That's the one. Boss resistances against magic start at 60% in the DLC, and it only goes up from there. If you're an Int caster you could make your weapons enchanted (pure physical damage, scales with Int) to at least have some damage output, but because of how your levels will be spread going pure physical is much better (and by that I mean pure Strength: for some reason they made Dex ass in Dark Souls 2 by having it scale damage a lot less than Strength). You could also reroll once you hit the DLC, but at that point you both have to deal with limited resources (Chunks don't become available for purchase until you've beaten the penultimate boss, and both twinkling titanite and dragon bones have to be farmed) and, you know, you'll be admitting that you can't beat the DLC as a caster.
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From Software The Dark Souls Discussion Thread
- Thread starter felipepepe
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There are no great differences in difficulty between the Demon's/Dark Souls games, just changes in overall quality and a general shift over the four games from having the player, when dying, start again at the beginning of a level (Demon's Souls) to placing bonfires within sight of each other. Perhaps the tempo also tends to increase from game to game. I still maintain that the original Demon's Souls is the best in the series, but you can't wrong with either that or Dark Souls 1. DS2 and DS3 are certainly worth playing for fans of this sort of action RPG, but you might as well play the better two first.
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Wasn't the best spell locked behind NG+ too?
Cat Headed Eagle
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You will probably feel like the game is very, very slow, and it is. If you mastered parrying in ER, you won't have much trouble doing it in DS1. If anything, moving too fast might be an issue to you. Attacks are telegraphed extremely obviously, but a lot of those hang in the air before actually hitting you. Another difference is that you might feel you have way less resources now in comparison.
And the game's way shorter. It's like you beat Morgott in your first fight against him and the game might be about to end (provided you went to the other areas instead of going directly to him).
Halfling Rodeo
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Souls games difficulty differences is based on how they use it. Demons and 2 make the adventuring hard and the bosses are less challenging. 3 and ER make the adventuring easy and make the bosses difficult instead.
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I prefer the first approach, also present in DS1. Cunning, creative and wicked level design (Sens Fortress never surpassed as the trap themed level, or the last level of Valley of Defilement as poison one), more spaced checkpoints and enemies usually not hard in isolation, but tricky combined with level hazards or group compositions.
In DS3 and ER regular enemies break grossly the rules of the game (hyper armor, very fast, no stamina regulating attack spam), have more HP and almost play like minibosses. I only liked the one with the curse gimmick, reducing you HP dramatically on sight (reminiscent of intelligent design in older titles).
I blame partly on the streaming community more and more influent in game companies. How do you avoid guys playing souls games 8 hours a day for a living to destroy and finish the game on release day? Make it much bigger and break their muscle memory with unfair, cheap mechanics in enemies and bosses. Spoiler: they will do it in 3 days and the ways of breaking the game will be more retarded and boring (rely on OP summons doing the work).
Also the fast travel from the start was a great mistake. It´s natural to get it when the game world has become too big. But at that point you earned it. Some inconveniences are good for the game, so it doesn´t become an authist build and rolling simulator, and remains an adventure were traversal in a dangerous world is core to the design.
Some of the most poweful spells require boss souls that only drop from the four bosses that also drop the great souls, but you can put them into NG+ by using bonfire aesthetics.
No, the real dicks up your ass will be Wrath of the Gods, Bountiful Sunlight and Great Chaos Fireball. The first two require you to reach rank 2 and 3 in the Blue Sentinels, which require 150 and 500 victories against invaders when you are summoned. And the last one requires you to win 500 victories against invaders, and you lose one point if you lose your fight. Fortunately you can buy all three from the guy in the castle in NG++, but you can't force that encounter without bonfire aesthetics. Have fun!
Falksi
Arcane
How hard do you think the Souls games actually are?
My first one was Dark Souls back in the early 2010's and it definitely jolted me out of what had become my then comfort zone, after around 5-10 years of easier gaming. I played it without a guide, and the initial learning curve was tough, I'd say 8/10. But once past that curve (around 10-15-ish hours) and outside the first game, most Souls games I've played have been around the 6 or 7/10 difficulty. With a guide you can easily drop this to a 5/10 (I used one for Code Vein as frankly it was boring me, and I just wanted to get it over with). And most normies who have now dogged onto the series use a guide for sure.
I don't think many, if any of them hold a candle to some of the older games of the 80's & 90's difficulty-wise. Twin Cobra (on the SEGA Megadrive, which is harder than the arcade), Chakan, DoDonPachi, Blades of Vengeance etc. if you're looking for genuine 9/10 or 10/10 difficulty....which is fair and mechanically sound...then I think all Souls games which I've played are still playing catch up to bygone eras by comparison.
Be interested to get takes from the likes of Great Deceiver , Lyric Suite and Nutmeg too.
My first one was Dark Souls back in the early 2010's and it definitely jolted me out of what had become my then comfort zone, after around 5-10 years of easier gaming. I played it without a guide, and the initial learning curve was tough, I'd say 8/10. But once past that curve (around 10-15-ish hours) and outside the first game, most Souls games I've played have been around the 6 or 7/10 difficulty. With a guide you can easily drop this to a 5/10 (I used one for Code Vein as frankly it was boring me, and I just wanted to get it over with). And most normies who have now dogged onto the series use a guide for sure.
I don't think many, if any of them hold a candle to some of the older games of the 80's & 90's difficulty-wise. Twin Cobra (on the SEGA Megadrive, which is harder than the arcade), Chakan, DoDonPachi, Blades of Vengeance etc. if you're looking for genuine 9/10 or 10/10 difficulty....which is fair and mechanically sound...then I think all Souls games which I've played are still playing catch up to bygone eras by comparison.
Be interested to get takes from the likes of Great Deceiver , Lyric Suite and Nutmeg too.
Cat Headed Eagle
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Chakan was only difficult because of some bugs in the code, the game was never meant to be like that.
Lyric Suite
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They are the very definition of hard but fair. Because of that, they aren't actually as hard as they could potentially be. Some arcade games were super hard because they were trying to steal your coins. Developers had to walk a fine balance though because the games had to be "unfair" but fun. Creative people being what they are they eventually started to look at this design process as an art. Battle Garegga was created out of sheer love for the craft, not because they wanted to cheat people out of their credits even more, but because it's an arcade game the basic design idea still has an element of "unfairness" to it that wouldn't be possible to have in a game where you are paying upfront and so the whole thing has to be accessible in its entirety after the initial purchase.
So Dark Souls is hard, but not so hard as to make people think they paid for content that is inaccessible to them. Arcade games didn't have this issue because hey, can't progress? No problem, insert more coins.
So Dark Souls is hard, but not so hard as to make people think they paid for content that is inaccessible to them. Arcade games didn't have this issue because hey, can't progress? No problem, insert more coins.
Nutmeg
Arcane
Many arcade games had checkpoints (e.g. Gradius, R-Type, etc.) so when you died you'd have to repeat the section at low power. If you couldn't figure out how to get past it, no amount of coins was going to save you.
Depends how you play it. If you use a bow or grind shards you can kill the difficulty. Like any *RPG it's really a make your own difficulty game so you have to be careful as a player not to ruin it for yourself.
Lyric Suite
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Meanwhile in Shinobi you couldn't continue in the last stage which means in order to master it you had to redo the whole game many times, speding a lot of coins in the process. And Ghosts'N Goblins had a false ending and you were forced to play the game a second time to finish it. That shit was clearly intended to make you waste more coins, and there were many cases like this. Contra if i remember only allowed you continue so many times (after which you had to start over) etc.
But i think i need to explain myself better here.
I'm not saying all arcade games were designed purely to rip people off. They were intended to because that was the bussiness model, but the people that made them also treated the process as an art and many times they did things purely because they took pride in their craft. This has always been a dilemma with commercial entertainment. How to balance the art with the necessity to sell your product. Even so, arcade games are unique in that the harder or more "unfair" they are, the more profitable they can potentially be. That's kind of the reverse with games where you pay the full price upfront. I don't think a game like Dark Souls could afford to be as unforgiving as a bullet hell game and still be commercially viable. Not saying it's beyond the realm of possibilities for a developer to just make a game super hard and unfair just for the hell of it, but i think even the most uninged develper is likely taking into consideration the game has to somehow make money in the end. I personally believe Miyazaki wanted his games to be harder (something he had to fight for when he first took over, if i remember correclty) purely because he thought the games would be better for it. That said, there's definitely things in Dark Souls that point to concessions that had to be made for commercial viability (summons to help bypass bosses being the most obvious one). No such concessions are required for an arcade game to be profitable, quite the opposite in fact.
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Nutmeg
Arcane
Sure, it's just what you initially wrote made it sound like arcade format games are pay to win (or more accurately, what you said was that they're pay to see all the content) when they're actually pay to play and get the fuck off the machine or pay some more if you suck. The very opposite of pay to win, or even pay to see the content.
To add to this a lot of games gate keep levels (Raiden Fighters) or loops (most Cave games) or bosses (Raiden Fighters, Cave games, again) behind skill requirements (amount of deaths, score). There simply is no way to experience all the content except by getting good.
Halfling Rodeo
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Souls games aren't hard. The reputation for hardness comes from playing a melee build and having to learn high damage boss attacks. If you found the right weapon combo or magic spell you could nuke entire health bars in little to no effort. Souls games never needed an easy mode because the tools to make the game easy were always there. Magic is especially broken in souls games and removes almost all the risk from being hit.
Or you can be a total scrub and summon someone to beat the boss for you or use ingame summons to do it. And that's only gotten easier and more stupid thanks to Bandai namco sending Redditors free swag for being online attention whores doing it. Next souls game is going to have hundreds if not thousands of people trying to ruin people's experiences by beating bosses for them and posting videos on reddit over and over to become an eceleb like letmesolo her. So no matter how hard these games get, pop a humanity and you can see the hardest bosses in the game killed while you learn nothing and use no skill to do it.
But souls games are SUPER HARD BRO.
Lyric Suite
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Yeah they are the farthest possible thing from being pay to win. They are pay to play technically but the crucial difference is the "play" part.
And the "getting good" part involves a lot of playtime, which of course requires a lot of coins.
I think the business model of arcade games had the effect of allowing for a lot of incline because developers had to put a ton of effort into making the game as enticing as possible to make the player want to beat the odds. Harder games meant more coins, but the games also had to have the best possible design and gameplay as well. That's why i said they are the opposite of pay to win because the game itself has to EARN your money. The game has to be so good that you are actually willing to pay to actually play it. Not pay to get rewarded, like in a slot machine, but pay to actually play, to actually be entertained by the game's gameplay, mechanics and challenge.
The downside of course is that this model only allows for a certain type of game. You are not gonna get a game like Civilization on an arcade.
Lyric Suite
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Dark Souls is definitely hard to say that it's easy is just as much of an extreme as saying they are so hard as to be impossible to beat without cheese, which is also not the case.
Personally, i think the key question is why the Souls need to be hard and if the difficulty makes for a better game, which i think it does. This also warrants asking why the difficutly makes the game better, and whether the challenge has to adhere to certain principles, and whether there's an upper limit to where the difficutly could potentially be a detriment rather than an asset for the game.
To me to ask whether the game's difficutly is "overrated" is to have fallen into the mistaken belief FromSoft was trying to make the games as hard as possible, and whether it's the difficutly in and of itself that is the point, which i don't think was ever the case either.
Personally, i think the key question is why the Souls need to be hard and if the difficulty makes for a better game, which i think it does. This also warrants asking why the difficutly makes the game better, and whether the challenge has to adhere to certain principles, and whether there's an upper limit to where the difficutly could potentially be a detriment rather than an asset for the game.
To me to ask whether the game's difficutly is "overrated" is to have fallen into the mistaken belief FromSoft was trying to make the games as hard as possible, and whether it's the difficutly in and of itself that is the point, which i don't think was ever the case either.
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At Demon Souls and Dark Souls era, From Software was trying to do challenging games that gave sense of accomplishment, that's Miyazaki 101, almost literal quote. Result is hard but fair games rewarding perseverance and paying attention.
DS2 nerfed parries and backstabs because they were very powerful if trained.
Difficulty relying in Gank squads.After DS2 they started to increase difficulty as much as possible through metagaming player tactics and make enemies cheat, to avoid people that got gud at that kind of game to cruise the games (pro gamer streaming trend amplified that).
In Bloodborne they manage to make a good designed game despite cheap enemies, because they gave the player more mobility, lifesteal, reduced stamina consumption and OP but FUN ranged parries with the guns, and longer range and faster melee weapons. So the game was well balanced in the power given to both sides.
In DS3 they unbalanced the game heavily in favour of strong cheap trash mobs, instead of tricky level design and enemy placement. Bosses with higher HP and retarded abuse of delayed instant attacks to punish roll-fags, worse shields overall and attack spam to punish shield-fags. The strong tools present in Bloodborne were not there. Back to weak Chosen Undead with nerfed equipment. The game was not so hard due to bonfire spam and first minute fast travel.
The complete decline came in Elden Ring with anime bosses resembling Ninja Gaiden ones, and the player not being Ryu Hayabusa or Dante, just a weak chosen undead with boring summons to break the game and increase its power. Lot of trash mobs fast and with absurd not interruptible delayed attacks.
TLDR: From design and approach of difficulty has evolved over years to worse, and the tools to break the game, while existing, are more boring to use.
POV: you pointlessly leveled up stamina and shield.
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When I played Demon's Souls for the first time, I vacillated between the Royal and Knight classes before settling on the former, and as I later learned it is the easiest class in the game, since you have access to ranged spells from the beginning (plus a ring that slowly regenerates MP), but can still melee decently (especially after buying a 100% block shield) even before being able to level up. Since you can purchase spices to regain MP, just as grasses regain HP, there is effectively no limitation on the number of spells you can cast. Though of course if you're sufficiently skilled at the game you can beat everything via melee without dying.
Dark Souls did significantly nerf magic by restricting the # spells cast between resting at bonfires, while also limiting HP regain through the new Estus flask mechanic but also adding more protection from armor, which skewed the ease of play in favor of melee builds (not necessarily relying on a shield, though). Dark Souls 3 modified the Estus Flask system so that magic can be regained, while being influenced by Bloodborne so that some enemies, even non-boss ones, have attacks that quickly break through shields; though when I played through DS3 with a sword-and-board build I found this aspect wasn't as common as reputation had it.
Elden Ring apparently has some quite overpowered magic, and of course the player-character can rely on Ash Summons to distract bosses (or large groups in the Open World in places where Ash Summons is allowed).
Great Deceiver
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I started playing with the Asian version of Demon's Souls (it was the first release in English) and at first the formula felt pretty hard, but fair. It rewarded the player for paying attention to his surroundings and not charging on like a retard. In hindsight Demon's Souls is the easiest game in the entire series by far, but it's still my favourite.
I consider each of the sequels worse than the preceding game (except for Bloodborne by sheer strength of setting + atmosphere), both because of the formula getting stale and because of increasingly silly solutions to fundamental mechanical problems that failed to address the root cause from a design standpoint (i.e. ubiquitous helicopter bosses to disincentivize roll spam instead of dealing with the fundamental issue of invincibility frames - except for DS2, which caused many people to cry).
But even at their peak difficulty, I don't think they compare to arcade games at all. You can suck donkey balls at any Souls game and still see everything the game has to offer by spending enough time to grind things out and/or look up an overpowered build online that will trivialize 99% of the content.
Shmups are very different - you can study superplays as much as you want, but the execution barrier is still incredibly (too) high for most people. So to me there's no comparison. Of course there are easier games, but even those considered to be on the easy side (i.e. Slap Fight, Deathsmiles) require sustained mental fortitude and execution that's simply absent from any modern games, Souls included.
Halfling Rodeo
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Demon's souls is very hard to judge the difficulty on as a vet. It's easy to say it's the easiest game when you know where all the traps and shortcuts are. 3-2 can be back breaking when you have no idea where to go. And even when you do manage to push into the boss area some bitch puts a bolt between your eyes for your trouble.
I do miss random black phantoms in souls games. They were always the most interesting bit and later games turned them into specific invasions. Having 2 red barbarians charging you out of no where is totally different from Nigger lips has invaded you. I need to redo my Gravelorded play through at some point. That's effectively the same thing but it needs cheat engine to set it up. Maybe when I pick up remastered..
Great Deceiver
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That's why I wrote 'in hindsight'
Falksi
Arcane
Great summary chap. That's pretty much where I am with them.
It's hilarious how many Souls players class themselves as great because they Meta game too. I think that's where a lot of truly classic arcade style games catch them out, because there's not as much online to lean on. Twin Cobra really fucks with their heads
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