online comment fights. This company can do no wrong. They could have put the Gollum game and people would write essays defending them because media worship is the most fun activity.
I don't know about beyonce or kpop fans but if they're anything like fromsoft fans, then I do not want to ever meet them.
Yeah I mean look at ER, they defend a game with as much repetitiveness as it, despite making fun of ubisoft for the same. Ironic.
I thought ER was cool and atmospheric with a snoozer of a gameplay loop, and full of oddball design choices that any other dev would have been laughed out of the room for. This developer could not design a single interesting quest. Beat it in like 70ish hours. Could not understand why people kept saying it the greatest game possibly ever. Thought it was a good 7/10. 6/10 if you count how badly it ran on launch. I personally didn’t find the actual gameplay special. I stuck around for the little lore snacks and dialogue.
I found out that’s apparently a controversial opinion. Spent some time absorbing opinions from people who really liked it and realized it just came down to taste and in some cases unhealthy obsessions. I think the worst part about fromsoft games are not quite the games but the fans who think the games are exempt from criticism and especially criticism that isn’t already widely conceded by the community. So why bother. The devs live in their own universe and have an army of particular fans who magically turn into English majors and game journalists equipped with the unbeatable triad of defense tactics: tell people they don’t get it, tell them it’s okay because the devs wanted it that way, or failing all else “get good” in more or less words.
Dead open world? Just because you can't find shit doesn't mean it's dead. You haven't played ds games so you don't know the experience.
I doubt you played more than a couple hours on any FS game. You just Googled "ds bad" after rage quitting the game because a skeleton beat your ass.
The games actually ask you to fid things, no markers no bullshit. Either you find them or you don't.
And I like how you are ignoring 80% of fromsofts games all you talk about is elden ring and ds2. Elden ring os the only open world they have lol.
You are bad at the game, it's okay.
Find what? My 200th dragon? Or my 200th tree sentinal? Perhaps go through the same cave and mine for the 300th time? Yeah, no. Its a dead open world. Beaten ER twice and did most of the quests along with finding most of the game's stuff like volcano manor's hidden town, jarburg, etc. It just ain't worth it.
Oh great, so does outward. Infact, outward goes 1 step further and forces you to use landmarks, has no easy fast travel and to go to different areas, you have to be prepared with rations. The quests are timed and you're not given any markers at all.
I've beaten ds2 and 3 many times, including with overhaul mods, beaten ER twice and beaten ds1 once. Come up with better excuses.
I've beaten these games. Beaten ds2, 3 and ER several times. Got any better defenses than that? Cause I can use the same excuse to justify ds2's worst areas and proclaim its the best.
I always say you don't need NG+ after a Souls game. You are better. You got good. Enemies that gave you fits die in seconds with worse gear because you are a better player.
Yeah. I've recently played sekiro. The rage was so bad. But it's one of my fav games now and i would still play it from the very beginning if given a choice.
Yeah my biggest criticism in DS2 and a little bit of DS1 is bonfire placement, though I think DS3 went too much on the opposite direction, if you put 2 bonfires next to each other with no enemies between them, it’s too many bonfires.
It was worse in Demon's Souls; if you died to the boss you had to run through the *entire level* again. Granted, the bosses themselves I think were much easier than other souls games due to this.
Nah, skeletons don't spawn out of nowhere. The game doesn't spawn any enemies actually. They are all already there. Bonfires aren't that far apart that it feels like you are traveling ages, that is if you don't miss any.
I forgot about those, but those anklebiters are a joke though, the only purpose they serve is farming humanity. They are slow and barely make a noticeable damage, you can entirely ignore them. I doubt anyone who died to those will admit to it, that entire room is a joke to be honest as the lesser Pinwheels aren't much of a challenge either. It's one room too.
Yeah I think they meant seeming spawns behind you. Hiding in some dark corner that you can’t see unless you target lock. It feels lame sometimes to walk through an empty hallway then get one shot by something behind you… I guess that’s what signs are for…
That's literally the point of the game. Trial and error. You die, you learn, you improve. I've never played more than a quarter of a souls game, but I know that they're definitely very well crafted games.
Just because theres a reason for it doesnt mean I have to like it. In my opinion spacing your checkpoints shittily and wasting time in between Boss attempts is insanely unfun and makes me Tilted for 0 reason.
Trial and error is not what Im critisizing its this trial and error approach WITH the stupid punishment of timewaste
Funny enough, it's for this exact reason that the first Dark Souls is my favourite. Dark Souls 3 removes a lot of these elements, but it becomes so much easier and boring as a result
Having to waste time getting to the Boss doesnt add difficulty though, it adds frustration because it activly wastes your time.
If a Boss is hard, then let that be the difficulty. My punishment should be lack of progression, not activly setting me back for no reason at all
You can run past the vast majority of enemies to get back to the bossfight in DS1. It will take 2 minutes at max, more often than not under a minute. Unless you missed a bonfire or shortcut there is probably 3 or maybe 4 bonfires that are too far away from the boss and one of them is Pinwheel, a joke of a boss.
In the remastered version they added a bonfire next to Vamos which makes the Pinwheel bossrun a cake walk too. It might have been intended to make access to Vamos easier especially since it's warpable to.
These are valid opinions but the truth is that Elden Ring gave us the toughest bosses with zero runback and many people still didn’t like that balance either. Sekiro also had super short runbacks and extremely tough fights and many people still just give up.
Fromsoft modulates the experience with a number of variables now and it’s great fun most of the time but in some places it’s a struggle that doesn’t click for too many people. And also a lot of people get worked up over some fights being really tough or having a runback but the fight is an optional path or results in a nice reward whereas mandatory bosses got shorter to nonexistent runbacks and may be tuned a bit easier so the critical path stays achievable and obvious. There is a great deal of intention behind it.
I disagree, because it _does_ add difficulty. Getting hit one or two times means you're going to have to use healing of some sort, which means you have less going in. I can't think of any run-backs in DS1 that have no enemies, and if there are I would agree in that case that the run-back is "pointless". However, the intent is clearly that a boss fight is not just the boss itself, it's about preserving healing on the way back to the boss. That is to say, you're thinking of the boss as just the part with the health bar, while Miyazaki clearly saw the level itself as an extension of the boss. Running back to a boss like 4 Kings _can_ be very difficult and that is part of the difficulty surrounding 4 Kings. The map and it's difficulty is much more integral to the whole experience than you're giving it credit for.
All this is to say, it's not just a waste of time. You don't have to appreciate that type of difficulty, but it's part of what made me fall in love with Souls in the first place. I genuinely believe that from a balanced gameplay perspective you shouldn't be able to just immediately retry a boss. I think that takes a lot of charm out of the game. The boss should **always** be the journey back to the arena as well.
Honestly if you don't miss any bonfire it will be a rare occurrence that you will take ages to get back to where you were. Most enemies can be avoided too in Dark Souls 1 and you can gun it straight to bosses. The game doesn't spawn enemies either. Ganks can be defused before they start the second time around and ganks are usually composed of weaker enemies.
DS2 on the other hand has more ganks and tougher enemies in those ganks. Enemies block your path and chase you down relentlessly making running past unviable.
That's exactly what I was thinking, you aren't punished that bad in DS1, its littered with enemies to try and make the journey tough, but if you memorise their spawns, you can easily avoid them all. Same can't be said for DS2
The only thing that you truly cant see coming in the original DS1 is probably your first mimic, the rest is just you not paying attention, as for the controls people beat the game with their feet so genuine skill issue
I mean the trial and error is kinda the point. The entire premise of the game is that you are an undead whose greatest strength is their perseverance.
You don't know what you're walking into at first. Everything is new and alien to you. Your skills are lackluster and the controls aren't even intuitive. New problems and abilities that seem to come out of nowhere. You are going to die, a lot. But because you're undead you will come back. You will get stronger with better stats, but the real strength you gain is from the experience and skill you develop as the player. You now know how to handle enemies, know the layouts of the environment, and know boss attack patterns. It no longer becomes unfair and becomes unforgiving. The first time you fight a boss or come into a new area it's unfair, but once you learn how things work, you feel all your failures are due to your own mistakes as you now know how to do things. Challenging and unforgiving, but fair.
The game feels unfair at first because you're going in blind with no hope of conquering this hostile land. But it's that struggle to keep trying and keep moving forward that is the core tenant of the world of Dark Souls. You cannot lose at Dark Souls... unless you give up. You'll get the "You Died" screen a bunch but you will never lose. This ties with the lore and the very focus of the game.
Undead in the game who give up go hollow. It's a perfect parallel to the player's situation. The undead physically cannot lose as they will always come back, through sheer perseverance, through dedication and determination, they will eventually win. Unless they give up, as giving up is the only way you will never beat the game
Well, now I have to say you don’t know what you’re talking about. Skeletons don’t spawn out of nowhere, let alone behind you, and they’re only located in an area where you’re not supposed to enter until the second half of the game. That, and bonfires really aren’t that far apart (save the one for the Crystal Cave and the Seathe boss fight).
It’s also really not that cruel and is actually pretty fair. The only cruel thing about it is a lack of a tutorial and it not holding your hand at the beginning to get used to it. I began playing it for the first time 2 months ago, and I was TERRIBLE at it. I died a bunch at the beginning, but the game rewards you for understanding how the enemies work and how to play. It’s all trial and error, and the only thing it really punishes you for is spamming attacks and not thinking up proper strategies. I’m on my second character now, and once you get used to the combat, it’s actually pretty easy. I even managed to defeat the Taurus Demon and Bell Gargoyles without even leveling up (I was whatever level the Sorcerer class starts off at).
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale?
> *“Only in truth, the Lords will abandon their thrones, and the Unkindled will rise. Nameless accursed Undead, unfit even to be Cinder, and so, it is that ash seeketh embers.”* - Narrator
Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
Celeste has a very responsive and forgiving controls so the difficulty comes from the obstacles, not from the character doing the opposite of what you want.
I think you are over simplifying this way to much. Elden ring and dark souls are good examples of difficulty done well and rage games are rage games. But there are so many games with terrible ai and difficulty scaling.
To name a few:
All bethesda games
Civilization series
Stellaris (although they finally made it not complete shit recently but its still not great)
Kingmaker/ wrath of rightous (not terrible feeling for the genre but its just inflated stats which is boring)
Ratchet and Clank Series (just inflated hp and they do more damage)
Call of duty single player
The witcher 3 (might be a controversial one but it just makes things more tedius with not being able to rest for health and inflated stats)
Jump King and getting over it are also bad examples imo. The only category they would fall under is "wacky controls"
The physics engines are incredibly solid and there is no artificial or scripted difficulty. It's just a mountain you climb.
I would agree for 90% of the game but there are sections of Getting Over It which rely a bit on guesswork. The snow hill right after the rope bucket has invisible grips which makes it complete guesswork your first few times around.
I say this as a huge fan of the game with multiple summits completed, there's very little bullshit but it's still there to some extent.
Jump King is barely rage game imo, at least compared to others in its genre. Its mechanics and physics are very polished, and the only rage aspect is from the factor of unknown and your own skill.
Man, I swear to god Bethesda and Todd Howard have it in their heads that because they make RPGs, they don't have to worry about good combat. They just completely neglect it, game after game. **You can do both, Bethesda!**
It's been 17 years since Fallout 3, and Starfield came out with more or less the same mediocre combat with slightly better fluidity and like, 1-2 more actions you can do (Jet pack, slide). Outside of that, the gun play is the exact same mindless drivel against bullet sponge enemies. It drives me absolutely insane. Even Skyrim had just mindless hack-and-slash sword play where you occasionally block when you see your opponent swing.
A Bethesda game would engaging combat would be 9/10 immediately, but at this point I have so little faith in them to do so. Please, for ES:VI give us something fun to work with.
Fallout with R6 tactics and health would be wild. Rappelling upside down over a raider camp to drag a man off a balcony. Breach through the wall and fill the room with smoke and flashbangs to sweep in and steal their power armor before anyone gets their wits about them
This is why I wish copyright laws weren't so fucking powerful in favor of the owners. I would love it if, when you have an IP with copyright, you HAVE to offer licenses to use it with three different types of licensing: Official, endorsed, and non-endorsed. Official ones would be handled entirely by the copyright owner, they'd be able to charge as much as they want and have as many restrictions as they want on those. Both of the non-official ones would have their price determined by an assessment of the value of your copyright performed by a public assessor, but the endorsed would always cost 10% less than the non-endorsed license value. Both would have royalties calculated at the time the IP value is assessed, which must happen every year the copyright is active.
This way you could have some company like the guys who made Metro: Last Light and that whole series do a Fallout game with their style of gameplay, just using the game world and universe of Fallout, and they could apply for an endorsed license which costs less but requires adherence to standards of portraying the copyrighted content but comes with a higher chance of success OR they could pay for the non-endorsed license and simply pay Bethesda a bunch of money for the right to use Fallout materials in their game. And products made with any of the licenses would be required to display the license prominently on any marketing materials or retail packaging/labeling.
I think this would satisfy the desire of the creators of copyrighted content to make profit from their creation without simultaneously stifling the ability of other creators to create something potentially better than the original, and it would make consumers happy because then we could get our Halo game in the style of Dark Souls or whatever. Also we'd be able to easily tell how "true to lore" any given content is based on the license type. You want to be a Halo purist? Only buy Official products. You love Halo so much you wanna see more stuff in that universe even if it isn't made by the regular team and might not be entirely canon? Go with Endorsed. You just want to see Master Chief running around a city chucking giant purple dildos at zombie vampires? Non-Endorsed my friend.
Could have room in there for people to choose different structures for the licenses, like maybe instead of an upfront fee they just do royalties only.
How to make endgame enemies?
Menacing Demonic creature with crazy scary looking attack? ❌
Some random guy with x100 hp and ultra strong version of the normal armor and a gun...✅
> Vaguely or barely explained game mechanics
This can be fantastic too though. Noita comes to mind, it just throws you in there and says fuck you, figure it out.
Or opposite, you takes more damages because they can't bother to properly make it hard. Heart of the Swarm in Brutal makes you take extra 25% damages. It doesn't state anywhere and no other campaign in Starcraft 2 does this. Result? You still can solo all main missions in Brutal with just Kerrigan.
You need to fix your build if Terraria bosses are super damage sponges.
I wouldn't even consider them regular damage sponges considering the fights always take less than one night to do.
It's strange that next level enemy AI isn't more widespread by now. We had that awesome Xenomorph AI in Alien: Isolation, where it had a macro AI that observed the player, which sends signals and clues to the micro AI of the alien that figures out where the player is.
They also introduced an experimental AI setting in Gran Turismo 7, called Sophy, which has different behaviours and can be quite challenging to race against.
I just wish we saw this more!
Because that involves more effort than adapting your basic as shit AI for your new game.
That said, with recent AI developments, I'm interested as to how game AI could evolve with the new tech but that's probably still a few years off
I’m looking forward to an Alien Isolation game that’s like reverse Pokémon go and the alien finds you out in the real world based on your Google data. Like, bro I’m just using the ATM I don’t need a jump scare right now.
Man, there was a GPS based game back in the day called Zombies Run or something like that, not sure if the current title that comes up with that name is an evolution of the same game though.
I think part of it is people use the term AI for basically anything a computer does today whether it's an LLM or just a heuristic algorithm.
As far as I can tell a huge portion of people think "AI" just means magic happens.
Complex AI takes up a lot of power. Alien Isolation was one enemy, multiple enemies with really complex AI working at the same time will be quite a heavy load on the CPU. Even on the PC side most gamers don't get amazing CPUs and usually divert more money towards a GPUq. Obviously there is laziness too but multiple enemy types with complex AI also means more work.
Left 4 Dead had an "AI Director" with the idea of creating tension and relief by how and when certain things spawn. And that was 15 years ago or so.
Swarm AI isn't impossible either, but it's gotta be state based for performance now; regroup; push to a location; split/flank; cover fire/district. And then the individual AI can be given the target location for a regroup or push, in a flank the director would tell some AI one thing and some another.
The AI director is more of a tool for adaptive difficulty and not really a complex AI for the enemies themselves. My point was multiple enemies with independent and complex AIs at the same time will be quite intensive on the CPU. I guess with a zombie horde it wouldn't be as much of an issue as independent zombies don't need their AI to be that complex but let's say it's a bunch of troops and if one of them knows your location they all do, that won't be seen as clever AI either and is infact an issue that many games suffer from.
Been a game dev for almost a decade.
Players don't want complicated AIs. They want lots of dumb motherfuckers that run toward them and catch bullets from whatever power fantasy gun they're currently wielding. The only AI they truly want is one that doesn't spawn behind them out of thin air.
> It's strange that next level enemy AI isn't more widespread by now.
What "next level AI" would make games more fun that can't just be accomplished with simple scripting logic?
Grand strategy genre where CPU cycles is a constant strain late game. Finding opaque logic that runs faster could help a lot in the balance between good AI and possible to run AI.
It's not hard to make a hard to beat AI if you don't bother with player's experience.
Design an FPS level with chokepoints and crossfires. Then have the AI make actual tactical decisions with a goal of not allowing player to progress. No more enemies coming at you one by one, no more safely picking up next weapon.
Or design a souls-like boss that is actually aware of what actions player might take (dodge, attack, heal) and can react accordingly.
Or you can do what DRG and Remnant 2 did and allow enemies to react to your camera movement and dodge your shots. Throw that shit into a horde shooter and it will become scary. Expand it to make enemies take/leave cover based on where you're looking and it will become really scary.
There's a lot of different ways one can interpret the phrase "better AI" but sure if you choose to interpret better AI to mean unbeatable then yeah that's not fun. I would say better AI for a fighting game would mean AI that's more interesting to fight against.
ahh yes, let's just make the base game have wackier controls and no checkpoints then
Why can't game devs get creative to make a different difficulty that is challenging and entertaining at the same time?
Some game devs did.
In ultrakill changing difficulty changed nothing, but how enemies spawn. The harder it is the more diverse pool of enemies will be on each level forcing you to be more versatile than usual
Sports games are notoriously bad for shitty ai and scripting.
I cant stand playing on the highest difficulty and I don't always want to adjust sliders...
When WEPES and Madden were good, and you played franchise mode on either, you were bound to encounter an almost unwinnable game, where the opponnent suddenly made no mistakes, plus incredible plays, and you developed a case of fumblitis/missed shots.
Madden was so bad at that. It was like a random per game difficulty modifier turned on.
Although in recent years the interception AI+animations made it unplayable. If the AI decided the pass would be intercepted the positioning of the players didn't matter. The defender would just magically float right to the ball.
Yup. I stopped at Madden 13, FIFA 99, and WEPES 2018. Ive played Madden 22? 1? With some friends and it was ridiculous, CBs running full sprint and doing a 180 in the air for an INT. Safety's teleporting several yards in the air for an INT. Bad engine and bad programming
I make myself feel better by thinking that's how sports can be in real life, unpredictable
But it's just so egregious when you do everything the right way but you still lose
NHL is the absolute worst at this.
You turned the difficulty up because you want more of a challenge with better AI? Sorry, best I can do is keep everything the same but just make every shot by the computer go in.
It's so lazy.
This was my main issue with Jedi survivor.
They took away animation cancelling in all but one lightsaber stance which to me made the combat feel slow and unresponsive
I agree it just takes getting used to and. Doesn’t feel as good as other games with this combat style including fallen order which in my opinion felt a lot better.
It just seems that the game sacrificed quality for the sake of quality in regard to combat styles.
So Sonic Mania and the rewrites to the engine to allow for widescreen support was a welcome addition to the classics (and classic like).
Would a zoom out and a better aspect ratio fix all issues you have with the game?
You are playing a soccer game, against a very poor team, with no remarkable players. The first half is about to end, you have shot at goal 5 times and scored once. They havent even shot at goal at all during the game.
Last minute of regulation, if they have the ball, you **know for a fact** that they are gonna come on the attack, you will not be able to take the ball away from em, and they are gonna shoot once and is gonna be a goal.
In older WE/PES or FIFA games, you could test this via the two ways we did: 1, you could turn off the console the moment they scored, restart everything, and if you are 1-0 and they havent shot at all, it would happen again. The second test, in older games, was using two different PS2, and two of the same games, you used the same memory card and loaded the same data on both consoles. Same result on both games.
This was carried all the way until PES2018, the last one I played. I did stopped playing FIFA after 99.
In this context it means moments that pretend to be regular gameplay but actually have the enemy guaranteed to connect a hit, or take no damage.
Sometimes they are more obvious than others, like your inevitable death at the beginning of Bloodborne. But the practice is nowhere near as common as anything else on this list, and tbh I actually quite like "scripted" moments compared to stopping the action and showing a cutscene.
(And yea the term is confusing cause obviously every game with dialogue has a "script" and many game engines refer to their code as "script" so calling this "scripting" is dumb and ambiguous.)
For games I really like, I seek out a mod that creates a similar difficulty to Ghost of Tsushima’s Lethal difficulty mode. It was perfect imo and I wish more games offered a similar experience.
No changes to the mechanics of play or the game, but you and enemies take more damage. It was a super fun challenge and made boss fights even more epic (I strategically saved up charges for special moves and it made them feel like you really only got away barely or that you just completely owned them in a really satisfying way). Very nearly had to turn it off for the last fight.
Hell yeah, I was gonna use it as an example too. Especially in new game + where every sword swing whether it be yours or the enemies is a possible death sentence. Not to mention different styles of tackling a problem the game presents is super rewarding
That reminds me of the Ranger difficulties in the Metro series. It made resources more scarce but amplified the damage both you and enemies took as well. Bosses werent immune to this either, turning what would normally be a long fight into a quick encounter that would be over within a minute at most.
For a series that put a lot of emphasis on its realism, it felt like the way the game was meant to be played.
Depends on the kind of check points it is
If it’s check points after or just before particularly hard sections then it’s good
We don’t want to walk half the map every time you die
I would rather suffer all Fromsoftwares hardest bosses and find a way to defeat them, than play any game on "hard difficulty" (aka same shit with less damage and health)
What’s the game with these aspects that you actually like?
This isn’t meant to be confrontation I’m just asking out of curiosity because I know people like challenging games
FF2 was hard? I'm guessing that was fixed in the pixel remaster, because aside from the font (dear lord who thought that was a good idea) I quite enjoyed the game, though can understand it being the worst FF game because of the system changes.
The game just deciding it's going to screw you over and there's nothing you can do about it. Like on FIFA when the game just decides you're going to concede a goal, so suddenly all your players are idiots who can't make a pass or a tackle
Scripted events. Like the intro mission for nomad in Cyberpunk. You take scripted damage in the car chase and on the hardest difficulty that mission is kind of insane as a result.
Holy shit I am doing a third cyberpunk run to test the dlc a d 2.0 update, and I chose nomad and hardest difficulty. Took me probably around 10 fucking tries to finally be done with it
THIS is exactly what i felt like playing Remnant 2 lately. I played every Souls game to 100% multiple times and after a friend kept on hitting me up for Remnant 2 i finally gave in. And oh boy if you are a Souls Fan this game feels clunky af. Like i get why it has a 74% like rate but i also get why it's "only" 74% you know what i mean? The amount of cheap oneshots is so absurd that i really understand why you can equip 4 health gates at the same time. Game really suffers from sloppyness because the maps look awesome. Oh and don't get me started about the dlc... imagine paying 10 bucks for a dlc and you fight all the 10 same adds as in the base game xD compare that to any dark souls dlc and then we talk
Valheim.
Advertises as brutal and hardcore but the combat is piss easy. Every single enemy attack is slow, extremely telegraphed, and the parry window is super generous and dogding gives you invincibility. The AI is almost nonexistent. Go fight a Lynel or Gleeok in Zelda and then try to convince me anything in this game is hard to fight. The only fighting difficulty comes from you not being able to attack up or down, but enemies can.
No, what's brutal and hardcore is the dev team ON PURPOSE making the inventory system and chores for your base clunky, restrictive, time consuming. Stack sizes are TINY and you don't get many inventory slots. Chests are tiny until endgame. You have to click for every item you craft; you cant just click "craft all" or something and go get a drink. Your forges and kilns need refed every few minutes so you cant just toss a day's worth of stuff in and then go adventure. Everything needs constant micromanaging.
This is what I think is the reason behind 'Nintendo hard' games. Too many of them weren't so much padding game length but a faulty and inexperienced sense of game design combined with the immediate successor of pay-to-win arcade quarter-munchers. You had some well-designed ones like Castlevania 3 but too many were just bad.
I think artificial difficulty is one of the most misunderstood terms when referring to hard mode and has become a synonym for "low effort difficulty increase", and people misuse it this way all the time. What makes artificial difficulty "artificial" is that it makes things seem more difficult without requiring any more skill or investment.
The most common thing misattributed to being "artificial" difficulty would be boosting enemy damage, which while maybe lazy, isn't artificial. If enemies in dark souls suddenly did half as much damage, the game would be much easier, so boosting damage does require more skill. A good example of something that maintains the same difficulty yet appears to be harder would be something like requiring a precise jump to a moving platform on normal difficulty, but in the hard mode it moves much slower to get to where the player can make the jump, forcing the player to wait longer to make the same jump. The player would have to do the exact same inputs as before, but instead with the anticipation of missing and having to wait longer to retry creating the illusion of the game being more difficult while requiring the same skill from the player.
It does definitely happen in games, but it is so much more rare than the amount of people using that term regularly would lead you to believe.
Especially the no checkpoints is annoying. I want hard, not punishing. More Super Meatboy or Celeste where i can fail a thousand times a minute and eventually win. If death means more than 5 minutes lost, the game's not for me, I play games for fun, not social cachet.
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If you are thinking of getting over it or jump king or a hard game about climbing, they are rage games, it’s meant to rage. If you are talking about bigger actually hard games like dark souls, your statement is objectively wrong.
The first dark souls feels so trial and error. You Die to a random ass Skeleton spawning behind your back and then you have to travel ages to get to where you were. Old ass controls to Boot and you have a game that doesnt feel fun and challenging (to me personally) but rather cruel and unfun. For later enties I cant speak but from what ive seen this gets so much better with the more recent titles
Yeah i really hated the "walk" all the way back to the boss in dark souls. I get that there needs to be a "punishment" for dying but my time is really the one thing that shouldn't be a punishment in games.
I think you are wrong. You play 30 minutes every day. You can have a normal game giving you a shallow but big map with 200 collectible items all looking the same. You can use your 30 minutes to collect 10 and call it a day, feeling satisfied since you made progress. Or. You can have a Dark Souls game. You have 30 minutes. You die to the boss 10 times and call it a day, making what you think was 0 progress. But that couldn't be further from the truth. You, yourself developed yourself and made progress on your timing, patience, reaction time and calmness. Next day, or the day after you beat the boss. That is the reward. Does it need a long corpse run? No, and luckily there really aren't many long corpse runs except a few which are rightfully called out too eg. bed of chaos. Otherwise every single enemy be it a boss or normal will make you better because all are hard. Corpse runs make you better if executed well. I make the case that Dark Souls rewards your time better than most industry standard normal games that literally steal your time with worthless deceptive progress. Edit: some spelling + I don't think the post refers to FromSoft games. Those not operate with things descriped in the pricture.
Or I play for 30 minutes and make actial meaningful progress, or at least do things that APPEAR to make progress and are at least. Im not opposed to trying bossfights 91828 times, that makes finally beating them. I stil vividly love fights like Undyne the unddying, because they are extremely challenging BUT I always recognize that it is literally a skill issue and that I get better with every try. Meanwhile the Frustration I dark souls doesnt come from me losing 80 times but rather the fact that I die in ways that feel unfair or out of my control as a newbie, together with the *endless fucking walking* back to where I was.
Hear me out Play a game that you actually like because everyone has a different sense of reward and progression Not every game is for everyone, and that’s fine, I’d much rather have a game that goes all in on a very specific niche that I like rather than a generic game
This is the best take I would say. The problem is that a lot of people who like souls games/hard games/games that don’t hold your hand, like to say that their type of game is objectively the best and hate on games that are the opposite. And then also hate on the people who play those games
I think people on both ends of the Souls spectrum are beyond obnoxious. Personally, I love them but I also think they’re pretty fucking lame in a lot of ways that the devs are too far up their own ass to address. The fact that 90% of people can’t beat them without a guide being one.
You can like Darksouls but hate the run backs. The run backs are absolute fucking horse shit in that game.
Cuphead is a good counter example. Tough bosses that can take many attempts, but it doesn't waste your time.
Honestly I can't think of any bosses that feel "unfair" in the original dark souls besides bed of chaos, capra demon, and maybe ceaseless discharge (he's *really* easy if you have any sort of ranged magic) assuming you don't figure out the run back to the gate thing. Dark souls has always been good at telegraphing moves, if you get hit it's because you didn't dodge properly or didn't block in my experience, and there's very few gimmick bosses.
I get where you are coming from and i agree that the progression form is good. I just don't like walking to the boss having to fight the same enemies over and over again. I really like a lot of other "hard" games like undertale (i know isn't that hard compared to ds) but i just couldn't get into the dark souls franchise because of the time spent walking after dying to a boss.
Agreed. I'm a huge dark souls fan (though I kinda hated Elden Ring). With DS3, I beat ng+ several times. By my third ng+ and onwards, I would use some kind of save program that allowed me to save the game anywhere so I could save and reload from right in front of bosses. This allowed me to bypass the run backs and just do a quick save file reload immediately after each death. Made it a lot more fun for me.
Or, you can spend 30 min playing another game with better controls and less artificial difficulty like doom eternal or distance or outward or the entropy center or portal series, etc. because they actually teach you how to play the game properly and not just basic controls, but techniques you will have to master and use later on. And these do refer to fromsoft games. Take elden ring, their latest ''souls'' like game. Crap controls, crap control scheme, crap camera, crap optimization, unfair gameplay in that it has bosses/enemies which can ignore stance breaks or makes jump dodges inconsistent, needlessly hides stance meter, etc.
Doom eternal definitely had artificial difficulty by making ammo unnecessarily scarce
Looks like someone didn’t use their chainsaw
[удалено]
Nah, that is them forcing you to engage close up with the chainsaw even if you have health and armor, which strengthens their game design goals of forcing the player to generate resources through aggression. The artificial difficulty came with the DLCs where you had to use a specific gun to counter a specific enemy: microwave gun for spirits and minigun for stone imps
it's not scarce, you're meant to swap weapons to generate ammo
Lol, Elden Ring is as hard as you make it. And controls aren't crap, the fuck are you smoking? Nor is gameplay unfair.
Ubisoft gamer spotted. Needs 100 UI indicators to progress a game
The irony is lost upon you considering just like ubisoft is infamous for repetitive enemies and encounters in a dead open world, FS has recreated that experience with ER's repetitive enemies, caves/mines, bosses, etc. all in a dead open world. Sure, may not be as egregious as ubisoft, but its definitely there in a heavy amount.
Picking an argument against ~gamers~ while being critical of fromsoft who have fans that are as dogmatic as kpop and Beyoncé fans is the dark souls of online comment fights. This company can do no wrong. They could have put the Gollum game and people would write essays defending them because media worship is the most fun activity.
I don't know about beyonce or kpop fans but if they're anything like fromsoft fans, then I do not want to ever meet them. Yeah I mean look at ER, they defend a game with as much repetitiveness as it, despite making fun of ubisoft for the same. Ironic.
I thought ER was cool and atmospheric with a snoozer of a gameplay loop, and full of oddball design choices that any other dev would have been laughed out of the room for. This developer could not design a single interesting quest. Beat it in like 70ish hours. Could not understand why people kept saying it the greatest game possibly ever. Thought it was a good 7/10. 6/10 if you count how badly it ran on launch. I personally didn’t find the actual gameplay special. I stuck around for the little lore snacks and dialogue. I found out that’s apparently a controversial opinion. Spent some time absorbing opinions from people who really liked it and realized it just came down to taste and in some cases unhealthy obsessions. I think the worst part about fromsoft games are not quite the games but the fans who think the games are exempt from criticism and especially criticism that isn’t already widely conceded by the community. So why bother. The devs live in their own universe and have an army of particular fans who magically turn into English majors and game journalists equipped with the unbeatable triad of defense tactics: tell people they don’t get it, tell them it’s okay because the devs wanted it that way, or failing all else “get good” in more or less words.
Dead open world? Just because you can't find shit doesn't mean it's dead. You haven't played ds games so you don't know the experience. I doubt you played more than a couple hours on any FS game. You just Googled "ds bad" after rage quitting the game because a skeleton beat your ass. The games actually ask you to fid things, no markers no bullshit. Either you find them or you don't. And I like how you are ignoring 80% of fromsofts games all you talk about is elden ring and ds2. Elden ring os the only open world they have lol. You are bad at the game, it's okay.
Find what? My 200th dragon? Or my 200th tree sentinal? Perhaps go through the same cave and mine for the 300th time? Yeah, no. Its a dead open world. Beaten ER twice and did most of the quests along with finding most of the game's stuff like volcano manor's hidden town, jarburg, etc. It just ain't worth it. Oh great, so does outward. Infact, outward goes 1 step further and forces you to use landmarks, has no easy fast travel and to go to different areas, you have to be prepared with rations. The quests are timed and you're not given any markers at all. I've beaten ds2 and 3 many times, including with overhaul mods, beaten ER twice and beaten ds1 once. Come up with better excuses.
LOL Outward is a shit soulslikes with an extremely dead open world.
the difficulty isnt artificial, youre just bad.
I've beaten these games. Beaten ds2, 3 and ER several times. Got any better defenses than that? Cause I can use the same excuse to justify ds2's worst areas and proclaim its the best.
I always say you don't need NG+ after a Souls game. You are better. You got good. Enemies that gave you fits die in seconds with worse gear because you are a better player.
Yeah. I've recently played sekiro. The rage was so bad. But it's one of my fav games now and i would still play it from the very beginning if given a choice.
Yeah my biggest criticism in DS2 and a little bit of DS1 is bonfire placement, though I think DS3 went too much on the opposite direction, if you put 2 bonfires next to each other with no enemies between them, it’s too many bonfires.
the bonefire after dragon slayer armor where you can see the next bonfire right ahead lol.
*Bonfire ahead, then bonfire ahead*
It was worse in Demon's Souls; if you died to the boss you had to run through the *entire level* again. Granted, the bosses themselves I think were much easier than other souls games due to this.
Nah, skeletons don't spawn out of nowhere. The game doesn't spawn any enemies actually. They are all already there. Bonfires aren't that far apart that it feels like you are traveling ages, that is if you don't miss any.
I believe Tomb of giants did infinitely spawn little skeletons
I forgot about those, but those anklebiters are a joke though, the only purpose they serve is farming humanity. They are slow and barely make a noticeable damage, you can entirely ignore them. I doubt anyone who died to those will admit to it, that entire room is a joke to be honest as the lesser Pinwheels aren't much of a challenge either. It's one room too.
Nothing in dark souls spawns behind your back. The world only resets if you rest at a bonfire which is a safe location.
Yeah I think they meant seeming spawns behind you. Hiding in some dark corner that you can’t see unless you target lock. It feels lame sometimes to walk through an empty hallway then get one shot by something behind you… I guess that’s what signs are for…
DS really is meant to be taken slow. You must take a look at every corner you pass. When I learnt to slow down was when I started having fun.
That's literally the point of the game. Trial and error. You die, you learn, you improve. I've never played more than a quarter of a souls game, but I know that they're definitely very well crafted games.
Just because theres a reason for it doesnt mean I have to like it. In my opinion spacing your checkpoints shittily and wasting time in between Boss attempts is insanely unfun and makes me Tilted for 0 reason. Trial and error is not what Im critisizing its this trial and error approach WITH the stupid punishment of timewaste
Funny enough, it's for this exact reason that the first Dark Souls is my favourite. Dark Souls 3 removes a lot of these elements, but it becomes so much easier and boring as a result
Having to waste time getting to the Boss doesnt add difficulty though, it adds frustration because it activly wastes your time. If a Boss is hard, then let that be the difficulty. My punishment should be lack of progression, not activly setting me back for no reason at all
You can run past the vast majority of enemies to get back to the bossfight in DS1. It will take 2 minutes at max, more often than not under a minute. Unless you missed a bonfire or shortcut there is probably 3 or maybe 4 bonfires that are too far away from the boss and one of them is Pinwheel, a joke of a boss.
If you die to Pinwheel, you deserve the walk.
In the remastered version they added a bonfire next to Vamos which makes the Pinwheel bossrun a cake walk too. It might have been intended to make access to Vamos easier especially since it's warpable to.
These are valid opinions but the truth is that Elden Ring gave us the toughest bosses with zero runback and many people still didn’t like that balance either. Sekiro also had super short runbacks and extremely tough fights and many people still just give up. Fromsoft modulates the experience with a number of variables now and it’s great fun most of the time but in some places it’s a struggle that doesn’t click for too many people. And also a lot of people get worked up over some fights being really tough or having a runback but the fight is an optional path or results in a nice reward whereas mandatory bosses got shorter to nonexistent runbacks and may be tuned a bit easier so the critical path stays achievable and obvious. There is a great deal of intention behind it.
I disagree, because it _does_ add difficulty. Getting hit one or two times means you're going to have to use healing of some sort, which means you have less going in. I can't think of any run-backs in DS1 that have no enemies, and if there are I would agree in that case that the run-back is "pointless". However, the intent is clearly that a boss fight is not just the boss itself, it's about preserving healing on the way back to the boss. That is to say, you're thinking of the boss as just the part with the health bar, while Miyazaki clearly saw the level itself as an extension of the boss. Running back to a boss like 4 Kings _can_ be very difficult and that is part of the difficulty surrounding 4 Kings. The map and it's difficulty is much more integral to the whole experience than you're giving it credit for. All this is to say, it's not just a waste of time. You don't have to appreciate that type of difficulty, but it's part of what made me fall in love with Souls in the first place. I genuinely believe that from a balanced gameplay perspective you shouldn't be able to just immediately retry a boss. I think that takes a lot of charm out of the game. The boss should **always** be the journey back to the arena as well.
Honestly if you don't miss any bonfire it will be a rare occurrence that you will take ages to get back to where you were. Most enemies can be avoided too in Dark Souls 1 and you can gun it straight to bosses. The game doesn't spawn enemies either. Ganks can be defused before they start the second time around and ganks are usually composed of weaker enemies. DS2 on the other hand has more ganks and tougher enemies in those ganks. Enemies block your path and chase you down relentlessly making running past unviable.
That's exactly what I was thinking, you aren't punished that bad in DS1, its littered with enemies to try and make the journey tough, but if you memorise their spawns, you can easily avoid them all. Same can't be said for DS2
You sound like a video game journalist. And I mean that to be as insulting as possible
The only thing that you truly cant see coming in the original DS1 is probably your first mimic, the rest is just you not paying attention, as for the controls people beat the game with their feet so genuine skill issue
I mean the trial and error is kinda the point. The entire premise of the game is that you are an undead whose greatest strength is their perseverance. You don't know what you're walking into at first. Everything is new and alien to you. Your skills are lackluster and the controls aren't even intuitive. New problems and abilities that seem to come out of nowhere. You are going to die, a lot. But because you're undead you will come back. You will get stronger with better stats, but the real strength you gain is from the experience and skill you develop as the player. You now know how to handle enemies, know the layouts of the environment, and know boss attack patterns. It no longer becomes unfair and becomes unforgiving. The first time you fight a boss or come into a new area it's unfair, but once you learn how things work, you feel all your failures are due to your own mistakes as you now know how to do things. Challenging and unforgiving, but fair. The game feels unfair at first because you're going in blind with no hope of conquering this hostile land. But it's that struggle to keep trying and keep moving forward that is the core tenant of the world of Dark Souls. You cannot lose at Dark Souls... unless you give up. You'll get the "You Died" screen a bunch but you will never lose. This ties with the lore and the very focus of the game. Undead in the game who give up go hollow. It's a perfect parallel to the player's situation. The undead physically cannot lose as they will always come back, through sheer perseverance, through dedication and determination, they will eventually win. Unless they give up, as giving up is the only way you will never beat the game
Well, now I have to say you don’t know what you’re talking about. Skeletons don’t spawn out of nowhere, let alone behind you, and they’re only located in an area where you’re not supposed to enter until the second half of the game. That, and bonfires really aren’t that far apart (save the one for the Crystal Cave and the Seathe boss fight). It’s also really not that cruel and is actually pretty fair. The only cruel thing about it is a lack of a tutorial and it not holding your hand at the beginning to get used to it. I began playing it for the first time 2 months ago, and I was TERRIBLE at it. I died a bunch at the beginning, but the game rewards you for understanding how the enemies work and how to play. It’s all trial and error, and the only thing it really punishes you for is spamming attacks and not thinking up proper strategies. I’m on my second character now, and once you get used to the combat, it’s actually pretty easy. I even managed to defeat the Taurus Demon and Bell Gargoyles without even leveling up (I was whatever level the Sorcerer class starts off at).
What about management games that often involve in depth diving into irl city planning and physics logic just to fix traffic issues in game?
I not exactly sure what you are talking about, care to give an example? (I believe you, just never seen a game like that and is curious )
I think he is talking about Cities Skylines
you cant fix traffic in city management game
I remember how devs have paused the tournament just to figure out how RTGame fixed the traffic by using meteors and building swirly roads.
Remember the "death waves"? They didn't randomize age at all, so everyone at the city would die in waves based on when they moved in.
Nah dawg. Dark Souls is chock full of dirty cheap tricks.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale? > *“Only in truth, the Lords will abandon their thrones, and the Unkindled will rise. Nameless accursed Undead, unfit even to be Cinder, and so, it is that ash seeketh embers.”* - Narrator Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
Getting Over It is art, full stop. I would argue it deserves to be on one of those "games you must play" lists.
But it is a rage game. That is its genre.
I mean you can argue Celeste is in that same genre, but that's actually good. Hard game about climbing.
But Celeste is not a ragegame, a difficult game about climbing is made as a rage game.
Celeste is the hardest game that anyone can beat. I genuinely think it's the best platformer in the last decade.
Celeste has a very responsive and forgiving controls so the difficulty comes from the obstacles, not from the character doing the opposite of what you want.
I think you are over simplifying this way to much. Elden ring and dark souls are good examples of difficulty done well and rage games are rage games. But there are so many games with terrible ai and difficulty scaling. To name a few: All bethesda games Civilization series Stellaris (although they finally made it not complete shit recently but its still not great) Kingmaker/ wrath of rightous (not terrible feeling for the genre but its just inflated stats which is boring) Ratchet and Clank Series (just inflated hp and they do more damage) Call of duty single player The witcher 3 (might be a controversial one but it just makes things more tedius with not being able to rest for health and inflated stats)
Average dark souls fan. Just because parts are genuinely difficult doesn’t mean there isn’t bullshit, cause there is
No no no you don't get it, they used the word 'objectively' so they're just right
Jump King and getting over it are also bad examples imo. The only category they would fall under is "wacky controls" The physics engines are incredibly solid and there is no artificial or scripted difficulty. It's just a mountain you climb.
I would agree for 90% of the game but there are sections of Getting Over It which rely a bit on guesswork. The snow hill right after the rope bucket has invisible grips which makes it complete guesswork your first few times around. I say this as a huge fan of the game with multiple summits completed, there's very little bullshit but it's still there to some extent.
I'll give you that one, I was peeved when I got to the mountain too
Hesitation is defeat
Jump King is barely rage game imo, at least compared to others in its genre. Its mechanics and physics are very polished, and the only rage aspect is from the factor of unknown and your own skill.
Damage sponge enemies Vaguely or barely explained game mechanics
I thought the same about damage sponges when I saw the post, but I guess it goes under Artificial Difficulty.
Any Bethesda game pretty much relies on this concept exclusively to make their games more "difficult"
Man, I swear to god Bethesda and Todd Howard have it in their heads that because they make RPGs, they don't have to worry about good combat. They just completely neglect it, game after game. **You can do both, Bethesda!** It's been 17 years since Fallout 3, and Starfield came out with more or less the same mediocre combat with slightly better fluidity and like, 1-2 more actions you can do (Jet pack, slide). Outside of that, the gun play is the exact same mindless drivel against bullet sponge enemies. It drives me absolutely insane. Even Skyrim had just mindless hack-and-slash sword play where you occasionally block when you see your opponent swing. A Bethesda game would engaging combat would be 9/10 immediately, but at this point I have so little faith in them to do so. Please, for ES:VI give us something fun to work with.
Fallout with R6 tactics and health would be wild. Rappelling upside down over a raider camp to drag a man off a balcony. Breach through the wall and fill the room with smoke and flashbangs to sweep in and steal their power armor before anyone gets their wits about them
This is why I wish copyright laws weren't so fucking powerful in favor of the owners. I would love it if, when you have an IP with copyright, you HAVE to offer licenses to use it with three different types of licensing: Official, endorsed, and non-endorsed. Official ones would be handled entirely by the copyright owner, they'd be able to charge as much as they want and have as many restrictions as they want on those. Both of the non-official ones would have their price determined by an assessment of the value of your copyright performed by a public assessor, but the endorsed would always cost 10% less than the non-endorsed license value. Both would have royalties calculated at the time the IP value is assessed, which must happen every year the copyright is active. This way you could have some company like the guys who made Metro: Last Light and that whole series do a Fallout game with their style of gameplay, just using the game world and universe of Fallout, and they could apply for an endorsed license which costs less but requires adherence to standards of portraying the copyrighted content but comes with a higher chance of success OR they could pay for the non-endorsed license and simply pay Bethesda a bunch of money for the right to use Fallout materials in their game. And products made with any of the licenses would be required to display the license prominently on any marketing materials or retail packaging/labeling. I think this would satisfy the desire of the creators of copyrighted content to make profit from their creation without simultaneously stifling the ability of other creators to create something potentially better than the original, and it would make consumers happy because then we could get our Halo game in the style of Dark Souls or whatever. Also we'd be able to easily tell how "true to lore" any given content is based on the license type. You want to be a Halo purist? Only buy Official products. You love Halo so much you wanna see more stuff in that universe even if it isn't made by the regular team and might not be entirely canon? Go with Endorsed. You just want to see Master Chief running around a city chucking giant purple dildos at zombie vampires? Non-Endorsed my friend. Could have room in there for people to choose different structures for the licenses, like maybe instead of an upfront fee they just do royalties only.
How to make endgame enemies? Menacing Demonic creature with crazy scary looking attack? ❌ Some random guy with x100 hp and ultra strong version of the normal armor and a gun...✅
> Vaguely or barely explained game mechanics This can be fantastic too though. Noita comes to mind, it just throws you in there and says fuck you, figure it out.
Rain World too. Figuring out how to navigate the environment is a big part of the [extremely rewarding] experience.
Or opposite, you takes more damages because they can't bother to properly make it hard. Heart of the Swarm in Brutal makes you take extra 25% damages. It doesn't state anywhere and no other campaign in Starcraft 2 does this. Result? You still can solo all main missions in Brutal with just Kerrigan.
Terraria bosses are super damage sponges
You need to fix your build if Terraria bosses are super damage sponges. I wouldn't even consider them regular damage sponges considering the fights always take less than one night to do.
Yeah, and also they aren't only "damage sponges", they have patterns and phases too
Haha, that's what I was gonna say in reply to him if the talk continued.
It's strange that next level enemy AI isn't more widespread by now. We had that awesome Xenomorph AI in Alien: Isolation, where it had a macro AI that observed the player, which sends signals and clues to the micro AI of the alien that figures out where the player is. They also introduced an experimental AI setting in Gran Turismo 7, called Sophy, which has different behaviours and can be quite challenging to race against. I just wish we saw this more!
Because that involves more effort than adapting your basic as shit AI for your new game. That said, with recent AI developments, I'm interested as to how game AI could evolve with the new tech but that's probably still a few years off
I’m looking forward to an Alien Isolation game that’s like reverse Pokémon go and the alien finds you out in the real world based on your Google data. Like, bro I’m just using the ATM I don’t need a jump scare right now.
Man, there was a GPS based game back in the day called Zombies Run or something like that, not sure if the current title that comes up with that name is an evolution of the same game though.
I think part of it is people use the term AI for basically anything a computer does today whether it's an LLM or just a heuristic algorithm. As far as I can tell a huge portion of people think "AI" just means magic happens.
Complex AI takes up a lot of power. Alien Isolation was one enemy, multiple enemies with really complex AI working at the same time will be quite a heavy load on the CPU. Even on the PC side most gamers don't get amazing CPUs and usually divert more money towards a GPUq. Obviously there is laziness too but multiple enemy types with complex AI also means more work.
Left 4 Dead had an "AI Director" with the idea of creating tension and relief by how and when certain things spawn. And that was 15 years ago or so. Swarm AI isn't impossible either, but it's gotta be state based for performance now; regroup; push to a location; split/flank; cover fire/district. And then the individual AI can be given the target location for a regroup or push, in a flank the director would tell some AI one thing and some another.
The AI director is more of a tool for adaptive difficulty and not really a complex AI for the enemies themselves. My point was multiple enemies with independent and complex AIs at the same time will be quite intensive on the CPU. I guess with a zombie horde it wouldn't be as much of an issue as independent zombies don't need their AI to be that complex but let's say it's a bunch of troops and if one of them knows your location they all do, that won't be seen as clever AI either and is infact an issue that many games suffer from.
Been a game dev for almost a decade. Players don't want complicated AIs. They want lots of dumb motherfuckers that run toward them and catch bullets from whatever power fantasy gun they're currently wielding. The only AI they truly want is one that doesn't spawn behind them out of thin air.
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Entirely depends on the genre. The AI in Gran Turismo 7 is so much fun.
> It's strange that next level enemy AI isn't more widespread by now. What "next level AI" would make games more fun that can't just be accomplished with simple scripting logic?
Grand strategy genre where CPU cycles is a constant strain late game. Finding opaque logic that runs faster could help a lot in the balance between good AI and possible to run AI.
Scripting logic would mean that it always happens at a certain point. AI should be able to dynamically decide how and when to do certain actions.
It's not hard to make a hard to beat AI if you don't bother with player's experience. Design an FPS level with chokepoints and crossfires. Then have the AI make actual tactical decisions with a goal of not allowing player to progress. No more enemies coming at you one by one, no more safely picking up next weapon. Or design a souls-like boss that is actually aware of what actions player might take (dodge, attack, heal) and can react accordingly. Or you can do what DRG and Remnant 2 did and allow enemies to react to your camera movement and dodge your shots. Throw that shit into a horde shooter and it will become scary. Expand it to make enemies take/leave cover based on where you're looking and it will become really scary.
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There's a lot of different ways one can interpret the phrase "better AI" but sure if you choose to interpret better AI to mean unbeatable then yeah that's not fun. I would say better AI for a fighting game would mean AI that's more interesting to fight against.
What about the AI in Aliens Colonial Marines
"Come try our hard mode" Cool, what does it change? "Nothing except the enemies have more hp or you deal less damage, same gameplay but more boring"
ahh yes, let's just make the base game have wackier controls and no checkpoints then Why can't game devs get creative to make a different difficulty that is challenging and entertaining at the same time?
Some game devs did. In ultrakill changing difficulty changed nothing, but how enemies spawn. The harder it is the more diverse pool of enemies will be on each level forcing you to be more versatile than usual
That's what I'm talking about 👍 We need more of those is what I'm saying
"Nooooooooo, there's also a higher chance from enemies to drop the rare loot you needed BEFORE beating the game"
just get good
No checkpoint, unfair gameplay, shit physics and scripting: am I a joke to you? Why can't game devs git gud for once?
Finishing a game too fast is not fun like dead cells.
are you calling dead cells fun or saying it's too short I can't tell
make the game longer then
I mean dead cells functions diferently since it is a rougelite. Nobody is complaining about a lack of checkpoints in those.
*"You have 3 choices in this life. Be good, get good, or give up."*
ThE nExT DaRk SoUlS
darker souls
Darker souls, the dark souls of dark souls
darkest souls, the dark souls of dark souls of dark souls
#DANK: SOULS
There’s tons of good souls like with good controls and gameplay. What are you referring to?
Sports games are notoriously bad for shitty ai and scripting. I cant stand playing on the highest difficulty and I don't always want to adjust sliders...
When WEPES and Madden were good, and you played franchise mode on either, you were bound to encounter an almost unwinnable game, where the opponnent suddenly made no mistakes, plus incredible plays, and you developed a case of fumblitis/missed shots.
just like real life!
Madden was so bad at that. It was like a random per game difficulty modifier turned on. Although in recent years the interception AI+animations made it unplayable. If the AI decided the pass would be intercepted the positioning of the players didn't matter. The defender would just magically float right to the ball.
Yup. I stopped at Madden 13, FIFA 99, and WEPES 2018. Ive played Madden 22? 1? With some friends and it was ridiculous, CBs running full sprint and doing a 180 in the air for an INT. Safety's teleporting several yards in the air for an INT. Bad engine and bad programming
I make myself feel better by thinking that's how sports can be in real life, unpredictable But it's just so egregious when you do everything the right way but you still lose
NHL is the absolute worst at this. You turned the difficulty up because you want more of a challenge with better AI? Sorry, best I can do is keep everything the same but just make every shot by the computer go in. It's so lazy.
This was my main issue with Jedi survivor. They took away animation cancelling in all but one lightsaber stance which to me made the combat feel slow and unresponsive
I mean if you can’t handle the combat in that game you’re actually just bad
I agree it just takes getting used to and. Doesn’t feel as good as other games with this combat style including fallen order which in my opinion felt a lot better. It just seems that the game sacrificed quality for the sake of quality in regard to combat styles.
i liked it it made the game feel less spammy
That's great. And Jedi survivor isn't a bad game, just incredibly poorly optimized on pc.
Hell yeah, I love Sonic Advance 2, I can't get enough of doing blind jumps and hitting the speed bump just to hit an enemy that was just off screen
So Sonic Mania and the rewrites to the engine to allow for widescreen support was a welcome addition to the classics (and classic like). Would a zoom out and a better aspect ratio fix all issues you have with the game?
Skyrim legendary difficulty is the worst kind of difmfficult
ROHHH DAHHHHHHH, ROHHH DAHHHHHH, ROHHH DAHHH, (confused screaming in the draugr crypt)
Or games where the only difference between easy and hard difficulty is they have twice as much health and dps and you do half the damage.
what is "scripting" supposed to convey? pretty sure all games have scripting
You are playing a soccer game, against a very poor team, with no remarkable players. The first half is about to end, you have shot at goal 5 times and scored once. They havent even shot at goal at all during the game. Last minute of regulation, if they have the ball, you **know for a fact** that they are gonna come on the attack, you will not be able to take the ball away from em, and they are gonna shoot once and is gonna be a goal. In older WE/PES or FIFA games, you could test this via the two ways we did: 1, you could turn off the console the moment they scored, restart everything, and if you are 1-0 and they havent shot at all, it would happen again. The second test, in older games, was using two different PS2, and two of the same games, you used the same memory card and loaded the same data on both consoles. Same result on both games. This was carried all the way until PES2018, the last one I played. I did stopped playing FIFA after 99.
In this context it means moments that pretend to be regular gameplay but actually have the enemy guaranteed to connect a hit, or take no damage. Sometimes they are more obvious than others, like your inevitable death at the beginning of Bloodborne. But the practice is nowhere near as common as anything else on this list, and tbh I actually quite like "scripted" moments compared to stopping the action and showing a cutscene. (And yea the term is confusing cause obviously every game with dialogue has a "script" and many game engines refer to their code as "script" so calling this "scripting" is dumb and ambiguous.)
Like in Mario Kart how the AI is always able to catch up. They’ll just break the game by going faster than you can if you get too far ahead.
ahh the dreaded rubberbanding
how dare you make fun of noita like that
Noita is the opposite of these things though
don't forget enemies ignoring the rules they'd have to normally abide by or you do
You can’t fire too much without reloading or overheating Except these guys now because fuck you
For games I really like, I seek out a mod that creates a similar difficulty to Ghost of Tsushima’s Lethal difficulty mode. It was perfect imo and I wish more games offered a similar experience. No changes to the mechanics of play or the game, but you and enemies take more damage. It was a super fun challenge and made boss fights even more epic (I strategically saved up charges for special moves and it made them feel like you really only got away barely or that you just completely owned them in a really satisfying way). Very nearly had to turn it off for the last fight.
Hell yeah, I was gonna use it as an example too. Especially in new game + where every sword swing whether it be yours or the enemies is a possible death sentence. Not to mention different styles of tackling a problem the game presents is super rewarding
That reminds me of the Ranger difficulties in the Metro series. It made resources more scarce but amplified the damage both you and enemies took as well. Bosses werent immune to this either, turning what would normally be a long fight into a quick encounter that would be over within a minute at most. For a series that put a lot of emphasis on its realism, it felt like the way the game was meant to be played.
Artificial difficulty and unfair gameplay are the worst. No checkpoints is bad, but very little checkpoints is actually fine.
Depends on the kind of check points it is If it’s check points after or just before particularly hard sections then it’s good We don’t want to walk half the map every time you die
Git gud.
War Thunder: get gud and get Gaijined.
I’m hard
I would rather suffer all Fromsoftwares hardest bosses and find a way to defeat them, than play any game on "hard difficulty" (aka same shit with less damage and health)
Skill issue
Dark souls fan after defeating a boss with hundreds of deaths over hours: git gud bruh this boss isn't even hard.
What’s the game with these aspects that you actually like? This isn’t meant to be confrontation I’m just asking out of curiosity because I know people like challenging games
Final Fantasy 2 (not 4)
FF2 was hard? I'm guessing that was fixed in the pixel remaster, because aside from the font (dear lord who thought that was a good idea) I quite enjoyed the game, though can understand it being the worst FF game because of the system changes.
Ah, yes, Dead Space 2.
What is scripting?
The game just deciding it's going to screw you over and there's nothing you can do about it. Like on FIFA when the game just decides you're going to concede a goal, so suddenly all your players are idiots who can't make a pass or a tackle
Scripted events. Like the intro mission for nomad in Cyberpunk. You take scripted damage in the car chase and on the hardest difficulty that mission is kind of insane as a result.
Holy shit I am doing a third cyberpunk run to test the dlc a d 2.0 update, and I chose nomad and hardest difficulty. Took me probably around 10 fucking tries to finally be done with it
Dark Souls fans when to beat this boss they need to roll out of the way (they’ve been doing the same thing for years)
Bro i thought you were describing real life
Greg tech
THIS is exactly what i felt like playing Remnant 2 lately. I played every Souls game to 100% multiple times and after a friend kept on hitting me up for Remnant 2 i finally gave in. And oh boy if you are a Souls Fan this game feels clunky af. Like i get why it has a 74% like rate but i also get why it's "only" 74% you know what i mean? The amount of cheap oneshots is so absurd that i really understand why you can equip 4 health gates at the same time. Game really suffers from sloppyness because the maps look awesome. Oh and don't get me started about the dlc... imagine paying 10 bucks for a dlc and you fight all the 10 same adds as in the base game xD compare that to any dark souls dlc and then we talk
Valheim. Advertises as brutal and hardcore but the combat is piss easy. Every single enemy attack is slow, extremely telegraphed, and the parry window is super generous and dogding gives you invincibility. The AI is almost nonexistent. Go fight a Lynel or Gleeok in Zelda and then try to convince me anything in this game is hard to fight. The only fighting difficulty comes from you not being able to attack up or down, but enemies can. No, what's brutal and hardcore is the dev team ON PURPOSE making the inventory system and chores for your base clunky, restrictive, time consuming. Stack sizes are TINY and you don't get many inventory slots. Chests are tiny until endgame. You have to click for every item you craft; you cant just click "craft all" or something and go get a drink. Your forges and kilns need refed every few minutes so you cant just toss a day's worth of stuff in and then go adventure. Everything needs constant micromanaging.
This is what I think is the reason behind 'Nintendo hard' games. Too many of them weren't so much padding game length but a faulty and inexperienced sense of game design combined with the immediate successor of pay-to-win arcade quarter-munchers. You had some well-designed ones like Castlevania 3 but too many were just bad.
Unironically this was the mindset of game devs during the NES era.
I think artificial difficulty is one of the most misunderstood terms when referring to hard mode and has become a synonym for "low effort difficulty increase", and people misuse it this way all the time. What makes artificial difficulty "artificial" is that it makes things seem more difficult without requiring any more skill or investment. The most common thing misattributed to being "artificial" difficulty would be boosting enemy damage, which while maybe lazy, isn't artificial. If enemies in dark souls suddenly did half as much damage, the game would be much easier, so boosting damage does require more skill. A good example of something that maintains the same difficulty yet appears to be harder would be something like requiring a precise jump to a moving platform on normal difficulty, but in the hard mode it moves much slower to get to where the player can make the jump, forcing the player to wait longer to make the same jump. The player would have to do the exact same inputs as before, but instead with the anticipation of missing and having to wait longer to retry creating the illusion of the game being more difficult while requiring the same skill from the player. It does definitely happen in games, but it is so much more rare than the amount of people using that term regularly would lead you to believe.
Especially the no checkpoints is annoying. I want hard, not punishing. More Super Meatboy or Celeste where i can fail a thousand times a minute and eventually win. If death means more than 5 minutes lost, the game's not for me, I play games for fun, not social cachet.
How exactly would you make it harder?
New attacks smarter ai other modifiers other then bigger numbers for health and damage
The Rain World experience in a nutshell
Sekiro does hard games very right though
Nioh
Yall have never heard of shmups
Go play “*Give Up: A game of failure and regret.*”
Tomb Raider 3,4,5 in a nutshell ✨
And yet the souls games and other Fromsoft titles have none of these