What Happened to Difficulty in Games?

does challenge or difficulty matter to you?

I think Elden Ring reminded a lot of people why they love video games.

We've been saying this about "Souls" games for years. People have been just too scared to play. ER is not a perfect game but it scratches a lot of gaming itches. Glad it's been so well received.

I think a big point is games actually being designed around difficulty, challenge, and player learning. Doom Eternal is a good example as while it has easier modes, Nightmare is where the gameplay fully expresses itself. It asks you to fully embody the Doom Slayer and use the entirety of your kit. The hardest part of Eternal isn’t even mechanical skill, it’s remembering when and how to use the multitude of options at your disposal. This demand for mastery magnifies the fantasy of the game as you really begin to feel like the Slayer. Where on easier difficulties you can get away without exploiting most of the mechanics, and you can basically ignore half your arsenal the majority of the time. The encounters, enemy design, and the players’ capabilities were explicitly designed with Nightmare in mind. On the other hand you have something like God of War, where the hardest difficulty just turns the weakest fodder enemies into massive sponges for your axe swings. Where you can tell the game wasn’t actually designed with that difficulty in mind as rather than enhancing the fantasy of the game it basically breaks it. I usually play on hard modes, but just the first tutorial encounter basically turned me off of it with how annoying it was to absolutely wail on these basic enemies for ages.

I feel like elden ring is a pivotal moment in the gaming market

I was so lost of gaming during the past years, switching a lot of game, trying a lot of new things, but always end up lost interest pretty fast. Until recently I'm telling myself, fine, I'll give elden ring a shot, plus I never played any soul games before, after playing a week, it just open a whole new perspective of gaming for me and also bring back a lot of feeling why I love gaming.

Hey, the no man’s sky developers totally made up for the overhype. They accepted that they overhyped things that weren’t even available, but made up for it by releasing years of free content/dlcs to create a in my opinion a better game then what they presented in the beginning. I suggest that you try the game now. I’m too lazy to list the reasons why to play it, and I don’t wanna rant so if you take my word for it, sure go ahead but you have reason not to and I don’t blame you if you don’t decide to play it. Oh yeah one more thing, once you buy the game, there are no micro transactions, and all updates for the foreseeable future are free

Sometime games that force you to play a certain way can be very fun. The main example is Doom: Eternal where the game is designed to make you use all the tools you are given since they all fill a role instead of one being simply better then another

Elden Ring is so fucking amazing, it truly gave me that feeling I've been chasing in the gaming sphere the past years --> TO PLAY A COMPLETE GAME, WHERE YOU CAN ACTUALLY FEEL THE LOVE FROM THE DEVELOPER. 10/10 game of the decade, perhaps my fav game ever. The map/world design, the sound design, its all SOOOO GOOOOD

Yo, that dungeon under the capital was seriously fucking with my head for like 30 minutes. I could not figure out what the hell they had done until I got through it, and once I figured out what was going on, I thought, "This is the most evil thing From Software has put in any of their games."

Elden Ring is unequivocally a masterpiece. It's not perfect, but man, I think it really exemplifies the saying "greater than the sum of its parts".

I feel like an old man when I say I still miss the experience I had as a kid playing Quake 2, Tribes, Starcraft online. Even with a 500ms ping I still had more fun predicting my opponents movements. FPS these days don't have strategy, you are just reacting.

On the subject of the weirder catacombs in Ring, honestly those dungeons while extremely obtuse I actually really appreciated because they're so confusing they created memorable "run around" moments, it feels like a direct homage to old school dungeon crawler and game design where the level maker was like yeah time to mindfuck the player

Elden Ring has the same game design as early 2000s games so that's why it isn't afraid to be difficult. It's an outdated design but as we see, the older games design where games were genuinely difficult gives characters a much greater sense of accomplishment

There is one thing you should know about difficulty: if a game is too difficult you’ll stop playing normally and you’re going to abuse the game mechanics, abuse the stupidity of the AI, only use the meta weapons. You have a artificial “challenge” but you sacrifice immersion and fun. Playing games on the hardest difficulty is good for your ego but you shouldn’t care about virtual medals and scoreboard, it’s pointless in a solo game or pathetic in a multiplayer game. So I often play on Hard (not normal but not the highest) on most games but some games can be hard, fair and fun, it’s just soooooo rare…. That’s depressing.

This went from a difficulty argument to a elden ring review

Here's my thoughts about the "lack of information" part: - The missable/obscure side quests: This is kind of a problem in ER, and From kind of acknowledged it by putting NPC marks on the map with the first patch. The thing is that ER was developed following the same structure of other Souls games, and those games were always conceived with multiple walkthroughs in mind. It doesn't matter if you didn't find every quest in your first run, because you're going to play through it again with a different build or go to NG+ again. Since the old Souls games were a much more linear and short experience, this philosophy worked well. With ER being a monster of a game, yeah, not so much. I get the feeling ER is going to be a crucial step for From, because they're going to have, for the first time, to learn to evolve their UX - "There is no explanation of what the effects actually do". It's a design choice. That "12% increase" of the scorpion charm was calculated by players who took the time to experiment with it. In a way, it's an extension of the "challenge" philosophy: they're not going to just give us a nice number we can compare, we get to experience it via gameplay. Which, to be fair, you could argue is a good thing: unless you're talking about a spreadsheet lover, no one cares about the exact amount of flat increase of damage (an amount that will be decreased by enemy resistances anyway). Personally, I read the scarseal's description, which said "increases stats but increases damage taken", equipped both of them, noticed a very dangerous amount of extra damage on my healthbar, and decided "yeah, not going to do it" and took off one. Would my experience have been better if the description stated a "20% increase in damage taken"? I really doubt that. Then again, I played every single Souls game, so I came in prepared, and in the right mindset. I can see why so many new players feel frustrated since they're used to have games spoon feed them every little bit of info they might need.

Best game I've played for the past 10 years. What a game.

dark souls 1 is the best artistic experience ive ever had, the world is so depressing yet i wanted to live in that world because no matter how many times you fail you will never fall unless you stop trying. The world of DS1 is the best world ive seen in a game but in later games they introduced fast travel from the start and it ruined the map design. I want to experience DS1 for the first time again.

For me the lack of information in Elden Ring is a good thing because it encourages experimentation for players