Dark Souls director considering easy mode, ‘people hesitant to play it’

Beats the hell outta me OG. Probably selfishness?

@51 and @52
What is being described here as difficulty is an intrinsic part of the design, it’s what makes the game what it is. It’s not actually difficulty as such, it’s making you *play* the game, it won’t allow you not to. You have to learn the combat controls and implement them, you can’t mash your way through the game. It only seems difficult at first because other games have become so slack and pandering.

It’s like asking Metallica to record easy listening versions of all their songs for the people who don’t like the normal ones.

I agree with those that have said the difficulty is intrinsic to the gameplay. I think it’s a shame for the dev to be considering this, primarily because their whole angle with the game was that it is HARD. Not unfair hard, but trial and error hard. Stay on your guard hard. Edge of your seat hard, in a lot of cases.

A lot of people these days just seem to want to breeze through every game they put in their machine without breaking a sweat, and we all know that the more accessible a game is the more it is likely to sell.

This is what I found so exciting about From Software and the Souls games. They knew that they were appealing primarily to a small portion of the gaming population, yet they stood by their vision. I would prefer they didn’t incorporate an easy mode into DS, even if it doesn’t affect me.

My hopes of them continuing to develop future (challenging) titles like the Souls games are diminishing. Everyone sells out eventually.

I understand what your saying, Doc. But I think those days for games to be tough as nails are pretty much over. You want to remember why games used to be hard. they weren;t for the integerty of the game. The simple reason is …

…the games need to make you put another quater in the arcade in order to make the dev/pubs and store/bar/arcade establishment money. Games also used to be short, if the game was easy it would be a quick experience that would feel like a waste of money(once things transitioned from arcade only to home consoles).

Games getting easier is just another market transition.

As the market expands beyond sadistic core elitest gamers(j/k), and reaches for a wider more mass market audiance, many buyers will be turned away if they buy games they can not get thru. I know I won’t buy DS for that reason. And also consider the sale of DLC. If the game is deemed too hard and not fun to play, who is going to buy DLC?

It becomes an art form of trying hard to not exclude would be buyers. that is more important then making a game geared for the much smaller core audiance that favors a “challange”.

Like I said, just another transition, you can find examples of them over the past what 25-30 years of gaming history?

The DS game is like a last bastion of hope for alot of core gamers. And I understand the love for it. But, without a dificulty option, the game is selling less then it could, imo.

wtf… people has to learn to play hard games… too many sissies around that cant handle a great game.
they die 5 times and whine, and on the other side we have those that whines before buying a great game saying its hell hard… lol.
the best part is that when they are ingame, they dont even know hoy to fight without backstabbing all the time. the only change this game needs la to ver rid of backstabbing in pvp ir when u have ir shield on ir back reduce the dmg 25% from backstabbing noobs.

r3volter, I learned to game in the 70s/80s man, trust me I played many a hard as hell game. But I have learned over the years is that it is just isn’t fun. Let me rephrase that. I no longer find it fun.

And this a reality the industry only midly understands, those same gamers that used to play in the 70s, 80s, and 90s still play games. And my skills are no where near what they used to be 20 to 30years ago. And as gaming moves forward so will the age of its consumers. Guys and gals like me are just on the cusp of it. But there are a lot of folks here that are in their 30s and 40s maybe even a few in their 50s.

So the solution is just to make things optional. Stick an easy mode in there. Or in most cases, stick a hard mode in their. Alot of games today do tend to be easier then some of the core would like, so make a mode in there that challanges them.

That being said, I have no problem with DS games. I understand that some folks want a game like it. But, the truth is, I won’t buy it because it lacks an easier mode.

So why does every game NEED to be available to every single person that might have a passing interest in playing it?

No other entertainment industry works like this. Not a single fucking one feels the need for every single last release to appeal to everyone. Not movies, not music, not literature and not art. Nothing.

Why is it so very bad for something like Dark Souls to exist? Nothing is going to change because whoever it may be might not enjoy the challenge, the fight the progress the improvement of skill, there is an audience for it though, as has been shown by the games sales figures.

I would never expect a Shmup to have an infinite shield which allows you to just hold down fire and move up the screen, it completely defeats the purpose and someone had to work on making it. Who could have been making something else.

God damn, why are these debates so circular.

I KNOW the game is at its best as it is!
I KNOW the game isn’t as difficult as it seems.
I DON’T personally want or need an easy mode.

But what about all the people who can’t hack it? Should they just fuck off? Are we that elitist now? If you’re a real fan of DS games you should want as many people as possible to be able to get a taste of it.

“So why does every game NEED to be available to every single person that might have a passing interest in playing it?”

Because pubs are in the biz of selling games. And moving more units is better then moving less units.

Let me turn it around on you.

Why does a game containing an easy and a hard mode bother you? You aren’t forced to play the easier mode. So why do you feel cheapend or offended by it?

“Why is it so very bad for something like Dark Souls to exist?”

Relax man, I wrote:

“That being said, I have no problem with DS games. I understand that some folks want a game like it. But, the truth is, I won’t buy it because it lacks an easier mode.”

And that kind of condences what I was saying.

Add in what PG just said, and that is a wrap.

I want them to get better. If they can’t get better then I want them to play something else more suited to their skill level. Its not as if theres a lack of things to play specifically designed for them or anything.

So because of publishers wanting to sell more continuously I as a game playing person am expected to put up with it?

Look at the Hearts of Iron games, could you imagine what an easy mode would do to those games? The samething goes for Dark and Demon’s Souls, im not going to say difficulty because thats not really what it is. Its attention, the games demand concentration and attention and adding in an easy mode would outright lessen the experience. So if I had to choose between a player either not playing the game outright OR playing a gimped lesser version I’ll take the first option. Lost sales or not.

But AZ if the game had an easy, normal, and hard mode to select from … wouldn’t that be ok? Your experience could be tailored to your skill set. I also think that a lot of other games could use the same type of thing, alot of gamers think some other games are too easy.

I think there could be a mode in the Souls titles that could possibly be called “Easy mode” but its never going to pull off the same atmosphere if it took the route that the rest of the industry seems to think constitutes lessened difficulty, that being more player health, less enemy health, more items to pick up.

It would involve changing enemy AI to make them less aggressive, changing spells, instituting some form or in-game tutorial and auto-levelling. It would take a fair amount of work to get it working and keep the same Souls feel. I would rather have the people assigned to work on that facet working on the game itself trying to get rid of bugs and frame rate issues.

Like I said before no other entertainment industry works on this principle, but just like the games industry there are publishers there trying to sell as much as possible to. Can you imagine a publisher sending a book back to Dawkins and asking him to remove the longer words because it might confuse part of his audience?

AZ, I don’t know why you’re saying no other entertainment industry works this way. 95% of the games I own have three or more difficulty modes. I would say that DS is the exception in this, rather than the rule.

I don’t even know what Easy mode is like in most of those games. I usually play through on Normal or Hard the first time and then the hardest mode the second time around.

It’s par for the course to have an easy mode AZ. And since like me, you’ll never play it, why would it bother you? I’m not a big FPS guy, but if I were gonna play CoD, I’d be glad of an Easy mode, or low-level gamers match-making online. What your saying sounds a lot like “Up your game or fuck off home” to me. It’s a game dude, a GAME!

It bothers me because Dark and Demon’s Souls was’nt just “another game”, it was a special little bundle of challenge and reward and secrets and helping and discussion and practise. All of those stemmed from un-comprimising nature of the game.

If Demon’s Souls had come out with an easy mode in place it would not have reached the level of cult love that allowed From Software to produce a follow-up.

The very nature of the difficulty produced a community devoted to it. They banded togethor against it, to beat it with each other and share stories about it. Without that challenge, that foe to face and defeat that never would have happened. Dark Souls would not exist if the games had an easy mode from the start.

I mention other forms of media simply as a comparison, no film director producing something like a horror movie expects to to appeal to everyone and for everyone to enjoy it. So does every game producer need to ensure that every single person who picks up a pad can play it?

Mainly its also because even one generation ago there were a select bred of games specifically about challenge, difficulty and practice to over-come. There are almost none now, hell look at what happened to Ninja Gaiden 3.

It bothers me because its something really quite rare and I want it to remain that way.

Fuck me if thats elitest but I really don’t care.

Isn’t the difficulty kind of the point in the Souls games?

I think it’s fair enough to set a skill bar in games if that’s what the actual game is.

Well, I don’t think anyone’s gonna change their opinion on this, so might as well leave it at that.

However,　it does occur to me that there are ways you could implement an easy mode that wouldn’t get in the way of that. Like say, give the easy mode gamers double/triple the humanity pick-up to make sure that they were always able to summon for help.

Or say, you could be immune from invasion for 10-15 levels and have an undead NPC follow you around before being brutally perma-killed by an invader to stop the hand-holding. Very Soulsy I think.

If you did it like that, it’d probably be enough to get most newbs up to speed on the game mechanic without breaking the atmosphere. It might even be better, seeing your dude get killed and scream at you to run or some shit. From could definitely make something like that work…

Is it really worth all the work adding that into the game just to get some people that are’nt interested enough to approach the game in the first place to try it out though?

When instead they could for instance be working on sorting out the frame rate issues in Blight Town instead? Or creating an entirely new area like in Prepare to Die?

The very thing that makes the Souls games what they are and why the fanbase adore them is whats being talked about being lessened, it would be a lessened experience for those that don’t have either the ability or the commitment to tackle them as they are now. That, for me, would be worse than not playing them at all.

I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree then…