Dark Souls Softcore mode?

[Broderick]

First of all, I love all of you(insert bob ross voice here). As other have suggested, there are quite a few tools already available for you(the OP) to use for your particular circumstance. Being hollow will cut your chances of being invaded to 0%, and your item find still goes up with your humanity counter till 10, regardless of whether you are hollowed or not. The way of white helps cut down invasions substantially too. As for elemental weapons? Most people early level use them because it is easy to pray on new players with them. Ever see someone wielding a lightning uchigatana slamming on someones shield before they either get blood loss or die from the lightening damage? It is REALLY scary for a new player. Better quality armors tend to have better resistance to such elemental damage, so many players tend to just upgrade their weapon to +15 AND use a resin of their choosing.

As for the debate at hand.... I do enjoy these debates, but this horse is tired and beaten. I am on the side that thinks a better tutorial would be a godsend to those new players and people wanting an easy mode. Frankly, I think most of the difficulty has to do with the learning curve of the game, and knowing how to respond to an enemies move set. The game does not do a good job of explaining how certain vital things work, like humanity(I didn't even know it increased item find till after sen's fortress). Heck, the game does not even tell you that you can roll jump. If those, and things like stats(Yes I know you can figure out what stat does what in the stats screen, but the game does not tell you that either) were better explained, people would have a much easier time I think.

A lot of the gripes with an easy mode basically come from the view that there are already tons of tools for players to make the game easier on themselves, so why have the dev waste time and money making an easy mode? There is way of the white, and hollowing if you do not want to be invaded. There is upgrading your armor and weapons to deal more damage and take more. There is kindling bonfires for extra flasks( I know I needed them the first time I faced manus). Players can leave messages for other players, so they can help(or troll if they prefer) others. There is player summoning to help you take out whole areas, including bosses; there is even a covenant(in game guild like thing) designed around that particular addition to the game.

The game also expects players to learn from their mistakes, or die. There are very few deaths that cant be avoided(the exception being the first time you face seath the scaleless, and even then you can just wear a ring of sacrifice to negate the loss of dying. The anor londo archer section was a bit bullshit though, mainly because you did not fight any silver knights up to that point, and you do not know their move set. The knights are easily parried and can be cheesed by poison arrows however. Also the bed of chaos was a terribly designed fight, and if I remember correctly, even the devs agree.

So...yeah! I think a better tutorial would be the best route frankly. It solves early player confusion, and helps show what the player may be coming up against, bettering them for the rest of the game. If there were less confusion about such things, and no bs sections, I believe the game would be near perfect for its niche.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Besides, your comment implies that those who play and like Dark Souls begin with skills that allow them to beat Dark Souls. Not true. Beating Dark Souls is a process of development and thought for just about everyone. Demon's Souls was even more hellish, if you'd believe it. So for what it's worth, Dark Souls is already reduced in difficulty from its previous game and I don't think it needs any more reductions. It could use some improvements in some design factors and some telegraphing of particular things, but those things are based on fairly informing the player rather than reducing the challenge of obstacles.

Dark Souls does not exist in a vacuum. There is much about it that we can bring in from other games. The combat is reminiscent of a lobotomized Mount and Blade. I'm told the boss battles are somewhat reminiscent of Monster Hunter. Anyone with passing familiarity of RPG systems will have a good handle on some of the underlying mechanics. Anyone who has a long history in CRPGs or MMOs will grasp the meta-game quickly and make very powerful, focused builds. And on and on and on. Life long gamers...and I'm assuming you and I both fit that category...can often forget that they are iterating on years and years of experience when they game. Difficulty levels that are pablum for them might be excruciating for the less experienced. Which is why we are presented with the concept of difficulty levels in the first place.

Frankly, the best argument for a single, locked difficulty level in Dark Souls isn't "OMG it would compromise the spirit of the game and alienate a legion of emo fans", it's that the game functions like a poor man's MMO with the invasion mechanic and the hint dropping. Which means everyone gets shackled to a single difficultly level because everyone is inhabiting a single world. And if it's the case that we have a Dark Souls 2 that again has a single fixed difficulty level as a result of this, so be it. I am not PERSONALLY invested in the idea of multiple difficulty levels in Dark Souls. I just don't find it to be an outrageous suggestion, and I find the arguments put forth in opposition to it often smack of serious e-peenery.

I should say that for all that I do enjoy Dark Souls, some of the difficulty does come from...less than admirable things. Tricky bosses? I'm okay with that. Nasty environments? Some of those are brilliant...Tomb of the Giants is particularly inspired. Horrible status effects, like Toxic? Good stuff. All that is top drawer.

There's some bullshit, too. Some forced failure. Some "oh I'm dead now, I guess that guy hits for my entire health bar", where you're basically learning through the repetition of failing. Which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the SLOG back through re-spawning trash. I understand the point here is to punish failure and thus increase tension, but the tension is only high the 1st or 2nd time, and then irritation and tedium sets in. This is Dark Souls at its worst, and I'm sympathetic to people who throw their hands in the air and say "life is too short for this shit" the 15th time they have to back track to a boss.

 

[Burst6]

See, that's the problem. I keep repeating myself over and over and it's like people are wilfully misunderstanding the argument. The game is not being changed. An option, by definition, cannot change a game because it's not mandatory. If you choose to implement it, then sure, it changes the game, but if you don't, then it cannot change your game. Having an option in the same disc doesn't change the game. Otherwise developers should never release things like optional costumes, extra levels, additional characters, bonus missions and so on, because the addition of something optional is somehow a sacrilege that irrevocably changes the original game you purchased. That idea, to me, is ludicrous.

Nobody's asking the devs to do anything for free. They are going to get money in exchange. That's how the entertainment industry works, I want something, someone makes it for me, and then I give them money for it. Nobody is asking you to buy for it if it comes out as DLC, and nobody's asking you to play it if it comes bundled with the game upon purchase.

And lastly, nobody's forcing you to do anything. This. Is. Optional. On the contrary, by trying to prevent this from happening, you are forcing everyone to play the game your way or not play at all. Adding more options means that if you don't like an option, you can still play the game by choosing something else.

So you're saying that adding something you can ignore in a game does not change a game at all? There would be no problem if, say, the developers of the next total war game decided to spend half their time adding an optional clone of call of duty into the game? Just in case people want the option to play a call of duty clone instead? I'm not forcing people to play the game how i want it. I'm playing the game how it was made. You're complaining that it should be changed to suit your own preferences.

Of course the game is being changed. If something changes how the game feels, it's being changed. I know i don't have the option to take it, but that's no excuse. That's like saying that Skyrim isn't too easy, go naked and use your fists. Weapons and armor are optional. Yes they're optional but they're also there and they are meant to be used. You can't just ignore it and say Skyrim is a challenging game.

Elitism isn't overtly telling someone you are better than them. Elitism manifests pretty much in this exact way, by aggressively resisting something that affects you in no way whatsoever, and in some of the posts I've seen here who encouraged humiliation on people who chose easy mode, or by disparaging the people who want the idea as unskilled, impatient, not-a-true-gamer, and any other negative adjective.

As I also said before, Dark Souls isn't the first online multiplayer game who had to find a way to balance easy and hard experiences. I'm not going to debate how it could be done because none of us here are programmers (or, at least, none of us here are programmers in charge of Dark Souls) and armchair programming will be nothing but useless speculation that will have no bearing on the actual point.

People encourage humiliation of easy mode because easy mode completely destroys the theme of the game. Dark souls is 40% atmosphere, and if you can't feel the atmosphere you're missing out on a big part of the game. People also want to be encouraged to play the hard mode. The game itself constantly tells you that the world is hard so you need to use every trick you can to make it easier. Taking the easy mode is the ultimate trick and very easy to do, so not taking it feels wrong if there's another option.

Most games keep online multiplayer separate from the main campaign. Dark souls doesnt. In fact its online multiplayer hasn't been done before. It's persistent, meaning everyone who's online interacts with everyone else constantly, a bit like an MMO. People invade your world, or you can summon people to help you, and you can use special items to mess with other people. Other than separating the servers, there's no way to balance the game without putting a massive amount of work into things like multipliers.

If the options you are adding result in an increase in sales, the options are paying for themselves. No part of the budget is being wasted on the options if the options end up generating a sufficiently large amount of revenue by increasing sales. Furthermore, options are generally sold separately from the game, as DLC, and that implies a game that has already been finished and whose budget has already been spent completely on the game the creators had originally in mind. The DLC is either born from leftovers that got cut from the game or as new projects with their own budget if sufficient demand has been deemed to exist.

If the options result in increased sales, yes they are paying for themselves. If is the big word. Like i said, too much options can make the game shallower, which could result in decreased sales. There's also the fact that developers can't do everything even with all the time and money in the world, and could lose focus if there's too many things to work on.

Also i have never seen a DLC that adds any of the options we're talking about. They add costumes, more places to play the game in, etc.. but I've never seen a game that had difficulty as DLC. Besides, if we're talking about dark souls it's too late at this point. Dark souls 2 is being developed and FROM is a relatively small company, so an easy mode probably won't happen.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

It does however, have everything to do with not wanting the core game to be altered. As I mentionned in the links in the first post, it is not possible make DS any easier without altering the level design. This WOULD in fact have an impact on my game.

Uh...did we not cover this? I outlined pretty clearly it was entirely possible to do so, and also incredibly easy. To which you replied, angrily, that the game would "no longer be Dark Souls". Of course it would be, only easier. And whatever the quality of the game play would be in this hypothetical easy mode should really be irrelevant to you anyway, as you'd never play it.

In much the same way, I won't be demanding a third person camera in Far Cry 3 just so that I can play it. The first person camera means that I was never in the target audience to begin with. And I'm okay with that.

This is a terrible analogy. Adding difficulty levels is not the equivalent of adding radically alternative game play modes. If someone was arguing for an isometric Dark Souls this would be the perfect analogy. But they're not. You're reaching.

A better analogy would be someone petitioning for a difficulty level between Normal and Classic, or between Classic and Impossible, on XCOM. Which they have. And which I support completely.

And if they are demanding that the game be altered to suit their own selfish needs because they do not like the current in-game mechanics, for whatever reason, they certainly do not "grasp" what the game is about.

If you continue to characterize them as such, do not be surprised when they in turn characterize you as elitist. It rather puts the lie to the "Why so mean to Souls fans!?" routine when you appear to be positively seething with hostility towards anyone asking for difficulty levels.

Regardless, I am tired of arguing with you, and I suspect you feel the same. I have said repeatedly that it is not a terrible, dread thing to be elitist about a video game, and I meant it. I am not attempting to demonize you, or besmirch your character. I have tried to get you to look at your own arguments critically and see how they can be read as elitist, which I now understand you are extremely reluctant to do. And that's fine, this is an internet forum, not a self-reflection seminar. I appreciate that you are enthusiastic about your game and fear the consequences of a bunch of easy-mode meddling, and given that much of the game's charm derives from its difficulty I can understand why.

The way of white helps cut down invasions substantially too.

You know, I keep hearing this, but I was in the way of white for the longest time and people kept crashing into my game like it was opening night at Studio 54. I was able to kill most of them (I had some surprisingly inept invaders) but it left me feeling like these "way of the white" claims were more than a little dubious. I'm in the sun one now and I haven't been invaded in just about forever.

People encourage humiliation of easy mode because easy mode completely destroys the theme of the game. Dark souls is 40% atmosphere, and if you can't feel the atmosphere you're missing out on a big part of the game. People also want to be encouraged to play the hard mode. The game itself constantly tells you that the world is hard so you need to use every trick you can to make it easier. Taking the easy mode is the ultimate trick and very easy to do, so not taking it feels wrong if there's another option.

I'd argue the game is 80% atmosphere, but that's the problem with perspectives. They tend to vary from individual to individual. I've been gaming long enough and have enough gaming friends to understand we all enjoy games in very different ways. The things I love about game A might be the things my friend hates most about it.

 

[Smithburg]

What the holy hell is everyone's problem. Holy shit. I've been staying out of the "Dark Souls easy mode" because I don't have any intention of playing it, but my goodness, this is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody is trying to take away your toys, people. Stop assuming that by adding something to a game, you are going to lose something else. More options are never, ever a bad thing (why? because they're optional, they're not mandatory, nobody's forcing you to pick them if you dislike them).

Clinging to your elitism and ego-stroking mechanisms, using games as a tool to feel superior to others and resisting any attempt to make games available to more audiences is being awful gamers. It's people like you that rag on about "fake nerds", "casual gamers", "fake nerd girls" or "gay options". Don't be a hateful, toxic gamer. If I want to spend 60 bucks or more and then "miss the point of the game" then fucking let me. If I want to use any game as an expensive coaster for my drinks, that's my choice. If I want to hang all my games from strings in front of a window so that they look pretty when they catch the sunlight, that's my prerogative because I paid for the fucking thing.

Stop. Policing. Other. People's. Fun.

Actually, yeah, easy mode can ruin a game like Dark Souls.

One it can change the basics of the game, if everything has to have an easy mode counterpart, it can screw up the way the game is played.

Two, it would fragment the number of available people online. There is already a system set up to limit online play, you can only get to either 10% or 10 levels + 10% below or above you. Adding easy mode players would lock them out of playing hard mode players. Unless they kept them both accessible, then depending how they did it, it would be unfair to either the hardmode or easymode players. If easymode player lost nothing when they died, there is no danger, and they could just invade others constantly, ruining the balance of the game.

Three, it can change the way they make the game, and start what many other games have done in sequels, where options or different ways of play are stripped out to make easymode more accessible to new players, leaving less depth for the endgame.

Four. Dark Souls and Demons Souls came out to be hard. That was one of the main points of the game. Hell, the slogan of Dark Souls was Prepare to Die. They boasted about it was going to be one of the hardest games out there. The game creators do not want to make it easy, they want this game to kick your ass. They knew this was going to be a niche title, and were fine with that. Having something be a niche title is not bad. You do not need to conform everything to appease the masses. Doing that strips the uniqueness out of a game and changes it to average out interests in the game so the most people buy it, often making the game lose it's identity.

If you do not like Dark Souls as a hard game, then you don't like Dark Souls. It being a hard game is as much a part of it's identity as Lordran or any of the characters. If you think it should be changed to be easy, there are tons of other games out there for you. Go buy them, and don't worry about this game, it's already excellent.

 

[Trollhoffer]

Dark Souls does not exist in a vacuum. There is much about it that we can bring in from other games. The combat is reminiscent of a lobotomized Mount and Blade. I'm told the boss battles are somewhat reminiscent of Monster Hunter. Anyone with passing familiarity of RPG systems will have a good handle on some of the underlying mechanics. Anyone who has a long history in CRPGs or MMOs will grasp the meta-game quickly and make very powerful, focused builds. And on and on and on. Life long gamers...and I'm assuming you and I both fit that category...can often forget that they are iterating on years and years of experience when they game. Difficulty levels that are pablum for them might be excruciating for the less experienced. Which is why we are presented with the concept of difficulty levels in the first place.

Frankly, the best argument for a single, locked difficulty level in Dark Souls isn't "OMG it would compromise the spirit of the game and alienate a legion of emo fans", it's that the game functions like a poor man's MMO with the invasion mechanic and the hint dropping. Which means everyone gets shackled to a single difficultly level because everyone is inhabiting a single world. And if it's the case that we have a Dark Souls 2 that again has a single fixed difficulty level as a result of this, so be it. I am not PERSONALLY invested in the idea of multiple difficulty levels in Dark Souls. I just don't find it to be an outrageous suggestion, and I find the arguments put forth in opposition to it often smack of serious e-peenery.

I should say that for all that I do enjoy Dark Souls, some of the difficulty does come from...less than admirable things. Tricky bosses? I'm okay with that. Nasty environments? Some of those are brilliant...Tomb of the Giants is particularly inspired. Horrible status effects, like Toxic? Good stuff. All that is top drawer.

There's some bullshit, too. Some forced failure. Some "oh I'm dead now, I guess that guy hits for my entire health bar", where you're basically learning through the repetition of failing. Which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the SLOG back through re-spawning trash. I understand the point here is to punish failure and thus increase tension, but the tension is only high the 1st or 2nd time, and then irritation and tedium sets in. This is Dark Souls at its worst, and I'm sympathetic to people who throw their hands in the air and say "life is too short for this shit" the 15th time they have to back track to a boss.

My perspective is simply that the goal of the Souls series shouldn't be to get everyone to play it. Dark Souls is a fantastic game and I understand that some people who want in on it are intimidated by its (highly exaggerated) difficulty. I suggest that those people try it and ask for help if they're having trouble.

I'm personally happy for anyone and everyone who wants to to play the Souls games, but both of them are very deliberate in design and were made without difficulty settings as part of that. I know, for sure, that there's enough versatility in the systems of those games for people of many different skill levels to beat them. True, people who aren't familiar with RPGs or games built around close combat are going to struggle at first, but we don't ask other games of the genre to cut out parts of their design philosophy to accommodate players outside the intended demographic.

And while this doesn't pertain to the topic at hand: in my opinion, the combat in Dark Souls has a lot more depth and versatility than that of Mount & Blade, at least insofar as we're talking about a similar scale (say, a dozen total combatants at most). Mind you, I love the hell out of Mount & Blade, but its combat system is designed to facilitate battlefield combat in a wider context rather than the more "survivalistic" combat of Dark Souls.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

And while this doesn't pertain to the topic at hand: in my opinion, the combat in Dark Souls has a lot more depth and versatility than that of Mount & Blade, at least insofar as we're talking about a similar scale (say, a dozen total combatants at most). Mind you, I love the hell out of Mount & Blade, but its combat system is designed to facilitate battlefield combat in a wider context rather than the more "survivalistic" combat of Dark Souls.

In terms of opponent variety, perhaps. No one in Mount and Blade will throw a magic missile at you, or kill you in one hit, or swing a hammer the size of a city bus. Not without some serious modding, anyway. But Mount and Blade has directional blocking, not "right click and hold blocks everything", and your shield can be shredded by repeated blows. Mount and Blade takes momentum into account when swinging, and adjusts damage accordingly. And of course Mount and Blade has mounts (also, blades).

I'm certainly not trying to diss Dark Souls by calling it a "lobotomized" Mount and Blade. If the game had M&B combat and your shield got mashed after a few hits it would be positively fucking insufferable.

My perspective is simply that the goal of the Souls series shouldn't be to get everyone to play it.

Well, that's ultimately the trade off, isn't it? How much reputation/panache would Dark Souls lose if it had difficulty tiers? How many new fans would it gain? It's impossible to say, all we can really do is speculate. I know XCOM always had a reputation as a murderously hard game despite having difficulty tiers, and it retains that reputation in the new version if all the caterwauling about how unfair it is are any indication. And the new version has a couple of difficulty levels that are pants on head easy.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

What the holy hell is everyone's problem. Holy shit. I've been staying out of the "Dark Souls easy mode" because I don't have any intention of playing it, but my goodness, this is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody is trying to take away your toys, people. Stop assuming that by adding something to a game, you are going to lose something else. More options are never, ever a bad thing (why? because they're optional, they're not mandatory, nobody's forcing you to pick them if you dislike them).

Clinging to your elitism and ego-stroking mechanisms, using games as a tool to feel superior to others and resisting any attempt to make games available to more audiences is being awful gamers. It's people like you that rag on about "fake nerds", "casual gamers", "fake nerd girls" or "gay options". Don't be a hateful, toxic gamer. If I want to spend 60 bucks or more and then "miss the point of the game" then fucking let me. If I want to use any game as an expensive coaster for my drinks, that's my choice. If I want to hang all my games from strings in front of a window so that they look pretty when they catch the sunlight, that's my prerogative because I paid for the fucking thing.

Stop. Policing. Other. People's. Fun.

OK.

Challenge accepted.

Fault #1: You don't play Dark Souls - and yet, you feel entitled to chime in like Spike melonfarming Lee playing opinionated Taliban on Django.

Fault #2: I am not taking anything away from anybody, quite on the contrary: People who are too lazy, stubborn, stupid or plain resistant to learning a new trick or two are intent on changing my game, pee in my soup and turn something beautiful and pretty much perfect into something you can already have in pretty much all shapes and colours from plenty other publishers and peddlers of mediocre gaming fare.

Yes, adding the oft-demanded features to Dark Souls does indeed significantly change the whole ride, into something which Dark Souls is not and should not be. It would imbalance things, it would break the online component, it would mess everything up, which would translate to more man hours being spent on shit that really shouldn't have been bothered with to begin with.

Dark Souls is not something you have adapted to your own individual selfish demands, it is a ride you yourself adapt to, thus becoming better and feeling really, really good when mastering an enemy or understanding rather simple things, like the layout of an area, which is great fun because there is no bloody map or medieval fantasy magic GPS of any sorts whatsoever. You memorize things, which is good for your brain. You are free to try out every weapon and see if its range and moveset is something you favour over other weapons. You can dual wield edged weapons, you can dual wield pretty much everything, thus creating your own character, your own fighting style, your own playstyle. It is a wicked good fun thing to play around in and with, and changing this delicately balanced work of art is disrespectful to both the creators and the players that agreed to play by these rules.

It's not about intended elitism. It's more about perceived elitism, which seems to nag the folks that give up. I don't know of much that has been achieved in human history by people that gave up. I don't think we should empower those that give up and instead take to whining and pestering people online.

The rest of your argument seems unrelated to my Dark Souls experience, and it also looks a bit like flamebait trolling, so I'll treat it as an off-topic rant of sorts that got triggered by your high blood sugar or hormone levels. Happens to the best of us, get well soon.

No more.

 

[IronMit]

If you have to be human and want an easy mode...join the way of the white covenant...it decreases invasions.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

If you have to be human and want an easy mode...join the way of the white covenant...it decreases invasions.

These folks don't want tips on how to get better or how to understand what's there better.

They want to feel empowered by getting heard and read and cited. They want to CHANGE the game, because they are unable to change themselves. Unable to adapt and come up with a solution of their own, they want the problem to be downsized, even if it means messing with the core mechanics of the game.

It's hard to reason, since it's really hard to shake hands with a clenched fist.

 

[GamingAwesome1]

I'm a chime in here because I've been thinking about a lot of the arguments made here in terms of most difficult games rather than just Dark Souls.

The one I keep seeing is "Easy mode would fundamentally alter the experience", this does not make any sense to me.

Shitloads of other really hard and finely crafted games of a similar genre implement difficulty settings just fine without sacrificing any of the tightness of the experience, just simply making it such that people who aren't complete masochists can actually enjoy an experience. Difficulty being relative and shit, a true casual may find Easy mode provides that same good challenge that Souls fans feel from the default setting, there's no really good reason to exclude people from the experience other than just laziness or elitism.

And if your game really would break down completely if you tried to tweak it to make it easier, it's probably not a particularly well-designed game, fucktons of other games pull off multiple difficulty settings perfectly well and making the argument that they just weren't as "finely crafted" as Dark Souls or some other variant smacks of total bullshit to me.

I don't see why Dark Souls should be the exception.

It's also largely irrelevant, the reason I haven't picked up Dark Souls is not due to extreme difficulty since I like to think I could handle such a challenge, but because I don't actually particularly care for the game in question.

 

[cikame]

I want to explore the game and variety of enemies but can't due to the difficulty, i need a mode for that.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Primarily to guard against resource loss due to player intervention. I like dueling (assuming the guy isn't porting around like a crazy lunatic), just not losing stuff to an X factor outside of what is programmed into the environment.

You're not focussed on playing Dark Souls, then.

To me, right now, it looks like you're playing your very own game of Dark Save File Backup.

Isn't that tedious as hell? Besides, in my books, this already qualifies as cheating - you are actively cheating yourself out of the Dark Souls experience, and you are cheating by creating a save file wormhole into your time-travelling re-enactment of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day.

It's like taking the already exhaustive infinite loop ride of the budding player and intensifying it.

You are playing hardcore time waste mode.

I take it you already know it, but I have to tell you - you are not playing the game, you are trying to play the system.

Besides, it has already been mentioned that there are functions implemented in the game that let you do your thing: 1) Play offline 2) stay hollow 3) Join the pothead fairy covenant.

 

[Sordin]

This is silly the people saying that dark souls having an easy mode would improve or in some way help the game are completely wrong. Dark souls is about the challenge and the difficulty, its about risk reward and the game would be less rewarding if there were no/less risks to take. And please stop whinging about elitism. Its a difficult game so not everyone can beat it but why is it so wrong for the people who do beat it to celebrate their achievement? Not everyone can run a marathon but we don't call out the people who do elitists because they managed something not everybody can do. Look the game is fun because its challenging removing the challenge would leave a boring game. So maybe, just maybe, the developers wanted to make a fun game and so made it challenging.

 

[CommanderL]

Dark souls No easy mode the whole point of it is to be on the edge of your seat alert becuase one small mistake is all it takes to fuck your shit up and that's why people love it there is no hand holding its right into the deep end hope you can swim buddy that being side a nice long intro teaching you stuff would make the learning curve less and still mantain what dark souls is about

 

[Peithelo]

The game is not being changed. An option, by definition, cannot change a game because it's not mandatory. If you choose to implement it, then sure, it changes the game, but if you don't, then it cannot change your game.

Earlier in this thread you said that having more options could never be a bad thing. I fundamentally disagree. The purposeful utilization of lack of options is also a valid design decision. An option by definition gives you an alternative to something and enables you to resort to it if you so desire. Having such an option would be, I think, counterproductive to Dark Souls and the experience it was designed to provide. Merely knowing that an effortless option to change the difficulty exists would affect the way you experience the game. This is why the means of affecting the experienced difficulty in Dark Souls exist within the game world and not in 'artificial' main menu as a clickable option.

 

[Colt47]

If you have to be human and want an easy mode...join the way of the white covenant...it decreases invasions.

These folks don't want tips on how to get better or how to understand what's there better.

They want to feel empowered by getting heard and read and cited. They want to CHANGE the game, because they are unable to change themselves. Unable to adapt and come up with a solution of their own, they want the problem to be downsized, even if it means messing with the core mechanics of the game.

It's hard to reason, since it's really hard to shake hands with a clenched fist.

Jumping to conclusions much?

Primarily to guard against resource loss due to player intervention. I like dueling (assuming the guy isn't porting around like a crazy lunatic), just not losing stuff to an X factor outside of what is programmed into the environment.

You're not focussed on playing Dark Souls, then.

To me, right now, it looks like you're playing your very own game of Dark Save File Backup.

Isn't that tedious as hell? Besides, in my books, this already qualifies as cheating - you are actively cheating yourself out of the Dark Souls experience, and you are cheating by creating a save file wormhole into your time-travelling re-enactment of Bill Murray's Groundhog Day.

It's like taking the already exhaustive infinite loop ride of the budding player and intensifying it.

You are playing hardcore time waste mode.

I take it you already know it, but I have to tell you - you are not playing the game, you are trying to play the system.

Besides, it has already been mentioned that there are functions implemented in the game that let you do your thing: 1) Play offline 2) stay hollow 3) Join the pothead fairy covenant.

Well, the point of the example is that the game doesn't need to have easier enemies to make an "easy" mode. If someone were to follow Terraria's model, simply having a mode where the player loses less upon death would make the game easier for that player, and thus increase the number of people willing to try the game. Also it's really not that much work backing up a save file in that game. Heck, I've been thinking of looking into seeing if a UI mod is possible and just have a one button click option.