If you’re not able to commit to learning new strategies and using game mechanics to adapt to a game’s difficulty, and experience it as the developers intended, maybe it’s not for you. You can always watch a lore video or let’s play by other gamers to get the story if that’s the goal. This is Dark Souls 2 all over again, and I will personally say as someone who initially hated it, then gave it another chance; When you persist and triumph through grit, the game leaves a lasting impression and sense of accomplishment that you cheat yourself out of with a difficulty slider. That’s my favorite game in the series now, which is a deeply unpopular opinion, unsurprisingly.
This debate pops up every now and then and my opinion remains the same, there are plenty of games that aren’t meant to be a challenge to choose from. Part of games that are built to be a challenge is being able to reflect on how far you grew in the process, and people hate to hear it but ‘git gud’ is a real thing for those who believe things worth doing are hard.
I personally think Outer Wilds should give you the whole lore as an audiobook, not everyone wants to go hunting for clues and reading a bunch of old conversations between dead people in order to figure out what’s going on…
Sigh this shit again, if it’s the creators decision to have a game with finely tuned hard difficulty, so be it, that’s the creators creative decision and it should be respected
In my opinion, the game is not particularly difficult. That is, if you’ve played through the original Hollow Knight. Which most people haven’t. In fact, it looks to me like a lot of people jumping on the hype don’t have too much experience with metroidvanias and soulslikes.
It’s a sequel, so intended to be played after the original. Why do we care what people who haven’t played the first game think?
Don’t like it, don’t buy it. I’m happy for team cherry and their success. It’s not for me but I don’t resent them that it isn’t. This nothing burger discussion is yet another herring designed to drive clicks and traffic off of the work of people who ACTUALLY create something of worth. Modern parasitism at its best.
My biggest complaint is the sheer lack of rewards when I finish a fight. Give me any currency.
I have spent so much of this game broke, unable to buy the things I need to advance any side plots.
I’m currently stuck on the fight for the Music in the top left of the citadel. The double boss at the end is brutal. But because no enemy in that fight drops monster parts, I have to quit to grinding it to go grind more materials to build equipment, despite having slain 20+ enemies each run.
I’m about 10 hours into silksong and it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. But the majority of the boss fights seem… cheap?
Like, their difficulty doesn’t come from their various attacks, or their environment. Instead, it usually comes from the fact that they do double damage, or the fact that they spam the same two attacks over and over way too quickly, or the fact that they can do the same add summon three times in a row and make what was a controllable situation practically impossible
Now, I’ve 112% the OG hollow knight and beaten true radiance, so I’m not against difficult boss fights. In fact I relish the feeling of learning their moves and patterns after every single death
But when the moves are “ram into wall. Then ram into wall again” it becomes incredibly annoying
Runbacks are a lame attempt at artificially increasing difficulty. I’ll happily die on that hill. I love difficult games, but there is a fine line between frustration and difficult.
Elden Ring (at least all the bits I played through) and Sekiro absolutely nailed it. None of the run backs were particularly egregious, and it let me really focus on experimenting and learning to feel out the difficult fights. Celeste is another good example. I have dropped hours on some of the later levels trying to master them, but never once got frustrated.
Hollow Knight I never finished because I got stuck on a boss and the runback was just way too long and annoying. I loved everything else about the game and want to finish it eventually.
Edit: I think they have their place as “mods” that you could enable to increase difficulty, and i’d actually probably enjoy it that way. Just designing the game around them is where i draw the line.
Unpopular opinion but I like boss runbacks.
To me it feels like “if you don’t survive the journey, you’re too weak for the boss itself” it brings me down and makes me calmer until I reach the boss.
I like them because I will think what I did wrong, not just going to do that wrong thing again until I get lucky with my wrong strategy.
I like them because it forces you to try to salvage a fight instead of just conceding after a bad start. The time spent getting to the boss is investment you don’t want to waste.
I think this is really just an issue of the tools and abilities not being inherently linked to the related bosses.
FYI quickhop attacking is faster than ground combos and you can weave in the trio dagger throws when you are dodging away from close attacks. Also your attack will negate enemy attacks weapon hitbox(but you still have to dodge bodily contact). The poison tool upgrade is overbalanced and makes a lot of fights a joke.
To be fair, From has like many games to learn from that while Cherry only has HK. I’ll never forget the sheer pain of the Frigid Outskirts from Dark Souls 2.
At least that’s an optional area. Now, the run back from pre-SotFS No Man’s Wharf? That was a pain.
The run to Blue Smelter nearly gave me a coronary.
Although DS2 gave us a reprieve with despawning enemies eventually, making runbacks feel rather poignant when you’re walking an empty world.
I hate that I only completed Frigid Outskirts because all the horses respawned. The bosses were absolute rock there too.
People forgetting that when you ran out of lives you used to have to go back to the start of the whole game.
People forgetting that when you ran out of lives you used to have to go back to the start of the whole game.
We remember. It was bullshit back then. It’s still bullshit now.
Edit: I beat many of those games on three lives. It was still some bullshit.
Why is it bullshit? If you couldn’t die nobody would play those games. The stakes were the reason to play.
It wasn’t bullshit. You could get through those games in about an hour and that set of levels was the game. Games like Sonic sunk or swam based on whether playing through those levels over and over to achieve a better run was actually enjoyable. Not to say that today’s much longer games aren’t valid too, but they don’t have to be as tight.
As someone who isn’t necessarily big on the notion streamlining is “objectively” good game design… That more or less began to be disposed of the minute we had the technology, minus a few now-niche genres that rely on it. It was gradual, but mass market games as early as Zork in 1981, had save schemes.
yes, i HATED that, and don’t think I ever finished any of those games.
that was not a good thing.
To you. It was for players who liked it that way. There are even popular rogue likes today.
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Zelda: Pwr off Rst. Must ensure progress is saved. Far end of the spectrum: Sewer Shark. Fuck that game, I didn’t want that beach life anyhow.
I think this discussion has more merit when framing this from an ableism viewpoint. Games having accessibility sliders to either slow down puzzles or enemies helps players who have a disability.
A game that comes to mind is Crosscode! You had options that could change the speed and damage for various things in the game. Was nice because sometimes I’d change the settings when I had been stuck and frustrated on a puzzle which made the game far more enjoyable.
skill issue
The main goal of a game is to be fun, not to be a bragging right; even more in a single player game.
If someone, for any reason, prefers a more casual experience, let them have it. On the other hand, if you prefer to brag, go for it and cramp up the difficulty.
There us no point of gating a single player game. Single player games should be accessible for all.
Fun is not the same for everyone.
Some people like visual novels. Others prefer games with frame perfect precision that push the player’s reaction, attention and concentration.
Nothing could be for everyone and that’s fine. Something not being for you does not make it a bad design.
A single player game shouldn’t be accessible to all. It should be accessible to everyone the creator intends it to be accessible to.
Devaluing and demanding an artist or team of artists compromise their vision and intent is flat out a shit take. You have to be a massive self centered asshole to think it’s even remotely acceptable.
Nintendo expects Mario games to be played by everyone, thus it’s reasonable to expect accessibility features and difficulty controls. To allow for the widest range of players.
A Mario game with out either implicit or explicit difficulty controls would be a fair thing to criticize when Nintendo’s clearly stated goal is to reach the boardest audiences and be a game for the whole family.
But a game made by say kojima IS NOT trying to reach the boardest audience. Thus, expecting any amount of control over the experience is just being an asshole on the part of the player. The game is designed for himself first and foremost. He’s making something he wants to make. Tell a story he wants to tell. If the player enjoys it then all the better.
Games are after all first and foremost art. Art can be a product or can be a passion. A product even if art is reasonable to expect it to be made for the consumer first and cater to them But never should any reasonable person. Assume a passion should bend the knee.
The main goal of a game is to be whatever the creators and/or you want it to be. Frustrating difficulty can still be fun, just like feeling scared in a horror game is fun. It simply has to be done right.
Keep in mind it’s already very hard to make a good, balanced game. Adding difficulty sliders increases that exponentially. Even if you add a few presets - that’s still a lot more work, which indie studios may not have resources for.
There doesn’t need to be sliders or options menu settings. Elden Ring handles difficulty settings beautifully: upgrading your flask is optional and increases both the frequency and amount of healing that can be received. Using summons is optional and can make some fights an absolute cakewalk. Same with all the different crafting items. If you want, almost every dungeon in the game can be skipped or revisited if it’s too hard.
All Team Cherry had to do was change the timing or location for access to certain tools in the game.
To be fair while Elden Ring is the most popular From game it’s also by many accounts a downgrade from their previous titles. It’s fun but not nearly Bloodborne, not Dark Souls with it’s ups and downs but establishing the genre, not even Sekiro which is weird for the series but still doesn’t have any game to compare where it shines. Personally if I had to choose between three Elden like games and one Bloodborne, I wouldn’t even think.
Many FromSoft games don’t strike that balance right. The ones I’ve tried, even the ones I successfully beat, gave me a groan of “Fucking FINALLY, now what mediocre reward and fresh hell do I get for that!? In fact, why am I playing this…?”
Another example, Stellar Blade. I enjoyed the difficulty, and got pretty good at the parries against bosses; but usually only hit about 60% of them. That wasn’t good enough for the very final boss, which takes off about half your health for each one you miss. Only for that fight, I ended up turning down the difficulty - and it was still tough! And, I still felt rewarded at the end.
One final example, Another Crab’s Treasure. It has some hard fights, and many difficulty options. I’m glad those were there…but I also just never used them. Also, it now has a NG+ that gets even harder.
For myself? Definitely! But someone shouldn’t be prevented from playing a game because of a disability. Just like how Frostbite engine games have great accessibility options for colour blindness.
Disability, accessibility and gameplay accessibility are two different things and should be treated as such. There is also a very hard line between what is possible to help someone with a disability. Enjoy a medium that requires certain minimal physical traits.
The color blindness deafness rebindable controls as many things that can help the disabled and these should be expected whenever possible. Hell a lot of these are built directly into your operating system and don’t require any effort from a game developer. They just need to make sure not to get in the way of already existing tools.
But gameplay accessibility is an entirely different beast and even very minimal. Gameplay accessibility can create an entirely new gameplay experience to the point where it’s not the same game. If the developer wants to add those, it should be up to the developer and what they’re targeting, both as an audience and as an artist.
We should always demand disability accessibility. We should never demand gameplay accessibility.
Colorblind accessibility is easy to implement and pretty much everybody can do it after reading a wikipedia article on colorblindness.
On the other hand, balancing a game for several difficulties is not easy and takes a lot of time. Plus, it doesn’t always make sense. Part of the game is the struggle. If you’re skipping the struggle, then you’re missing a part of the game.
Tbh it’s a reflex and dexterity game, among other things, so it is not for everyone. In the same way a game that requires memorising melodies is not for me, since I suck hard at it.
I suppose there could be a mod that simply doesn’t let you die and you can explore the whole world. There is no other way to make a platforming section easier, unless you add more anchor points etc., which requires actually changing the world (essentially, you remove the platforming section), so those could still be a problem.
Celeste is a game about reflexes and dexterity. They implemented tons of accessibility features, including ways to make platforming easier.
And the game is fundamentally not the same with some of those accessibility features enabled. Good on the devs for targeting a wider audience but fundamentally they have different game play experiences.
Not every designer wants to have multiple experiences in their game. That should be entirely up to the designer and demanding them add entirely new experiences is unreasonable.
Color blindness support, rebindable controls, subtitles, on screen audio visual cues. There’s plenty of things that can help the disabled that don’t change fundamental aspects of the game. If a developer adds these but doesn’t want to compromise the intended gameplay as they see it then they shouldn’t have to.
End of the day. It’s art that is being sold to be consumed. If you don’t like the art, then it’s not for you.
I have never heard of the game, i guess you are referring to https://celeste.ink/wiki/Assist_Mode?
I can see they have lots of options! However the platforming seems to be slightly different? In case of HK I suppose that invincibility-like mode is what I suggested brought to the extreme (I.e. you can just walk over spikes etc). Maybe the other thing that could work is slowing the game down so that timing is easier to get.
I think it’s an interesting discussion accessibility from this point of view. I think everyone draws the line at some point, between accessibility and simply making a game with some principles that represent the soul of the game.
I mean personally I don’t have any issues with an easy mode in games, casual play is nice when you come back home from work half dead. Silksong is advertised as a soulslike though. Feels a little counterintuitive to take away the aspects that define a soulslike, even if it makes the game accessible to a wider audience.
For me though, a lot of Souls games are about opening shortcuts and then running past anything left to get another go at the bosses.
You can’t reliably do that in 2 though with the sheer amount of ganking enemies.
Yeah, I wasn’t fond of 2. Although you could just kill them 12 times and never have them respawn. Quite tedious, especially in the DLC.
I spent 3 hours stuck on one boss fight.
In most games, finally beating it would have me saying “thank fuck its over”.
In silksong, I’m saying “fuck yeah that was a good boss”. It’s a very different feeling, and one that I haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying in quite some time.
That said.
I think both hollow knight and silksong should have easy modes. It would be fine. It doesn’t hurt me any that someone else can have an easier time. People need to remember that video games are entertainment, and the sweaty “hardcore gamers” can fuck off with their usual judgemental elitism.
I think it’s a great game for veterans who like challenges like myself.
But I have to call out team Cherry for their interviews: They said they wanted anyone to be able to pick up this as their first Hollow Knight game and just start playing… Sorry, but, bullshit. the difficulty ramp is too quick, double damage comes out to early and the boss fights get more challenging quickly. See the weaver for instance, a fight I’d place around the difficulty of Grimm, but there’s double damage and you probably only have 5 health.
Also they mentioned part of the game’s difficulty was due to Hornet’s competence and utility… Ghost is canonically a better fighter than Hornet, so by that logic they should have made the game easier (yes I’m being silly about this part).
Didn’t personally watch the interview in question (or forgot by now) so I don’t know what they meant, but it definitely feels like lore wise Silksong can stand as an independent game with what I’ve discovered so far.
Regarding difficulty, Hollow Knight isn’t the only game that could have prepared you for Silksong I think.
I think what it helps a lot with is familiarity and mindset. The overall game loop is very similar.That said, I think it’s wise to give HK a try before buying Silksong. It’s a cheaper game, worth playing through if you’re into these kinds of experiences and if you don’t enjoy it, chances are Silksong will not be much fun for you either.
I think its fine for a player new to the series but you’ve got to the type of person that is willing to learn and willing to die over and over. For people who play these kinds of games its not insane to expect them to pick it up.
is nobody going to define what “runbacks” are?
I’m guessing it’s something like when you lose to a boss you have to travel a senselessly difficult and long way back to the boss to try again?
That does sound annoying and I hate when I even have to sit through a cutscene on each retry of a boss…
I’m guessing it’s something like when you lose to a boss you have to travel a senselessly difficult and long way back to the boss to try again?
That’s exactly it. The runbacks aren’t too long in this game despite all the complaints, but some of them are tricky and can get annoying if you keep dying 10 seconds into a fight.
There have been several boss fights so far where I die to the path to the boss more than the boss itself and it takes way longer to get to the boss than actually beating it.
That being said though, I do think there’s some merit to runbacks as an actual consequence for failure. I definitely strategize more cautiously because of it.
Most runbacks aren’t too bad, but fuck the Bilewater one. That shit was too hard and annoying. I had less trouble with the First Sinner than that boss.
All the homies hate bilewater, actual dogshit even with the shortcut
The devs looked at blight town from dark souls 1 and thought ‘we can do worse’. It really is a nightmare but somehow I killed the boss first try in the end
Lucky! I had to try more than ten times due to unlucky behavior in the waves before the boss, and finally managed to win only by using tools.
So it’s basically the standard platformer formula going back three or more decades?
More like the Dark Souls formula of having to trek through heaps of enemies and traps to get back to the boss. Including the whole “lose all of your money on death” thing.
Modern from games barely have run backs anymore. Atleast in souls game you can bank your currency into stats or buy consumables, you can’t reliably do that in SS.
Yes you can! There’s plenty of places where you can turn prayer beads into consumable chains.
No, just those with bad level design. Nine Sols has plenty of challenging boss fights, zero run back. Same with Sekiro, and most newer titles.
I mean, there are some really bad runbacks, but yeah most of them are fine.
How is it compared to HK?
This is the only thing I wanted to know from reviews, for whether or not to bother with Silksong. I love difficult boss fights, but cannot be arsed to spend more than half a minute doing a tedious chore in order to actually redo boss fights.
The worst one I’ve encountered apparently has a secret bench somewhere that makes it much better, and the second worst (the runback that I think everyone is talking about) is about as long as the runback to crystal guardian I think.
Some of these mother fuckers never dealt with nosk and it shows.
Unskippable cut scenes should be dragged into the street and shot.
Along with unpausable cutscenes. My kid will cry exactly during your 10 minute cutscene, and I want to know the story.
I’m guessing it’s something like when you lose to a boss you have to travel a senselessly difficult and long way back to the boss to try again?
Exactly. Lots of bosses don’t have convenient save points nearby, so you’re forced to walk back from the save point every time. And many of the treks are either long or just outright annoying (cheesy enemies, obstacle courses, etc). It’s like the 5 Minute Long Unskippable Cutscene’s more annoying older brother, because this unskippable cutscene requires actual gameplay and focus.
Hot take here, but I don’t mind them. Exactly because they take focus. They tell me when it’s time for a break. If I’m not up for the runback, then I’m not up for aother attempt at the boss.
Eh, make it optional. On hard difficulty make it a thing, medium difficulty allow it to be skipped.
Why? If you can’t get through that, you aren’t going to beat the boss.
I haven’t played silksong, but I’m just going off other games in the past for my experience.
If you make it through the hallway of meaningless denizens that just waste time and get to the boss, then die to the boss… Why waste time going through the meaningless denizens again to challenge the boss?
I can see it on higher difficulties when you need to make sure you get through the meaningless denizens perfectly in order to preserve your health and resources to have a better chance of defeating the boss.
But when you just want to experience the story on lower difficulty why make the denizens less powerful to make the boss easier when you can instead just put the save point in front of the boss in instead of the denizens? You’ve already made it through the denizens, it’s not like you’re skipping content.
Because if you can’t make it through the denizens, you can’t make it through the boss. It’s a filter.
It’s not that you can’t make it through the denizens, making it through the denizens is usually easy. It’s just a waste of time for the most part.
What a weird take. It’s about respecting the players’ time. Making it through the denizens to the boss is not challenging whatsoever. Why would you think it is? It’s just tedious, and bad level design.
We should definitely talk about how levying criticism, especially thoughtful criticism, is treated as a personal attack by other people playing the same game. It’s a bizarre form of tribalism.
Steve Bannon recognized exactly this (with gamergate) and harnessed it for his fascist ends.
We should also talk about how “Difficulty is part of the game and if you find it too difficult then this game is not for you” is not a personal attack, but a perfectly valid response to said criticism.
This excuse stopped working the day I opened a tough-as-nails game like Furi, saw it had a difficulty menu, said “That’s nice”, and went back to challenging myself against the bosses on default settings.
It’s such a huge cop-out of self control, and especially falls to acknowledge that the forms of difficulty in a game are often varied - and someone might suck at only one of them.
If the criticism is limited to “It’s too hard.” then I would agree. But that’s not a valid response to criticisms about specific design elements like “these power ups feel like they do nothing”, even if it’s a perception issue at hand you need to address the actual observation and not jump on with ‘git gud’.
I was learning a game a few months ago and struggling with understanding a specific character, so I went to the official discord and asked for advice, not complaining it was too hard, just asking for what kinds of strategies work and I was met with endless ‘try harder, scrub’ responses and literally no actual advice. I quit playing the game because the community was so up it’s own asshole.
And for sake of clarity. I don’t play HK, it’s not my preferred genre and my favorite game (that I can replay) is Noita so I am familiar with reviews that complain about difficulty. It’s fine for games to be hard and it’s also fine for people who find the games too hard to leave a review saying they found it too hard. That is part of informing buyers so people can only pick it up if they desire that kind of challenge.
It’s just a trend that is all too common in gaming. People like a game or a developer and become incapable of seeing an opinion that they disagree without taking it as a personal slight. It’s weird.
Part of that is definitely gatekeeping.
But a lot of it speaks to… people are REALLY stupid these days. You notice it a lot when buildcrafting comes up. If it is more complicated than “raise strength to the soft cap” then people start making up massive excuses on how it is too complicated to explain and you are a fool for asking and MAYBE to go watch their favorite youtuber and so forth. When I feel particularly trollish I make a “like bags of sand” joke but the reality is that they just do not have the ability to actually learn what they are talking about. They can barely even regurgitate what an influencer told them.
And that has more or less broken fighting game discourse online. Because it is no longer “oh yeah, so and so has a super easy 20 hit combo” and inherently has to be “your crouching light jab is a +4 but your crouching light kick is -2” because EVERYONE is an expert in frame counting and so forth.
Souls gamers more or less broke with Elden Ring. The base game is probably the most accessible any Souls game has ever been and most people learned fast they can just beat Malenia by doing an arcane bleed build or getting a big fricking hammer to stunlock her, but they felt like they were super cool for it (which is the point of a Souls game). Then the DLC came out. And people felt the need to shit on the games media folk saying “So… this shit is kinda hard?” before rapidly getting their poopy pushed in by silver knight equivalents.
And it very much broke people. The discourse went from “Git gud. But in all seriousness, Capra is a boss that is designed to make sure you know when to block and when to dodge” into “Git gud you fucking loser. I beat it with no problems”. And we are seeing similar discourse with Silksong as a lot of us talk about how some of the runbacks are REAL bad and get responded to with “That is just what Hollow Knight is”… even though there was like one bad runback in the entirety of that game (Mantis Lord… and Radiance is just a different kind of fuckery).
thanks. I hear a lot about this game and was wondering about it but Im a relaxagamer though so its good to know.
