I had given DS1 a try on PC back when I saw the game played by PewDiePie (jesus this was ages ago) and didn’t really get the game at all; keyboard controls prior to PTD edition probably didn’t help either lol
My first real venture into soulslikes was Bloodborne and it went horribly to say the least. I killed the Cleric Beast and Gascoigne the first evening I tried the game and put down the game afterwards but it was just too much for me. I was scared, didn’t know what I was doing, and it was just waay to hard for me.
Took me a couple of years to get back to it and give it another shot. One of my all-time favourite games today.
How about you guys?
Played Dark Souls 1 after a friend recommended it, INT+DEX Magic Build.
Got to Blighttown, took me forever to beat the Capra Demon.
Load up the game next time, save corrupted.
Whatever, I think. Dark Souls is all about failing and trying again. I make a new character, and since I know the game a little better this time I level her more efficiently.
Get halfway through Blighttown, put the game down.
When I return, save file corrupted.
Now I’m pissed, and I’m not letting Dark Souls beat me in this low-down, dirty fashion.
I figure out that it’s enabling online mode that may be causing the save corruption
So I start the game again, grind a little for souls. Book it to Darkroot Basin, whip that little fucking dickhead Black Knight’s ass, firebomb the Hydra, spend 20 minutes rollsoulsing the Golem that contains Dusk and get my magic buff items.
Honestly, I felt satisfied. It was annoying to lose all my progress, but it really made me git gud.
That third run, I was at level 5 doing more damage than my level 20 the previous run. That build steamrolled Ornstein and Smough on the first try.
And now I’m unable to beat Four Kings, for some reason.
I feel like I’ve had a very unorthodox playthrough of DS1 so far.
Honestly this sounds amazing. It’s your origin story and will lead you to many more adventures, I feel like
Yeah, as soon as my save corrupted I realized it was the ultimate “YOU DIED” and I didn’t deserve to play Dark Souls if I couldn’t git gud from there.
Tried DS1, immediately put it down. Years later tried Sekiro, immediately put it down.
Then I played Elden Ring until the Fire Giant and put it down.
Then I finished Elden Ring multiple times, finished Sekiro, finished Lies of P, and am now making my way through Black Myth: Wukong.
Took some time to really get invested, but now I love Soulslikes! I often find myself doing a couple of boss attempts, doing something else for 30 minutes, and then doing another bunch.
I feel like this is the experience most people getting into these games go through. It’s just a very different kind of game compared to what’s out there and usually played. It’s funny if you think about too: soulslikes, at their core, are also just 3rd person action adventure games with combat, story, whatnot, but the way the combat is the focus of the games makes for a very different experience
I got Dark Souls for free on the Games with Gold on Xbox 360.
Was like “hey, this seems pretty nice, love the art style and music.”
Only months later I heard this was supposed to be this notoriously hard and frustrating game for real pros.
I was then like “Well it did seem a little bit unforgiving, yes. Maybe I should leave this for later. You know, after I’ve 100%d Metroid Prime 2.”
(Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on GameCube is balls hard. I beat the last major area boss. Then my Mad Catz memory card died. Did the whole game again. Beat it. Didn’t get 100% because I missed one scan. I will do it again, probably soonish now that I’ve dumped the disc for Dolphin, but I’ll wait a moment if there’s a Switch rerelease.)
I have enjoyed some other Soulslikes - Elden Ring is great fun even though my tangible progress is quite slow.
Wow that’s brutal. Hope you do get around to finish Metroid sometime!
I tried
PD1DS1 and really didn’t like it. I hate being made to play the same content over and over so the typical soulslike loop of “die and repeat until you’ve learned how to deal with this one specific challenge” really doesn’t resonate with me. The “drop all of your souls upon death” mechanic also didn’t help. All in all I made it maybe 10% through the game at most and I’m not going to touch it again.Later I tried Remnant 1 and found it to be vastly more enjoyable. The focus on ranged combat and much more robust player character vastly improved playability. The fact that coop is possible without having to allow people to randomly pop in and engage you in PVP also helped greatly. I also found the setting and art style more interesting but that’s fairly minor. I finished it with all DLCs although there are still a few events I haven’t seen yet.
I haven’t ever thought about all of the FromSoft titles not really allowing for good ranged builds. It kinda does go against their design philosophy, I feel like, and they do have magic and ranged combat in some ways, but both are not as fleshed out as melee combat and its plethora of weapons is. Would a good ranged weapon whose moveset you enjoy help you finish a traditional soulslike?
It’s definitely matter of philosophy. The traditional soulslike approach is to impose a high skill floor and be unforgiving about certain mechanics, especially dodging. The player character is fragile and the player is expected to learn each enemy and situation so they know precisely how and when to attack, dodge, etc. This leads to players being fully expected to die over and over to the same situations until the proper approach has been learned.
It’s a difficult, deliberate gameplay approach that rewards those who like to apply themselves to a situation until they’ve mastered it. This focus on repetition to achieve mastery is intentional and the enjoyers of classic soulslikes tend to want a game where completion is the kind of challenge you can brag about meeting.
This doesn’t work for me. I have limited patience for being made to repeat sections too often; traditional soulslikes overstress it in the same way frustration platformers do. While I can deal with frequent loss and repetition in something like a roguelike (or roguelite), those have the benefit of short cycle times and self-contained runs. Meanwhile I get the feeling that Dark Souls just wastes my time if I spend five minutes making my way back to where I died, repeatedly.
Remnant deals with this by lowering the skill floor to be on par with most shooters. The emphasis on ranged combat and more capable player character mean that most encounters can be handled with a modest amount of learning; mistakes are far less deadly and death has a lower penalty. You learn your weapons and skills rather than the enemies’ patterns. Even most bosses can be done without precisely learning their patterns. (That excludes you, Barbed Terror.) This makes the game a lot more pleasant for someone who doesn’t appreciate FromSoft’s strict approach.
In essence, it’s like comparing classic Castlevania to Symphony of the Night: SoTN made the series more approachable by introducing stat growth, allowing players to overpower enemies with numbers if their skill wouldn’t suffice. Traditional Castlevanias and Igavanias ultimately are different subgenres that cater to different audiences. Both are perfectly valid. And it’s the same with FromSoft’s games and Remnant.
And that’s why I don’t think that a good ranged weapon would help – the game would have to be designed to accommodate it and if it was to retain its character as a classical soulslike, ranged combat would still have to be deliberate, lethal, and built around precise timing. I wouldn’t want to turn Dark Souls into Remnant; it’s fine the way it it, it’s just not for me.
(Oh, and one note: When I wrote “PD1” in my original post, I meant Dark Souls 1 but mistyped. I’m gonna go and correct that.)
Thanks for you excellent and very detailed breakdown - I enjoyed reading it a lot.
Yea, I feel what you’re saying. I feel like many FromSoft fans have this very strict idea of what a soulslike and its difficulty entail. The punishing difficulty is a driving factor for many, of course, but it’s also a divise one at that, something that’s actively keeping people from playing and enjoying these games.
I think we’re overdue some sort of difficulty settings. It’s the same argument over again with people who are very adamant about those games not needing to cater to “casuals” and rather sticking to the roots of the genre, but it’s just gatekeeping in my opinion. Having difficulty settings does not diminish your accomplishments in a game - all it does is make the game more accessible to other players. Who am I to dictate how someone should be playing with a game they’ve spent money on to enjoy? Of course, artistic intent and whatnot is something to keep in mind, but especially FromSoft is a studio that should be capable of cooking something up that does not impede their vision or other players’ enjoyment.
Now, Elden Ring definitely took a step in the right direction with its lack of strict linearity and plethora of different builds. However, a (semi-)ranged weapon with the depth of something like Simon’s Bowblade from Bloodborne, which is part sword part bow, is dearly missing from souls titles. If the ranged options weren’t just regular bows, crossbows, staves and stuff that are very crude and one-dimensional, more people would try ranged tactics instead of smashing their heads against a wall to no avail. It helps broaden the players’ horizons and gives more options to people that crave them.
A fair point. Difficulty settings can be done in a way that doesn’t detract from the experience and even the challenge.
System Shock 1 had a multidimensional difficulty system and something like that could work for a soulslike as well. You could make timings looser, give the player more health relative to enemies, reduce or even remove the death penalty, disable invasions, or turn off some of the harder boss attacks.
Of course the game will display how you set it at the end so only those who set everything to maximum get to really brag about it. They can even claim that people who play on easy (= not everything maxed) didn’t really finish the game. Meanwhile the rest of us get to experience the game at a manageable difficulty. Even those who turned it into a glorified walking simulator.
Perhaps we can gate a stupidly difficult secret boss behind the hardest settings for those who think that bragging about your settings is too abstract. They get to battle Kahooma, Maelstrom of Neverending Torment, and her single-frame windows of opportunity. It’ll probably take about two months until someone beats her with a Guitar Hero controller.
More variety in play styles could also help, although they do make balancing a lot harder. You don’t want to ship your will-shatteringly hard soulslike only to find out a week later that most bosses can be trivialized by creatively using the Beartrap Bow to interrupt their attack animations. (I seem to remember that Dark Souls 2 actually did ship with massively overpowered lightning magic or something.) So some care needs to be taken.
In the end I’m just happy that there are some soulslikes that are approachable for players like me. There’s definitely something to the genre, even if a fair amount of that something puts most soulslikes out of reach of many players.
I bounced off Bloodborne hard, about three times over the years. Same with Sekiro. I love these games conceptually, but there just isn’t enough bandwidth for me to engage with them on their level, and my fighting style has always been so painfully conservative and generally lackluster. I’ve only been able to finish DS1 and DS3.
Yea you do have to adapt to the games’ speed and play on their terms. Once you do, you’re having a great time, but you need to get there first. Bloodborne is definitely the more approachable of the two in terms of difficulty and actually shouldn’t be too far away from DS3 when it comes to speed and aggressiveness given that DS3 was inspired by BB’s design
…I had to mute the TV in order to beat Aldrich. Maybe my auditory processing issues were the problem with BB.
I kept getting flustered, but I never wanted to turn off the sound. I love the BB soundtrack so much. And yet…!
Wait, that’s interesting. What kind of auditory processing issues, if you don’t mind my asking?
It’s no bother. It’s been a long journey for me to figure out what’s the matter with me and I’ve only recently become self aware enough to talk about it and start looking after myself better.
There are a few ways it affects me. If I’m reading something and someone talks to me, I might completely not even hear them. Or I might only hear them and lose the ability to read. Also if there’s more than one person talking to me, I immediately begin to get overwhelmed.
In video games, sometimes I turn off the sound (or just deactivate the music) and this often helps if I’m stuck.
The weird thing is, if it’s my music then I seem to do even better sometimes. So it’s nice that I figured out how to make my game console mix in music from my NAS recently.
I’m still learning how to deal and how to communicate when I’m struggling. I used to be certain I was neurotypical, but looking back that’s kind of laughable.
I can imagine it’s tough dealing with this. How do you manage? And is this an official diagnosis or just something you’ve noticed over the years?
Like I said, it’s not life changing like some pathologies I just have to be mindful of what is difficult. Sometimes I mute the TV, sometimes I have to apologize very well and ask for people to repeat themselves - or ask them not to talk to me while I read. It’s a little friction but not insurmountable.
It’s not an official diagnosis, just a label I’ve found useful for dealing with shit I can’t handle
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