With Hollow Knight: Silksong’s huge launch in full swing, community debate about its qualities and flaws has gone back and forth, with some players insisting their criticisms about things like the game's difficulty are valid and shouldn’t be instantly dismissed as "hate."
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.
There are mods and cheats for this game already—and they even run on Linux. I turn 50 next month: though I’m still playing, I don’t have as much time for gaming as I used to and my reflexes aren’t what they were. I haven’t entirely removed the challenge with mods, but I feel no shame in tweaking this game to go easier on me and chew up less of my time as punishment for failure. I wish they had these as accessibility options built-in, but I’m fine with hacking it.
Anybody telling me I should “git gud” can pound sand: I’m already good at a bunch of things that get me a paycheck. I play games so I can relax and be terrible at something for fun. I’m certainly not playing for bragging rights.
I think this game is not for you then.Harfd games are hard so that you can feelproufd of yourself after completing something hardet than you though you could. You may not complete the story but if you “git gud” you may actually enjoy it more.
Some games are not meant to be relaxing. Why would you even play a hard game if you want something easy?
I don’t mind difficult games. I recognise that they exist as a kind of pushback against mobile games and casual games that have risen in popularity. I don’t mind that they exist. Likewise, I strongly believe that gaming is for everybody, but not every game has to be for everybody.
I think it’s perfectly fine, though, to ask the question: if the game — any hard game, to include the Dark Souls game and its spinoffs (e.g. Elden Ring) and knockoffs (e.g. Breath of the Wild) — had an easy mode, where virtually anyone could win it eventually, would that truly make the game less fun for people who like hard games? What if the game were hard by default, and easy mode cost $5 extra? That way, you would never be presented with the option, but those who want it can get it for a slight upcharge. (Maybe less on a $20 game, I’m thinking the $5 would be for a $70 game.) Case in point: Final Fantasy XV was never hard. But for 49¢, you could buy a “DLC”/“mod” that made gas cost half — 5 gil instead of 10 for any fill-up — and also made hotels (which give a big XP buff) half price. So one early-game strategy was equipping a ring that would not pay out experience when you camp, and saving your XP (which is normally paid out every time you sleep) until you could afford a room at the XP-doubling Galden Quay resort hotel, gaining you several levels by then. With the DLC/mod, you could afford it much sooner, and you could actually do it a few times, setting you up for later parts of the game. It wasn’t an easy mode, but it did soften the grind a bit, and it wasn’t presented as an option in the game. You kinda had to know about it and go look for it.
I actually think there’s something to that. Making a game and selling parts of it never really goes down well with players. But most players can’t beat hard games. So what if instead of new games being $70 or $80, they were $50 or $60 still, but people who want help can buy things that will make the game easier. Let those players subsidize the ones who are good enough to beat it without them, incentivising them to get better. Ideally, to get better at that game so they uninstall the helpers, beat it without them, then when the next one comes out, they’re ready.
I don’t hate hard games. But I’m not going to pay for them. If they make their money off people who have that much time on their hands, that’s fine. It’s a sound business decision. But I also think a game can’t say “we wish we made more money” while intentionally excluding players who maybe have full-time jobs, families, or other valid reasons to not learn the perfect button combinations and ultra-precise timing some of these games require. I think if they could find a way to include those players while not putting off their base, they’d have a winning solution on their hands. And no, we’re not gonna quit our jobs or neglect our families to “git gud” like we live with our parents and are half our age.
I agree with most of it, except I think it’s fine for developers to make a hard (or very hard game) if that’s their vision. Not every games is for everyone. And if developers are fine with targeting just a niche, there is no issue with it.
That being said, I do have issue with players / gamers saying there should be no easy mode. Adding an easy mode doesn’t take away anything for anyone who isn’t playing easy mode. All it takes away is their ability to brag that they finished a game half the people can’t finish. There are ways for developers to handle even that. Give some special achievement or something for those who finish on non-easy mode, but that’s again up to developers, and I am fine if there isn’t one.
Rockband was a good example of achievement-gating the higher difficulties. You got an achievement for beating the game on Medium, Hard, or Expert. And doing it on one of the two higher ones would unlock the ones below if you didn’t already do it on those difficulties. So if you were good enough to beat it on Expert, you got three or four achievements. Now I know you’re probably thinking “wait how do you beat Rockband”? By completing the Endless Setlist, which is unlocked when you beat the story mode. The story mode just unlocked the higher tiers of difficulty. The Endless Setlist was all the songs. Six hours and 20 minutes minimum. Oh, and when I said “three or four achievements”? The fourth one is if you do it without pausing or failing (at any difficulty Medium or higher). That one was called the “Bladder of Steel Award.” Yes, I own it. You food prep in advance, you do it on vocals, and you time your bathroom breaks very carefully (and drop a deuce in advance as well). But those three achievements for beating it at difficulty? Those are per instrument. I only have the gold (expert) vocals award. I may have the bronze (medium) bass award, but I never got any for guitar or drums.
That’s just one example of difficulty and incentives. I like how Deus Ex 1 did it, too. On Easy, you did more damage and took less. On Hard, you did less and took more. On Medium, it was balanced. On Realistic… everyone takes more. That was how I played. I wasn’t getting hit. I played a sniper. Even on Easy it was hard to one-shot enemies with a good gun and a headshot. For some reason that didn’t kill them. On Realistic, a shot to center mass with my .30-06 will drop any human enemy. A shot to the head will drop the augmented ones. So that’s how I play… played. It’s not on Xbox and it’s not on the Mac. My Mac can run it through Whisky, but I haven’t played much more than parts of the first level, so I’m not sure what the compatibility looks like later.
Well, you know the 30.06 ammo is kinda hard to come by, so I didn’t use it all the time. I’d avoid combat on Liberty Island and just hoard ammo. I modded a mod for it and made a few changes — like after UNATCO “cuts through” the NSF “like a hot knife through butter,” with my mod, they don’t loot the bodies. So I do. Bit of a reward for getting through without being detected. So then I trade the pistol for the silenced version. The mod that I modded, Shifter, makes unique versions of each guns with a stat or two buffed. I could tell you where the pistol is (Lebedev’s bed on the plane) but I forget where the silenced pistol was. May have been in the canals in Hong Kong — so, not worth waiting for. I mean as opposed to slapping the weapon mods on the regular one. So for most guys I’d shoot with the silenced 10mm. Sniper’s really only good at range. But, that one mission, where they drop you on top of the 'ton (the hotel in NYC, supposed to be Hilton, but… copyrights) I take everybody out with the sniper rifle (it’s like 8 guys tops) before dropping down to street level. I can’t remember if it’s when you go to Dowd to get the plans to scuttle the freighter, or when you go back to NYC to send the singal from NSF HQ. Been way too long since I played, but really only a year or two. I wish they’d put it on Xbox.
I don’t mind difficult games. I recognise that they exist as a kind of pushback against mobile games and casual games that have risen in popularity
You got that backwards: difficult games are as old as arcades. If anything, casual games exist as pushback against difficult games, not the other way around.
I grew up with Atari and the NES. I think it’s actually both ways. I don’t think casual games were ever really a pushback against difficult games though, I think they were just trying to reach a wider audience. Take Subway Surfers for example, it’s probably the best example of the casual (phone) game. Anyone can pick up and play it, and if you fail, you just start over. IIRC you had to watch an ad first though? I dunno, I got hooked on it and I bought the coin doubler for $5 which also removed the mandatory ads (not the ones you can opt to watch to double some prizes or open ad-gated prize boxes though). That’s all I ever paid for it — far less than any paid game. Of course you can’t “win” at it either, it just goes on forever. On consoles, you also have Animal Crossing and the like. Games that never end but you can’t lose, either. Like you can get stung by wasps or scorpions or bit by tarantulas (though the latter two encounters are rare), but you just pass out and wake up in front of your house with nothing lost. But no, I don’t think casual (e.g. Animal Crossing) or accessible (e.g. Subway Surfers) was an active “push back” against the “NES Hard” trend of hard gaming.
Of course, arcade games weren’t just hard to be hard — like Subway Surfers and other phone games, they exist to get you to spend money. An arcade game that isn’t generating revenue isn’t desirable to people who operate arcades.
Yes indeed, when arcade games were the norm devs specifically designed for absurd difficulty ramp ups and cheap deaths to finagle another quarter out of you.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we don’t have enough language to talk about difficulty in a productive way.
You could keep all the boss mechanics the same in a game but add a 1 minute unstoppable cut scene at the start and the game is “more difficult” because it takes you longer to learn boss patterns and experiment with different strategies. But that feels very different to narrowing the windows to react or expanding the move set of a boss which feels different again to changing the values so you need to grind more/fewer levels or resources to pass it.
“Runback too long” and “git gud” sound a lot like people talking past eachother, but maybe thats just an artifact of the journalist reporting rather than the discussion itself
I think we have the language and you just proved it, but often people are just not reading or thinking enough about other perspectives before talking, and so do talk past each other like this.
I like your comparison to an unskippable cutscene; these are, I think, universally reviled at the start of boss fights. For some reason I don’t think long runbacks are reviled in nearly the same way, yet repeatedly running through the same area with no challenges (jumping off the staircase for the shortcut to Ornstein & Smough in DS1 does not count ffs!) is not really any less boring.
The ideal runback to me has a few enemies that you can soon work out how to run around. You actually get a feeling of having accomplished something, but don’t have to get perfect at defeating those enemies, nor waste time doing so (running will always be faster than fighting, pretty much).
I think “git gud” is just a knee-jerk meme though - there is no reason to believe that someone saying it has engaged in the slightest with what has been said to that point; they’re just trolling.
Regarding difficulty: I’ve lived through the 80’s, where difficulty was ramped up to make the game last longer, as you only had precious few kilobytes to fill with content. I’ve grown to hate difficult games.
It is your right as creator to go that way if you wish, but it is my right as player to hate your guts if I buy your game and it kills me over and over again in the first minutes.
Another 80s child here. The difficulty of ganes of that era was to extend tge game duration and made them seem longer. They were designed that way to eat quarters at the arcade, the original “games as a service”. What happened with home computer and console games at the time was that developers used the same paradigms for “buy to own” games that they used for arcade, thus the idea of limited lives, game over screens, high dificulty, etc.
If it is clear that the topic is Impressionist art, I would not go. If I buy the ticket to see Expressionism and get Impressionism instead, I would fell upset.
I’m in act 2 and while Im in love with the game, I can agree. The game could be impossible for people who aren’t already very good at platformers. Benches are very sparse and money is always an issue. I hope Team Cherry make the game more reasonable through updates.
I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
I think the big difference is that HK had a smooth difficulty curve as you slowly unlock new abilities. Silksong by comparison picks up where HK left off and is immediately hard which makes it hard to approach for new players. Early game areas feel as hard as late game areas from the first game. That’s throwing everybody off who is either new to the franchise or hasn’t played Hollow Knight since it came out checks notes 8 years ago
Early game areas feel as hard as late game areas from the first game.
Are you sure about that? It’s been a while since I played Hollow Knight, but other than Hunter’s Marsh I think Sillksong has been comparable to or slightly harder than equivalent parts of the Hollow Knight. The enemies are tougher, but you also get more tools to deal with them so it evens out. Mostly thinking of the projectiles here, but the mobility difference also can’t be understated; you can abuse dash attacks in Silksong in a way you never could in Hollow Knight. Also I haven’t quite (or at all really) gotten the hang of it but the game might’ve been designed with parrying in mind, which would allow you to avoid a lot of damage because many of the harder enemies are warrior types.
Ya, Hollow Knight’s first areas like forgotten crossroads and greenpath were a lot easier. There werent any mechanics you have to worry about other than jumping and attacking, and most enemies you faced just walk slowly towards you. Bosses were also fairly straightforward.
By comparison Silksong has you fighting tougher enemies that could deal 2x damage, and quick bosses right off the bat like Bell Beast which kills you in 3 hits. Healing taking your entire bar also makes platforming more difficult because newbies will often be low HP and not have enough silk to heal.
Yes, Hornet is way faster and stronger than the knight but that kinda assumes you’re good at dashing and pogo jumping, which many people fail at in the start.
Ya, Hollow Knight’s first areas like forgotten crossroads and greenpath were a lot easier. There werent any mechanics you have to worry about other than jumping and attacking, and most enemies you faced just walk slowly towards you. Bosses were also fairly straightforward.
Compared to what areas in Silksong? Because Moss grotto and Marrow seem to have roughly the same range (and difficulty) of enemies as forgotten crossroads and greenpath. I think you also have somewhat rose tinted glasses regarding the starting areas of Hollow Knight because most enemies weren’t walking slowly towards you. I’d say it was more of a 50/50 split between walking enemies and flying enemies with some flying enemies shooting projectiles and flying projectile shooters are much harder than the one projectile spitting regular enemy in the first 2 areas of Silksong.
By comparison Silksong has you fighting tougher enemies that could deal 2x damage, and quick bosses right off the bat like Bell Beast which kills you in 3 hits. Healing taking your entire bar also makes platforming more difficult because newbies will often be low HP and not have enough silk to heal.
I think the comparison here isn’t as one to one with Hollow Knight. Silksong is much faster paced. Hornet is more mobile and heals faster (and heals more at once), so bosses killing in 3 hits might not be that much harder because it’s easier evade attacks and healing is faster. Bosses killing in 5 hits in Hollow Knight might end up being harder than Silksong because healing is a much slower and deliberate action and you might not get a time to heal with an unfamiliar boss.
From my experience grotto and marrow have been comparable to crossroad and greepath. It gets harder after marrow but Hollow Knight also got harder when you got into fungal wastes. Maybe the pace change makes you feel like it’s harder than Hollow knight but so far I haven’t felt like it was noticeably harder than my first Hollow knight playthrough.
I mean…it’s kinda silly to go into Silksong without playing Hollow Knight yeah? Unless Silksong has something at the beginning that sort of catches you up to speed OR is like a Souls or Final Fantasy where it has nothing to do with the previous game entry.
But If I were a fan of the series I would hope the game ramped up difficulty and didn’t hold my hand for the sequel. That, in my opinion, would be a worthy purchase. I had playing sequels that kind of “reset”.
It’s the latter of the two. The focus is on a side character from the original game, but takes place in an entirely different map/kingdom. You don’t need to have played Hollow Knight, but there are little lore pieces that tickle the brain if you have (and didn’t just skip over all the dialogue). I’ve been really enjoying the game so far, and there’s only one runback that’s felt REALLY tedious, but it’s on what I’m assuming is an optional boss based on what I’ve played so far.
The thing is, there is no reason not to add accessibility settings.
Hollow Knight and Silksong are beautiful games with an intriguing world, great characters and lots of areas to explore. There’s no reason to gatekeep games like these from people that just can’t beat them because they are too hard.
Just add a simple accessibility menu where you can scale health, damage and loot drops. It’s almost no work to implement, players can still try the regular difficulty and turn it down when it’s too much and speedrunners can make their lifes more difficult. Everyone wins.
In a game like Hollow Knight (and Silksong), I can’t help but feel such a crude setting would end up doing more harm than good. I mean, let’s take health for example. Increasing your health wouldn’t help much if you can’t handle what the game is throwing at you; the few extra masks the game gives you only really help if you can handle the difficulty but need mistake tolerance, otherwise enemies will still hit you and you’ll still fail at platforming and fall into spikes. Fundamentally the difficulty of a game like Hollow Knight comes from a lot more than just damage numbers, so a naive difficulty scale would only give an illusion of accessibility that would fade away at the first difficult part, and in that case it’s better for everyone involved if the inaccessibility of the game is easily apparent.
the few extra masks the game gives you only really help if you can handle the difficulty but need mistake tolerance
Increasing mistake tolerance already increases accessibility, even if you still have to manage a tough platformer part.
Of course the options given are just examples to get it done quickly. Accessibility options can be a a lot more nuanced, even going as far as altering level structures to provide pathways for players that can’t platform.
The point of my post was that for all I care the difficulty options can go all the way to invincibility, one hitting every boss and skipping every platformer segment. It does not reduce my enjoyment of these games if other people can play the game in a way they want to.
The thing is, I can’t personally think of an accessibility setting that would serve the intended function without removing the sense of having finally met the challenge. I struggle with difficult games too, and I don’t always complete them. That struggle and uncertainty is part of the journey though to me and if there was a difficulty tweak available as soon as I got frustrated the first time, it would erase those stakes (for me).
I mentioned Celeste as a positive example. I did feel a satisfaction with completing that game, but if not for the highly emotional personal journey of the narrative potion of that game I don’t think it would have been as satisfying. At every point I knew there was an easy way out, and staying frustrated and gradually getting better was a conscious choice without any real stakes attached to it other than my own self-satisfaction. The was never any worry that I’d fail to complete the game. Those stakes do make eventually winning feel real.
So I just can’t think of any suggestions for this. It’s elitist or ableist I realise, and I’m not happy with that. The creator certainly was aware of games like Celeste, and they had plenty of time to consider those options. Before casting any judgment or making suggestions on their behalf, I’d be really interested to hear what they have to say about the choice. Do they think the struggle has to be as firmly set as it is for the triumph to feel as elating? I can’t read their minds, so if there’s an interview where they address that I’d be all ears.
To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.
And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.
I hate to answer a rhetorical question directly, so please forgive that; my satisfaction would have been much greater, if I was able to achieve those things. I have a realistic sense of what I was able to do given the challenge that I faced and the skill I was able to muster, and although more success would have been sweeter, I am able to be content because I have a shared context with other people who faced the exact same challenge.
I know many have been unhappy with what they are able to accomplish in games with no difficulty settings, and I see it as a choice by the creator to set people apart. It’s a harsh choice that seems most appropriate in grim and harsh stories.
Those who say it is passé argue so very convincingly, but I can’t hide that it appeals to me. It speaks to something primitive, perhaps anhedonic. I was wondering if it’s a generational preference more prevalent among people who grew up during the era of “Nintendo hard”, and if single-difficulty games will fade away in time completely. Maybe this game should have been called Swansong, if so.
I have to agree. Although I would have said “the real easy difficulty is realizing that not every game is for you”. And sometimes that includes really popular games, ones that everyone else seems to be enjoying. And that’s ok.
That’s fair, but I also don’t see a problem in voicing criticism about aspects of the game I don’t like. Especially if I do like the game as a whole. People should not see that as an attack on their personal enjoyment of the game.
Sure, and as a consumer of a product, you are within your rights to do so. But I think that a lot of times there’s an underlying thread of entitlement that comes with a lot of the criticisms. The tone suggests more ,“how dare you make something I can’t play” and less “I’m not suited for this challenge”. There’s surprisingly little in the way of complaints about the game design that read as things that fit the theme and game vision. There are a few, but most aren’t.
And full disclosure I’m speaking from the standpoint of someone who while interested in a lot of the “git gud” genre games, can’t cut it 90% of the time. It took me realizing that I just wasn’t who those games were for before I was able to look at some of my options and realize they were just me and my sour grapes.
Yea. I wont dismiss this criticism as hate, but I will dismiss it as dumb. The game was designed to be a challenge. Not everyone is up to that challenge, that’s fine. The game isn’t meant for you, then.
My friend can’t play the Dark Souls games. He’s really interested in the setting and has given a few multiple attempts, but the difficulty curve just isn’t for him, so he just doesn’t play them.
Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.
Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring. Hell, even Ninja Gaiden went away from boss runbacks starting from the second game, and that came out in 2008!
I can’t say I’ve gotten to some of the examples people have mentioned as “annoying; bad design”, so I’ll leave judgement until I get there. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with runbacks if it’s part of the design and the boss is the culmination of that.
Stakes of Marika are definitely there to appeal to a wider audience. I personally don’t care for them, as for most areas in DS I enjoyed trying to claw my way back to the boss unharmed. It was like a puzzle.
It’s fine to criticise things, but I personally think “make checkpoint outside of the boss” the criticism is not a good one. At the end of the day, that’s all personal opinion.
A lot of DS1 runbacks were true runbacks where you could just run past everything. Once you’d worked out the running, they weren’t too irritating, but some were a bit long. In DS3 a number of runbacks had unavoidable enemies on the way where you could mess up and eat a hit and then be down an Estus charge.
The main two problems are:
boredom. Punishing you for failure by forcing you to walk through a section of level again for a couple of minutes isn’t fun for anyone. It’s not “stakes”; it’s boring. Repeatedly dying to the challenging boss is not boring because you are constantly trying to improve, learn its moves, and beat it. Running through the same path is boring. Anything boring is bad game design.
Risk of unrelated mistakes. This is more subjective, but for me there should be some separation between different challenges; there should be a feeling that after you have convincingly solved one challenge, you shouldn’t have prove yourself against it again too much. Doing so is, yes, boring again, but also frustrating. Things that are frustrating (to some) can be good game design, but I don’t want to be frustrated. Whiffing a roll you’ve done successfully many times and being set back on an unrelated challenge is, to me, annoying.
You’re getting voted up for your opinion, and I’m getting down for mine. Strange. Things you say are unfun for you are fine for me, like I said in my post, I do believe it’s personal opinion.
I’m not denying that there has to be design intent in here, but I take great issue with people stating “runbacks are unfun” as a matter of fact. Again, if it’s taken into consideration with time and how the boss mechanic works, that’s simply how the game is designed. I respect everyone’s opinion and their thoughts being the opposite, but I don’t think it’s a universal truth that must be upheld with every game.
Again, maybe I’ll feel differently regarding Silksong specifically as I get further. So far I don’t take umbrage with it’s runback design.
Well, some opinions are more valid than others, even when there is subjectivity… of course, I would say that.
“Design intent” is not an excuse for unfun mechanics. Design intent matters - for example if you’re complaining that it took you 50 attempts to do a boss and you’re frustrated, but other people are completing the same bosses in fewer attempts and enjoying it, the intent of the designers and the spectrum of opinions is absolutely critical. But this isn’t that.
Someone else in the thread made a great example: would you be so “design intent is all important” if the designers put a 1-minute unskippable cutscene before the boss? To me, and I think to almost everybody, that would be fuckin awful. Everyone hates unskippable cutscenes you have to sit through repeatedly. How does that differ, really, from a typical 1-minute runback?
I think he’s being upvoted and you’re being downvoted because boss runbacks have been around for a long time and both the industry and community have since come to a consensus that they’re just objectively bad game design. They don’t add anything of value to a game and their existence is a detriment to the experience. I don’t think you’ll find a single person who holds the opinion that they’re fun. People like yourself may tolerate them, but a tolerable inconvenience is not the same thing as fun. You’ve actually gone exceptionally out of your way to avoid calling them fun.
Like with anything, not all personal opinions are going to be held in equal regard. And your take here is going to be an outlier so I wouldn’t be surprised if you continue to get this reception.
I haven’t gone out of my way. While I haven’t used the word “fun”, I did say I enjoyed most runbacks in Dark Souls as a sort of puzzle. Being downvoted for a subjective opinion is absurd, especially when the person I’m responding to also has a subjective opinion. But nice to know my opinion has less value.
Anyway, I don’t really want to go in circles with this since I feel like both sides here have said what they want to say.
I’ll just leave with an example of a mechanic I find unfun and wish would go away, as a sort of olive branch of understanding that opinions are opinions. In Breath of the Wild and similar games, I hate the weapon/item degradation mechanic. I understand their design goals with it, and I understand how removing it from those games would change quite a bit of how they want the game to run, but I’d be much happier if it were to disappear completely.
It’s undeniable that the challenge is part of the mystique for some games. I note with great respect the fact that Celeste offers accessible difficulty tweaks. I beat that game and it was a great experience.
Both choices can be good, when made with intention and care, and when motivated by specific goals as a creator.
With dark souls, at least the ones I’ve played, the difficulty can be tweaked by engaging with the world, learning the progression system and the character options that suit you. For example I didn’t beat DSI until I tried playing a magic user, because I’m slightly bad at those games. DSIII was easy enough by comparison to beat as a straight up STR build, but that’s beside the point. Difficulty is a design choice, and the conversation around it is tiresome when it ignores the aims of the creators.
Let me start by saying I have a few thousand hours in Hollow Knight and I do for the most part enjoy the Git Gud type of games.
There are entire genres of games that I can’t enjoy because they’re too open/chill and if they had a hard mode I would probably really like them. This is the same problem the other way.
Maybe wait and some modders might make the QoL parts you want available, maybe never play it, maybe watch a streamer do it. But not every game has to be fun for everyone.
There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.
These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.
I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.
“Nintendo hard” isn’t about difficulty it is about entire games being based around knowledge checks, like having to remember to pre-swing when you jump particular gaps or get knocked into the gap in og ninja gaiden for instance.
When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.
Time will tell. These games all have so much talk about how certain builds are “cheese” or how the ashes make the game too easy or whatever - that’s all just dumb. The game itself is the difficulty settings, sometimes.
It seems too early to say how Silksong will be remembered, and Team Cherry still only had two games under its belt so it’s arguably too early to judge them. Will their next game be totally different and a massive risk, or do we have a Vivaldi on our hands, doing masterful variations on a theme?
I think the game is difficult, probably a bit more difficult than the first game (which I haven’t played in over 5 years, so I might be wildly off), but I don’t find it unreasonable.
I know a lot of the time it’s my fault that I died, because I’m someone who likes to trade damage with enemies, which just isn’t really possible in this game, but I can’t stop doing it.
As for runbacks, I think there are a few weird ones, that can be terrible, depending on if you found/unlocked the nearest bench, but otherwise I don’t remember anything truly awful.
spoiler
For example the Chapel of the Beast in Hunter’s March I think, if you didn’t unlock the trapped bench, that’s pretty close (even then it’s still kinda long, although you’re basically just running).
The fight against the gatekeeper, at the entrance of the Citadel, can have a long runback from the worm area. But the fleas, along with a bench, also move directly in front of the boss room, theoretically you might be able to do that before you fight the boss.
A high difficulty is not inherently good game design. Making a game more approachable through lower difficulty settings with additional checkpoints doesn’t make it worse for people who like a challenge. It just makes it enjoyable to more people.
Claiming it’s down to “artistic vision” just feels dishonest. You could claim Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you… but why? How is it a bad thing if more people can enjoy something?
Cup Head is a great example. It’s a fantastic game with an art style that younger kids love. But it’s too difficult for most kids, which doesn’t make the game better, it just locks them out from a game they’d otherwise love.
Following up on this, I think the studio ghibli is a good example of where community adding accessibility in the form of mods or cheats (or fan subs or dubs in the case of ghibli)
Is it not fair for the game developers’ artistic vision to not be accessible to all? Accessibility is nice, expands the potential audience, but if it compromises my artistic vision and I’m ok with giving up reach and money to preserve it, that doesn’t make my game bad or my vision invalid.
It would be ridiculous to call up the bar or the ama and complain to them that becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not accessible to all.
One last addition, adding control remapping, color options, and text to speech are true accessibility. Easy mode is fake accessibility
Easy mode is not fake accessibility. Celeste has the correct idea in allowing players adjust the difficulty for accessibility purposes.
Not everyone has the same reaction speed, same cognitive abilities, same eyesight. There are people who can only use one hand and that automatically makes reacting to attacks many times harder, should they be excluded from being able to enjoy the game because they are not physically capable enough for the boss fights?
And boss fights are probably 5% of the game anyway!
No, I think if something can be done to allow more people to enjoy the game, then it should not be considered a bad thing to do it. You can not make it accessible to everyone in the world, but if there are time and resources to add accessibility, it should not be neglected.
And I don’t agree with the use of artistic intent as an excuse to not include specific accessibility options: take closed captions for example, they are made to allow deaf and hard of hearing people enjoy the content even when they can’t hear the sound. A lot of media is built on sound being a cornerstone of the experience, and people who will use closed captions will have no notion of it, but does it mean that they should be excluded completely?
Just because people who use the accessibility options will not experience everything in a way the author intended does not mean they should not be experience it at all, and in this day no one really complains about game including captions or colourblind options, but anything that might affect difficulty is, for some reason, out of the question and is only subject to the artist’s vision of it.
I agree with making accessible controllers with special layouts and allowing custom control bindings to accommodate those who are differently abled.
Those can be accommodated without meaningfully altering the game. Changing the gameplay is different however. Not that adding more difficulty options is a bad thing, I don’t mean to disparage anyone by calling it fake accessibility, just that I don’t think it’s the same as other options because it fundamentally changes the experience compared to other options that I considered “real”
Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you…
I feel this is a false equivalence.
If you wanted to make a movie analogy, I’d say it’s more like a movie having subtle subtext or context which would make it’s message or intent more difficult to comprehend.
Imagine if someone watched The Cabin in the Woods (satire movie about horror movies) and said it was a bad movie because it wasn’t scary.
I think its fair to say that person would have low film literacy at least.
How do we compensate for that? Should movies start offering accessibility features so every viewer can have the ability to know foreshadowing, film cliches, or meta-narrative devices?
I feel like giving viewers an option before a movie to say “i have low media literacy”, which would result in popups during the movie to say “hey, this is a callback to the Hellraiser franchise” would be insulting to the creators.
The film wasn’t made for casual movie viewers, it was made for a specific audience. The creators aren’t obliged to make it more easily digestible.
Edit:
Satire falls apart when it’s spoon fed.
If difficulty is part of the games design, then reducing it is functionally similar to explicitly stating irony to a viewer.
But The Cabin In The Woods is exactly what I’m talking about. A product with mass appeal that still caters to a small group of people. Much like Paul Verhovens old movies. You can watch them as dumb action or social criticism.
And movies have several accessibility features. Things like subtitles, which often translate cultural references or jokes that don’t directly translate to viewers from foreign countries. Descriptive audio tracks for visually impaired, directors commentary to learn things behind the scenes. Many services and devices also allow you to even out dynamics and enhance speech.
The problem with games that have a too high difficulty threshold isn’t that you’re missing out on some hidden subtext. It’s that you will never get to see 70% of the game, for absolutely no good reason.
Cuphead is such a good example of this, according to xbox achievement stats 31% never made it past the first part of the game, 72% never got to the end of the game.
Accessibility in film delivers the same work to more people. Accessibility in games can cross the line into creating a different work entirely, because the interaction itself is the art, not just the visuals or sound.
Saying “most players never saw the end of Cuphead” isn’t proof of failure; it’s proof of selectivity. Just like not everyone finishes Infinite Jest, but it doesn’t mean Wallace failed as a writer.
Cuphead was made to invoke arcade game feelings. The gameplay is brutal by design. That’s the point.
It’s like watching Terrifier and throwing up half way through, storming out of the cinema and saying “the acting was good but it was too violent, I wish I could watch a version of the movie without the gore”
But it doesn’t, accessibility in film does not deliver the same work to more people. Films are translated, dubbed and subbed to be approachable. Adding voice acting from talent that were never involved in the original film. It’s all about adapting the film to fit a wider audience.
The fact that gamers think games are somehow different and the “git gud” approach is just pointless elitism. How would Cuphead, Super Meatboy or Silk Song be a worse game if they had an easy game mode where you had more life and/or checkpoints? How does that setting change the experience of someone playing in normal, veteran or hardcore mode?
Subtitles/dubs are translations. They adapt language, not pacing, cinematography, editing, or structure. That’s fundamentally different from altering a game’s difficulty, which changes the mechanics, the thing the art is built from and differentiates it from other mediums.
A better analogy:
Subtitles are like adding glasses so more people can see the same painting.
Easy mode is like repainting sections of the canvas so it’s “clearer.” You can call both “accessibility,” but one preserves the work, the other mutates it.
Furthermore, language isn’t a good metric by which to compare analogies because games are also translated.
“How would the game be worse if it had an easy mode?”
Adding an easy mode changes the experience even for hardcore players because:
Design intent shifts. Once multiple difficulties exist, developers design around them. Balancing, encounter pacing, even story beats get shaped by the lowest common denominator.
Cultural meaning shifts. If a work is known as “brutal but fair,” its identity collapses when an easy bypass exists. (Dark Souls without consequence isn’t Dark Souls; Cuphead without punishment isn’t Cuphead.)
Easy mode doesn’t just let more people in; it makes it a different game. Saying “just don’t play easy” is like saying “why not release a PG-rated Terrifier with no gore? Horror fans can still watch the R version, so what’s the harm?”
Terrifier is available in several cut versions for specific regions / services. Which is incredibly common for movies in general and have been since the 70s. Which you do to reach a wider audience.
Both Silk Song and Cuphead already have additional difficulties. They’re already balancing difficulties, they’ve just decided to gate keep gamers who are not able to play difficult games.
If Gears Of War and Call Of Duty had hardcore and veteran as the only difficulty setting, it wouldn’t make them more interesting games or make a statement about the horrors of war and the fragility of man. It would just make less people enjoy them, for no good reason.
A high difficulty threshold is bad game design. And it’s exclusive to people who have physical disabilities or limitations, or other reasons to why they can’t play overly difficult games.
And I say that as someone who loves to beat games in the higher difficulty tiers. But as someone who also wants more people to be able to enjoy the games I enjoy and who’s happy game design has improved since the 80s.
“But as someone who also wants more people to be able to enjoy the games I enjoy”
Its really not about you is it? I get where you are coming from but in the end its people who make the games who decite what kind of experience they want to make. Sometimes their visio does not click with everyone and that is allright.
I’ll write my response as if you’re being sincere;
Cabin in the Woods is one of my all time favourite movies, but the entire premise is built around horror movie tropes.
The “gods” mentioned at the end of the movie are the movie viewers themselves. They “demand blood” (watching a splatter movie for the sake of watching people get killed).
It’s a requirement that “the virgin” be the last one killed, but the death is optional (this is a staple of horror movies; the ‘Final Girl’)
One of the literary devices the movie toys with is the idea that ALL the horror movies we’ve seen are part of the same universe, and the guys in the offices are the ones pulling the strings to entertain us.
The entire movie is one giant nudge-nudge, wink-wink for people who love to get meta with horror movies.
If you enjoyed it regardless, that’s fine, but my point was that it would be a bad product if it tried to accommodate for viewers such as yourself.
No I really did like the movie and yes it was full of stereo types like the chad, the stoner, the girl etc but I never came to think of it as satire or that we are the gods demanding the blood. But it was a good movie, I liked it.
Small aside: the characters aren’t stereotypes, they’re archetypes. This is another example of the satire, as well as the gas station attendant from the start (I think he was called the Harbinger?)
Why everything should be for everybody? And why artists should care about your opikion when they are creating what they want to create.
Cup head is great example. Everything in the game is meticiusly hand crafted. The big part why its so popular is the difficulty that forces you to focus on the aninations and sprites. The difficulty also is economical in game as labor intensive as cup head. Because every sprite was hand drawn devs could not just churn unlimited levels and the games lenght came from the difficulty. Making the game easy would ruin the pacing of the game.
Games are art form like any other. There are mainstream movies, plays, songs, paintings and games etc etc etc. that try to reach as large audience as they can. But there is also obscure art pieces that only small group of people can enjoy. And both ways are fine
I find it obnoxious when people bitch about desing choices that devs have consciously made. Its not like they have any obligations to make a game in one way or another.
I like the game, but I definitely think it deserves some criticism. I really don’t get the thinking behind not placing a bench directly in front of every boss arena. The run-backs don’t make the game harder, just more frustrating. It’s also something I disliked in older Souls games, but thankfully they realized the problem and fixed it in Elden Ring. And some mechanics are just baffling, like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench. Why on earth would they do this, with currency already being as sparse as it is?
I have been running around the citadel, and with more fast travel options there I’ve gotten in the habit of constantly going back to belhart and making rosary necklaces. Sekiro had a similar mechanic with gold pouches. Also in this stage of game I’m finding a lot of silkeaters, so if I take a wrong turn at alburquerque and don’t want to get locked into a fight or weird platforming area I can just recover my beads. It gets better kids. Keep playing.
like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench
I found this in one small area, which was probably done for the flavor, since it makes thematic sense there, but otherwise it’s always been permanent unlocks.
First is in a house, that you need to pay to enter, with a bench and vendor inside.
The ones I originally meant are below the Citadel, there are a few rooms, with two or three benches each, but you have to pay 15 every time to use the bench for a short time.
Dunno which one of those you mean, that can be made permanently free, or if there’s even others I forgot or haven’t found myself.
yea, that’s entirely valid. I love these games (Metroidvanias) because of the exploration and worldbuilding. The combat is a way to advance further into that world, but it’s just a means to an end to me. Make it too tough, and you’re preventing me from enjoying the parts I like.
I played a good 4 or 5 hours of Silksong so far and loving it. It’s a little tough though, and I think it could use a nerf.
I haven’t played this yet, so I don’t know anything about what difficulty settings it may or may not have But in general, I see difficulty settings as an accessibility feature.
I liked the way that Ender Magnolia did it, where, at a save point, you could adjust several settings to customize the difficulty. I was able to temporarily make it slightly easier just for a few bosses that I lost my patience for.
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
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.
Yeah I think as long as the devs are forward about it no problem. I have plenty of ‘hard things’ in my day to day life and I’m not looking for more of that in a videogame. Give me a Stardew or Factorio everytime - I want to relax and design things. Different games are for different people and that’s a good thing. Any game made to satisfy everyone will almost certainly satisfy no one.
Absolutely, it’s important to know what you like and want. Hell, lots of people work off vibes and go through phases where certain game types stimulate them, then fall off of those. Like MMOs and online FPS used to be my main thing, now I stick to single player story driven games. I’m not about to go loudly pout about how Stellaris doesn’t work for me and should be changed to appeal specifically to my wants, too busy with other games (and life).
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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.
There are mods and cheats for this game already—and they even run on Linux. I turn 50 next month: though I’m still playing, I don’t have as much time for gaming as I used to and my reflexes aren’t what they were. I haven’t entirely removed the challenge with mods, but I feel no shame in tweaking this game to go easier on me and chew up less of my time as punishment for failure. I wish they had these as accessibility options built-in, but I’m fine with hacking it.
Anybody telling me I should “git gud” can pound sand: I’m already good at a bunch of things that get me a paycheck. I play games so I can relax and be terrible at something for fun. I’m certainly not playing for bragging rights.
I think this game is not for you then.Harfd games are hard so that you can feelproufd of yourself after completing something hardet than you though you could. You may not complete the story but if you “git gud” you may actually enjoy it more.
Some games are not meant to be relaxing. Why would you even play a hard game if you want something easy?
I’m very provoced by this. Sorry.
I don’t mind difficult games. I recognise that they exist as a kind of pushback against mobile games and casual games that have risen in popularity. I don’t mind that they exist. Likewise, I strongly believe that gaming is for everybody, but not every game has to be for everybody.
I think it’s perfectly fine, though, to ask the question: if the game — any hard game, to include the Dark Souls game and its spinoffs (e.g. Elden Ring) and knockoffs (e.g. Breath of the Wild) — had an easy mode, where virtually anyone could win it eventually, would that truly make the game less fun for people who like hard games? What if the game were hard by default, and easy mode cost $5 extra? That way, you would never be presented with the option, but those who want it can get it for a slight upcharge. (Maybe less on a $20 game, I’m thinking the $5 would be for a $70 game.) Case in point: Final Fantasy XV was never hard. But for 49¢, you could buy a “DLC”/“mod” that made gas cost half — 5 gil instead of 10 for any fill-up — and also made hotels (which give a big XP buff) half price. So one early-game strategy was equipping a ring that would not pay out experience when you camp, and saving your XP (which is normally paid out every time you sleep) until you could afford a room at the XP-doubling Galden Quay resort hotel, gaining you several levels by then. With the DLC/mod, you could afford it much sooner, and you could actually do it a few times, setting you up for later parts of the game. It wasn’t an easy mode, but it did soften the grind a bit, and it wasn’t presented as an option in the game. You kinda had to know about it and go look for it.
I actually think there’s something to that. Making a game and selling parts of it never really goes down well with players. But most players can’t beat hard games. So what if instead of new games being $70 or $80, they were $50 or $60 still, but people who want help can buy things that will make the game easier. Let those players subsidize the ones who are good enough to beat it without them, incentivising them to get better. Ideally, to get better at that game so they uninstall the helpers, beat it without them, then when the next one comes out, they’re ready.
I don’t hate hard games. But I’m not going to pay for them. If they make their money off people who have that much time on their hands, that’s fine. It’s a sound business decision. But I also think a game can’t say “we wish we made more money” while intentionally excluding players who maybe have full-time jobs, families, or other valid reasons to not learn the perfect button combinations and ultra-precise timing some of these games require. I think if they could find a way to include those players while not putting off their base, they’d have a winning solution on their hands. And no, we’re not gonna quit our jobs or neglect our families to “git gud” like we live with our parents and are half our age.
I agree with most of it, except I think it’s fine for developers to make a hard (or very hard game) if that’s their vision. Not every games is for everyone. And if developers are fine with targeting just a niche, there is no issue with it.
That being said, I do have issue with players / gamers saying there should be no easy mode. Adding an easy mode doesn’t take away anything for anyone who isn’t playing easy mode. All it takes away is their ability to brag that they finished a game half the people can’t finish. There are ways for developers to handle even that. Give some special achievement or something for those who finish on non-easy mode, but that’s again up to developers, and I am fine if there isn’t one.
Rockband was a good example of achievement-gating the higher difficulties. You got an achievement for beating the game on Medium, Hard, or Expert. And doing it on one of the two higher ones would unlock the ones below if you didn’t already do it on those difficulties. So if you were good enough to beat it on Expert, you got three or four achievements. Now I know you’re probably thinking “wait how do you beat Rockband”? By completing the Endless Setlist, which is unlocked when you beat the story mode. The story mode just unlocked the higher tiers of difficulty. The Endless Setlist was all the songs. Six hours and 20 minutes minimum. Oh, and when I said “three or four achievements”? The fourth one is if you do it without pausing or failing (at any difficulty Medium or higher). That one was called the “Bladder of Steel Award.” Yes, I own it. You food prep in advance, you do it on vocals, and you time your bathroom breaks very carefully (and drop a deuce in advance as well). But those three achievements for beating it at difficulty? Those are per instrument. I only have the gold (expert) vocals award. I may have the bronze (medium) bass award, but I never got any for guitar or drums.
That’s just one example of difficulty and incentives. I like how Deus Ex 1 did it, too. On Easy, you did more damage and took less. On Hard, you did less and took more. On Medium, it was balanced. On Realistic… everyone takes more. That was how I played. I wasn’t getting hit. I played a sniper. Even on Easy it was hard to one-shot enemies with a good gun and a headshot. For some reason that didn’t kill them. On Realistic, a shot to center mass with my .30-06 will drop any human enemy. A shot to the head will drop the augmented ones. So that’s how I play… played. It’s not on Xbox and it’s not on the Mac. My Mac can run it through Whisky, but I haven’t played much more than parts of the first level, so I’m not sure what the compatibility looks like later.
Wow, that’s some dedication. Salute to you for actually getting those achievements.
That’s an interesting way to play Deux Ex, never tried the sniper walkthrough, will give a try if I went back to it.
Well, you know the 30.06 ammo is kinda hard to come by, so I didn’t use it all the time. I’d avoid combat on Liberty Island and just hoard ammo. I modded a mod for it and made a few changes — like after UNATCO “cuts through” the NSF “like a hot knife through butter,” with my mod, they don’t loot the bodies. So I do. Bit of a reward for getting through without being detected. So then I trade the pistol for the silenced version. The mod that I modded, Shifter, makes unique versions of each guns with a stat or two buffed. I could tell you where the pistol is (Lebedev’s bed on the plane) but I forget where the silenced pistol was. May have been in the canals in Hong Kong — so, not worth waiting for. I mean as opposed to slapping the weapon mods on the regular one. So for most guys I’d shoot with the silenced 10mm. Sniper’s really only good at range. But, that one mission, where they drop you on top of the 'ton (the hotel in NYC, supposed to be Hilton, but… copyrights) I take everybody out with the sniper rifle (it’s like 8 guys tops) before dropping down to street level. I can’t remember if it’s when you go to Dowd to get the plans to scuttle the freighter, or when you go back to NYC to send the singal from NSF HQ. Been way too long since I played, but really only a year or two. I wish they’d put it on Xbox.
Ah interesting.
You got that backwards: difficult games are as old as arcades. If anything, casual games exist as pushback against difficult games, not the other way around.
I grew up with Atari and the NES. I think it’s actually both ways. I don’t think casual games were ever really a pushback against difficult games though, I think they were just trying to reach a wider audience. Take Subway Surfers for example, it’s probably the best example of the casual (phone) game. Anyone can pick up and play it, and if you fail, you just start over. IIRC you had to watch an ad first though? I dunno, I got hooked on it and I bought the coin doubler for $5 which also removed the mandatory ads (not the ones you can opt to watch to double some prizes or open ad-gated prize boxes though). That’s all I ever paid for it — far less than any paid game. Of course you can’t “win” at it either, it just goes on forever. On consoles, you also have Animal Crossing and the like. Games that never end but you can’t lose, either. Like you can get stung by wasps or scorpions or bit by tarantulas (though the latter two encounters are rare), but you just pass out and wake up in front of your house with nothing lost. But no, I don’t think casual (e.g. Animal Crossing) or accessible (e.g. Subway Surfers) was an active “push back” against the “NES Hard” trend of hard gaming.
Of course, arcade games weren’t just hard to be hard — like Subway Surfers and other phone games, they exist to get you to spend money. An arcade game that isn’t generating revenue isn’t desirable to people who operate arcades.
Yes indeed, when arcade games were the norm devs specifically designed for absurd difficulty ramp ups and cheap deaths to finagle another quarter out of you.
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…
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.
Some of these mother fuckers never dealt with nosk and it shows.
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.
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.
All the homies hate bilewater, actual dogshit even with the shortcut
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.
It is slightly worse then HK.
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.
Unskippable cut scenes should be dragged into the street and shot.
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.
I think we don’t have enough language to talk about difficulty in a productive way.
You could keep all the boss mechanics the same in a game but add a 1 minute unstoppable cut scene at the start and the game is “more difficult” because it takes you longer to learn boss patterns and experiment with different strategies. But that feels very different to narrowing the windows to react or expanding the move set of a boss which feels different again to changing the values so you need to grind more/fewer levels or resources to pass it.
“Runback too long” and “git gud” sound a lot like people talking past eachother, but maybe thats just an artifact of the journalist reporting rather than the discussion itself
Add an easy mode just half the boss health and damage. Easy fixed
I think we have the language and you just proved it, but often people are just not reading or thinking enough about other perspectives before talking, and so do talk past each other like this.
I like your comparison to an unskippable cutscene; these are, I think, universally reviled at the start of boss fights. For some reason I don’t think long runbacks are reviled in nearly the same way, yet repeatedly running through the same area with no challenges (jumping off the staircase for the shortcut to Ornstein & Smough in DS1 does not count ffs!) is not really any less boring.
The ideal runback to me has a few enemies that you can soon work out how to run around. You actually get a feeling of having accomplished something, but don’t have to get perfect at defeating those enemies, nor waste time doing so (running will always be faster than fighting, pretty much).
I think “git gud” is just a knee-jerk meme though - there is no reason to believe that someone saying it has engaged in the slightest with what has been said to that point; they’re just trolling.
they are related and compound each other. it’s harder to “git gud” if you have to do a bunch of runbacks too.
In this thread: people complaining who are apparently bad at game mechanics and can’t or won’t learn to improve.
Just beat Widow second attempt.
The run back has you start on one screen, traverse two screens, and done. I got as high as 12 Mississippi counting during it.
Regarding difficulty: I’ve lived through the 80’s, where difficulty was ramped up to make the game last longer, as you only had precious few kilobytes to fill with content. I’ve grown to hate difficult games.
It is your right as creator to go that way if you wish, but it is my right as player to hate your guts if I buy your game and it kills me over and over again in the first minutes.
Another 80s child here. The difficulty of ganes of that era was to extend tge game duration and made them seem longer. They were designed that way to eat quarters at the arcade, the original “games as a service”. What happened with home computer and console games at the time was that developers used the same paradigms for “buy to own” games that they used for arcade, thus the idea of limited lives, game over screens, high dificulty, etc.
If you dislike impressionist art, would you still go to a museum exhibition on that topic and then get angry at the curators?
If it is clear that the topic is Impressionist art, I would not go. If I buy the ticket to see Expressionism and get Impressionism instead, I would fell upset.
(Actually, I’d go either way, I love art)
I’m in act 2 and while Im in love with the game, I can agree. The game could be impossible for people who aren’t already very good at platformers. Benches are very sparse and money is always an issue. I hope Team Cherry make the game more reasonable through updates.
I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
I think the big difference is that HK had a smooth difficulty curve as you slowly unlock new abilities. Silksong by comparison picks up where HK left off and is immediately hard which makes it hard to approach for new players. Early game areas feel as hard as late game areas from the first game. That’s throwing everybody off who is either new to the franchise or hasn’t played Hollow Knight since it came out checks notes 8 years ago
Are you sure about that? It’s been a while since I played Hollow Knight, but other than Hunter’s Marsh I think Sillksong has been comparable to or slightly harder than equivalent parts of the Hollow Knight. The enemies are tougher, but you also get more tools to deal with them so it evens out. Mostly thinking of the projectiles here, but the mobility difference also can’t be understated; you can abuse dash attacks in Silksong in a way you never could in Hollow Knight. Also I haven’t quite (or at all really) gotten the hang of it but the game might’ve been designed with parrying in mind, which would allow you to avoid a lot of damage because many of the harder enemies are warrior types.
Ya, Hollow Knight’s first areas like forgotten crossroads and greenpath were a lot easier. There werent any mechanics you have to worry about other than jumping and attacking, and most enemies you faced just walk slowly towards you. Bosses were also fairly straightforward.
By comparison Silksong has you fighting tougher enemies that could deal 2x damage, and quick bosses right off the bat like Bell Beast which kills you in 3 hits. Healing taking your entire bar also makes platforming more difficult because newbies will often be low HP and not have enough silk to heal.
Yes, Hornet is way faster and stronger than the knight but that kinda assumes you’re good at dashing and pogo jumping, which many people fail at in the start.
Compared to what areas in Silksong? Because Moss grotto and Marrow seem to have roughly the same range (and difficulty) of enemies as forgotten crossroads and greenpath. I think you also have somewhat rose tinted glasses regarding the starting areas of Hollow Knight because most enemies weren’t walking slowly towards you. I’d say it was more of a 50/50 split between walking enemies and flying enemies with some flying enemies shooting projectiles and flying projectile shooters are much harder than the one projectile spitting regular enemy in the first 2 areas of Silksong.
I think the comparison here isn’t as one to one with Hollow Knight. Silksong is much faster paced. Hornet is more mobile and heals faster (and heals more at once), so bosses killing in 3 hits might not be that much harder because it’s easier evade attacks and healing is faster. Bosses killing in 5 hits in Hollow Knight might end up being harder than Silksong because healing is a much slower and deliberate action and you might not get a time to heal with an unfamiliar boss.
From my experience grotto and marrow have been comparable to crossroad and greepath. It gets harder after marrow but Hollow Knight also got harder when you got into fungal wastes. Maybe the pace change makes you feel like it’s harder than Hollow knight but so far I haven’t felt like it was noticeably harder than my first Hollow knight playthrough.
I mean…it’s kinda silly to go into Silksong without playing Hollow Knight yeah? Unless Silksong has something at the beginning that sort of catches you up to speed OR is like a Souls or Final Fantasy where it has nothing to do with the previous game entry.
But If I were a fan of the series I would hope the game ramped up difficulty and didn’t hold my hand for the sequel. That, in my opinion, would be a worthy purchase. I had playing sequels that kind of “reset”.
It’s the latter of the two. The focus is on a side character from the original game, but takes place in an entirely different map/kingdom. You don’t need to have played Hollow Knight, but there are little lore pieces that tickle the brain if you have (and didn’t just skip over all the dialogue). I’ve been really enjoying the game so far, and there’s only one runback that’s felt REALLY tedious, but it’s on what I’m assuming is an optional boss based on what I’ve played so far.
Every time a hard game gets made, we have to have this debate? Maybe the real easy mode is just not trying to please everyone.
The thing is, there is no reason not to add accessibility settings.
Hollow Knight and Silksong are beautiful games with an intriguing world, great characters and lots of areas to explore. There’s no reason to gatekeep games like these from people that just can’t beat them because they are too hard.
Just add a simple accessibility menu where you can scale health, damage and loot drops. It’s almost no work to implement, players can still try the regular difficulty and turn it down when it’s too much and speedrunners can make their lifes more difficult. Everyone wins.
In a game like Hollow Knight (and Silksong), I can’t help but feel such a crude setting would end up doing more harm than good. I mean, let’s take health for example. Increasing your health wouldn’t help much if you can’t handle what the game is throwing at you; the few extra masks the game gives you only really help if you can handle the difficulty but need mistake tolerance, otherwise enemies will still hit you and you’ll still fail at platforming and fall into spikes. Fundamentally the difficulty of a game like Hollow Knight comes from a lot more than just damage numbers, so a naive difficulty scale would only give an illusion of accessibility that would fade away at the first difficult part, and in that case it’s better for everyone involved if the inaccessibility of the game is easily apparent.
Increasing mistake tolerance already increases accessibility, even if you still have to manage a tough platformer part.
Of course the options given are just examples to get it done quickly. Accessibility options can be a a lot more nuanced, even going as far as altering level structures to provide pathways for players that can’t platform.
The point of my post was that for all I care the difficulty options can go all the way to invincibility, one hitting every boss and skipping every platformer segment. It does not reduce my enjoyment of these games if other people can play the game in a way they want to.
Sure, but then we’re way past “there’s no reason not to add X.”
The accesibility is called getting a controller that works for your disability, then training to beat it.
The thing is, I can’t personally think of an accessibility setting that would serve the intended function without removing the sense of having finally met the challenge. I struggle with difficult games too, and I don’t always complete them. That struggle and uncertainty is part of the journey though to me and if there was a difficulty tweak available as soon as I got frustrated the first time, it would erase those stakes (for me).
I mentioned Celeste as a positive example. I did feel a satisfaction with completing that game, but if not for the highly emotional personal journey of the narrative potion of that game I don’t think it would have been as satisfying. At every point I knew there was an easy way out, and staying frustrated and gradually getting better was a conscious choice without any real stakes attached to it other than my own self-satisfaction. The was never any worry that I’d fail to complete the game. Those stakes do make eventually winning feel real.
So I just can’t think of any suggestions for this. It’s elitist or ableist I realise, and I’m not happy with that. The creator certainly was aware of games like Celeste, and they had plenty of time to consider those options. Before casting any judgment or making suggestions on their behalf, I’d be really interested to hear what they have to say about the choice. Do they think the struggle has to be as firmly set as it is for the triumph to feel as elating? I can’t read their minds, so if there’s an interview where they address that I’d be all ears.
To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.
And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.
I hate to answer a rhetorical question directly, so please forgive that; my satisfaction would have been much greater, if I was able to achieve those things. I have a realistic sense of what I was able to do given the challenge that I faced and the skill I was able to muster, and although more success would have been sweeter, I am able to be content because I have a shared context with other people who faced the exact same challenge.
I know many have been unhappy with what they are able to accomplish in games with no difficulty settings, and I see it as a choice by the creator to set people apart. It’s a harsh choice that seems most appropriate in grim and harsh stories.
Those who say it is passé argue so very convincingly, but I can’t hide that it appeals to me. It speaks to something primitive, perhaps anhedonic. I was wondering if it’s a generational preference more prevalent among people who grew up during the era of “Nintendo hard”, and if single-difficulty games will fade away in time completely. Maybe this game should have been called Swansong, if so.
Not every disability is magically cured by a controller.
I have to agree. Although I would have said “the real easy difficulty is realizing that not every game is for you”. And sometimes that includes really popular games, ones that everyone else seems to be enjoying. And that’s ok.
That’s fair, but I also don’t see a problem in voicing criticism about aspects of the game I don’t like. Especially if I do like the game as a whole. People should not see that as an attack on their personal enjoyment of the game.
Sure, and as a consumer of a product, you are within your rights to do so. But I think that a lot of times there’s an underlying thread of entitlement that comes with a lot of the criticisms. The tone suggests more ,“how dare you make something I can’t play” and less “I’m not suited for this challenge”. There’s surprisingly little in the way of complaints about the game design that read as things that fit the theme and game vision. There are a few, but most aren’t.
And full disclosure I’m speaking from the standpoint of someone who while interested in a lot of the “git gud” genre games, can’t cut it 90% of the time. It took me realizing that I just wasn’t who those games were for before I was able to look at some of my options and realize they were just me and my sour grapes.
if i purchase a game, you bet your ass i feel entitled to play the whole thing.
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Yea. I wont dismiss this criticism as hate, but I will dismiss it as dumb. The game was designed to be a challenge. Not everyone is up to that challenge, that’s fine. The game isn’t meant for you, then.
My friend can’t play the Dark Souls games. He’s really interested in the setting and has given a few multiple attempts, but the difficulty curve just isn’t for him, so he just doesn’t play them.
Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.
Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring. Hell, even Ninja Gaiden went away from boss runbacks starting from the second game, and that came out in 2008!
I can’t say I’ve gotten to some of the examples people have mentioned as “annoying; bad design”, so I’ll leave judgement until I get there. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with runbacks if it’s part of the design and the boss is the culmination of that.
Stakes of Marika are definitely there to appeal to a wider audience. I personally don’t care for them, as for most areas in DS I enjoyed trying to claw my way back to the boss unharmed. It was like a puzzle.
It’s fine to criticise things, but I personally think “make checkpoint outside of the boss” the criticism is not a good one. At the end of the day, that’s all personal opinion.
A lot of DS1 runbacks were true runbacks where you could just run past everything. Once you’d worked out the running, they weren’t too irritating, but some were a bit long. In DS3 a number of runbacks had unavoidable enemies on the way where you could mess up and eat a hit and then be down an Estus charge.
The main two problems are:
You’re getting voted up for your opinion, and I’m getting down for mine. Strange. Things you say are unfun for you are fine for me, like I said in my post, I do believe it’s personal opinion.
I’m not denying that there has to be design intent in here, but I take great issue with people stating “runbacks are unfun” as a matter of fact. Again, if it’s taken into consideration with time and how the boss mechanic works, that’s simply how the game is designed. I respect everyone’s opinion and their thoughts being the opposite, but I don’t think it’s a universal truth that must be upheld with every game.
Again, maybe I’ll feel differently regarding Silksong specifically as I get further. So far I don’t take umbrage with it’s runback design.
Well, some opinions are more valid than others, even when there is subjectivity… of course, I would say that.
“Design intent” is not an excuse for unfun mechanics. Design intent matters - for example if you’re complaining that it took you 50 attempts to do a boss and you’re frustrated, but other people are completing the same bosses in fewer attempts and enjoying it, the intent of the designers and the spectrum of opinions is absolutely critical. But this isn’t that.
Someone else in the thread made a great example: would you be so “design intent is all important” if the designers put a 1-minute unskippable cutscene before the boss? To me, and I think to almost everybody, that would be fuckin awful. Everyone hates unskippable cutscenes you have to sit through repeatedly. How does that differ, really, from a typical 1-minute runback?
I think he’s being upvoted and you’re being downvoted because boss runbacks have been around for a long time and both the industry and community have since come to a consensus that they’re just objectively bad game design. They don’t add anything of value to a game and their existence is a detriment to the experience. I don’t think you’ll find a single person who holds the opinion that they’re fun. People like yourself may tolerate them, but a tolerable inconvenience is not the same thing as fun. You’ve actually gone exceptionally out of your way to avoid calling them fun.
Like with anything, not all personal opinions are going to be held in equal regard. And your take here is going to be an outlier so I wouldn’t be surprised if you continue to get this reception.
I haven’t gone out of my way. While I haven’t used the word “fun”, I did say I enjoyed most runbacks in Dark Souls as a sort of puzzle. Being downvoted for a subjective opinion is absurd, especially when the person I’m responding to also has a subjective opinion. But nice to know my opinion has less value.
Anyway, I don’t really want to go in circles with this since I feel like both sides here have said what they want to say.
I’ll just leave with an example of a mechanic I find unfun and wish would go away, as a sort of olive branch of understanding that opinions are opinions. In Breath of the Wild and similar games, I hate the weapon/item degradation mechanic. I understand their design goals with it, and I understand how removing it from those games would change quite a bit of how they want the game to run, but I’d be much happier if it were to disappear completely.
well if you buy the game and it’s difficult enough to keep you from playing it all the way through that’s kinda shitty.
It’s undeniable that the challenge is part of the mystique for some games. I note with great respect the fact that Celeste offers accessible difficulty tweaks. I beat that game and it was a great experience.
Both choices can be good, when made with intention and care, and when motivated by specific goals as a creator.
With dark souls, at least the ones I’ve played, the difficulty can be tweaked by engaging with the world, learning the progression system and the character options that suit you. For example I didn’t beat DSI until I tried playing a magic user, because I’m slightly bad at those games. DSIII was easy enough by comparison to beat as a straight up STR build, but that’s beside the point. Difficulty is a design choice, and the conversation around it is tiresome when it ignores the aims of the creators.
Let me start by saying I have a few thousand hours in Hollow Knight and I do for the most part enjoy the Git Gud type of games.
There are entire genres of games that I can’t enjoy because they’re too open/chill and if they had a hard mode I would probably really like them. This is the same problem the other way.
Maybe wait and some modders might make the QoL parts you want available, maybe never play it, maybe watch a streamer do it. But not every game has to be fun for everyone.
There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.
These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.
I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.
“Nintendo hard” isn’t about difficulty it is about entire games being based around knowledge checks, like having to remember to pre-swing when you jump particular gaps or get knocked into the gap in og ninja gaiden for instance.
When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.
I’m reminded of when Elden Ring first came out and we had a little panic attack about how much harder it was than other souls games.
Then like a year later it was widely considered to be the easiest Fromsoft game (if you’re just doing the required content).
Time will tell. These games all have so much talk about how certain builds are “cheese” or how the ashes make the game too easy or whatever - that’s all just dumb. The game itself is the difficulty settings, sometimes.
It seems too early to say how Silksong will be remembered, and Team Cherry still only had two games under its belt so it’s arguably too early to judge them. Will their next game be totally different and a massive risk, or do we have a Vivaldi on our hands, doing masterful variations on a theme?
I think the game is difficult, probably a bit more difficult than the first game (which I haven’t played in over 5 years, so I might be wildly off), but I don’t find it unreasonable.
I know a lot of the time it’s my fault that I died, because I’m someone who likes to trade damage with enemies, which just isn’t really possible in this game, but I can’t stop doing it.
As for runbacks, I think there are a few weird ones, that can be terrible, depending on if you found/unlocked the nearest bench, but otherwise I don’t remember anything truly awful.
spoiler
For example the Chapel of the Beast in Hunter’s March I think, if you didn’t unlock the trapped bench, that’s pretty close (even then it’s still kinda long, although you’re basically just running).
The fight against the gatekeeper, at the entrance of the Citadel, can have a long runback from the worm area. But the fleas, along with a bench, also move directly in front of the boss room, theoretically you might be able to do that before you fight the boss.
A high difficulty is not inherently good game design. Making a game more approachable through lower difficulty settings with additional checkpoints doesn’t make it worse for people who like a challenge. It just makes it enjoyable to more people.
Claiming it’s down to “artistic vision” just feels dishonest. You could claim Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you… but why? How is it a bad thing if more people can enjoy something?
Cup Head is a great example. It’s a fantastic game with an art style that younger kids love. But it’s too difficult for most kids, which doesn’t make the game better, it just locks them out from a game they’d otherwise love.
Cuphead is a throwback in every sense. Making it easy would just make it a throwaway game that is seen once and never again.
Following up on this, I think the studio ghibli is a good example of where community adding accessibility in the form of mods or cheats (or fan subs or dubs in the case of ghibli)
Yes, community mods that add accessibility options are great. But unfortunately they’re generally limited to certain platforms.
Is it not fair for the game developers’ artistic vision to not be accessible to all? Accessibility is nice, expands the potential audience, but if it compromises my artistic vision and I’m ok with giving up reach and money to preserve it, that doesn’t make my game bad or my vision invalid.
It would be ridiculous to call up the bar or the ama and complain to them that becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not accessible to all.
One last addition, adding control remapping, color options, and text to speech are true accessibility. Easy mode is fake accessibility
Easy mode is not fake accessibility. Celeste has the correct idea in allowing players adjust the difficulty for accessibility purposes. Not everyone has the same reaction speed, same cognitive abilities, same eyesight. There are people who can only use one hand and that automatically makes reacting to attacks many times harder, should they be excluded from being able to enjoy the game because they are not physically capable enough for the boss fights? And boss fights are probably 5% of the game anyway!
That’s an interesting take. You think game developers should not make games that require hands, vision, hearing, etc to enjoy them?
No, I think if something can be done to allow more people to enjoy the game, then it should not be considered a bad thing to do it. You can not make it accessible to everyone in the world, but if there are time and resources to add accessibility, it should not be neglected.
And I don’t agree with the use of artistic intent as an excuse to not include specific accessibility options: take closed captions for example, they are made to allow deaf and hard of hearing people enjoy the content even when they can’t hear the sound. A lot of media is built on sound being a cornerstone of the experience, and people who will use closed captions will have no notion of it, but does it mean that they should be excluded completely?
Just because people who use the accessibility options will not experience everything in a way the author intended does not mean they should not be experience it at all, and in this day no one really complains about game including captions or colourblind options, but anything that might affect difficulty is, for some reason, out of the question and is only subject to the artist’s vision of it.
Oh I totally agree with you.
I agree with making accessible controllers with special layouts and allowing custom control bindings to accommodate those who are differently abled.
Those can be accommodated without meaningfully altering the game. Changing the gameplay is different however. Not that adding more difficulty options is a bad thing, I don’t mean to disparage anyone by calling it fake accessibility, just that I don’t think it’s the same as other options because it fundamentally changes the experience compared to other options that I considered “real”
I feel this is a false equivalence.
If you wanted to make a movie analogy, I’d say it’s more like a movie having subtle subtext or context which would make it’s message or intent more difficult to comprehend.
Imagine if someone watched The Cabin in the Woods (satire movie about horror movies) and said it was a bad movie because it wasn’t scary.
I think its fair to say that person would have low film literacy at least.
How do we compensate for that? Should movies start offering accessibility features so every viewer can have the ability to know foreshadowing, film cliches, or meta-narrative devices?
I feel like giving viewers an option before a movie to say “i have low media literacy”, which would result in popups during the movie to say “hey, this is a callback to the Hellraiser franchise” would be insulting to the creators.
The film wasn’t made for casual movie viewers, it was made for a specific audience. The creators aren’t obliged to make it more easily digestible.
Edit:
Satire falls apart when it’s spoon fed.
If difficulty is part of the games design, then reducing it is functionally similar to explicitly stating irony to a viewer.
But The Cabin In The Woods is exactly what I’m talking about. A product with mass appeal that still caters to a small group of people. Much like Paul Verhovens old movies. You can watch them as dumb action or social criticism.
And movies have several accessibility features. Things like subtitles, which often translate cultural references or jokes that don’t directly translate to viewers from foreign countries. Descriptive audio tracks for visually impaired, directors commentary to learn things behind the scenes. Many services and devices also allow you to even out dynamics and enhance speech.
The problem with games that have a too high difficulty threshold isn’t that you’re missing out on some hidden subtext. It’s that you will never get to see 70% of the game, for absolutely no good reason.
Cuphead is such a good example of this, according to xbox achievement stats 31% never made it past the first part of the game, 72% never got to the end of the game.
Accessibility in film delivers the same work to more people. Accessibility in games can cross the line into creating a different work entirely, because the interaction itself is the art, not just the visuals or sound.
Saying “most players never saw the end of Cuphead” isn’t proof of failure; it’s proof of selectivity. Just like not everyone finishes Infinite Jest, but it doesn’t mean Wallace failed as a writer.
Cuphead was made to invoke arcade game feelings. The gameplay is brutal by design. That’s the point.
It’s like watching Terrifier and throwing up half way through, storming out of the cinema and saying “the acting was good but it was too violent, I wish I could watch a version of the movie without the gore”
But it doesn’t, accessibility in film does not deliver the same work to more people. Films are translated, dubbed and subbed to be approachable. Adding voice acting from talent that were never involved in the original film. It’s all about adapting the film to fit a wider audience.
The fact that gamers think games are somehow different and the “git gud” approach is just pointless elitism. How would Cuphead, Super Meatboy or Silk Song be a worse game if they had an easy game mode where you had more life and/or checkpoints? How does that setting change the experience of someone playing in normal, veteran or hardcore mode?
(Ill reply to both parts in separate replies)
Subtitles/dubs are translations. They adapt language, not pacing, cinematography, editing, or structure. That’s fundamentally different from altering a game’s difficulty, which changes the mechanics, the thing the art is built from and differentiates it from other mediums.
A better analogy:
Subtitles are like adding glasses so more people can see the same painting.
Easy mode is like repainting sections of the canvas so it’s “clearer.” You can call both “accessibility,” but one preserves the work, the other mutates it.
Furthermore, language isn’t a good metric by which to compare analogies because games are also translated.
“How would the game be worse if it had an easy mode?”
Adding an easy mode changes the experience even for hardcore players because:
Design intent shifts. Once multiple difficulties exist, developers design around them. Balancing, encounter pacing, even story beats get shaped by the lowest common denominator.
Cultural meaning shifts. If a work is known as “brutal but fair,” its identity collapses when an easy bypass exists. (Dark Souls without consequence isn’t Dark Souls; Cuphead without punishment isn’t Cuphead.)
Easy mode doesn’t just let more people in; it makes it a different game. Saying “just don’t play easy” is like saying “why not release a PG-rated Terrifier with no gore? Horror fans can still watch the R version, so what’s the harm?”
The harm is you no longer made Terrifier.
Terrifier is available in several cut versions for specific regions / services. Which is incredibly common for movies in general and have been since the 70s. Which you do to reach a wider audience.
Both Silk Song and Cuphead already have additional difficulties. They’re already balancing difficulties, they’ve just decided to gate keep gamers who are not able to play difficult games.
If Gears Of War and Call Of Duty had hardcore and veteran as the only difficulty setting, it wouldn’t make them more interesting games or make a statement about the horrors of war and the fragility of man. It would just make less people enjoy them, for no good reason.
A high difficulty threshold is bad game design. And it’s exclusive to people who have physical disabilities or limitations, or other reasons to why they can’t play overly difficult games.
And I say that as someone who loves to beat games in the higher difficulty tiers. But as someone who also wants more people to be able to enjoy the games I enjoy and who’s happy game design has improved since the 80s.
“But as someone who also wants more people to be able to enjoy the games I enjoy”
Its really not about you is it? I get where you are coming from but in the end its people who make the games who decite what kind of experience they want to make. Sometimes their visio does not click with everyone and that is allright.
Cabin in the woods was a satire movie??? I like the movie…
I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not lol.
I’ll write my response as if you’re being sincere;
Cabin in the Woods is one of my all time favourite movies, but the entire premise is built around horror movie tropes.
The “gods” mentioned at the end of the movie are the movie viewers themselves. They “demand blood” (watching a splatter movie for the sake of watching people get killed).
It’s a requirement that “the virgin” be the last one killed, but the death is optional (this is a staple of horror movies; the ‘Final Girl’)
One of the literary devices the movie toys with is the idea that ALL the horror movies we’ve seen are part of the same universe, and the guys in the offices are the ones pulling the strings to entertain us.
The entire movie is one giant nudge-nudge, wink-wink for people who love to get meta with horror movies.
If you enjoyed it regardless, that’s fine, but my point was that it would be a bad product if it tried to accommodate for viewers such as yourself.
No I really did like the movie and yes it was full of stereo types like the chad, the stoner, the girl etc but I never came to think of it as satire or that we are the gods demanding the blood. But it was a good movie, I liked it.
Glad you liked it anyway lol.
Small aside: the characters aren’t stereotypes, they’re archetypes. This is another example of the satire, as well as the gas station attendant from the start (I think he was called the Harbinger?)
Oh yeah arch types it is. Did you know you can buy the cup-bong on the internet lol
Why everything should be for everybody? And why artists should care about your opikion when they are creating what they want to create.
Cup head is great example. Everything in the game is meticiusly hand crafted. The big part why its so popular is the difficulty that forces you to focus on the aninations and sprites. The difficulty also is economical in game as labor intensive as cup head. Because every sprite was hand drawn devs could not just churn unlimited levels and the games lenght came from the difficulty. Making the game easy would ruin the pacing of the game.
Games are art form like any other. There are mainstream movies, plays, songs, paintings and games etc etc etc. that try to reach as large audience as they can. But there is also obscure art pieces that only small group of people can enjoy. And both ways are fine
I find it obnoxious when people bitch about desing choices that devs have consciously made. Its not like they have any obligations to make a game in one way or another.
I like the game, but I definitely think it deserves some criticism. I really don’t get the thinking behind not placing a bench directly in front of every boss arena. The run-backs don’t make the game harder, just more frustrating. It’s also something I disliked in older Souls games, but thankfully they realized the problem and fixed it in Elden Ring. And some mechanics are just baffling, like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench. Why on earth would they do this, with currency already being as sparse as it is?
I have been running around the citadel, and with more fast travel options there I’ve gotten in the habit of constantly going back to belhart and making rosary necklaces. Sekiro had a similar mechanic with gold pouches. Also in this stage of game I’m finding a lot of silkeaters, so if I take a wrong turn at alburquerque and don’t want to get locked into a fight or weird platforming area I can just recover my beads. It gets better kids. Keep playing.
I found this in one small area, which was probably done for the flavor, since it makes thematic sense there, but otherwise it’s always been permanent unlocks.
Even there it can be made permanent if you pay attention, (and don’t mind doing a little light property damage)
So looks like I forgot about at least one bench.
spoiler
First is in a house, that you need to pay to enter, with a bench and vendor inside.
The ones I originally meant are below the Citadel, there are a few rooms, with two or three benches each, but you have to pay 15 every time to use the bench for a short time.
Dunno which one of those you mean, that can be made permanently free, or if there’s even others I forgot or haven’t found myself.
Ah, I haven’t gotten into the citadel yet; I’ve just beat the Weaver
No way ? I haven’t seen this so far. Paywalled benches ??
Not actual cash, but they require in game currency.
yes, that’s what I heard. phew, actual cash would shatter the internet lol. “Beloved indie team falls to predatory microtransactions”
I found one so far, pilgrims rest costs 30 rosarios everytime you want to enter, there is also a merchant inside
There is a way to make Pilgrims Rest free :)
Good to know :)
yea, that’s entirely valid. I love these games (Metroidvanias) because of the exploration and worldbuilding. The combat is a way to advance further into that world, but it’s just a means to an end to me. Make it too tough, and you’re preventing me from enjoying the parts I like.
I played a good 4 or 5 hours of Silksong so far and loving it. It’s a little tough though, and I think it could use a nerf.
I haven’t played this yet, so I don’t know anything about what difficulty settings it may or may not have But in general, I see difficulty settings as an accessibility feature.
I liked the way that Ender Magnolia did it, where, at a save point, you could adjust several settings to customize the difficulty. I was able to temporarily make it slightly easier just for a few bosses that I lost my patience for.
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
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.
Yeah I think as long as the devs are forward about it no problem. I have plenty of ‘hard things’ in my day to day life and I’m not looking for more of that in a videogame. Give me a Stardew or Factorio everytime - I want to relax and design things. Different games are for different people and that’s a good thing. Any game made to satisfy everyone will almost certainly satisfy no one.
Absolutely, it’s important to know what you like and want. Hell, lots of people work off vibes and go through phases where certain game types stimulate them, then fall off of those. Like MMOs and online FPS used to be my main thing, now I stick to single player story driven games. I’m not about to go loudly pout about how Stellaris doesn’t work for me and should be changed to appeal specifically to my wants, too busy with other games (and life).