Me doing the Courier’s Rasher quest 17 times and getting my ass kicked over and over again by Lace:
Bullshit game, fake difficulty, sadistic devs, pls nerf
Me doing the Courier’s Rasher quest 17 times and getting my ass kicked over and over again by Lace:
Bullshit game, fake difficulty, sadistic devs, pls nerf
I don’t want to complain too much about how other people enjoy single player video games, but it also creates the necessity of the compass always on mod since you’re exploring the map quite a bit less lol
yeah that’s a great example of there being purpose to some game mechanic that somebody might not like and by rounding one edge you (general) make a second-order thing worse for yourself. another part of the checkpoint system and the map exploration is so you can go do something else if you’re banging your head against something for a while, but maybe removing that aspect doesn’t matter for a player who was going to stubbornly try to do one thing at a time.
Yeah you’re spot on!
My general experience with Silksong so far:
I notice I keep losing earlier and earlier to a boss because I’m stuck in a rut and am actually practicing losing. I need a break. But I can’t make myself stop.
“I got to his 2nd phase on my 5th try, why can’t I do it again? The runback sucks but I’ll give it just one more run! Maybe if I spam my poison kunai I can brute force through the 2nd phase!” (Spoiler, there’s a third phase I didn’t know about)
repeat step 2 til I’m out of bug shards
give up and go farm shards
quick detour to a vendor to bank the rosaries I got while farming shards, and buy more shard bundles
oh hey, while backtracking I met NPC who wasn’t there before but has moved here now! Taking a break wasn’t bad, it was good!
oh snap I accidentally stumbled onto a new area! Taking a break was actually great!
15 hours of exploration and gameplay later, multiple damage upgrades, new tools and abilities found: “I should try that boss again”
discover a shortcut yo the boas that makes the run back easier too, which I’d missed before because I was too tunnel-visioned.
beat them in under 5 tries with my new tools and skills and greater fluency of the game.
Yes, but I’m going to say they’re playing the game wrong and if they want to suffer extra then they can pay the price of that. Let them opt in to that. If the devs responded to gripes by making tools/shards/rosaries infinite and putting stakes of Marika everywhere, they’d be encouraging the “beat your head against the wall forever” approach. Which would make sense in a game that’s very linear with a level progression, but would conflict with the design of these kinds of exploration games.
Sometimes walls are there to encourage you to do something different. Sometimes they’re there for pacing. If you brute force the graveyard in Dark Souls 1 right odd the bat you’ll pay for it and that’s part of the game’s charm. It was trying to tell you to explore somewhere else and learn how to handle the graveyard.
In Demon Souls, the run to the boss was basically part of the boss’s design. Putting in stakes of Marika would have been bad.
Cool and fun though it was, I actually feel Elden Ring was a step backward in FromSoft’s game design, lore, and worldbuilding, and I think it’s too bad this was the game that really blew up and did the best of their catalogue.
I feel like Lies of P having adjustable difficulty is one of the better ways to open these difficult action games to broader audiences. I didn’t use it much, but there were a couple of bosses I got tired of slamming my head against the wall for in that one lol
I agree, though I didn’t end up using those features in retrospect I should have. And I think Lies of P is the best soulslike I’ve ever played. (Apparently it’s also easier if you play anything other than the build I chose, oops).
Another Crab’s Treasure does it well too with a lot of different accessibility settings! It also is more linear so you can get really really roadblocked with nowhere else to go and nothing to do except best your head against the wall. I did resort to the Glock accessibility setting in Another Crab’s Treasure for one boss.
Let me guess - you did a strength build on that little guy
Some of the bosses seem like a huge pain in the ass if you have a slower weapon
I struggled with the final boss of the expansion enough to
the difficulty button. There were a handful of the bosses I found annoying enough in NG+ that I did it too lol.
I still need to check out Another Crab’s Treasure - it looks super cute.
Dex build actually, because I thought a strength build on the little guy would just look too silly. I loved the moveset of the starting rapier so much I stuck with it for the entire game, occasionally swapping to the tyrant slayer’s dagger for boss fights or really big and tough enemies because I liked the drip of taking down bosses with a weapon named that.
I also didn’t bother with swapping weapon handles because it would mess with the moveset and therefore the aesthetics, and this game is heavy on aesthetics and style. I kind of Fashion Souls’d myself out of a core mechanic of the game. I tried, mind you, like when I was struggling with one boss in particular I looked for advice on how to fight her and “longspear handle + acid spear tip” was the consistent answer. I tried, but the moveset was not aesthetic, so I went back to ol’ (un)reliable
I gifted a friend the game, he went with an arcane build because he likes magic stuff, and he breezed through it. I felt a little bad for him that he found it so easy actually. Part of the joy of these games is the struggle.
You missed out on combining the Wintry Rapier blade with the Tyrant Murder’s Dagger handle lol. I think the lack of weapon experimentation is where you got the added difficulty. I had a handful of weapon combos for a Dex build (lots of the Booster Glaive handle), and ended up using the katana
in the end of the game, but didn’t struggle too much.
I could get lost in a paper bag so I almost always wear the compass unless I need the spare slot for a specific boss fight and have memorized the runback.
I know about the always on compass mod but I choose not to install it anyway because I think of it as a balancing choice. Team Cherry could have put in an always on compass feature and come up with some diegetic explanation for how it worked. That they chose not is a deliberate balancing choice and I choose to respect it by not modding it out.
I agree. Choosing not to use mods is easy for me though, because I’m playing on a console and can’t implement mods even if I want to. Usually that’s a major disappointment for me - some games I won’t play because I think the ability to use mods with them is a major piece of the enjoyment of the game.
But for games like Silksong, I’m actually kinda glad the option to mod just isn’t there for me because when I get frustrated, I know it would be a temptation. I want to play the game at full difficulty, as intended by the developers, but there are still times when I keep dying to a maddening boss fight where I would be itching to use something to make it easier, so I didn’t have to keep banging my head into a wall. I’m always glad when I finally get through it that I accomplished it without aid though. Like I’m really glad I threw myself at the Sister Splinter boss enough times to beat her before the devs did that update that nerfed her a bit.
I do kinda regret doing the Courier’s Rasher the way I did that was a bit cheesy, but I justify that for myself since the way I did it is part of the game as it was originally made, using the systems put in place by the devs (not someone else altering it as with mods). All of that said, I absolutely don’t begrudge anyone who does use mods and I’m glad mods exist that allow people to play the game as they choose to.
I pre-killed enemies too and it still took me a bunch of tries, lol. I actually thought I would like to more/cheat past that hurdle but decided I’d give it a few more honest tries because it seemed doable, I was just making mistakes. That is, it didn’t feel unfair to me.
I did use cheats 3 times in my replay of the original Hollow Knight I played in preparation for Silksong: one to deal with a bug where if the soul master hits you as you kill him, he wiggles in his death animation forever, and you have to quit and fight him again. That’s a bug they should have fixed buy never did, so I put on infinite health to be able to brute force through fighting him again. The 2nd and third times I cheated weren’t legitimate, but I was just not having fun anymore, had done evwrything else except the final boss and godhome (which I never did because I didn’t care about it) and I wanted to see the lore / dialogue: white flower, and path of pain. I have no regrets about cheating my way through those because I just wouldn’t have seen that content otherwise (I didn’t do them on my first play through).