HoloDust said:
When you put it that way...sure. The thing is, from my observation at least, it's impossible to balance games for wide difficulty scaling and preserve intended expereince. Eventually, you get games that are trying to be more "accessible" where that "accessibility" creeps into every design decision, no matter the level....right about every AAA game these days is guilty of that. To the pojnt of whole genres being hijacked and completely diluted. Like i said I think that narrow scaling can work in some games. I don't really expect any AAA publisher to implement it though, mass market is there audience and they are designing games for mass market. Nothing inherently wrong with that, there are plenty of people who like those games. Just as it's nothing wrong with those who have other priorities offfering their games "as is", and it's up to each person to decide if it's for them or not...and git gud...or not. |
I agree with you. My experience with difficulty setting has never been very pleasant. I enjoy learning how to play the game so I tend go for higher difficulties as I know that nowdays "normal difficulty" just means stroll through the game without ever dying. The problem is that games are never really balanced around the Hard difficulty, so what ends up happening is you have games like Skyrim, where any difficulty lower than legendary is piss easy, but when you set it to legendary you are pretty much forced to use a bow or magic as meele combat will almost always get you instant killed by any somewhat strong monster.
So because the games are not balanced around higher difficulties, these difficulties ttend to force the player to play a certain way such as using gimmicks or a certain overpowered item or weapon and are usually more frustrating than difficult. Yet lower difficulties are just as silly, if you see any casual gamer play games you will see how there is no thought process behind any of their actions, they just stroll forward and bash their head against whatever pops up.
As far as the souls games goes I think they shouldn't have any difficulty setting. If anything maybe they could add a "never die" setting which would be as easy as turning a switch and your character can never die. Yet I feel like what the hell is the point of playing the game then? This is what I dont understand from these "easy" difficulty people who want to play Souls games, the whole point of that game is dying and overcoming the odds by learning and getting better. There is no great story, or great social interactions or anything like that. The games are purely about the gameplay so why would the gamers who dont care about gameplay want to play it? Other than to make themselves feel like they can do it too or something. Not much different than the players who dont want to lower the difficulty because the feel it is an achievement to have beat the games and it shouldnt be handed down to others who didnt want to put in any effort.
SO basically I think this debate is about the whole movement nowadays where people think they deserve everything and everything should be given to them without any effort on their part. It is why micro-transactions are rampant, it is why world of warcraft was ruined years ago and also one of many factors that are responsible for the terrible state of the game industry today.
