If they were all over 50 you would have a point ;)It's well established by now that you slow down as you get older. As a kid waiting 10 minutes for a bus felt like an eternity, going 160kp on the highway didn't feel very fast at age 18, now at age 46, going 100 feels pretty fast already. Same for video games, they all seem to move faster nowadays. For example: https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-not-just-you-time-really-does-speed-up-as-you-get-older-researcher-argues

So this one difficulty for all is a fallacy. Reaction time goes down as you age as well as how fast you perceive things. There are differences between humans of the same age as well of course but this you can simply see happen as you age. I still hope to be able to enjoy many video games into my 80s while not being restricted to puzzle games or walking simulators. Timing windows, movement / combat speed should be variable.

The average age of gamers is going up (currently around 35) and a new market is opening up soon. The retiring gamer with a comfy pension and plenty time to play video games!

Come on, I love Dark souls, played it through twice until I didn't feel like doing Ornstein and Smoug yet again in NG++, but the game is anything but balanced. I restarted after getting stuck in my first play through, 20 hours in. I had leveled the wrong things not really knowing what did what since the game doesn't explain much of anything and faced an insurmountable amount of souls needed to get the stats up I actually needed to use better equipment. Failure on my part for not reading a wiki first, or failure of the devs for not explaining the game mechanics? (It was my first souls game)

It took me another bunch of hours in my second attempt to figure out you could actually jump! I had to look up how to get to the lower depths since the door (near the dragon) simply looked like a painted on door to me and it never occurred to me to actually try it. It simply looked like a wall texture. The fight with the 2 dogs was extremely cheap. Zone in, immediately get rushed, track back all the way again, repeat. Until you figure out the 'trick' or 'cheat' dash up to the stairs in the back where the path finding can't get to you and chuck bombs from a safe spot. Had trouble with a fight, you could summon online help which usually came from someone already in NG+ slaying the boss in 5 seconds, leaving you feeling completely robbed of the experience.

On my second playthrough I had read some online tips, got the skeleton key and retrieved an early op sword which completely changed the game. One hit kills at the start instead of 3 or more hits turned the early game into a cake walk. That's not balanced, it's borderline insulting.

My best memories of Dark Souls are when I had a 15 minute long fight with a tower knight, wearing each other down and using the pillars in the room to stay alive. One time I got lost in the lower depths. I jumped down and hit a bonfire then had no clue where to go. It took hours of careful exploring, slowly learning the layout and how to tackle the enemies there. Same at the castle when I fell down to the bottom. It was very rewarding, yet after that the game never reached that balance again. Magic quickly got me over powered and the only stumble blocks where the boss fights which were simply bullet sponges against magic.

DS2 was hard at the beginning again, yet since I knew the mechanics I became op there as well and the rest of the game became easy with a couple vertical cliffs thrown in. The largely uneven difficulty and needing to grind to overcome the spikes is what turned me off the series.

Now if you have a game with adjustable difficulty levels, you can enjoy the whole game at your ability level! Turn it up when you feel unchallenged, turn it down when you hit a roadblock. Ultimately a game should do this automatically like an AI director. Oblivion tried this but got it wrong, making it almost impossible to don the first story quest later on while having common bandits walk around in glass armor costing 100 times more as what they were trying to steal lol.

Imo the main problem is the focus on achievements, achieving things, trophies, scores, part left overs from the coin op days, part feeding the ego of gamers. Games aren't a test of skill, they can be challenging but they shouldn't be about passing a preset bar. A good dungeon master adjusts the experience to be challenging but not frustrating. A narrow escape instead of die try again. Reward doing better instead of punishing doing badly.

Ever since online became a thing everyone has to compare themselves to the world. Who cares if your 1st or 632724th on some ranking board. Instead focus on personal improvements, your own journey through a game instead of passing the test set by the developers.

Anyway it's just a shame that there is no way I can recommend one my favorite games, Dark Souls, to any of my non gamer or casual gamer friends. They might like the setting and atmosphere but they'll never even get out of the starter dungeon. I cherish Dark Souls for its ambience, level design and subtle story telling, the game play was meh to often frustrating to very easy, all over the place.

Well, Im sorry that you had that experience, but thats simply not true.For example, I had neither the problems you just mentioned.Sure, I had more problems with some enemies than others, but other than that the experience was simply wonderful.

But that was exactly why I explicitly said it was critically aclaimed.Because the score average of the reviews given to the game is the closest thing we have to impartiality.Comparing personal experiences, in this case, is useless.Simply because one might find a determined experience horendous, while the other might think its the best thing ever.(Because opinions are like ass;Everyone has one)And before you say " Thats why it needs dificulty options!", I'll say that this exact problem goes back to the point I made in the thread.Its either financially impossible, due to having to rebalance the entire game, or its simply way too expensive.

The sentence in bold: And that's fine!Not every game is for everyone, and if one day one of your friends become more experienced with games, he will try it.Simple as that.

Well, Im sorry that you had that experience, but thats simply not true.For example, I had neither the problems you just mentioned.Sure, I had more problems with some enemies than others, but other than that the experience was simply wonderful.

But that was exactly why I explicitly said it was critically aclaimed.Because the score average of the reviews given to the game is the closest thing we have to impartiality.Comparing personal experiences, in this case, is useless.Simply because one might find a determined experience horendous, while the other might think its the best thing ever.(Because opinions are like ass;Everyone has one)And before you say " Thats why it needs dificulty options!", I'll say that this exact problem goes back to the point I made in the thread.Its either financially impossible, due to having to rebalance the entire game, or its simply way too expensive.

The sentence in bold: And that's fine!Not every game is for everyone, and if one day one of your friends become more experienced with games, he will try it.Simple as that.

The fact that you didn't experienced it doesn't make it false.

The opposite is also true though.

If he experienced then the game have it. Unless you are claiming he is lying.

Unless he said everyone experience it, then you not experiencing could invalidate his point.

The opposite is also true though.

Why is it funny?Reviews have been a thing since forever.It's made from people that dedicate their times to seeing the quality of a product so we have more information about it and make an informed purchase.I don't see how funny that is.

If the discussion was about your own personal experience about difficulties and such then yeah, reviews would hold small weight compared to your own personal opinion.But thats the point: It's not about you.We are discussing about how difficult games should remain unchanged for their games, affecting everyone.In this context, the aggregate of "official" reviews are more important, because they better represent the overall public opinion of a game.Or are you saying that your opinion alone is more important than hundreds of one to the general public, and we should just ignore them because they are trash?

Otherwise I could easily say: "I am of the opinion that hard games are the best and no easy game should exist.There, my opinion is absolute.End of discussion".And, as you should have guessed, that's not how a discussion works.