| mZuzek said: It's true, though. Certain games aren't meant to be "fun", in the same way that certain movies, for example horror films, aren't meant to be either. Movies, games, books or whatever else, can entertain us in several different ways, and that can often mean not fun. As for Dark Souls, well... I'm no fan, either. I tried getting into it twice, and I hated it. I hated the difficulty, yes, but specifically my biggest issue wasn't with the trial-and-error nature of it, but rather with how extremely punishing the game is. You often lose up to 20 minutes of progress each time you die, and on top of that you also lose all the experience you got, which you can only recover by making it back to where you died - which is one reason to make you more eager to "just get through" the backtracking, on top of also wanting to do it asap because you don't wanna waste a lot of time replaying stuff you already did, and well, ultimately it leads to you dying again and losing even more progress. It's a completely toxic gameplay loop. I stopped playing at the (apparently infamous) dragon bridge, because that was the point where I died twice in a row to things I couldn't avoid without prior knowledge, and lost far too much progress for me to bother investing again in a game I was simply not enjoying in any way (and this was my second time playing it, the first time I quit even earlier). I very much dislike all the culture that's been created around this game, the "IT'S HARD" thing, because it is hard in all the wrong ways, and actively wants the player to quit playing. Well guess what, I did quit. It's the modern day equivalent of oldschool games giving you a "game over" and sending you back to the beginning, it's just bullshit. I love me some hard games, and have beaten my fair share of them, but I can only appreciate difficulty if it's well made, and Dark Souls' wasn't. |
I very much agree.
Difficulty is fine with me; punishment and frustration masked as difficulty are not. Old games did it to seem longer but that's not a trick I can accept in today's environment.
I've had enough of games that make me replay entire levels or archaic save mechanisms that waste my time. That's not difficulty, it's just punishment. I don't play games to NOT enjoy myself, so I have zero interest in mechanics designed for that very function.
