cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/612204
Personally, I gave up at the first fight in Bloodborne (I have 40 min of gameplay). Never touched a souls game ever again.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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The Souls games actually do have difficulty settings; they're just a bit esoteric. I think of it like the Mario games: almost anyone can "beat" a Mario, but there are secrets and collectibles all over those games that are only pursued by players who want more of a challenge. It's the same game, but the player is opting to increase difficulty.
Souls games start at a higher skill floor than the average Mario, but you can unlock tools to make the game easier if you choose. There's co-op summons, overpowered weapons and equipment, places to easily farm huge numbers of levels. Plus plenty of cheesy strategies for most of the toughest bosses. It's all optional in-game choices you can make to tweak the difficulty to your taste without the devs putting in a menu slider that just gives every enemy double-HP or something. And they've gotten better at implementing these tools every time they've iterated. The few people who dunked on Elden Ring often criticized how easy it was relative to earlier FromSoft games. It's not inherently easier, there are just many more ways to scale down the challenge if you want.
Not the original commenter but I do feel the same. I dislike souls games. Although I did enjoy sekiro and made it to the stupid lightning samurai guy.
The problem with souls-like games for me is the combat doesn't feel good for the challenge and I believe you can see this in high tier players lazily dodging attacks.
The game isn't about skill and strategy. It's timing and flat experience to kill some bosses you just gotta fight them 600 times and learn the attacks patterns which to me feels mentally exhausting and frustrating. It's like a glorified DDR game with swords. I have to do the right combos to win, some strategies exist sure but at the end of the day it's DDR.
The big argument everyone has is "mechanics vs numbers" thinking mechanics is the true skill side but mechanics isn't just what you do with a controller, it's also what the game allows you to do.
Too many games equate difficulty with time sink. I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both. Souls games don't offer that, they're peg legged
Thank you, now I think I'll have to try sekiro. For Elden Ring there is a way out of the "learn timings" chore: go hard into defence, and there will only be a couple of boss strikes that can take you down, or go into insane damage increase and just evaporate everything (counter points to this: neither is to my liking and also neither is going to happen on first play-through for most people), but that is supposed to be the "best as of now" iteration. Need to see what was before it
I think they'd benefit taking a note from the witcher but not as linear.
For instance spirit/ghost creatures have them be susceptible to salt, silver, iron, holy water and a specific wood like holly. None are required to kill it, some have advantages over others or affect certain spirits more.
Maybe then I could be sneaky and have rare wood arrows with silver tips and eliminate from afar, I could be full rogue and sneak attack with blessed iron daggers, or just a big man with a plain sword and brute force my way through.
I think if you slapped Hatsune Miku on a dark souls screen and have her dancing going "jump!, roll!, duck!" People would realize it's not as much of a skill game as they thought.
I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both
That's how every DS game except Sekiro works. There's absolutely broken PvE builds for each game you can discover. There's people who challenge themselves by coming up with builds capable of 1-hitting every boss in the game.
People come up with all sorts of broken or just extremely novel builds for PvP too, "bad numbers, no mechanical skill, but the enemy isn't ready for what you're about to do to them" is a perfectly effective strategy.
That usually requires you to play the game in a traditional way first to learn/acquire that information and/or bang your skull repeatedly against a boss that feels like bullshit because you failed to dodge one single ability. It's just not my schtick.
I heard this being the case. Its very good game design.
I've been playing video games since the 1970s. Now I'm just a poor old man. My legs are grey. My ears are gnarled. My eyes are old and bent.
These days I mostly play video games for the story and to relax so I usually play on easy. And I'm ok with that.
Kojima:
We added Very Easy Mode
Also Kojima:
Get good or wear the chicken hat
I think Terraria has a really good approach to this.
Your first playthrough is on "normal" mode. Boss fights aren't about skill, you don't have to be on your toes constantly, etc. — except, that doesn't matter. Because your first playthrough is hopefully blind and without the wiki, meaning you'll have really bad, inefficient gear, and most of the challenge will come from finding and understanding good gear and how the world works before you can even find and beat bosses. Normal mode on your first playthrough has its own kind of challenge.
After that you will know how to progress and want more challenge and excitement for your second playthrough. Enter "expert" mode. New loot, new super powerful cool accessories, everything is way harder, even basic mobs hit twice as hard. Now everything is about staying on your toes, showing your skills in boss fights, meticulously crafting plans — but you're rewarded for it by a new experience and what feels like a new, more exciting Terraria. If you get tired of expert mode (I'm gonna say 200–300 hours of playtime later), there's the ridiculous "hard" mode. And "hardcore." Endless possibilities.
But everyone is given a chance with normal mode, which is really extremely easy. Everyone gets a chance to get to know the game. But you are rewarded with the full game, in a sense, for playing the proper difficulty.
Difficulty settings are accessibility settings and anyone who disagrees can kiss my ass.
As long as the setting accommodates everyone, including people who want a difficult game
Yeah that's the point at least in my eyes. I don't see why it has to be one way or the other. You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain from difficulty accessibility options. If someone sees difficulty as some sort of status symbol... Well, don't project that onto me.
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There’s a lot of “you made your art wrong” in here. If you don’t have legs, you’re not going to be able to play soccer. You can make your own no-leg soccer if you want, but I’m just going to make an “ew” face at you if you say that soccer needs to change for you. Try arm wrestling!
The best argument against games (or any software) that don’t work for you is that you often can’t get refunds, and that’s a valid concern, but it has nothing to do with the content itself.
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Souls ganes has easy modes. Usually there’s an OP build or archetype which makes the game much easier
I think that is what Miyazaki's philosophy is. Not everybody needs to be a parry god, nor do you need to defeat the boss naked with a broken sword in order for it to "count". The souls games and their contemporaries are as difficult as you want to make them. If a boss is too hard, come back when you are overleveled and stomp it. Or use some cheesy build to trivialize it. That's what he means by "fac[ing] that challenge" and "overcom[ing] it in some way that suits them as a player".
I think Souls games went too far tho. If we stayed at DS1 level that'd be one thing, but the Elden Ring DLC just went stupid with it.
Celeste did it perfectly imho with their Assist Mode. Just add those difficulty options in for accessibility, with a statement that it is not how the developers intend for it to be played, but still to use it freely if need be.
"Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode."
It is 2026. Gamers should be able to enjoy any game they want at any difficulty they want without judgement, as long as it does not affect anyone else.
That actually does sound perfect
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I don't mind any of these approaches. Personally I'd want a single difficulty that is made challenging but with specific accessibility options. Like disable quick time events, loose lock on, and other things to make the interface more bearable if you have a physical or mental disability.
While I don't care if a game has an easy mode, a lot of the "easy mode is accessibility" arguments feel similar to the "AI art is accessibility" arguments. Unless you can't properly interface with the game, having low skill is not a disability or something needing accessibility support. If you practice you'll get better at it.
The "but I don't have much time" argument feels especially weird, like would you demand a cliff notes version of a book or TV show because you don't have the time otherwise? If you just want the story just find a playthrough online.
If a game has an easy mode, great, it appeals to a wider audience. If it doesn't, great, it's catering to a specific audience. A game's not worse for having an easy mode and a game's not inaccessible for asking you to practice its mechanics.
If I buy a game for €50 and the game is too difficult for me to get past the tutorial, even with practice, I cannot access 90% of the game I paid for. You could call it catering to a small audience but it is different than a game like "pc building simulator" which also caters to a small audience that can at least be fully accessed by everyone (not considering impairments)
If there is no way of scaling down the difficulty then I would like a refund of the money I spent on content I could not access.
The 'just watch a playthrough for the story' argument doesn't work for me. Games are a unique medium in a sense that the story is shaped by player decisions. Even if there is not a branching story, giving the player agency over small decisions like cosmetics makes the player more invested in the character and allow for roleplaying. That's all lost when you watch someone else play the game.
I agree that if the difficulty is too high you ought to return it. Typically games are balanced for a sizable enough audience, if a game's tutorial is impossibly difficult then it's probably not a good tutorial or the game's for a hyper niche audience.
I guess I can understand the appeal of easy modes just for experiencing the story. This does hit a wall though when a game's story is dependent on its gameplay. Like Fromsoft games demand a lot of attention to understand the story beyond a basic level, they clearly want to gatekeep that and it's part of their games' identity.
My point is basically, difficulty is one of the tools a developer can use to craft their experience. While most games want to appeal to as many people as possible, it should be just as valid for a game to decide their experience requires inherent skill requirements, at the risk of people returning it if they aren't the target audience.
The “but I don’t have much time” argument feels especially weird, like would you demand a cliff notes version of a book or TV show because you don’t have the time otherwise?
Sweet Summer child...
Yes, there are dummies like that. I remember reading about someone actually bragging about "reading more" by asking for book summaries via AI.
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Making a game hard for the sake of making it hard is a cheap way to increase difficulty.
The challenge shouldn't come from enemies being damage sponges or the AI having superhuman reaction times. It should come from player skill.
Balatro is one of the best examples of this. The game naturally gets easier as the player learns its systems and gains experience through playing.
Destiny 2 also had excellent skill progression. Say what you want about the game as a whole, but the core gunplay and the mechanics of its three classes rewarded players for improving their own abilities.
Even games like Madden and NBA 2K have, to a lesser extent, systems that reward player skill rather than simply inflating difficulty.
Many older games were made extremely difficult because they were relatively short. The increased difficulty extended playtime and made players feel they were getting more value for the price. That's one of the reasons games like Ninja Gaiden on the NES earned their reputation for being brutally hard.
As for Soulslike games, they're simply not my cup of tea. I fully acknowledge that they're well-made games, and if you enjoy them, that's great. They're intentionally designed to be challenging. While the original Dark Souls was developed under a tight schedule and has some rough edges, its high level of difficulty was a deliberate design choice rather than the result of bugs or glitches.
Making enemies soak up more damage and deal more damage is lazy difficulty. Giving enemies more tools to use against the player is the better way to handle game difficulty IMO
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