DEMONS/DARK SOULS AND HARD AS SHIT GAMES.

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Have any of you ever played either of these games?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Souls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon%27s_Souls

They're action RPGs on the Playstation 3 known for being hard as shit. In a nutshell, enemies and bosses can completely and unforgivingly demolish you, deathtraps are everywhere, you die a lot, dying is punished by losing all of your 'souls' (doubles as both currency and experience you invest into level gains) and starting over at the level, there's no manual save, only autosave to prevent save scumming, and the game itself is very dangerous, with very few 'safe' zones to be had; mostly the entire game is a gauntlet full of deathtraps.

But, amongst all that, the game is fair. Your success in the game is directly proportional to your personal skill; yes, you gain levels and get armor and weapons to help you out, but it's entirely technically possible (but hard as shit, so you probably won't) to beat the game with the clothes on your back at minimal levels. You learn from your mistakes and you excel and overcome. It's not some bullshit difficulty where you get cheap shotted. But it's harsh. Like I said, saving is heavily managed, death equals starting over and fighting your way back to your corpse to get your 'souls' back, and literally one wrong move can equal death from full health.

So anyway, how do you guys feel about games with this level of harshness and difficulty? Obviously not all games should be this difficult, but the main draw with these two examples is that they are. When you finally do beat a boss or a level and get that cool sword, it's extremely gratifying. Like, dodging a blow that would have killed you and slaying a boss is crazy cathartic. Keep in mind both of these games were critically acclaimed, so it's not like this is some tinfoil fringe ideas either. Games like these tell you from the jump that if you're not looking for a punishing but rewarding challenge, play another game, period.

Do you dig games like these? If you were thinking of creating (or playing) a game where its challenge was its main draw, what do you expect to see out of it? What is 'proper' game design for a game that's meant to not be something you can just pick up and beat real quick?
Played an hour or so of Dark Souls on my friends xbox the other day, going to go out and pick it up next time I'm off work.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I wish all games at least had the option for me to make them be that hard, via difficulty settings or whatever. When games are too easy, none of the systems and strategies and cool gameplay actually matter, because you don't have to use them. So many RPGs have so much potential, but then they're so easy that they end up being worthless.
Loved Demon's Souls but haven't had time to play much of Dark Souls.

The funny thing is that Demon's Souls really only felt tremendously hard in the opening hours. Once you acclimated to it -shield always up, check every corner, DODGE DODGE DODGE!- a lot of the challenge began to fade away. As already said, it was tough but fair, and as long as you played bits rules you could dominate it.
These are two of my favorite games and I love games in general with high difficulty as long as it is fair; these games work because it is always your fault if you die, not just the game throwing something unavoidable at you.

I generally like to refer to these games in particular as 'modern games with a NES mindset'. By this I mean that they are obviously 'modern' as far as gameplay goes; graphics aside the core gameplay mechanics are not things you would see in a NES game. However, the way these games present themselves very much feels similar to the way an average NES game does in four crucial ways.

First, there is very little handholding - there's a brief tutorial to teach you the basic controls early on and then absolutely everything else is left up to you as the player to figure out.

Second, enemies are carefully placed to take advantage of the environment - modern games tend to have enemies with a few neat tricks and they get placed just about anywhere, but in these games, like in many NES games, even the weakest enemy can severely injure or outright kill you because it is placed in such a way that it suddenly becomes dangerous (usually by making it able to knock you down a pit like so many NES bats and birds).

Third, memorization and experimentation vital and failure has minimal consequence. While you can technically get through the whole game without dying, this isn't going to happen, at least not on a first run. Careful planning can save your life, but you ultimately need to experiment to see what the best way to deal with each situation and enemy is. Being able to get through a previously nightmarish encounter unscathed due not to any tangible upgrade, but simply because you have understood how to properly approach the situation is fantastic and is very much how many NES games are designed (ex: many people think of Contra as an extremely hard game their first time through, but it's actually not bad at all after a few attempts). Furthermore, the death penalty is very low in order to counterbalance the high rate of death; losing all of your souls sounds terrible, but it usually only takes a few minutes to get them back and any items/gear/shortcuts/etc unlocked will remain with you and any minibosses usually remain dead forever.

Finally, the AI is meant to be abused. Whether it's intentional or not, the enemies in the Souls games are deadly, but not all that bright. Both the games themselves and the playerbase tend to actively encourage taking full advantage of these shortcomings to make it through the day; pattern recognition, an understanding of enemy limitations, and getting creative with the tools one has at one's disposal are the keys to success here.

Now, how all this applies to other games is another matter entirely and depends in large part on just what the game in question is. For example, a traditional turn-based RPG or one with an ATB system is going to need some degree of actual grind unless you make some pretty big changes (no leveling, the ability to dodge attacks like in the Mario & Luigi games, etc) or if you make the difficulty come from something other than normal encounters (ex: the Etrian Odyssey series gets a big chunk of its difficulty from environmental hazards and forcing players to find ways around fights they can't win). On the other hand, this can work well with platformers - both the 8 and 16-bit consoles have dozens upon dozens of great examples of 'hard yet fair' difficulty - though far too many indie games these days take the I Wanna Be The Guy approach of requiring pixel perfect platforming from beginning to end along with many 'joke' deaths the player will have no chance of avoiding the first time through (often to a far greater extent than IWBTG, which was a game which understood the importance of checkpointing and kept the blatantly cheap stuff to a minimum).

So in short, games with a focus on difficulty have the potential to be great, but they need 1) frequent checkpointing or some other form of meaningful progress 2) a minimal death penalty (even many older games and roguelikes with permanent death are usually so short that they can be gone through in about an hour, making even a late-game death not actually all that bad) 3) difficulty which neither comes from raw numbers nor from deaths which players have no chance of avoiding on a first time through other than via pure luck and 4) a sense of discovery and freedom alongside the high difficulty (Etrian Odyssey, the Souls games, IWBTG, roguelikes, and even Super Meat Boy are packed to the brim with secrets to discover and optional content and often give the player a good amount of freedom as to how he/she wants to play and what he/she can do) - creating a game with the mindset of 'I am going to make this thing as masochistically hard as possible' without an understanding of how to make the experience a rewarding, entertaining, and fair one will inevitably lead to a terrible game.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I don't think discovery/freedom is really even related to this, much less a necessity. It's a totally different feeling than challenge. Some people play games for both, but lots of people play games for one or the other.

This focus on skill-based difficulty is a big part of why I hate grind. Enough grind removes any difficulty (usually). This is why most RPGs have zero difficulty, no matter how strong or complex the enemies are. You have two ways to beat every challenge, and only one of them is hard. Not grinding is technically an option, but to me it's like not using skills - you can make any game as hard as I Wanna Be the Guy if you tie one hand behind your back, but it lacks satisfaction, and goes against the way the game is subliminally prompting you to play.

I agree with most of your assessment of what makes these games hard in a good way. Except the low penalty for failure. That's something modern/easy games do and retro/hard games don't, usually, in my experience. I like it when difficulty is paired with a low penalty for losing, but it's rare. I mean, Demon Souls deletes your character if you die a second time before getting your souls back, right? Nethack deletes your character after a single death. NES games only take about 2-3 hours, but losing all your lives is way more of a setback than losing all your lives in Mario Galaxy, which only resets your progress on the current stage.
I love hard games, BUT if the game has other good elements (story, art, music etc,) you can do A LOT worse adding a difficulty system.

It's unfortunate when great games like Star Stealing Prince lose some players, because they can't defeat some of the really hard bosses.
Try not to overly niche your game as much as possible.

(And if you DO make a difficulty system, try to allow it to be changed mid-way through. A lot of players will RQ after realising hard mode required 35 minutes of grinding, or needing to start THE ENTIRE GAME OVER.)

tl;dr,
ALL games should make a flexible difficulty system. It makes baby jesus happy, and it doesn't require ANY sort of script to make.
author=Chris
tl;dr,ALL games should make a flexible difficulty system. It makes baby jesus happy, and it doesn't require ANY sort of script to make.


That's fine some of the time, but doesn't that undermine the kind of games like Demon/Dark Souls where its explicitly designed to be incredibly difficult and skill/workings base? Those games aren't made for anyone just to pick up and beat; they're designed so that you have to adjust yourself to the challenges that the game offers, not the other way around. If you don't like it, play another game.

Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
that's fine for the Souls series, and it's the same idea I had when designing Wine & Roses. Most RPGs could stand to have a normal and hard mode, though. my favorite form of difficulty has to be in Bastion, which lets you choose which options to enable to increase your rewards. If that system was in the Etrian Odyssey series to increase XP gains I would be so fucking happy
author=LockeZ
I mean, Demon Souls deletes your character if you die a second time before getting your souls back, right?

Not quite. Dying once makes you lose all your souls, but creates a bloodstain at the point of death where, if you reach it, you get all your souls back. Dying again simply creates a new bloodstain and the old one disappears. So, if you die with 20,000 souls and try to make it back and collect 5,000 souls along the way but die before reaching the original bloodstain, the 20,000 soul bloodstain is forever gone and a 5,000 soul bloodstain appears in the place of death and so on. The Souls games are also very smart about giving you frequent shortcuts and checkpoints, so unless you've been very, very careless you rarely will lose more souls than you could get back within 5-10 minutes.

The trick is that it's a penalty which 'sounds bad' (oh no all my money and exp I was planning to use to level up is completely gone!), so it's something which builds tension as players definitely do not want it to happen. However, in actual execution, it barely sets players back at all and there are likely all sorts of other ways they've made progress in to counterbalance it, such as finding new gear, opening up a shortcut, finding some consumables, or simply becoming more familiar with the area's dangers. I'd say that NES games are the same way for the most part; needing to restart Contra from scratch or getting a Game Over in Mega Man and starting over from the beginning of a level are harsh-sounding penalties which raise tension, but which only set the player back a few minutes.

It's probably worth noting that the Etrian Odyssey series is a bit harsh in this regard as it leads to a standard Game Over, but it lets you keep the map you've drawn, the importance of which I cannot stress enough and which is probably impossible to completely convey unless you've played yourself (i.e. having a map marking all the hazards, shortcuts, and nasty enemies you've thus far encountered is far more useful than any amount of grinding in that series).

As for exploration or some other form of freedom as to what to do, I really do think this is vital to a good 'hard' game. Even if a player has to eventually do everything anyway, it is simply frustrating to run into a brick wall which refuses to budge. Even if there are no tangible stat/gear boosts a player can gain by 'being able to do something else first' the player may simply find one path easier than the other and will gain more skill at playing the game (ex: IWBTG offers several branching paths and Super Meat Boy allows for some leeway with level skipping while also offering plenty of secret side levels and an entire 'dark world' with harder versions of all the normal levels and the player can bounce between these choices pretty freely).

I think the Souls games are so renowned in large part because they have completely mastered this technique; choosing a single area and sticking to it from beginning to end in these games will almost certainly lead to pure frustration, but simply rebounding back and forth to slowly inch through each area and obtain gear/abilities/items/levels/general-skill results in the player receiving a nearly imperceptible chain of micro-boosts and a sense of constant progress, in turn leading to a general lack of frustration because there will very rarely be a point where the player is forced to spend hours grinding for and dying to a fight they just can't seem to win.

EDIT:
Agreed about the flexible difficulty. I don't think an 'easy mode' necessarily 'works' with all games (especially ones like the Souls series which are designed with high difficulty in mind and which contain some sort of multiplayer), but if a game does have flexible difficulty it should be able to be toggled at any time and not just at the start; having some way to increase the difficulty in a way other than 'everything hits harder and has more health' like in Bastion is also always nice if it leads to higher rewards (whatever those rewards may be).
author=Craze
most RPGs could stand to have a normal and hard mode, though.


Yes, but this topic isn't about how to adjust difficulty for normal RPGs, this topic is more about how to/your thoughts/etc on RPGs that are designed to be difficult and challenging. I realize that its sort of a niche, but it's a well appreciated one nonetheless (as noted by the success of the Souls series) that's worth examining.
Isrieri
"My father told me this would happen."
6155
Personally I find that high-difficulty/high-level gameplay works best when it isn't an RPG. But rather platformers or other action games. That's not to say that it wouldn't work in classic RPGs. But two of the reasons I like hard games are the feeling of accomplishment when you make progress simply put. In addition to how immersive I personally find such games to be.

Take Contra. Contra is hard. But Contra has great game feel. The whole point of the game seems to put you in the shoes of a Schwarzenegger hero. The most badass action dude who ever lived, and the game reflects that in the obstacles you face. But it also does something else: it makes it hard as shit so you also feel a load of tension as you play the game. Have any of you seen Contra III? The stuff that goes on in that game? Its so ridiculous it's ridiculously awesome. The stuff the game demands of you is nothing sort of outrageous. But the way I see it, that's all part of the package the game offers up.

It doesn't hand you the action hero feeling. You have to work for it. As said above, hard games make you adjust yourself and your play-style in order to master the game. The whole point of having a challenge is in the way you overcome it. In doing so you feel accomplished because it wasn't handed to you and the game devs didn't cater toward you ineptitude (a personal pet peeve). Contra is responsible! It knows if it just hands you victory you'll quickly grow bored of it cause you didn't earn it. When you have to claw your way to victory through hordes of god-knows-why-it-exists and actually feel the tension of the consequences of losing. Then you'll savor victory all the more and value each successive one. Zero Punctuation reference.

Ghouls n' Ghosts is another game series I really like for similar reasons. The game is very easy to pick up and play. But god damn if it isn't hard to master. The very simple controls and very simple stage design belay how diabolical the enemies are. It's all about their placement or attributes of each enemy. But I think the real reason I like the games is because they're openly mocking and condescending toward you. No modern games would have the balls to do so. It's possible to have your knight character turned into a woman or baby. A certain demon enemy taunts you into hitting it before dodging and kicking your ass.

But that's all to produce that feeling of accomplishment. The game throws everything it can at you (and in some cases even cheap shots you), and when you finally do beat a level it's like flipping the bird to the game devs. That you've accomplished the impossible. It's great. And at least in my case, you wouldn't really call the game you're playing unfair: Just that you aren't good enough to beat it...yet. That's a tricky aspect of difficulty that such beloved hard games like Contra and Dark Souls need to nail. To put up a fierce opposition without just outright killing the player in a spiteful way. It has to ultimately be up to you to succeed, but it also must be you who fails and not the game killing you just because.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's harder to emulate that same experience in an RPG because it's less skill based and more strategy based. You have to treat it more like a puzzle than as a battle to the death. I imagine that if you wanted to really make a difficult RPG that provided a challenge it would require keeping the player on the defensive at all times. Rather than encouraging the player to go all out and shower the enemy with constant attacking other skills (primarily augmentative or defensive ones) need to be made useful. If each move the player makes carries significant consequences for screwing up, then when he makes a truly good move or has a good streak of luck, he'll feel as though he sufficiently outsmarted the opposition. But that brings in the grind aspect of it. If you constantly are put up against even the most ingenious of encounters, the strategy is still rinse and repeat once you figure out the most optimal solution of dispatching them. You could say the same of action games like Contra, but I still posit that the feeling isn't quite the same.
author=Feldschlacht IV
author=Chris
tl;dr,ALL games should make a flexible difficulty system. It makes baby jesus happy, and it doesn't require ANY sort of script to make.
That's fine some of the time, but doesn't that undermine the kind of games like Demon/Dark Souls where its explicitly designed to be incredibly difficult and skill/workings base? Those games aren't made for anyone just to pick up and beat; they're designed so that you have to adjust yourself to the challenges that the game offers, not the other way around. If you don't like it, play another game.


Totally. I was mostly talking about games that offers more than just an awesome challenge.
masterofmayhem
I can defiantly see where you’re coming from
2610
I have both games. I haven’t finished Daemons Soles yet, but I probably could if I stoped screwing around trying to get all the black/white tenacity events.

I’m a huge fan of hard games, especially difficult RPGs, and don’t tell me they can’t be done because they totally can. Anyone here ever play the original Shin Megami Tensi games? They will destroy you if you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing. In fact the company, who made those games, Atlas, is like a guru when it comes to making ridiculously hard games (they produced Etrian Odyssey I believe). There kind of my heroes.

Anyway, I’ve tried to incorporate the “Hard but fair” type of difficulty into my project. The very first random encounter in the can kill you if don’t pay attention to what you’re doing, but the encounter itself is still very beatable. Everything you fight has some sort of weakness, whether it be elemental, to states conditions, or just the way it fights, that you can exploit or work around. The game gives you everything you need to beat it you just have to find out for yourself how. And while you can grind your way though some encounters it’s only a temporary solution. Sooner or later you’re going to run into something that grinding is just not going to help against and you’re going t have to use actually strategy in order to defeat.

At least that’s the idea. How successful I am with the endeavour thus far... that’s a different question.
chana
(Socrates would certainly not contadict me!)
1584
Some of the best (and difficult) bosses I've played as RPGMaker goes were in Fire God Saga by spirit_young, the last one of course but others, you might be interested :
https://www.box.com/shared/klcp6qse0d
Dark Souls is my favorite ps3 game, I put in 300 hours in it. It was also the only game where I kept on playing after I platinum it...with that said, how I feel about super hard games? In general I hate them.

Hard games is something really difficult to pull off. So many rm games has done this wrong. If I die in a normal battle 90% of the time I'm just going to right click delete folder. SSP is one of very few rm games where I keep restarting. Here is the reason why: The feeling of accomplishment and rewards. Dark souls has done this better than any game. Each time you die in Dark Souls, you know more about the enemy/boss/environment. Point is, if I feel like I can do something different to beat the boss then I'm all for it, but if the game is just being cheap and unbalance then forget it.

Also, I hate games where you get to choose difficulty.

-NC
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=NinjaChrome
Also, I hate games where you get to choose difficulty.


You are the first person I've ever heard say this, and I am really really curious why. Can you possibly try to explain your thought process in detail?
Ciel
an aristocrat of rpgmaker culture
367
Traditional 'video games' without an extreme level of difficulty are pointless. Game mechanics are rendered meaningless without difficulty because the player is not required to use them. Random old games that seem unremarkable can spring to life just from patching in a difficulty boost. Suddenly all the nuances of the design are illuminated... mastery of them indispensable to victory. Difficulty makes games sing. I can't understand the purpose of designing all this shit for a game and then making it so easy that all of it can be completely ignored.

I mostly stopped playing new games around when the PS2 came out aside from the brilliant Castlevania Level 1 Hard Modes. The one modern franchise I am interested in is Souls. They are wonderful and engrossing games, but honestly they could use a Hard Mode, still being pretty easy. Still holding out hope that somebody makes a difficult video game for me to play one day. I really can't understand people who complain that Dark Souls is too hard, unfair, etc. Just, don't get hit by the bad guys?

You don't know what "hard as shit" means until you've played Wizardry IV. That's definately the most infuriating, frustrating, "I wanna smash the keyboard against the monitor and throw what's left out of the window"-inducing game I've ever played. Definately a lesson on how not to cross the line between challengingly difficult and hideously sadistic.

Example: if you mistakingly teleported yourself into a wall (which wasn't exactly unlikely, considering that the game obviously didn't have an automap feature) you'd lose your entire party (unlike, say, M&M 4 and 5 where the spell simply wasn't cast). Permanently. Let's not even start to mention the instant death traps, the @#!%& random teleport traps, one-way passages which (if crossed) would most likely mean you'd be stuck forever, enemies that could break your weapons and armor with a single hit and so on...

Then, when you think you've seen it all, you get to Maze of Wandering. Jesus H. Christ on a trike, the Maze of Wandering... words cannot even begin to express how nightmare-inducing that dungeon level is. It's basically a 20x20 maze filled with rotator rooms (you enter in one of those and you get spit out in a random direction - considering that almost every dungeon room looked the same, you can see where this is going), one-way passages, cage rooms you couldn't escape from unless you had specific items and obviously totally pissed enemies which would try to smash you to bits while you were trying to figure out how to navigate the goddamn thing without going insane.
author=LockeZ
author=NinjaChrome
Also, I hate games where you get to choose difficulty.
You are the first person I've ever heard say this, and I am really really curious why. Can you possibly try to explain your thought process in detail?


Sure, and the reason is more than one.

1) When I play a game, I want to experience the same thing that all my friends experience, and talk about how good/hard/easy the game is.

2) I feel like it is just for marketing so the game can attract more players. "So are you just in it for the story? we have super easy mode for you! Are you a hardcore player? Than here is Legendary mode!" This is why dark souls is so good but at the same time unpopular because it aims at one audience.

3) If the game has one difficulty, developers can take more time perfecting and balancing the game. The players are playing how the game is meant to be played.

4) 90% of games with multiple difficulty do with this: Increase/decrease enemy health, attack, magic, defense...etc. This is cheap and it just shows lack of effort that was put into the game.

5) The Story. Lets say you play in super easy mode. It takes 20 bullets to kill you but you only need to shoot your enemy twice before he dies. Wait...what? I thought I was human...and the guy that I just shot is human too...isnt he? It screws up the story and hurts realism.

6) Games where you can change difficulty during the game. I hate this more than bad mapping. Example skyrim. At the end of the dungeon but I cant kill the bandit chief..."okay I'm just gonna go back outside and grind for two hours, then Il kill this chief" uh no. I'm just going to change the difficulty because the option is there. You can argue this is stupid because I can just not change the difficulty...but for me the option is there and I'm gonna use it.

Also a bit off topic but this is the same with fast travel. I hate fast travel. I prefer the only way to fast travel is with the carriage, and can only go two cities, and from cities you to where ever you want. But do you know what? even though I hate fast travel I still do it because it is convenient and the option is there.

Im sure there are more reason but I wrote enough.

-NC
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