This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.
Basically any game can be made much more difficult through challenge runs or speedruns, and they'd confer just as much intrinsic pride for beating them as a Fromsoft title would at equivalent difficulty. But those challenges would lose the extrinsic motivator of one being able to pretentiously lord their gaming superiority over others, since e.g. saying "I completed [game] in the any% hitless category in under 14 minutes" is a lot less legible to people who don't play it themselves. Conversely, plenty of people know about the reputation of the Souls series.
Even if you personally enjoy that extrinsic motivator, it's undeniable that it creates other problems. Discussions of the game become worse in a lot of ways, with plenty of obnoxious policing on how you're "supposed" to play the game (e.g. "you didn't really beat Elden Ring if you used Ash Summons" or "you didn't really beat DS if you used ranged/magic"). Then there's the people who are so overprotective of difficulty that they'd say any change that would make the game better but also slightly easier is automatically bad. Think the game craps the bed when fighting 2+ enemies? Git gud. Do you think enemies attacking through walls when the player can't should be fixed? Git gud. Think the terrible grab hitboxes should be adjusted to more closely match the enemy model? Git gud. Fromsoft games are the only series I've seen people unironically defend framerate drops as something that shouldn't be fixed since they "add to the difficulty and atmosphere of blighttown".
Apart from the peripheral issues, the core of the game itself is degrading as From runs along the difficulty treadmill, trying to make ever more difficult enemies that are almost certainly made as hard as they are to preserve the series' reputation for difficulty as opposed to any compelling gameplay reasons. The later bosses in Elden Ring are a good example of this, and are something that Joseph Anderson has gone into at length here.
As for the easy mode discussion itself, I propose a hypothetical to you. Say the challenge runners and speedrunners took control of the development of the series and decided to massively increase the difficulty so it appealed to them personally, but you were now excluded. Your first instinct would probably be to retort with "I'd just get better, adapt to the challenge, and enjoy the game even more!" But let's say this wasn't an option. Say you were either hard-limited on your skill such that you couldn't progress, or that the amount of time it would take you would be so high as to be unreasonable. You'd now effectively be locked out of a series you had greatly enjoyed up until this point. An optional easy mode could fix this and allow you to enjoy the games, but oh wait the speedrunners have decided they don't want to do this. They give some half-hearted excuse answers about "developer vision" as to why they say they don't want it, but you know that at least a big part of the reason is because if they implemented an easy mode, then they couldn't be quite as smug when they say they've beaten the game on discussion forums.
I don't understand this perspective at all. That is, I don't see how the high difficulty in these games is arbitrary. I haven't played a single Souls game, but I've spent probably 500+ hours collectively on Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I'm about 50 hours into Elden Ring right now. Bloodborne is my favorite, though Elden Ring is challenging its place at the top while being by far the easiest of the 3, while Sekiro is a close 3rd despite also being by far the hardest of the 3. And in all of these, the difficulty, or perhaps more precisely the challenge, is one of the core elements that make them fun. And it's not that there's some extrinsic motivation in bragging about accomplishing things other people haven't; out of those 3, Elden Ring is likely the most popular and most well-loved, but, again, it's also by far the easiest and most accessible (Bloodborne being a PS4/PS5 exclusive plays a factor here though, admittedly).
It's generally how quickly and mercilessly they punish you that people consider them of high difficulty. To be honest, the main thing that makes these games tougher than the typical game of the same genre is the scaling on enemy damage; in most games, even bosses can hit you 10+ times before you die, whereas in these games, most regular mobs can kill you in 2 or 3 hits. But this is only one piece of the combat design in these games that make them so fun; the counter to this is that, often enough, the player can kill the enemies very quickly just by playing well. Sekiro exemplifies this perfectly with how every miniboss in the game that has 2 lives can have 1 of those lives taken out immediately before the fight begins, essentially halving their HP.
And furthermore, because enemies are so punishing, it forces the devs to design them to be fair. I consistently marvel at how well designed the enemies are in these games in terms of their attack patterns and animations which clearly convey to the player exactly what they need to do in order to avoid damage and to counterattack safely; the tough part is actually executing them consistently while under pressure from a very intimidating-looking enemy (furthermore, the execution is often not particularly difficult due to the slow pacing of these games; the timing precision and reflexes required for even Sekiro are basically nothing in comparison to something like a Devil May Cry). I've watched players with little experience in Souls games take down tricky bosses like the Guardian Ape in Sekiro - a sort of "twist" boss which took me over a dozen tries on my 1st go-around - on their 1st try, merely because they were smarter than me about analyzing their moves and experimenting safely with counters.
I'm also of the opinion that these games would be strictly better if they had easy modes. Beyond the challenge of the games, I'd say the From Soft games I've played are top of the industry in terms of level design for exploration and lore/world building. These are things that any player who doesn't care about the combat could enjoy and appreciate.
For your first two paragraphs, I agree challenge can be fun, but I strongly disagree that the challenge I would face would be diminished if other players could opt for an easy mode. That's the crux of the debate here. From your last paragraph I feel like we probably agree on this point. An easy mode would allow more people to experience the games if the difficulty would have otherwise precluded them, and it would smash the elitist snobbery surrounding the games to a good degree.
Definitely not. I've already responded to your other comment on how these games aren't fair in general. A better lens the "fair" would be "predictable and preventable" that Joseph Anderson has detailed in his video essays on the series. Games like Sekiro nail that concept, while the later bosses of Elden Ring fail horribly. Again, watch the JA critique I linked above for examples of how they do so. Elden Ring is proof that in at least some instances, FromSoft values the elitist snobbery over good game design.
Yes, we agree that these games would be better with an Easy Mode - even moreso, my opinion is that all games would be strictly better with a Dev Mode where any and all cheats that developers use for debugging/testing their games can be toggled on and off at will, including the ability to hop into any place in the game at any time, and this should be unlocked from the very start. These are games, not exams; let me have my fun.
My point, though, is that, at least with Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, the high difficulty isn't arbitrary. The difficulty directly impacts the visceral thrill of playing and mastering these games. It's akin to the thrill of a boxing or MMA match, where no matter how well your favored fighter is doing, a single momentary error can mean getting KO'd. No matter how much you've mastered a boss and no matter how close you are to winning, knowing that you can lose it all from being careless for just a second makes the encounters much more fun and exciting. That the games tend to give you a ton of healing items but requires you to leave yourself vulnerable to use them plays into this high-volatility philosophy, since dying is often not about losing more HP than you have available to you (i.e. including healing items) but rather about making a bunch of mistakes in a row. This also means near-misses can happen fairly often, where you go down to 5% HP but then manage to find a healing opportunity to give you more slack for the rest of the fight, which you hopefully go on to win. There's something to be said about winning the World Series on a sweep, but there's greater thrill in winning in game 7 through a come-back walkoff.
I feel like we basically agree with each other.
You've mentioned "arbitrary" in both your comments so I assume you're reading into that word more than what I meant by it. I've never been opposed to players finding high difficulty enjoyable, I was opposed to them wanting to force that on others who may not want that if they'd also like to play the game, perhaps for other reasons like its lore or aesthetic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've never played the Souls games, so I'll take your word for it that they're not good. But if so, why are they occupy such a large cultural space? Obviously, because they are difficult - that extra challenge is clearly adding something that other actions RPGs just lack. I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.
I wouldn't say they're bad games per se, but they're certainly overrated on their own merits barring Sekiro.
Nonsense, they occupy a large cultural space because they're needlessly exclusionary, which appeals to a lot of elitists. Difficulty isn't hard to find, just try any challenge runs or speedruns for games you already enjoy. But there's a reason why speedrunning is incredibly niche while the Souls games aren't. People like to watch speedrunners but not to actually do it themselves, while the Souls games sell millions of copies, and it's mainly because of the elitist snobbery the Souls games have wrapped themselves in.
I think this take and your favorite Soulslike being Sekiro are entirely at odds, which is what I don't get.
Souls, and to the greatest extent Elden Ring, allow you to use the game's systems, content and options to make the game as difficult or as easy as you want. Even in Demon's Souls, you could essentially powermax your character through repetitive soul farming until you trivialized a lot of the content, serving as a sort of soft difficulty modification depending on how the player wanted to play. There are options in the game that can make the majority of bosses a joke, and the oneshot magic spell is a meme in the Elden Ring community.
Sekiro is not like that. You either have reflexes or you don't. If you don't parry, you're dead. People who don't have the reflexes to accurately do so are never going to be able to complete Sekiro by design.
One of the sillier parts of debating the possible inclusion of an easy mode is this exact line of reasoning. "The devs must not include an easy mode as that would ruin the game... except oh wait they already did! It's [any playstyle I think is too easy]!" My response would be to question why easy playstyles are fine, but an easy mode is perceived as such a sacrilege?
The effect of levelling is overstated. It has its biggest impact at the lowest levels, but even there it doesn't make much of a difference beyond giving maybe 1 or 2 more hits of leeway before you're flattened into a pancake. Weapon upgrades follow a similar path of the lower levels everyone will get being pretty impactful, but there's quite diminishing returns after that. The oneshot magic spell (I'm assuming you're talking about the big beam thing?) is good for Twitter clips and YT clickbait but is way too inconsistent to rely on in any capacity for a first playthrough.
You're not wrong about the general point though. There are definitely things you can do to trivialize the game. Using magic in DS1 feels like you're the only character in the game with a gun, and Ash Spirits trivialize every boss in ER (although in a really boring way, the Joseph Anderson critique I linked above goes into that more).
You don't have to play Sekiro using parries. I did hit-and-run tactics for most of my first playthrough, which is low risk and low reward. It's definitely not the best way to play the game and had I not grinded the bosses after beating the game I probably never would have noticed how well-designed most of them are, but it's certainly possible to do. Heck, new players probably gravitate towards it if they've played other Souls games before.
Also, I don't really understand how that is connected to the overall point. Sekiro is the tighter game overall, but it would still be fine if it had an easy mode.
I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.
To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.
Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.
The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.
The purpose of a game is to be fun. Difficulty is a big part of that. Something too hard is frustrating, while something too easy is boring. Skill differences between players are wide, which is why the vast majority of games include difficulty options.
For most games this is true, but FromSoft has found a niche where alienating less skilled players is worthwhile for them to prop up the series' reputation for difficulty, which appeals to smug elitists. "Developer vision" arguments are vacuous nonsense that essentially boil down to "you can't criticize any design choices, ever".
More options
Context Copy link
Even if you never valued at all any gifts you have got at birthday or some other occasion, it does not mean that it is universal.
ironically, heirlooms are quite universally in this category
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Clearly, that exclusionary element is not needless - it serves a purpose or satisfies some desire. I think that desire is the desire for competition, just channelled into a single player game. I also think it's wrong to write off that very natural drive as snobbery.
There's a big difference between the drive for completing a tough challenge, and being pretentious for having done so. I get that the smug superiority people get is part of the reward for doing the challenge, but it's best not to make that the central premise. For FromSoft titles it very much is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I haven't played a Souls game, but having played Bloodborne, Sekiro, and probably half of Elden Ring, I believe this is actually the opposite. The challenges in these games tend to be very fair, even the sucker punches and surprises are ones that could have been prepared for. Which is to say, when you're in a boxing ring facing against an opponent, there's no such thing as a sucker punch, just poor attentiveness. These games have their share of surprise encounters, but every one of them could have been anticipated just by looking around a corner before stepping in - it's just that looking around each and every corner in a large, complex game world with tons of enemies is tough to do and can be quite stressful.
And it's that sense of fairness that makes these games so well-regarded in contrast to the generic difficult action game. They're not perfect and so exceptions do exist, but by and large, they telegraph to the player very well exactly how to react to any challenge to overcome it; they just demand great attentiveness and consistent execution while under pressure. The reputation for difficulty tends to come from how few mistakes a player is allowed to make before their character dies (most regular enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits most of the time). The fact that healing locks your character into a vulnerable animation and thus needs to be strategically used based on one's knowledge of the enemy's behavior also plays into this.
Categorically not true. Enemies can attack through walls while you can't. Enemies can attack through each other while you almost never get allies in the first place (at least prior to ER). Grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible. DS2 has a large emphasis on groups of enemies which is the literal definition of unfair.
Then there's traps like the infamous dragon bridge in DS1 that is just terrible game design. Absolutely no indication that the bridge is a trap other than scorch marks (like somehow fire in the past means a dragon is about to attack you in the present). It also comes right after a difficult boss and could easily make people think they're supposed to go somewhere else when you're actually supposed to dodge around the dragon.
I have to admit, that bit makes me laugh. That's the kind of sneaky "well eff them but right, technically in hindsight they did give me a clue" move that would have me both screaming in anger and laughing at the sheer brass neck of the devs. Though I'm never going to even attempt Dark Souls, so I imagine the level of frustration already engendered makes it hard to see the humour, from the outside.
It's more frustrating because many in the community refuse to accept that it's bad. The dragon bridge is a frequent flashpoint on the game, and the scorch marks are one of the goofy defenses that DS stans frequently offer in retort. It's dumb because it's such a massive leap in logic. You can put on the heaviest armor in the game and essentially bodyslam a thin bridge that's just two thin planks, but they won't break because the game generally does not expect you to make big leaps of logic when reading the environment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
First of all, when people say "fair" in the context of single player games where it's player vs AI, that doesn't mean having the exact same mechanics available to the player and AI or having the exact same number of enemies as the player (i.e. 1 on 1). The point of fairness in these games isn't to put each entity on equal footing, but rather to have the player experience a challenge where failure is the result of their own mistakes. DMC games are generally regarded as very fair, and the vast majority of the non-boss gameplay is centered around defeating large groups of enemies. All 3 From Soft games I've played have their moments of unfairness, but all have tended to be far better at fairness than most similar games of similar genres.
Second, it's simply not true that you can't attack through walls. I've cheesed enemies in Bloodborne and Elden Ring by attacking them through walls. Your weapon swings sometimes bounce off the wall in both games, but not always.
I actually was going to agree that grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible, but the only ones that really stick out to me are Genichiro's running grab and the Guardian Ape's leaping grab. For most grabs, I'd say it's the tracking that's complete BS, such as with Emma's. I can't speak to the latter half bosses in Elden Ring (I've just gotten to the royal city, having defeated Godrick, Rennala, and Radahn as the main big bosses), but I can't recall a single grab that struck me as being off compared to their character model. Godrick's grab was really frustrating to me, as was the Fallingstar Beast's (rather well-telegraphed) one, but both matched their character models quite well, especially for Godrick where I could just step back a foot and punish the grab by slashing his arm.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I find it odd that you have a very similar ranking of the FromSoft titles with Sekiro on top, yet you still disagree with my point. In my view, Sekiro is the best title in part because it is so tight. There is a limited amount you can do in terms of grinding to defeat the bosses. So you just have to... uh... git gud. In contrast, in Elden Ring you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want by using ashes or meta builds. This makes the game more accessible in the same way that a dedicated easy mode would have made it more accessible. At the same time, it creates the risk of having overtuned bosses like Malenia. You couldn't have a Malenia type boss in Sekiro because almost nobody would beat it. So it is exactly the tightness, that a bounded difficulty level brings, that may have made Sekiro the better game.
Full agreement on the second paragraph. Comparison with others is part of the enjoyment for some people.
Sure, the flanderization of Dark Souls is bad. Sure, some people have dumb opinions and justify it with git gud. I wouldn't blame it on the lack of easy mode though.
I am generally against taking an established franchise to a completely new direction that alienates many of it's old fans, whether that be adding an easy mode or making it insanely hard. Therefore, I would reject it on these grounds. A better example would be creating a new franchise that is so hard that I can't beat it. I am perfectly fine with this shrug
I personally liked Sekiro because it doubled down on what the Souls games did well while removing most of the crap. One of my biggest pet peeves, the instadeath pits, were removed. This is something that had bugged me since the janky platforming of DS1, but people always defended that garbage with the nonsense elitist difficulty argument. Unfortunately the pits returned in ER, and are actually a pretty big issue in that game despite its dedicated jump button. Sekiro compensated with higher base boss difficulty, but those bosses also felt a lot tighter at the higher levels of play as well. I can pretty consistently do Genichiro, Owl Father, and Inner Isshin damageless, and doing them gives a great sense of mastery. I never got the same feeling with Malenia. ER bosses feel like I'm cheesing an algorithm rather than dueling, and Malenia in particular never felt good even after a bit of practice.
It definitely doesn't help, as it helps to entrench the series as unwelcoming to players who can't adapt to the arbitrary difficulty. That's the elitism people are defending.
"It shouldn't have an easy mode because it didn't have one before" is a goofy argument. Further, I feel like you just ignored the point of my hypothetical, i.e. the arbitrary exclusion, rather than addressing it.
More options
Context Copy link
I do understand that, but I think what the established fans forget is that when the game first came out, they were new players and it wasn't developed to the point it is now after several years. Now new players are coming in at the level of the established players, not the level at which the game was first brought out, and that's a lot of the disjunction between "this is too damn hard" "well just git gud, noob".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link