Sekiro, Difficulty & the Importance of Perspective (Noclip) - Videos for the 97.4%

Lore and universe design is arguably integral to the souls series, it's a big part of what makes it unique and you can see that in the way most souls-like clones dripfeed you lore and backstory in very similar ways. If the atmosphere and worldbuilding wasn't good then the games would be just as bland as a game with a great world but super weak gameplay.

But it’s secondary to it, it’s not what pulls you in. All the lore in the world couldn’t save it if the gameplay wasn’t engaging. The average first time playthrough for the first is 45 to 50 hours in the first game, with it giving you minimal lore details, most of only will only be noticed by players in NG+ or the hefty amount of lore videos you mentioned.

Just because you find the only enjoyable part of souls borne games to be the difficulty doesn't mean that's the only way a player is allowed to enjoy the game. I'm someone who's finished each souls game, including sekiro. I'm also someone who used summons to get through most of the boss fights. Hell usually I just sat back and watched the summon absolutely wreck whatever boss I was on. Yet i still loved the souls games. I fell in love with from softwares specific style of show dont tell stories. The satisfaction for me came from finally finding a story piece that ties a bunch of points together. Enjoying a game differently doesnt mean you're enjoying it wrong, and reducing soulsborne games to just being "hard" does them a massive disservice

I didn't say that the only enjoyable part is the difficulty, but without difficulty it would deflate what the appeal of the game massively. Most wouldn't get to the lore, if they stopped bored midway through the Undead Burg because the game wasn't engaging.

Dark Souls wouldn't be shit if it was easy, but it wouldn't have has nearly as much attention paid to it if it was. Dark Souls helped me get through a miserable time in my life, a time where I felt useless and pathetic. Every game I played was too easy for me because all I did every day was play games. Then Dark Souls came along with the tagline "Prepare to die" and I knew there was finally a game for me. And then the game beat my ass hard and after a week of not being able to beat the boar in the undead burg I quit in frustration. I didn't play it again for three months. Up until that point I had played games all the time, to the point where it was natural for me to do well. It was with Dark Souls that I had to learn how to play again. I had to understand how the game worked and I had to work for every victory. It rekindled something in me that I had lost. If Dark Souls had an easy mode or was just made easier overall I would have beaten it in two weeks and never looked at it again. I would still be miserable, I probably wouldn't have gone back to school and began turning my life around. The reason I am argueing that developers shouldn't have to make their games more accessible is that some people need the opposite. As I've said before, you can't make a game to suit everyone and I don't think you should. Have rebindable buttons and colour blind options, allow non-standard controllers. But if a game is made to be hard it should be allowed to be.

Most games are so much more than their challenge. It's the world, atmosphere, sounds, characters, storytelling, everything. It's dumb to be up in arms about how an option to reduce or even remove the challenge would make the whole experience pointless. Without an option like that, some people might never see the work of artists and writers that went into a game, be it due to disability or any reason. Removing challenge ruins the experience intended by the gameplay designer or auteur? Don't use it then. There is no argument.

Sure... for yourself, at least. I've been playing since Demon's Souls first came to the west and the world + atmosphere grabbed me way more than the difficulty did initially. Different strokes for different folks. Also @ this, games like Planescape Torment and to a lesser extent New Vegas are generally heralded as pretty great games more on the strength of their writing than anything. The actual gameplay (by which I mean combat, mostly) is serviceable at best, terrible at worst. It's genuinely awesome that DS helped you get through a rough time, but I feel like arguing against an easy option because forcing a challenge has the potential to help some players mentally is maybe a bit outside the bounds of what devs should be considering . Plus, who's to say, maybe there's someone the games could have helped just as much but they were turned away by the initial difficulty or just inability to play in general?

The things is Planescape inverts the story to gameplay ratio, you have massive amounts of dialogue and story compared to the Souls games. The question is, would Planescape be interesting, if you found a character every 3 to 4 hours of mandatory terrible combat and had minimal dialogue between them as opposed to the interactive book, with optional combat it is.

But that's my point. There should be games that are too hard and games that aren't. There are millions of games, most of them designed to be as accessible as possible. You're saying that that it doesn't matter that the game helped me as it is because it could have helped other people if it was different. Which is kind of a shitty thing to say to be honest.

I'm not advocating for a standard 'Easy mode' as other games have either, I'm advocating for an Assist Mode like in Celeste. And I mean, I agree with you about the game, I also love From Software's games and I guess a big part of it is the challenge it provides. But if my skill in the games had been so low that the frustration of losing outweighed the joy of winning, then I wouldn't have felt the same. And there's many people in that boat, and many of them want to experience the games but don't like the difficulty. Adding an Assist Mode would let them enjoy the games and it would not affect the intended way to play the game at all.

Fair point, it'd probably be awfully boring. That said, I think what I would say here is that Dark Souls' story/gameplay ratio isn't as skewed towards gameplay as you seem to be arguing (assuming I understand right). Uh. That wasn't what I said. If that's really how I came across to you then I apologize. What I was trying to get across is that the potential for different types of people to be helped isn't mutually exclusive. If the developers are up front about saying 'x is the intended way to play, but if you can't do this and need a more accessible option then pick y' then you get to experience the game in a way that's beneficial to you + likewise for anyone who wants to enjoy the other aspects of the game even if it doesn't follow dev intention. I think my post about Furi on the previous page explains what I feel here better than this current post honestly. That game having an easy mode doesn't diminish its challenge or difficulty in any way that I can see, but if you disagree I'd be curious what your thoughts are.

As I said in my longer post if I had the option to play it in an easier way I wouldn't have gotten as invested in it as I did. So it was mutually exclusive from someone who would have connected with the game if it was easier.

Wouldn't a toggable on/off invincibilty/ infinite ammo or mana be an acceptable compromise? It wouldnt hurt to have easy to implement options that could let others play the game.

I think there's a lot of writers, artists, composers, level designers, etc. at FromSoft that would be disappointed to hear that many of their fans don't give a shit about their work, and that all they want is difficulty. I don't think you honestly believe the rest of the game isn't worth anything, but I think you're massively under-appreciating the story, world, atmosphere, gameplay mechanics unrelated to difficulty, and more. FromSoft games would likely be less enjoyable for me if they were easier, but they wouldn't be worthless. And also, if the games were easier it wouldn't force you to play it in the most reductive way you could find: if the game allowed me to just Forward+R1 through the game, I just wouldn't do that. I already tended to play Souls without shields because I enjoyed the risk involved in relying on dodging and parrying more. The amount of options you have in FromSoft games is another strength that isn't directly tied to difficulty. Adding an Assist Mode to Dark Souls would not change a single thing about the game except for the people who want to experience the game without difficulty. People who like piles of poop, apparently. The guy who wrote the PC Gamer article about using a slowdown mod to beat the game said he loved the game, and he found it fun to play at half speed, so really it's just wrong to say it isn't fun without, or with lower, difficulty.

What I'm primarily concerned about is the games journalism race to the bottom that seems to happen with this kind of thing. Accessibility options are great, and it's great that this topic is getting some major discussion and visibility. We have the technology and know-how to make games playable and enjoyable by a wider audience and we should absolutely be doing that. But a reasonable and logical standpoint doesn't generate clicks, so I'm fully expecting a load of manufactured outrage going forward about how X game isn't inclusive enough and therefore bigoted, as are any arguments or opinions to the contrary... man would you look at how bigoted gamers are because they reacted poorly to me saying that VR should cease to exist because it discriminates against the blind. How awful, they're still trying to argue it, they must really hate blind people. That's obviously a huge dramatization of the current discussion but it's what I expect to happen among journalists once the initial controversy dies down and a totally reasonable resolution is reached. I just hope the bad press doesn't scare devs away from making unique experiences. That being said I'm going to read into that AbleGamers site someone linked earlier because I'm currently working on a game and I think it'll be a great resource. Cheers.

Well, I can't really argue with how an accessibility mode would affect you personally in that case, but I don't think the idea should be discounted entirely. Maybe there are other solutions than just a separately labeled game mode. I saw you bring up the Witness on the last page and its accessibility is an interesting case, because Blow is on record as saying certain puzzles are just impossible to be solved if you're colorblind or hearing impaired. He compensated for that by making it so you could beat the game without going through every single area. Dark Souls could be said to have similar compensation with the whole co-op thing, but there are bound to be further solutions to increase accessibility without sacrificing core gameplay. I can't think of any off the dome but I don't think it's impossible

I think the vast, vast majority of games should have accessibility options to make them easier to engage with. Fuck game journalists, I really do want those options for the people with limited accessibility to games. It's also somewhat selfish of a desire as I'm slowly going blind in my left eye, and that can make some things fucking annoying to deal with in games. There's edge cases and specific games that might not function better with all the same options, and I can also see it really hamstringing a development teams resources. I want those options for people, but I also don't want them to have to scale back the scope of the game by a large margin to fit in those.

Yeah, reading through this thread it seems like people ignore just how important the actual gameplay is to a games impact on people. Dark Souls has great world building, atmosphere and minimalist storytelling on top of being difficult and all of that meshes together as a cohesive whole. The difficulty in Dark Souls is part of the core experience and helps enhance the games apocalyptic and hopeless atmosphere and if you removed that it wouldn't be the same. Games have that advantage over novels and movies, they can use their gameplay to play into their themes, mood and story and sometimes the difficulty is integral to that experience.

I have very slow degenerative neurological disorder that's mostly plateaued I've lost my ability to play games like I used to. I have to use an extralarge mouse pad and a very low sensitivity to play on par with how I used to and game pads are hit or miss. I'll stop playing video games before I ask for aim assist or disability features.

Piggybacking this a bit, and before someone asks that optional easy mode brings no harm, they do. Options to reduce challenges are often haphazardly implemented. The average player will often favor easy solutions over enduring a lesson, when that easy solution is within grasp during a difficult moment, the temptation will be high. This actually has wide implications, as games made for mass appeal are increasingly steering towards simplistic mechanics for superficial engagements, leaving obscurity and hardship behind, because more and more are pampered to be expecting wins with just enough effort. If you are a game dev you'll be surprised how easy people tend to give up. This is why I think games that has mechanical depth should be preserved. Easy-Normal-Hard is a TERRIBLE metric, there is no benchmark on which mode is the most optimal for each player. Making games easier doesn't help the impaired, consulted, specialized systems do. I unfortunately has more respect for fortitude from an artistic standpoint than people who are daunted by difficulty. Should an obstacle prove too difficult to pass, seek help, or online resource to better oneself than to take the easy route. Opting for lesser gameplay should be last resort, not default. Nonetheless, assist mode (Celeste / Crosscode) are decent additions, they communicated clearly: "Do not use them until absolutely need to!". I do wish to pursue better solutions.

Actually I've decided that I'd like to play a little bit of devil's avocado because there's been a series of really long and ridiculous arguments about difficulty in Final Fantasy XIV's raids. For simplicity of explanation we'll say that there's two versions of content in FFXIV, Easy and Hard. The Easy version is what's encountered through the game's story. Most Easy content can be cleared without much effort by most groups and rewards people with story progression and sometimes some minor rewards. Nearly all Hard content is optional, has little or no story attached to it, requires significant effort and commitment to clear, and results in much more desirable rewards. This has resulted in a significant level of animosity towards the Hard content and the people who run it. A large portion of the more casual playerbase asserts that their subscription fee entitles them to everything the game has to offer without any additional investment of time, effort, commitment, etc. and no one is allowed to tell them otherwise. Not the devs, not the community, and not the other players attempting to clear content with them. Anything less than handing them their rewards on a silver platter is tantamount to gatekeeping and discriminatory towards players who have less time than the high-level raiders or are otherwise incapable or unwilling to attain the skill required. This has continued long after Hard content was made much more accessible on average and the introduction of a purely challenge-oriented Very Hard difficulty level with cosmetic rewards that could only be attempted after all easier content had been cleared. There is a frightening number of people who believe that there should not be any challenge in this game that they should not be able to complete while explicitly refusing to improve their playstyle. Now, it bears mentioning that any item rewarded through high level content is either purely cosmetic or only useful for clearing PvE content. It doesn't give you a direct advantage towards other players, only against computer-controlled mobs. So my question is this: Is it an issue to limit accessibility to content that is supplementary to a game rather than essential to it? If it wasn't obvious by my language above, I side with the high-level raiders and developers on this, that having rewards beyond the average player's reach is essential to keeping the game alive and players invested. It should drive people to improve and provide those that do with a token of their accomplishment that they can display and feel proud of... and it's why I can somewhat sympathize with the emotion of reluctance towards making challenges and rewards more accessible too indiscriminately. What do you guys think?

Personally I'd say if the average player can still play and enjoy the game without doing this kind of thing then it's totally fine. Options for increased difficulty or challenge for players who crave it are important too.

They are entitled to everything the game has to offer, in this case: the upper echelons of MMO society and accomplishment rewards for continuous commitment. You can't experience those by handing everyone the key to high society club.

How? How does it affect you if there is easy mode? I'm a DMC vet, but I don't bitch and cry about assist mode or human difficulty being a joke. I can turn them off or select the intended difficulty option. The main reason why it even has it was after the main complaint of dmc3 being too hard for most people new to the genre or just didn't have the coordination to get with it. Im just lost as to what is the big deal if the developer added an easy mode alongside the intended mode.

https://youtu.be/pM_5S55jUzk?t=1530 If you're curious why exclusivity might have value, I think Chris Wilson puts it really well here. Content being exclusive changes its meaning, and by extension the experience players will get from it. Even players that never interact with exclusive content are affected by its existence. People will almost always take the path of least resistance in any situation. This is just a fundamental aspect of human psychology, and if you're a developer creating an experience for an audience, it's something you have to keep in mind. If you gave someone a version of Dark Souls where you could press a button to teleport to the end of Sen's Fortress, most people would probably use it after their first few deaths. That isn't to say any kind of "easy mode" has to be that intrusive. A Dark Souls easy mode could be hidden from normal gameplay, it could be diagetic ala the Champions Covenant from DS2, it could be implemented in such a way that it couldn't be activated in a moment of frustration, and it could be made clear that it only exists for people who physically require it. But even then, its existence would still alter the meaning of the game, in the same way that even a perfect translation will still in some slight way alter the meaning of a text. It might be barely perceptible, but most artistic choices are like that.

The ratio is a hard point to analyze and discuss, but I'm sure most of the time you spent playing Dark Souls you spent engaged in combat. Again, I'm not saying the atmosphere of the game and the world building isn't top notch, far from it, but I don't think saying that a "sight seeing" Dark Souls game where the enemies would be just R1 fodder wouldn't lose much of it's appeal. Not even mentioning how much the themes of the lore, especially the mortality part, would be lost if you could dispatch enemies left and right. I'm pretty such every element of the team at From Soft is aware that if the core of the gameplay isn't challenging or engaging, that the rest of their work suffer from it. Difficulty isn't all I want, but difficulty (in the good way not in the DS 2 way) is part of what elevates the game and makes it shine. To put it in a bigger way, how lost would the themes of the story be, if you never struggled to hold on to humanity? If you barely had a reason to kindle a bond fire? If the game was so easy you'd never notice your death and rebirth? If the game allowed you to foward + R1, would you just wait for an enemy that would take ages to attack, for every encounter in the game? Would it be fun to run shieldless if there was no risk to be had in it? Would all the options matter if you could just run around and just strike enemies with any dagger, without any challenge? About that article, he only used the slowdown cheat on the final boss, not the entire game.

I feel we're going in circles... Yes, I would enjoy it less if it was easier, but if I didn't like the difficulty at all then I would have preferred to enjoy a slightly less true version of the game over simply quitting. A Celeste-style Assist Mode would let people do that without compromising the intended way to play it.

Games as a media type can be for everyone, but how on earth are you going to accommodate something like complete blindness in every game? I think games should do more to be accessible, but also there are some considerations that are impossible to integrate in a game without either sinking a huge amount of time into redesigning parts of the game around them, or changing the base game itself to accommodate those considerations. If your game has any complexity or finesse at all with anything involving reaction speeds, perceptive ability, or even simple logical inferences you're going to be missing at least some of the disabled population. Bindings should be standard though I don't think you'll see many people disagree with that one.

He's not saying an easy mode removes something from a normal mode. He's saying that someone playing on easy mode gets the same experience and the same content as if they played on normal difficulty. Which is false. A game that's well designed will have a level of challenge that was tailored for a specific audience to feel a specific emotion in that specific time. When you start implementing arbitrary difficulty settings like Easy/Medium/Hard that just scales hp/damage, not only it makes it unclear which mode was the creator's vision, but it also messes up the balance, it's lazy, and runs the risk of making intense moments become dull for no reason. I'd argue that the opposite is true too. I also hate "hard" modes where they crank up the numbers to add artificial difficulty. It's not a proper challenge, it's lame. What if I'm in an area that's supposed to be a more quiet introspection moment for the character, but just because I picked Hard mode I die to an unfair fight? It becomes unintended narrative dissonance that could've been avoided if there were just one difficulty mode. If games want to be treated as art, both devs and players need to think of them as a whole. If the character is supposed to feel overwhelmed, it needs to be communicated the same way in the gameplay, in the animations, the music, the color palettes, etc. If you could just skip some aspects of it by making that part a walk in the park, you're not having the same experience. It's like watching a horror movie without sound. Like I said, the opposite is also true. If a chapter in a game is supposed to be more relaxing, everything needs to go that way. You shouldn't listen to heavy metal while watching Blade Runner because you think it's too slow, you'd ruin the experience. So I don't understand why some of you think they're entitled to difficulty settings. Proper assist modes are need to be done on a case by case basis, it takes time/money to design, create, balance, test them to make sure the overall experience is untouched. People need to realize that not everything is made for them.

I'm gonna tear this post apart so Difficulty /= content, you still have the same enemies/levels/story/dialogue with less difficulty. Games can still be difficult for some people on easier difficulty, but it allows people to adjust themselves accordingly. Why is adding another difficulty option hinder the core experience? You are given the option for the normal gameplay at the start, DMC does this with both assist mode and human/demon hunter difficulty while explaining which is for whom. Sekiro ironically is not really that well designed considering i've been told to cheese the AI to make some mini bosses easier, or bosses being put into small rooms that fuck the camera up repeatedly. Not to mention the absurd amount of gifs that show the hitboxes being absolutely fucked for some grabs and sweeps. Again, medium has always been considered the normal difficulty for most games. And easy for you might seem like a walk in the park, but for some it might still enforce a challenge. Gate keeping by saying "well I had no issue running this on easy, therefore everyone else should have 0 issue playing it on easy" is ignorant. If a player feels that easy is too easy, they can move up to medium, same goes for medium with hard. Oh boy you'd love sekiro then, because earlier enemies return and do double damage and have double health, or have adds thrown in to make it more difficult to do anything really. Prime example is one boss literally coming back almost right after beating it in a different area, and it just throws a copy of the same boss at you. Dark souls 1-3 looks like a masterpiece compared to sekiro to be quite honest when it comes to fairness in difficulty. Again, just because its easy for you, doesn't mean its a challenge for others, stop using yourself as a basis for difficulty. I'd say the ape in sekiro is extremely piss easy, but I spent 2 hours on the corrupted monk fight. meanwhile in the thread, I saw the opposite was true for a lot of people, doesn't mean either side is right or wrong, its opinion. Just like how saying easy mode is too easy for you, it could not be easy for others this goes for this comparison as well: Oh of course they aren't entitled, but they are free to complain about it not being really accessible for them. Assist modes are literally made as handicaps outside the experience so everyone can enjoy the game. Who are you to say someone didn't get the full experience just because they didn't like to grind their nose for days trying to get past something insanely hard to them? Also Celeste is an indie game made with 4 people who were able to add a simple assist system so everyone could enjoy the game from every spectrum, so its not as incredibly hard as you think. And people like you need to realize they are free to criticize the game for it as well in their opinion.