Masochism

I know it's bait. I'm just looking for an opportunity to unload.

On the flip side, I don't understand why people like playing video games that just tell a story and pretty much spoon feed every victory to the player. It feels hollow and incredibly boring.

ER is not even difficult unless you specifically want it to be

Overcoming adversity, or maybe they just want to be the guy

It's not for everyone, but there's a subset of people who enjoy hitting their desk 10 hours straight just to beat a single boss. It's very satisfying in the end, and often also repeating the fight perfectly just feels so damn good it's worth the struggle.

It's really not different than fighting hard battles with your other hobbies, learning that difficult technique or whatever

For me it was great challenge. Sure it was not easy but it's doable and the feeling of overcoming a fight you thought to be impossible gives a great feeling of growth and succes.

The draw of elder ring and soulsborne games in general is the challenge. Taking the time, failing, learning and getting good, finally beating that challenging boss, the thrill and rush of seeing the big "You Defeated" text across the screen is truly unmatched by most other games.

I also totally get not wanting to go through that. The low moments in the game can hit really hard on the motivation to play. Hitting a difficulty wall and just not having the ability to progress, dying a second time and losing a ton of souls/currency you were going to use to level up.

Do you like a 1000 piece puzzle or a 100 piece

Very game dependant for me. I enjoy metro/stalker on their highest difficulties and play CS2 sometimes but most other singleplayer games yeah no thanks. It's mostly just a flat increase to health and damage anyway

What I like about ER compared to the other games is that if I find a section too challenging, I have the option to go explore somewhere else and come back better leveled.

They gotta make something their personality!

Maybe stop and think that it isn't that difficult to everyone? I don't want to sound elitist, but people have different level of skills at video games (or anything really).

Saying no games should be hard is like saying no books should be difficult to read. To take the book analogy further, at some point after reading a lot of books you want to read more and more complex books. To say we shouldn't have difficult books would be a disservice to those who want them.

Both easy and hard games should exist. And everything in between. Not every game needs to be played by everyone, which I think really is the issue. People feeling left out or pressured into games that aren't their play style.

Complaining that the game is too hard , or the opposite, that the player is too bad. Both of these are the wrong approach. The best approach is "I'm not the intended audience for this game"

Because finally conquering that boss and getting to explore further feels so good. It feels good to git gud

Not everyone’s content to be spoon fed their dopamine.

For mechanically difficult games, definitely agree. Celeste is an example I usually bring up - it's a platformer that can get pretty tough at times, especially in the after-story optional levels. But it also has one of the most flexible and useful accessibility modes I've ever seen. It allows you to adjust basically every aspect of the game a player might struggle with (game speed, additional jumps, timed mechanics, you name it). And the game itself is very good as well.

Honestly... I disagree. What is accessibility? Every souls game has been beaten with dance pads, rock band drum kits and guitars. They're also frequently beaten by people with serious disabilities using specialized controllers. Input speed is not an issue here, Souls has always been about carefully choosing your moves to manage the end lag and stamina cost of your actions. It's about making the right move, not about moving quickly or pressing a lot of buttons at once.

IMHO, accessibility is frequently cited as an excuse for lower difficulties here, when in reality the difficulty isn't a serious part of the barrier for disabled players. It could use better accessibility options, like configurable colourblind modes, audio indicators, more configurable text size, some kind of clear colour indicators on attacks for low vision, but difficulty? No.

There are also lots of good reasons not to add explicit difficulty options, which is y'know, why From Soft haven't done it yet.

I recently noticed the accessibility settings in Brotato, which are a great example of this. In addition to the normal difficulty setting, in accessibility they give you access to sliders for enemy health/damage/speed and some toggles for other visual and difficulty features.

The only option I use is being able to restart a wave after a death rather than losing the whole run, and it’s kept me occasionally playing the game and enjoying what the devs have created.

Sucks for console users. On PC there are trainers.

Agreed. Games are meant to be enjoyed or as a measure of skill, but they don't have to be both.

I agree. It's a good think FromSoft doesn't make difficult games. They make challenging games. Their games can be trivialize by meeting it on its own terms. If you pay attention to what things are weak to, it's often pretty easy. Also, you always have the option to level up and improve your situation. Outside of secondary content, everything is easy, but it wants to challenge you to see if you're paying attention. The issue is this is abnormal for modern games, so it's seen by some as being hard. Modern gamers expect to have their hands held, which I don't think developers should always oblige if it weakens the intended experience.

I see where you're coming from, but when a game's message is that meaning and purpose is born through hard work and struggling against impossible odds then that message is kinda undercut by a button that turns the struggle off, even if it's there for a good reason.

yess harderrr

That's the key. If you:

• summoned
• used spirit ashes
• used ashes of war
• used sorceries
• used incantations
• levelled up
• drank a flask
• opened the map
• used a weapon
• used a controller or a mouse/keyboard
• opened the menu
• used your hands

You didn't beat the game.

I'm currently playing Elden Ring for the first time and I'm note sure if I'm not just doing it for self-flagellation instead of fun

How am I supposed to have fun if I'm not better than you?????

Edit: ???

Absolutely not! I play games to be the best! To dunk on those losers who can't defeat evey boss with only their fists and a dream. This is what it means to be a real gamer, ignoring my family, friends, and calls from my boss.

All you can do is look up at me on my pedestal from your lowly lesser-gamer chair.

I separate people into two camps.

People who beat THE Sega Genesis classic Sonic 3 with lock-on Technology with Sonic and Knuckles and achieved all 12 Chaos Emeralds, and LOSERS.

Some people see videogames as a legitimate art medium that generates experiences. Not all experiences have to be fun. Some can be scary, somber, or introspective.

I say stupid shit on purpose all the time but I don't pretend it's anything but.

You don't want to spend twenty hours trying to beat one boss, and being told to git gud whenever you ask for advice on the internet? But think of the sense of pride and accomplishment you'll feel when you finally beat it! The best part is you get to go through this like 10 times

/s

Counterpoint: not every game needs to be chill

I am playing Sekiro with a easy mode mod.

Even with being able to kill everything with 1-4 hits, I was getting TRASHED by bosses. People play this without the mod? 😭

I use Arch

I have nothing against prosthetizing vegans, because vegans make me think of food and I'm always hungry

Ok :)

Can I have an easy mode for veganism where I can still eat some forms of meat?

it gets much easier when you start treating it like a rhythm game where you get into dance offs with the enemies:)

and no need to interact with a game's community when it's shite, it's a single player game you can enjoy it however you want! (or don't, i'm not pressuring you, just don't want you to miss out on a good game because its fanbase is made of out assholes)

I bought Rain World recently, having heard a lot of good things about it, and I found it hard to get into because I didn't really see a point to what I was doing, whether I was doing it right, etc, so I put "how to enjoy Rain World" into my search engine of choice and found an article with some beginner tips, one of which being that the bleak, helpless feel is intentional and part of the experience. I respect it as an artistic decision, but my private and work lives are stressful enough as it is, which is probably partly why I was bouncing off the game, so I just got a refund, and I'm fine with that decision.

There are probably some mods that make it easier if you want to play.

And yeah game communities suck sometimes.

If you ever want to give it a shot, everything in the souls games can be trivialized if you just farm a little extra between the next fight.

That's not to say it won't be difficult at times, but if you prepare yourself well enough you can take just about anything.

Praise the Sun, my friend

Can't you just summon a new vehicle?

Did you not just hit the "summon a vehicle" button that the game gives you to summon one of the many cars the game gives out for free? Cause it's there. I believe they tell you about it during the prologue and it's enabled before then.

Did you just skip all tutorials or something? I'm struggling to understand how on earth you got stuck so bad you ended up quitting the game. Plus, if you're half way through, you have a minimum of 2 vehicles, the starting car and Jackie's bike, if not even more. Wtf were you even doing?

I think the whole "Elden Ring is hard" is overrated.

I'm a garbage player. And I manage to cheese my way through the game. It has classic NES/SNES energy where you can absolutely leave and come back when you're way stronger. The game is so massive, you will always find something else to do.

Then again, if cyberpunk made you rage quit, maybe you won't like Elden Ring. I found that game to be really straightforward.

I'm willing to replay a section as many times as it takes, as long as I consistently feel a sense of progression and improvement. The problem is that it can take dozens of attempts before I realize I'm plateauing, and I have to give up.

I cannot tell you how much I want to play Remnant: From the Ashes. In between boss fights, I'm in love with the game. The story is deeply fascinating, and I love the gameplay. There is exactly one boss in that game that I was able to beat without going online and waiting for some random to join and carry. Eventually I got to a point where in order to upgrade gear, I had to kill bosses, and in order to kill bosses, I had to upgrade gear. Uninstalled it after I made no story progress for like 10 hours.

Contrast that with Outriders. Considered by many to be an awful game, it was my favorite game that I've played this year. The story is deeply fascinating, I love the gameplay, and there is exactly one boss in that game that I couldn't beat at the highest available difficulty. So I turned the difficulty down, breezed through it, and turned it back up afterward, and there was no penalty for doing that.

How would you even expect the developers to accommodate every possible combination of disabilities?

That's basically what Another Crab's Treasure does too, as with a few other hard games. Their accessibility modes let you basically become god, and skip the combat if the way it's set up isn't working - and that could just be something you do for a single particular encounter if needed. I've never used them, and don't mind them being there, because a good hard game is satisfying to play without such things.

Basically how I beat Moloch in Outriders. He has way too much health and deals way too much damage, so you turn the world tier down to one and obliterate him at the cost of one quest reward being low level, then turn it back up to get better gear again

Not saying they should have to, just saying it would be better if it had it.

I don't really enjoy the way hardness is implemented in souls like games: long health bars just make the game take longer and make it boring for me, so I don't play them. That's OK if they don't want my money 🤷

I know there's also the argument that a lot of players wouldn't bother with the hard mode if easy was available and you're denying the players that experience if you implement easy mode, but I think it's a flawed argument because if you add any small incentive to play on hard mode such as a simple cosmetic reward that's enough to incentivise most players to do it.

It's wild how everyone loves to wax poetic about a mythical auteur developer that breaks from the industry mold to make something unique, but every time that actually happens a massive group of people comes out and says it needs to be like everything else. Pathologic 2 is another example that comes to mind.

It's gonna be very hard for videogames to ever take themselves seriously as an artistic medium if the majority of purchasers prefer committee-designed slop.